What do you think UFO's are??

[Mr. P]

I thought the string theory helped to explain the existance of yo-yos .!

No...not that one. The Silly String Theory!
We're bein serious here! Geeezzzz...

 

[KarlMarx]

String Theory is really wierd....

In short... it explains everything from the fundamental forces to the properties of matter....

However, in order to do it, there is a requirement for 11 dimensions (10 space dimensions and 1 time dimension)....

Then there's M Theory which is supposed to unite all the different types of String Theory....

But the equations are so complex that scientists can only work with approximations.....

Some day the equations that will describe the exact moment of Creation i.e. "The Big Bang" will be derived. That is what Einstein was working on the 2nd half of his life.... and he was not successful.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Now, how do we get through a wormhole without being torn to bits?

 

[Zhukov]

Even if you could somehow travel at the speed of light, it would take you 4.3 years to get to the NEAREST star.

What's 5 years to a civilization that's been around for hundreds of thousands or millions of years? What's ten, a hundred, or a measly thousand years for that matter?

I would say that is extremely unlikely that an alien civilization has visited our planet. After all there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and we are nothing special.

Sure we're special. Though I doubt we're unique, the fact that this planet bears sentient life is probably a relatively rare thing and therefore worthy of study, at least to someone.

 

[Mr. P]

String Theory is really wierd....

In short... it explains everything from the fundamental forces to the properties of matter....

However, in order to do it, there is a requirement for 11 dimensions (10 space dimensions and 1 time dimension)....

Then there's M Theory which is supposed to unite all the different types of String Theory....

But the equations are so complex that scientists can only work with approximations.....

Some day the equations that will describe the exact moment of Creation i.e. "The Big Bang" will be derived. That is what Einstein was working on the 2nd half of his life.... and he was not successful.

Yes, yes, yes! that's what I remember...the need for more dimensions and how so many
poo-poo the theory do to that..*brushing my cobwebs away a bit*

 

[Bonnie]

Actually mass, time and space all distort with increasing velocity. Newtonian physics is an approximation of Relativity. Newtonian physics works well at low speeds compared to the speed of light. So for most things, Newton's laws of motion still apply.

I hope that this isn't considered advertising.... but if you read "A Brief History of the Universe" by Hawking and Albert Einstein's "Relativity : The Special and the General Theory" (both are written so that even we lay persons can understand it). Einsteins' book does require some knowledge of math, though. He explains how it is that this is so.

BTW. Brian Greene's books on String Theory (e.g. The Elegant Universe) are also a good source of this kind of info.

Doesn't time and space increase exponentially? But even with those kind of numbers it would be almost if not impossible to travel through conventional means and would require going through dimensions in such a way as to bend time itself? Is this in theory even possible?

 

[Zhukov]

Doesn't time and space increase exponentially? But even with those kind of numbers it would be almost if not impossible to travel through conventional means and would require going through dimensions in such a way as to bend time itself? Is this in theory even possible?

As you approach the speed of light, time for a stationary person, as you observe it, slows, eventually to zero once you are at the speed of light. Time for you as you experience it increases to the point where all things happen instantaneously at the speed of light..

Likewise, as you approach the speed of light your mass approaches infinity and at the speed of light, when mass equals infinity, you exist everywhere simulataneously.

You can get very close to the speed of light without serious space-time dilation. Dilation effects occur exponentially, so you could be travelling at 99% c and experience only a fraction of the dilation effects were you travelling at say 99.01% c.

 

[CSM]

As you approach the speed of light, time for a stationary person, as you observe it, slows, eventually to zero once you are at the speed of light. Time for you as you experience it increases to the point where all things happen instantaneously at the speed of light..

Likewise, as you approach the speed of light your mass approaches infinity and at the speed of light, when mass equals infinity, you exist everywhere simulataneously.

You can get very close to the speed of light without serious space-time dilation. Dilation effects occur exponentially, so you could be travelling at 99% c and experience only a fraction of the dilation effects were you travelling at say 99.01% c.

I couldn't help but think of the old Baltimore Catechism the nuns used to teach out of to us Catholics..."God is everywhere" and "God is all knowing".
I wonder if they should have added "...and travels at the speed of light"

 

[Bonnie]

I couldn't help but think of the old Baltimore Catechism the nuns used to teach out of to us Catholics..."God is everywhere" and "God is all knowing".
I wonder if they should have added "...and travels at the speed of light"

Very wise they were, they taught my mother something as a child as well........In the future sin will no longer be seen as sin, maybe they were psychic? Sorry... I digress....

 

[Zhukov]

I couldn't help but think of the old Baltimore Catechism the nuns used to teach out of to us Catholics..."God is everywhere" and "God is all knowing".
I wonder if they should have added "...and travels at the speed of light"

"God is Light" - I John 1:5

 

[CSM]

"God is Light" - I John 1:5

YABUT, they never had that in the Catechism....

 

[no1tovote4]

YABUT, they never had that in the Catechism....

But they did let you buy that book, you know the one that I am talking about... That holy book thingy. It had that verse in it!

 

[CSM]

But they did let you buy that book, you know the one that I am talking about... That holy book thingy. It had that verse in it!

They made us buy that book...you think I actually READ it?

 

[Patriot]

Let’s give this whole UFO issue some scientific perspective.

First, according to Einstein, nothing with a non-zero mass can travel at or faster than the speed of light (the speed of light being 186,000 miles per second). The reason for this is that as you go faster, your mass starts to increase in such a way that by the time you are traveling even near the speed of light, your mass would be almost infinite. So? Well… in order to propel your increased mass, you need more and more energy. So that by the time you are near the speed of light, you would need an infinite energy source to keep going faster or even at the same speed.

