UFO's
 

Do you believe in UFO's. I myself think there is such a thing. Earth is just a little spec in the universe so I'm sure there are others far ahead of us but what do you guys think.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2004/05/13.jpg
A Mexican airforce video shows unidentified flying objects in the skies over Campeche.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3707057.stm

Re: UFO's
 

From someone named asfter a starship & using a Star Trek logo for an avatar we all have a good idea what you belive in...:D :D

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Just to be stubbon I'll say its named after the HMS battleship :D

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I dont know about "dont care" but I'd go for a "still keeping an open mind about it" rather than a yes/no vote.

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Yes of course I believe in UFOs, I see them probably every day. Do I believe them to be from another planet? No.

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I have never seen one but only human arrogence would allow us to assume that we are the only inteligent beings in existence... With the infinate size of the universe there MUST me something else out there.

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Well of course there are UFO's, any time you see a flying object that you can`t identify it's a UFO, you mean do you believe in the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) ;)

That little nitpick aside, as you state, given the vast size of the universe I would be surprised if we haven't been visited from time to time. Precisely how much UFO activity actually involves alien craft is another debate entirely.

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Have you heard the story of philadelphia experiment and connection with roswell ;)

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I, on the other hand, see infinite complexity and size and say "designer".
On the same tack, looking at our universe, I don't think we (man) are the only intelligent beings in existence either ;)
I think you can guess the rest. ;) :D

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Just like most people so far, I look at the size of the universe and have to assume that there must be other lifeforms out there, and some of them may be advanced enough to travel this far.

I also think that a lot of he "UFO" sightings can be proved to be experimental aircraft and the like, and it serves most governments needs to allow this to continue rather than admit whatever secret project they have going...

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Wasn`t that something to do with spreading soft cheese on weather balloons? ;)

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:rofl: PMSL :D

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thats the one yes lol

No from what I've read the scientist's who were at Roswell were behind Philadelphia experiment. Of course the US government also deny the Philadelphia experiment even though there were witness's

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it would be nice to know if we are alone but I think SETI has got more chance of proving it than us getting a personal visit from ET, after all who would want to come here, I'm trying to get off ;-)

the thing that always makes me wonder is when you look at the clear night sky, all those stars are suns just like ours, and we can only see a tiny fraction of them, all of them could have planets around them, just like ours, how many of them could have life on them ? how many would want to visit here ?
do a little research on the drake equation if you are curious.

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I don't think there are UFO's as you are thinking of them.After all thinkng of the resources required to just get to the moon or to Mars and think what it would take to get from this star system to the nearest star system to us.Who's got the time?Who would waste the resources?And yes if they have FTL travel because they are so superior to us why would they come unless they want something.Possibly some of our resources to get home again.

I don't see us ever leaving our own star system personally.:)

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That's the wrong way of thinking about it though. You never know what's going to be developed in the next 50/100yrs. There may be civilisations thousands of years ahead of us. That far ahead infact they wont to stay hidden and just spy. Some recon the human race may just be an alien experiment.

Anyway think back in the 30/40's. If someone was to tell them there will be a passenger plane that can go twice the speed of sound they would have laughed at you but this was done (and gone)

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Very good point, If you do a little digging the stealth Fighter F117, entered operational service in the late 1970's!!!!!!!

Imagine what that looked like to people back then.

I believe in alien life, I am hesitant to say they have managed to conquer the vast distances in space but I dont see any reason why they havent.

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It's the power source that will be the biggest problem.We are still trying to find a cheap power source that converts easily obtainable renewable resources(therefore cheaper)that aren't toxic(who wants to be irradiated before the final destination) and gives out enough output to get up to speed so as to get somewhere within living memory.Then having got up to speed we have to make sure that we don't smear ourselves across the windscreen in a bloody pulp before we work out how to stop.Also before we go any distance away we want to be sure we can get back with whatever we discover or the whole experience will be wasted for those left back here on earth.

I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying we may run out of resources (renewable or non renewable) long before we get to the stage of discovering a means to reach the stars.

How wonderful if we achieve it,but we have a lot to learn and discover before that day.I think we will be a much different society to the one we now have when we do discover how to FTL,so much so that we may not WANT to go to other star systems.

