let knowledge tenderly caress you �or� bringing knowledge and wisdom to the victims

[TPR950H]

Didn't some physicists already transmit a photon "faster than the speed of light" through liquid helium several years ago?

aren't photons "mass less"?

also read something about tachyons.

[Bona Drag]

BOTTOM LlNE 4 U NERDZ: R WE TALKIN TIME TRAVEL??!?!??

[broneck]

well, the article suggests that "anything faster than the speed of light technically arrives before it leaves"

so whatever that means

[Bona Drag]

tellin u doe, it aint a coincidence that the NIKE MAG dropped last week

[sistersuzie]

what about the speed of smoke

[redX]

now let's not get ahead of ourselves suzie ok?

[sistersuzie]

smoke got there before me anyways

[ke1]

What about the sound of silence doe?

[fobsquad]

silence is the lack of sound. what of it bro?

[bfan]

aren't photons "mass less"?

also read something about tachyons.

yea I believe that photons behave like a 'wave-particle', it technically has no mass but can still act as a particle

[Spastic_Koala]

a=b

a^2 = ab

a^2 + (a^2 - 2ab) = ab + (a^2 - 2ab)

2a^2 - 2ab = a^2 - ab

2(a^2-ab) = a^2 - ab

divide by (a^2 - ab)

2 = 1

u mad?

Mini proof brought to you by the biography of Ramanujan, "The Man Who Knew Infinity". Spot error and if I remember, I'll give you +rep.

[Baeyer-Drewson]

^The final division is not possible because you are dividing by zero?

[halomunkey]

edit: LOL.....i see it

[Spastic_Koala]

^The final division is not possible because you are dividing by zero?

Well that mini-puzzle didn't last very long!

[Baeyer-Drewson]

Line 1 and 2 are fine, but by line 3 you are stating that 0 = 0. The problem only arises because you try to divide by that 0 at the end. (0 characters).

Anyway, here is one that a colleague has been bugging me with for a while:

I haven't done any non-chemistry-related mathematics (ie, anything beyond arithmetic) for quite some time, so I can't show that this is fallacious even though I know that the perimeter is truly getting shorter with successive "folds". Stupider with age concept.

[redX]

isn't that similar to the infinately large mandelbrot thing? while you are flipping the corners you are always at 4 but still you are approximating and you will never overlap with the circle. the only things that actually are on the circle are the corners of your square

smoke got there before me anyways

a thought popping into your head before the thought was formed :eek:

[Lozinski]

Quick question in regards to the beginning of the big bang.

I know that quantum fluctuations are at the base of everything but the thing I can't get my mind around is how did the first particles ever exist?

Are there theories that explain the origin down to the creation of the first particle?

(I know we're supposed to be posting smart shit in here but I feel like this is the best place to ask my question...)

Thanks in advance!

[shufon]

@Baeyer-- even if you took the number of steps to infinity, the black line still only touches the circle tangentially four times rather than converging to the circle. It needs to converge to the circle (touch it tangentially in all places) to equal the perimeter, or pi. Also, the black line will never be inside the perimeter of the circle, so it will always be bigger than the circle. Therefore the black line > pi and pi != 4.

edit: err, just noticed redX's post, pretty much said the same thing.

[redX]

to build on that point - the black outer line will always only touch the inner ring on a given amount of points (!) and a point doesn't have a dimension so you will never be able to argue that the outer perimeter = pi

but how to express that in mathematical terms is beyond me

[shufon]

Right, it only really touches in the four places that it is tangent to the circle to begin with. I'm not sure how to express your point in mathematical terms either, but I think the easiest way (for me at least) to see the flaw in the logic is that if the black line is only ever tangent to the circle in those 4 places, there is always an integrable space between the black line and the circle in all places but those tangents. The integral should equal 4 - pi since the black line always equals 4.

I dunno if I explained that very clearly.

[TPR950H]

infinite divisions contained in a finite space. fractals and what not.

flower of life..

NOW WE'RE HEADING SOMEWHERE.

[redX]

but an integral is a space and 4-pi would result in a measure of length

[broneck]

Virtual monkeys recreate Shakespeare? Methinks not.

For example, look at this boiled-down Shakespeare snippet--"whatsinanamethatwhichwecallarosebyanyothernamewouldsmellassweet"--that's 63 characters long.

The chances of picking that particular tidbit out of 63 randomly generated characters is 1 in 26 to the power of 63. Wolfram Alpha informs me that 2663 is more than 139 octovigintillion (139 with 87 zeros after it), and 1.4 billion times the number of atoms in the visible universe.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20111659-264/virtual-monkeys-recreate-shakespeare-methinks-not/

[Lozinski]

what's the point of the research?

[DüM]

it's a phrase

give monkeys typewriters and eventually they will write shakespeare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem_in_popular_culture

[ke1]

@Loz, check out the video I quoted a few pages back. Krauss explains to a certain extent how something (the big bang) could have been born from 'nothing'. I use the phrase 'to a certain extent' because I'm not familiar enough with the physics terms and mathematical formulas mentioned in the video.

[Lozinski]

He doesn't explain the origin of the first particle. He basically starts after that point. I'm unsure if there's an explanation for it anywhere tho

[OCEANSECT]

the way i see it, either a) matter always existed, and likely we're in a flux of expansion starting with a big bang and then compression due to some event or something else created the first particle, some other being way beyond our means or comprehension that exists in some kind of universe that i can't accurately explain, as its incomprehensible, but in some plane outside of ours, anyway, where matter per se doesn't exist like it does here. or c) our universe is a simulation created by aliens or real humans in the real universe or whatever.

[shufon]

but an integral is a space and 4-pi would result in a measure of length

Err sorry, meant the area of the space within the black line - the area of the circle. I was caught up in the logic and got confused for a second.

[bfan]

I don't think anyone really knows where the universe came from, that will probably come after a few more decades of studying dark matter and stuff like that. the idea of dark matter and dark energy came about after people realized that the rate of expansion of the universe is actually accelerating rather than decelerating as predicted by older models.

here's something I saw that's some SMART SHIT:

http://www.startribune.com/business/129982703.html

IBM is stacking microchips to exponentially increase computing speeds