Second, the nearest star to our own is 4.3 Light Years away. A light year is the distance traveled by light in one year. That distance in layman’s terms is about 6 trillion miles (a 6 with 12 zeroes after it). Therefore, the nearest star is about 24 trillion miles away. Even if you could somehow travel at the speed of light, it would take you 4.3 years to get to the NEAREST star.

Typically, however, the stars that you see at night are all much further away. The Dog Star, Sirius, is about 9 light years away. Most of the stars that you see at night are within 200 light years away (i.e. the stars that you can see with your naked eye).

Our galaxy is 150,000 light years across (it is a spiral galaxy). Although there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy most are concentrated at the center, we are on the outskirts of the galaxy (sort of like Upstate New York in relation to New York City).

The nearest spiral galaxy is 2 MILLION light years away (the Andromeda galaxy) and furthermore the entire universe is about 20 BILLION light years in diameter (yes, space is finite, not infinite … but that’s another story!).

What is my point? Well…. If UFOs have visited our planet, the chances are entirely unlikely that they got here by conventional means. As I have shown, the Law of Relativity (which HAS BEEN verified by experiment many times) states that speeds at or faster than that of light are not possible. So, if an alien civilization has visited our planet it must have been through some other means.

One other means is via a “worm hole”…. It is possible under extremely strange conditions to create a short cut from one part of space to another. However, the extremely strange conditions would have to mimic those of a black hole. A Black Hole is a collapsed star that is so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape it. In a Black Hole, space-time is distorted to such an extent that it literally curls up on itself.

So what does that mean? Well, if you want to go through a worm hole, you need a black hole. But Black Holes are rare. And if you ever were to get near one, it would crush you into sub atomic particles then suck you in (and you can’t get out!).

Even if you were to overcome the difficulties of traveling near black holes and were successful in using a worm hole, there still is the problem of distance. The nearest black hole is dozens if not hundreds of light years away! So you still would have to travel by conventional means to our Earth!

So, in light of all of this… I would say that is extremely unlikely that an alien civilization has visited our planet. After all there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and we are nothing special. The Sun is an average star on the outskirts of a galaxy that is filled with billions of other stars like it. It is much more likely that UFOs are what I said they are before … natural phenomenon or secret aircraft that happened to be sighted by civilians.

And to think back just as little as two hundred years ago anyone would have thought this possible..The fact that I am speaking to you on the internet.

 

[Mr. P]

And to think back just as little as two hundred years ago anyone would have thought this possible..The fact that I am speaking to you on the internet.

Or a Microwav or telephone or airplanes, spacecraft etc...Good Point.

 

[Patriot]

My point being is just because we humans limit ourselves to logic and scientific facts and findings doesnt mean there isnt something out there that we havent even fathomed yet.

 

[freeandfun1]

I have a question!

What about time travel? Really, if it is unlikely we can travel across the Galaxy, what are the chances of us finding time travel in the future?

 

[KarlMarx]

I have a question!

What about time travel? Really, if it is unlikely we can travel across the Galaxy, what are the chances of us finding time travel in the future?

I hate to be a wet blanket, but I'm afraid, that too, is not possible.

Why? Because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. That law states that no action can decrease the entropy of the universe. That means that entropy only increases.

What is entropy? The best explanation of it is that it is a measure of the disorder of the universe. For instance, if you drop a ball from a height, the ball converts gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy (i.e. kinetic energy is the energy of motion). When the ball hits the ground, the energy is released in the form of entropy. Therefore in this example, entropy increases. For you to perform the experiment again, you must apply energy to the ball to get it back to its original position.

If entropy could decrease, then you would see the ball go back to its original position without any outside influence.

OK.... so what does this have to do with time travel? Well... if you can travel back in time, you have decreased the entropy of the universe! Since you are setting the universe back to a state where the entropy was less than it was now. Therefore, you violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Reality stinks sometimes, doesn't it?

 

[no1tovote4]

I read articles about this that have stated it both ways. I think as long as we limit ourselves to the laws of physics in the physical universe it will be impossible. However there can be more than we can see and observe from our vantage that we have not yet found out.

To impulsively believe in the science of today seems to be the way of humans. If we all did that and nobody thought outside the realm of current scientific theory we would still believe that the world was flat and that it was carried on the back of a turtle. It is conceivable that current scientific theory however mathematically sound does not actually encompass all of physical reality and that we will in time discover some way of traveling above the speed of light, or even through time.

 

[KarlMarx]

I read articles about this that have stated it both ways. I think as long as we limit ourselves to the laws of physics in the physical universe it will be impossible. However there can be more than we can see and observe from our vantage that we have not yet found out.

To impulsively believe in the science of today seems to be the way of humans. If we all did that and nobody thought outside the realm of current scientific theory we would still believe that the world was flat and that it was carried on the back of a turtle. It is conceivable that current scientific theory however mathematically sound does not actually encompass all of physical reality and that we will in time discover some way of traveling above the speed of light, or even through time.

Well, OK.... I could preface the posts with "according to current scientific knowledge..."

Still however, even when laws of science and physics have been revised, the old laws they revised still applied. For instance, Newton's Laws of Motion have not yet been repealed even though Einstein discovered Relativity.

We may find that time travel is possible, but it might require conditions that would make it impractical. Similarly, we may find that going faster than the speed of light is possible but again, not practical.

(As an aside, scientists have theorized that there is a family of particles that actually DO go faster than the speed of light.... they are called "tachyons". However, they have never been observed. The strange thing about tachyons is that they can't go SLOWER than the speed of light.... it's because they have "imaginary" mass. "Imaginary" numbers are those numbers that are multiples of the square root of negative one. If you try to take the square root of a negative number on a calculator, you'll get an error. However, imaginary numbers are used quite a bit in theoretical physics.)