Re: UFO's
 

When you consider how many different life forms there are on our planet it is impossible to think that there are no other life forms elsewhere.

We can only judge what is possible regarding inter planetary movement with our existing knowledge which may be very limited. Just think about how our ability to travel has changed in the last 100 years or so. The impossible today will be commonplace tomorrow.

For all we know we may be from a planet far far away that ended up on Earth either accidently or deliberately. Were Adam and Eve aliens and was the Ark a spaceship?

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Who's to say we don't already have another power source now. Do you know how many millions/billions they'd get paid to keep there mouth shut. Not just by the oil and fossil fuel company's either but by Government's who use this with taxe's to keep the economy running. Its off topic but on the along the same lines with the cure to the common cold. do you have any idea how much all those different medicine's generate in cash.

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Well Defiant if you think that little of our species ability to see beyond it's collective nose then we won't be leaving the planet will we?:D

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I think we will thats if we dont blow ourselve's up or the extremist country's blow us up

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technology is already being investigated and has been for a long time.
NASA are developing an ION engine that produces constant acceleration.

as pointed out, we need to know how to stop, and stop fast in these circumstances and in the vacuum of space thats gonna be problematic.
Engery resources wouldnt be THAT important provided we had enough fuel for a burn to get us coasting back to Earth.

Distance is the problem, we are talking light years, we cant accelerate anything above particles to the speed of light so 50 light years is gonna take over 50 years to get there.

Still jsut because WE dont have the technology doesnt mean another life/race doesnt. Perhaps they perfected the ION engine hundreds of years ago?

The USA even investigated a Nuclear powered aircraft for long term recon missions. But decided it wasnt feasible.

Re: UFO's
 

If we were to commit the effort to it we could make a reasonable stab at it within a relatively short space of time. Daedelus was a proposed spacecraft in the 1970s that would use nuclear explosions to propel a craft. You wouldn`t need to use this method on its own, once your craft is up to a reasonable speed you can collect interstellar hydrogen in ramscoops to use as fuel, although for that it would be handy if you had a stable fusion reactor on board. As for the bloody pulp business, any GSCE science student should be able to tell you the answer to that one, just keep your acceleration within reasonable limits. Unfortunately this would most likely require a global effort, so don`t expect to see it happen any time soon.

As for concerns about toxicity, I wouldn`t care about that if you are wizzing through space. You're going to need enough shielding on your craft as it is, a bit more if required isn`t going to be a problem.

While not practical for us at the current time, you shouldn`t dismiss energy sources that may not require a vast supply of resources. If a civilisation is advanced enough to get here then it would be a fair bet that they would have things like zero-point energy sources, or some other exotic equivalent.

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Time of travel would only be a major concern for those people left behind on Earth, for those on the space craft dilation effects would come into play once you got up to a suitable speed, so they`ll make it there in much less time.

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Oh yes, isnt that the old.....At the speed of light time slows for those travelling at that speed, yet on earth time would be normal. There for 10 years travelling at the speed of light could see someone age 10 years there, but on earth someone would age 20 years. (example figures).

Still as a human species we measure time as time on earth, so lets stick with that for now huh? lol dont wanna fry brains here.

Mind you, time travel is theoretically possible once exceeding the speed of light, as you would arrive at your destination before the light you were in when you left got there?????? still we cant so it dont matter.

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Which is a mode of thinking that we would have to abandon once we head out to the stars.

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I think it's the time issue that could be the problem in a global effort.It could take a lot of precious resources but without being able to see the final result how many people(and short term governments) would think it was worth the effort?

This is nice! A sensible discussion without any sniping for once. :tu:

Incog. :D

Re: UFO's
 

When I worked for the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the 60's we held the NACA and NASA reports in secure storage and they made interesting reading. You could never guess how much was kept out of public view.

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I believe there is life else where in the universe.
It developed here, so it's pretty unlikely to not occur elsewhere, especially when the universe seems to have loads of amino acids floating about in space.
Have we been visited? Probably not.

