ZetaX

@Sternface: Then what would you need as evidence¿ I think I understand what K^2 wants as evidence, but would you like him want to (and be able to; as said above, it needs a nontrivial amount of knowledge) check several scientific papers¿

Irreversible¿ No almost definitely not. Extremely costly¿ Easily possible. And that's why we might want to intervene as early as possible. We are talking about putting, say, another 10% of its current CO_2 content into the atmosphere in the next decade. If we then start trying to reverse the effects, we will not only start 10 years later, but will also have to deal with more to get rid of/get to live with. I am all in for holding a status quo if that means keeping the CO_2 at the same level until we know better what exactly is going on. But just continuing and even increasing the output until we know every detail sounds naive to me. The potential costs, not even counting possible deaths, just money, are quite high. Regarding the actual costs when not knowing any more details we should work with the expected value. Thus if we assign climate change a chance of 20% to actually being aviodable/reducable by us strongly reducing emissions, we have to half those potential costs/the potential savings. And I expect those then still to be well over a trillion dollars. So the question can also be put as this: is the expected value of the costs of climate change lower or higher than the expected value of this or that countermeasure. And I am confident that at least for the cheaper ones (e.g. fuel efficient cars, more non-carbon-based power plants [well, I also see some cost problems with nuclear ones in the very long, so this would at least be tricky]) this is true.

My previous statement also still holds: those are experts on their fields, so they are likely to have vastly more knowledge on this than I do. Science indeed works as you said, but there is also the point of learning all the required theories first. I just see no point in me doing this, as doing this instead of me is exactly what an expert exists for. Those experts already agreed before it was a political question, as climate change is not just ten years old. There will definitely be tons of assumptions and simplifications, thus allowing you to point out that this and that is somewhat insufficient. But this is a problem with all sciences that are hard to repeat or not possible put in a controlled small environment (medicine, psychology, some aspects of biology, ...). You can't use the full strength of the physics meaning of "proof" there, as this is beyond the scope of human abilities for now and probably for quite some time to come, and its usage would just do one thing: stall all scientific advances in those areas. Climate scientists invent models for how climate works, then test what happens with and without human "intervention", and the general result is that the latter causes a significant effect in most models; these tests are one of the ways to actually verify things: run a simulation and compare with what actually happenes/-d. If they work sufficiently well to predict at least the most relevant effects and generally agree between different simplifications, then I claim that this is evidence enough. Things might get a bit different, though, if they actively adapt to simply fit the results, but apart from such claims by "climategate" I have not seen evidence of this actually happening.

At first I would like to have more details on this time travels. Are they purely observative¿ Can they change the past¿ Can they be used to set up a scientific experiment that e.g. runs in an eternal 500 year time loop¿ What kind of paradox resolution do you choose¿ I also don't see why those two questions are interesting; JFKs possibly has political ramifications, but Einstein likely just said some last words not any different from that of any other person. It is almost completely excluded that he had some new insights on physics, nor are political/spiritual/etc. views of dying men relevant.

We already did so in 1932, it has a half life of about 14.7 minutes.

Replace climate by evolution in these sentences... Or to make my point more clear: the fact that someone still tries to refute it is not evidence in any way. As far as I know, there is not much debate along scientists (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change) if human caused climate change happens, but just on the exact size. The if-debate is political and politics is not really concerned about facts.

No, one of the main properties of special relativity is that only relative speeds matters, or more generally that there is no special distinguished speed like "standing still". It is therefore completely indistinguishable from the inside whether the space ship is "moving" (which, without another object to compare it to, doesn't even make sense in the context of special relativity as said in the first sentence). What you can distinguish is when it accelerates (but then, general relativity is mostly equivalent to the claim that this is indistinguishable from gravity).

Two points: a) There are sever agencies, mainly right wingers and industry, who are very willing to give you money if you can give "counterevidence". You could also say that it is very hard to get a job as a geologist of you claim the earth is flat and are not trying to prove that sphere conspiracy stuff. This is true, but simply due to the fact that everyone who ever has put some effort into this know that "flat earth" is just nonsense.

Where is that power supposedly comming from if not fission or decay¿ If any of those, leaving aside practicality and that you could already do that woth e.g. plutonium, it will give you cancer, or at that energy output more likely a rather fast death by radiation poisoning. Also you are talking about several (milli)grams of pure energy, i.e. a small nuclear bomb if handled incorrectly. By the way, the island of stability is around 120 (not 300, that's definitely absurd) protons, if I remember correctly.

You seem to miss my point. Being fast is completely useless if there are way too many stars to look at. It doesnt help that you can instantly teleport to any of them, if there are 10^30 stars you will never see all of them in a human lifespan.

Then you should focus to make the universe smaller, not stuff faster, because having less than an atosecond to look at each star is not very satisfying.

I find the current stand of technology rather SciFi-ic from a perspective of 80 years ago. We have nukes, computers, pretty huge planes, can send stuff throughout the solar system, ...

K^2: isn't that exactly what I said, namely that an ideal Newtonian universe is not having any¿

Would you please elaborate on that evidence against it¿ Because most of them I've seen on the web are of the creationist level of stupidity. It is a fact that a very huge majority of those that do the actual research agree on this topic, and it is not the general public that should judge this as it requires heck of research to even understand the more complex models, there is a reason one has experts on something, and it is outright ridiculous to have experts, but only believe them if they agree with you.

Adding in to what the others said: a) Superconductors are perfectly viable in a Newtonian universe (matter not being infinitely reducible is what causes friction and similiarily electrical resistance). You imply that several persons that (judging from what they post) have a very good grasp of actual physics don't know what they are talking about. c) You seem to imply you do, or at least do to a higher degree than those mentioned in . Please, learn some actuall physics instead, which is not the same as reading some popular science book.

Current physics predict nothing like your "quantum communication", as all transmission of information is bounded by c via relativity.

No, just no! Don't think that rocket engine exhaust travels at orbital velocity or higher, because it doesn't, and it doesn't need to. You get faster by Newton's laws if you eject some mass with any speed backwards, however miniscule. More speed of the ejected mass just means you accelerate more at once, i.e. you are more efficient in regard to mass spent as exhaust (-> specific impulse). Light speed being impossible to achieve for anything of positive mass is a purely relativistic problem and has othing to do with such matters of Newtonian physics.

I tend to think that you are missunderstanding him there, as you confuse electrons with an electromagnetic field. To do electronics, you don't need to be able to change any fundamental property of electrons, but only of their distribution. Similiarily, you could achieve a change of mass by redistributing Higgs bosons (apart from this being a horrible oversimplification). Thus compare mass (induced by "presence" of Higgs bosons + relativity) with charge (induced by electrons, etc.).

I think it is completely impossible to have such a laser on ground based weapons, as atmospheric diffusion would make it a) impossible to hit a target defocus the beam. But even in space, this is currently and probably forever impossible at higher distances: You would need an incredible good focus on the beam, orders of magnitude better than what we currently have; also there are some weak effects that defocus such beams by interference effects, maybe even making it physically impossible. Altogether, it is probably far better to get your laser as close as possible first, then fire it. The question is if getting close enough is possible if the target actively tries to dodge. Last time I checked we were maybe able to pull this of from a distance of 1km, and somewhat more is definitely possible. On a more minor note, it is also necessary to aim where the target will be in 1/10 th of a second (if killing geostationary stuff from low earth orbit/ground), but targeting with a beam of light is indeed much easier and it is impossible to detect beforehand (but dodgable with strong thrusters doing random movement if expecting it).