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I definately believe in all the aliens, ufos etc (see sig :D ) and have got a sneaking suspicion that there may be an alien race living in my home town :D

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This dude on ch4 thinks that the royal family are reptillian aliens :)

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It's always a good thing to lob Fermi's paradox into any any discussion of UFOs. Basically this says that if there are space travelling aliens, why haven't they colonised the earth by now? The arithmetic is quite simple. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years. Assuming that their ships are capable of travelling at 1% of light speed, then hopping from solar system to solar system and stopping of at each one to build up an industrial base, it should only take them about 10 million years to colonise the galaxy. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old, which is much longer than 10 million years, so these hypothetical aliens have had plenty of time.

Re: UFO's
 

I'm with Russ here.

Just because you see something you can't identify doesn't mean it's little green (or grey) men paying us a visit.

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You know, for someone who's using the nick of "Time Warrior" I wonder if there's something we should be told...! :D

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isnt light the speed limit ? even the star trek lads fold space to travel as they cant travel faster than light... or i may be wrong im sure this sort of thing gets changed all the time especially since einstien sat down and gave us a couple of relativity things to consider

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:eek: Have you not seen Voyager, Paris got to over warp 10 and achieved time travel. It is real isn't it ?????

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Yeah but didn't he turn into a giant slug shortly afterwards ;)

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A common argument is:

Life has arisen on Earth against vast odds, BUT the probable number of planetary systems in the universe is even more vast, SO it is likely that life has arisen somewhere else as well.

But this rests on the assumption that life is capable of arising spontaneously. As Si1ver pointed out earlier, while most people look at the universe and see an outrageously unlikely set of coincidences, some of us look at the universe and see intelligent design. And if that is the case, then there need be no other life of any kind anywhere in the universe, unless that intelligent designer decided there should be. And as I derive my understanding of that designer from the Bible - which says absolutely nothing about his business elsewhere in the universe - I have to say I am mildly interested but not convinced, or especially bothered, one way or the other.

Re: UFO's
 

I thought it was warp 12

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3707057.stm

Weird...

Re: UFO's
 

In the Star Trek universe, Warp 10 is the maximum possible speed, at which your molecules inhabit the enture universe simultaneously ... or something like that. :erm:

Re: UFO's
 

Do I believe in UFO's - YES
Do I believe in Aliens - probably (But I'd be much happier if I met one - assuming it was a nice one :) - and not a 12foot tall armour plated giger-type killing machine)

Re: UFO's
 

"Following a series of holodeck simulations to reach Warp 10, Paris and the engineering team iron out the technical glitches and prepare to send Paris out on a real flight. The next day, the crew watches as Paris takes the Shuttlecraft Cochrane to Warp 10, crosses the transwarp threshold, and abruptly vanishes" I love Voyager :tu:

Re: UFO's
 

well apart from Lt tom paris then - i assume the speed of light is the limit?

Re: UFO's
 

At the moment. Who can say if a warp drive - or some other method of propulsion will be invented.

Re: UFO's
 

It is believed to be, although you will have to hope a passing theoretical physicist might stop at the forum long enough to explain why.

EDIT

I don't think the theory has anything to do with available forms of propulsion, I think odd things happen to time, energy and matter when objects get up to that kind of speed.

Re: UFO's
 

Which could be why I said 'or some other method' :)

I can't reveal TOO much or I'll be violating the temporal prime directive :D

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"30 mph??!.. no one can live at that speed.. look!! the wallpaper is peeling away from bluebottle's hat" ~ gotta love the goons :D

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well thats in space time - you could go outside space time giving the perception ur travelling faster than light such as worm holes - all things in space time are relative to each other in my understanding if u could nip down a worm hole and appear somewhere else quicker than u could by travelling speed of light then ....arghh

Re: UFO's
 

ooooohhhh ... ouch ... I'm gonna need another cup of coffee if this is how the discussion's going.

Can't we talk about little green men, that's much easier. Or bluebottles? :erm: :D

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Just as long as it's not the aforementioned big killing machines :)

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little green women

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Well Xaccers is a brain box on things like this, where is he when we need him :rolleyes:

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The faster an object travels, the more massive it becomes. As an accelerating object gains mass and thus becomes heavier, it takes more and more energy to increase its speed. It would take an infinite amount of energy to make an object reach the speed of light.

Google is my friend ;)

There is a whole other thread in this, as more modern thinking, based on quantum mechanics & string theory, suggests for example, that the speed of light is not constant & that there are more than the 'normal' 4 dimensions. :Yikes:

Re: UFO's
 

Well, I am no physicist, but AFAIK the only times you need propulsion in space is if you need to change speed or direction. In fact, I did read that if you went into orbit and were able to fire a handgun toward the sun, the bullet would eventually reach the sun (assuming it didn't get too near any other objects).

I personally do believe in Aliens, but I don't know if we have been visited by UFOS.

One interesting thing to note is that a lot of sightings are apparently near military bases, so it's entirely possible that some sightings are actually of experiemental military aircraft (like the aforemention Stealth bomber).

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:spin: but why? Where does the mass come from? :shocked: :dunce: :confused: :erm: :( :disturbd: :Yikes: :monkey:

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its to do with the equivalence of mass & energy & their relation to the speed of light, the classic E=mc² (Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) applies to a stationary object, it gets a little more complicated if the object is moving...........

It's the main reason why, imo, the concept of some kind of 'warping' of the space/time continuum is necessary to travel any useful distance.

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And on that note - my brain has just turned to mush :confused:

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Admit it, you haven't got a clue either ;) :D :spin: :spin: :spin:

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:help: :banghead: :blah: :erm:

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:Yikes: :disturbd: :wtf: :Sprint:

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Sorry for the late start, but I've just noticed this thread... Also, appologies if I'm repeating someone else!

I think it is VERY nieve to think we are the only inteligent life in existance. BUT.... looking at the countless stars in our galaxy has shown us that it is unlikely there is life (like ours) nearby.
There are billions of galaxy's, so it's fair to say one (or more) of them must support inteligent life...... but can they get here?
We can't get there with our technology..... YET!

.....

My mum is now 65 yrs old. When she was at school she sat in a science lesson talking to her friend about life on the moon. Her science teacher explained that man could not possibly get to the moon as there is no engine / device powerfull enough to escape the gravitational pull of our planet. He went on to explain the high radiation levels in the Van Allen Belt and the dangers of next-to-zero atmosphere

A few years later, some guy named Neil Armstrong made one small step.

Now, Neil got to the moon on the Apollo space program. (well, it was actualy on a rocket powered by the Saturn V, which is still today the single most powerfull engine in the world) NASA managed to get the Apollo program 'off the ground' (sorry for the pun!) using valve based computing technology!

Anyone seen Apollo 13? Remember where Tom Hanks says "One day we will be able to store a computer in a single room. It will hold thousands of pieces of information!"
Well, you can now pop along to Currys and purchase a computer which holds MILLIONS of pieces of information and fits in your pocket.

That's just 40 or so years after the Apollo program.

OK, that's only the computing side of things, but think of the implications.... Now we have super-computers we can performe calculations to try out space flight without building space craft and launching them.

As for the craft we do build, look at teh ****pit of the Space Shuttle, compared to the Apollo Command Module!

This enabled us to send probes to Mars, Jupiter and WAY beyond!

IMO, it is only a mater of time before man steps foot on another planet.
I believe the USA have said they aim to get a man on Mars in the next 10 years, it is entirly feasable with todays technology, albeit DAMNED expensive!


Bearing this in mind, look at a slightly bigger picture....
As a species, humans WILL die out along with our sun. We have a fair few thousand years to go, so don't panic just yet!
But... if we can travel inter-stella, we can live forever. Keep poping off to any green/blue rock that's close enough to a hot enough star for us to live there. (now THERE'S incentive!)

.....

So, bearing this in mind, we should also consider that the 'other' inteligent life in a galaxy far from here may well have developed their technology MILLIONS of years before we even existed. They may well also expirience time in a format not familiar with us.
This is awkward to explain, but to give you a picture.....
If you look at life through the eyes of an elephant, humans are these very fast little things that speed around all day but only live for 70 or so years.
Through the eyes of a fly, humans are increadibly large, slow creatures, hardly moving at all, but live for a massive 70 or so years!

Take that a step further and it's plain to see that an alien life form (seeing time from the fly's point of view) may have come here, looked around and left without us even noticing!

Throw into that the confusion of time only being relative to it's surroundings (the faster you travel, the slower time passes) and you can see that the chances of us finding life we could comunicate with become ever more remote.

BTW, I voted YES because I'm not a plane spotter so often can't identify most of the stuff in our sky's ;)

Re: UFO's
 

lol - I would like to understand it better, that is for sure ;)

So far the experiments to try & verify Einsteins theory have raised as many questions as they have answered.

One thing that does seem certain is that the physics of the universe will apply equally to alien species, but what insights are possible from current research attempts to establish an 'Unified' theory, who knows?

Re: UFO's
 

Trek cheats because, according to one explanation (well, ok, bit of Treknobabble) what the Warp Engines are supposed to do is to "compress" space in front of the ship such that it doesn't *actually* go faster than light.

Imagine you put a needle on a rug, then bunch the rug up in front of it, push the needle through that bunched up section and then flatten the rug again, that's sort of what's supposed to happen, although that explanation actually comes from Harry Harrison's excellent and hilarious "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers!"

As to Tom Paris exceeding Warp 10 in ST:Voyager, that's just another example of Trek failing to keep to its own rules, because the "warp scale" is supposed to be an exponential curve where Warp 10 is unachievable but can only be approached asymptotically (except if you're slingshotting around a star to do a quick bit of time travel as in assorted Trek films... Consistency? What's that??)

Of course that episode also has the nonsense that, for some reason, exceeding Warp 10 didn't cause Tom Paris to go back in time, but, instead, caused him to "evolve", which rather demonstrates that the Trek writers have no idea what evolution is all about, because instead of him becoming "better fit" to his environment, the first thing that happens is that he almost dies because his lungs change to breathe a different mixture of gasses...!!

The point is that, according to Einstein, mass increases as you approach the speed of light, so as you accellerate you need more and more energy until you need an infinite amount of energy to achieve it.

Re: UFO's
 

True, however...

Which rests on the assumption that there is some form of "creator" and the logical precursor to that is where did that creator come from, the response is generally that we have to assume that He always existed.

However Occams Razor suggests that if you have two explanations that fit the facts you should pick the one that requires the least number of assumptions. The belief in a creator involves a whole series of extra assumptions, so whilst it is a *possible* hypothesis, it's not, logically, a *probable* hypothesis.

Because God didn't tell us about it, or because those who wrote it didn't *know* that there were any other worlds elsewhere in the universe?

Re: UFO's
 

And this is my cue to join in!

Or more likely, we simply don't need to know about other planets.

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Err, actually that's unlikely because the speed you need to achieve orbit (around 17,500 MPH IIRC) is less than "escape velocity" (about 25,500 MPH again IIRC) which is what you need to get away from Earth's gravitational pull.

So unless you can fire that bullet at 8,000 MPH *and* get the trajectory right, it's more likely to stay in orbit around the Earth.

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And that's my cue to leave this part of the discussion because we're talking about UFOs, not religion and I don't want to see this thread get closed by a flame war...!

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Personally I saw it as an answer to a valid question which could easily be asked in a discussion on UFOs but then again, what do I know.... :shrug:

Re: UFO's
 

All true, but I'm not going to go in to all that again now ... might be a little OT to go into all that detail here :)

All of which may be true, but this is a principle, not a law - unless there is some evidence that, throughout history, the 'correct' explanation always turns out to have been the one that required fewer assumptions.

Both. God used humans to write the Bible, and they only wrote beyond their own ability to perceive when circumstances required it (e.g. writing a prophecy). The Bible writers had no way of knowing about other worlds, and God had no need for them to know. Now there's a whole mouthful of assumptions for you to chew on ;)

This is the first time I have ever met anyone else who has read that ... I am not alone!!!! :D

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I'll tell you in PM :)

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No, there is no evidence that the "correct" explanation is *always* the one that required fewer assumptions, but there is empirical evidence that shows that it's *most often* the case.

Anyone who hasn't read it is missing a great spoof on "heroic space fantasy" and a really good laugh :D

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I think, sadly, that the fact I found and read it in my school library when I was but 11 years old meant that I missed rather a lot of the spoof....

dn-drff, garnishee, and 747 that travels space powered by a lump of cheddar cheese :spin: ... d'oh!

Re: UFO's
 

ok a questioning thought :confused:
who decided what the speed of light was, what if it was measured wrong, what if it's not as fast as you all think ;)
how many laws of physics have already been adjusted to fit in with modern thinking ?

I say nothing is impossible and in support of my case may I point out that NTL are still in business ;)

they said we could not travel faster than 30mph
they said we could not fly
the list goes on, but they were wrong

Re: UFO's
 

Galileo, I think, using the motion of Jupiter's moons. Apparently his initial calculations were reasonably accurate.

EDIT Or was it Newton?

Some brainy classical dude with a telescope, anyway.

Re: UFO's
 

the 'modern' classic experiment was the 'Michelson-Morley' one, which demonstrated that the speed of light was a constant, independant of the speed & direction of the emitter. i.e. the same speed from a star moving towards us as from a star moving away.

- the shift in frequency of the light depending on its direction relative to the observer (red shift & blue shift) is what enables us to estimate the relative speed & distance of the stars to our sun. It is the fact we observe most stars light as red shifted that forms one of the main 'proofs' of the 'big bang'.

so if the Universe really is expanding, those aliens should get here sooner rather than later, or we will all be too far apart :D

Re: UFO's
 

At the end of the day we are looking at this subject based on todays knowledge which may or may not be accurate. We cannot visualise travel to other galaxies because the distance involved would mean that we would not get there in our lifetime. But with advances in medical technology will our three score years and ten eventually be multiplied many times over. If there are many other lifeforms in existance throughout the galaxies it is highly likely that many of them are far more advanced than ours and who have life expectations so long that enduring a hundred year or more voyage might appear to them just as long as a flight to Australia appears to us.

We judge everything by our standards but could there be alien life that is many times our size, maybe several miles tall. If you look at life on Earth there are many types of life forms in many sizes. Can you realistically believe that we have every possible life form here and there are non elsewhere.

Changing the subject slightly, can you ever be sure that what you are doing at this moment in time and your total memory that you think you have are not just part of a dream (or nightmare). Is reality yet another dimension?

Re: UFO's
 

True, and where we have no knowledge, we like to fill in the gaps with our imaginations. Hence, medieval cartographers drew their maps with sea-serpents and other kinds of monster in those parts of the world as yet unexplored.

Similarly, we think about the great, unexplored ocean of space and speculate that there must surely be strange, exotic and perhaps terrifying creatures awaiting us.

We might just find that, once again, aliens and UFOs are just a fanciful doodle on the margin of our understanding. ( <--- wow, did I really say that? :spin: I should write a book... ;) :D )

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But whilst the medieval cartographers drew the sea-serpents that did not exist, mankind did exist on the unexplored areas of the maps.

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Only because we had already migrated there, from whatever part of the world we are believed to have originated from. The humans 'discovered' in America and Australia were not novel life forms.

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so who's to say we only got as far as america perhaps we have got further ;)
or who's to say where we started from, perhaps we are the aliens :Yikes:

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we will be aliens to what ever is out their - i find it pretty hard to belive that in this infinate universe i live in we are the only things and look how we ****ed it all up :) maybe all the aliens stay away for a good reason.

what we need is some seriously fast way of travelling in space and seeing whats out there and folding space seems to be the best way :)

Re: UFO's
 

as the majority of the atoms which make up our bodies were once formed in stars and may have been 'recycled' several times, you could be right ;)

Re: UFO's
 

My point about 'time' seems to have been lost...

Sorry for the repetition, I'll keep it brief ;)

Time From A Fly
From a fly's point of view, humans are very slow, large creatures which live for hundreds of generations.

Time from an Elephant
From an elephants point of view, humans are small and very fast moving creatures with a relativly short life.

BOTH.
How does the elephant see the fly and vice versa?

It's fair to say, the elephant can 'see' the fly, butthe fly cannot 'see' the elephant. The elephants movememnts are so slow, the fly may well not notice them!

So, who's to say that alien life isn't microscopic and it's been here, looked around and gone again billions of times over with nothing more to discover?


If we are talking about alien life as being *ANY* life, then yes, I would imagin there are countless lifeforms on countless planets.

If however we are talking about the kind of life form we cound communicate with, which percieves time at the same rate as us.... then that, I believe, would indicate there may be no other life in the universe

Re: UFO's
 

Galileo tried and failed using two people with lanterns a mile apart
Roemer used Jupiters moons, but didn't have accurate distances so got it as 200,000Km/s
In 1958 Froome used a microwave interferometer and a Kerr cell shutter to measure the speed of light to be 299,792.5 km/s.
These days we define a meter as 1/299,792,458 the distance light travels in one second.
In A level physics, you can get away with using 3x10^8m/s

Re: UFO's
 

:wtf: :erm: :rolleyes: :dunce: :confused: :help: I've only just got to grips with what makes up a billion (thanks Proppin :D )

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:nworthy:

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E=MC^2
We all know it, but do you know what the letters stand for?

E is energy
M is mass
C is the speed of light

therefore using a bit of arabic we get

C=square root (E/M)

So as speed increases, Energy and mass increases.
Something like that anyway.

Now, faster than light travel is theologically possible, although what you really do is take a short cut bye folding or warping spacetime

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1X10^6 is a million :)
1X10^8 is 100 million (8 zeros)
m/s is meters per second (standard unit for speed)

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Newton came up with Newtonian physics (so it's a good job he wasn't called smith!)
F=MA

That works with most things (hence why GCSE physics teaches it) but it's not perfect.
Newton knew this but didn't know the mathematics to fix the problem, like with Mercury's orbit.

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But the point is that this is *science*.

If someone claims that "we cannot fly" or "we'll die if we travel over 100 mph" someone else can go out and do an experiment and either prove them right or wrong.

Then yet another person will go over the second person's results and check to see they didn't make any mistakes.

It was originally thought that the speed of light was inifinite, simply because those thinkers didn't have the ability to measure it. Then it was measured, corrected, measured again and it was stated that the speed of light was constant. Then someone else looked at the details and said "hang on, no, it's not constant, it can change in certain circumstances..."

Science constantly evolves and changes as we learn more, so, to quote Arthur C Clarke's personal "three laws:

1) "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

2) "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Laws.html

(Gregory Benford came up with a corollory to Clarke's third law: Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced!)

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very true, I think one of the 'problems' we have with physics, especially, is that a lot of the theory is just that. Einsteins work was initially based solely on mathematics, rather than experiment. When we were able to try to verify the theory, a lot of his conclusions turned out to be very close to the observations, but there were enough anomalies to beg further questions. This is currently being theorised in the various incarnations of string theory & supersymmetry, but again this remains, for now, a purely mathematical exercise. The scientists hope that the new particle accelerators due to come on-line soon e.g the one at CERN, will shed fresh light on the quest for 'the theory of everything'.

If some of this work bears fruit we may be looking at understanding antigravity & who knows what else - something to show the 'little green men', when they arrive.:)

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Problem is poor reporting by the media, a scientist publishes a theory, the newspapers get hold of it, mis-report and the public, not knowing how science as an institute really works, believes that the scientists are proclaming it as a definite rather than a theory

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so what about the faster than light negative mass tachyons? where do they fit in

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Surely if they are travelling faster than light then they don't fit in NOW but at some point in the past ;)

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Leptons, Quarks, and Black Holes

my head hurts now, but one more for you clever folks, if mass increases with speed, how heavy is light? no pun intended. :angel:

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ooh this will get me googling, but afaik the 'latest' versions of supersymmetry theory don't include tachyons - & wasn't the mass 'imaginary' rather than negative?

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That's what I was wondering. I remember reading somewhere that scientists can't agree whether light is a wave or a particle, as it has characteristics of both. If it is some kind of wave, then presumably weight is irrelevant?

/head throbs

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I suppose you are right, tachyons are still a theory unless something has changed recently, but theory or not the maths looks good for there existence.