The Science Thread

@fuchsia_nightingale: Doc Brown, Definately Doc Brown

@willpayton or anyone who knows these answers. Before the universe expanded, what did it consist of? what did it contain? Where did the ingredients for our universe get here? why did it expand?

Simple answer: We dont really know.

Longer answer: What we know about the early universe comes from what we can see. At the extreme distance we see the Cosmic Microwave Background which is the left-over energy that's just now reaching us from the early parts of the expansion of the universe... what's generally called the Big Bang. From these observations and our mathematical models we have an idea of what the universe must have been like very soon after the BB. And, we're pretty confident about all this because those models make predictions that are confirmed by observations.

So, having said that, all the Big Bang says is that the universe was once very hot and compact, and expanding very quickly. Why space started expanding, I dont think we know. It could simply be that if it didnt, then the newly created universe would simply annihilate itself soon after creation. This expansion then slowed down, but continues to this day. The BB is not a theory about how (or when) the universe was created, where the energy/matter came from, or whether there's only one or an infinite number of universes. Those questions must be answered separately, and are currently pretty much unknown since we simply have no data... although people do have some ideas about it.

But, what are some current ideas? Well, one idea is that the universe was created as a sort of quantum fluctuation. This is a process whereby in our own universe particles and anti-particles are created in the vacuum of space (called virtual particles), due to the nature of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. One particle has positive energy and the other negative, and the result is that the total amount of energy stays the same, but now 2 particles exist where none did before. This effect has even been measured experimentally as in the Casimir Effect.

So that's one possibility. The universe might just have been spontaneously created out of existing vacuum. One thing to note is that when virtual particles are created, the total energy is still zero. So, how can this be for the universe, since there's obviously more than zero energy? The answer is, actually, the total energy of the universe might well be zero! According to a current theory all the energy/matter in the universe (positive energy) is exactly balanced by negative gravitational energy. There's other ideas if we get into string theory, etc, but I wont go into those because that's out of my depth.

As far as what the universe contained soon after the Big Bang singularity... it was an extremely hot and dense volume of energy. By "extremely hot" I mean that particles were moving at relativistic speeds (close to speed of light). Also, the current forces of nature did not exist, and we believe that all the forces were unified into a single force. This was all, mind you, still only around 0.01 nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Afterwards (around 1 microsecond after the BB) things cooled enough that the forces of nature separated into the current forms, and subatomic particles like protons and neutrons could now exist without being torn apart by the high energies.

@willpayton Thank you. That eas simple enough for me to understand. At what rate is the current universe expanding? Does that mean new stars and planets are being formed? Will the universe stop expanding at some point?

Hmm... at what rate? I'm not sure on that one. There's many astronomers looking into that stuff and probably one has put a number on it, but I dont really know. What I can tell you is that the expansion away from us depends on the distance. So, things near us are expanding slower than things further out. This causes a "red shift" in light coming to us from distance objects, and we can use this to tell the distance to far away galaxies.

Are new stars and planets being formed? Well, new stars and planets are being formed, but not as a result of the expansion of space. The expansion just means that space itself is stretching like a rubber band. The Law of Conservation of Energy tells us that no new energy can be created in the universe. Stuff that's in the universe just gets dragged along with whatever space it's sitting in, which means that all that stuff slowly moves further apart, but nothing gets created in between.

Will it stop expanding? Before we discovered Dark Energy, we used to think that this is what eventually would happen. It was called the Big Crunch. The basic idea was that because of the gravitational pull of all the matter in the universe pulling on all the other matter, eventually that pull would overcome the expansion and everything would collapse down into a black hole. But with the discovery of Dark Energy we know believe that the universe is actually accelerating its expansion. If this continues, then it means that eventually space could be expanding so fast that every molecule and atom in the universe gets ripped apart. Nothing would survive and the universe will eventually be a featureless cold place (near Absolute Zero temperature).

Interesting. The scinecy thread.. I'll come back to this later.

Giggles

@willpayton: Excellent stuff. I even looked up the links. thanks

@willpayton: Well, most physicists now believe in the Big Freeze, yes, but I think the Big Rip would be far more dreadful as a fate for the universe. Everything literally boiling until the atoms themselves are destroyed. The way all the planets and stars would come at us would literally melt the mountains and boil the oceans.

There's also a weird Big Bounce theory, which is basically the Big Crunch into the Big Bang over and over again.

I guess the strangest part is that some physicists still believe that the universe might just expand forever.

@pooty: Last year it was reported that the speed of the expansion of the universe is approximately 74.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

I... yep, here.

Some food for thought

@shootingnova said:

Whether the visible universe will continue to expand, rip apart, or bounce back into a crunch is all determined by balance between positive and negative energy... Negative energy is... essentially space (which would also make it time but meh). Positive energy is everything you are used to being called energy... which includes everything that isn't space.

I might get the direction mixed up but it's not really important to understanding and which is which is made up anyways... not by me though.

You take all this energy, positive and negative and you get number...

greater than 0 (1 for example) the universe will continue to expand and the universe will end in a big rip because there is a tiny amount of negative energy in between all normal particles which will eventually make them go boom.

Less than 0 (-1 for example) The universe has enough gravity in it that the expansion will eventually slow and be pulled back together into a singularity... till eventually it expands again.

equal to 0 The universe will continue to expand forever but things that are bound, gravitationally or otherwise, will continue as they are now...This will eventually result in all the energy locally to be lost to the void between gravitationally bound groups as space expands at a greater speed than light... Interestingly I think this would actually eventually make this energy relative to the overall universe to return back to "normal" non-void space

All relevant data indicates that the answer is 0, what is called a flat universe. And in the future... eons into the future... If I remember right something like 2 trillion years in the future. The data that shows the big bang will be imperceivable.

There are a bunch of interesting things that come from these conclusions, like what are the limitations of our current ways of improving our processing power, but that also ignores a few things...

Lawrence Krauss discusses this and you can find his lecture on youtube...multiples of them.

On a side not... Ever thought that maybe the universe isn't expanding but rather everything is compressing?

What interests me on this topic generally is more along the lines of describing the universe with the fewest amount of rules. I find that I can satisfy myself personally by simply trying to explain this with Opposites attract and Similars repel. I can come up with good enough explanations with this rule for most things I can think of ^.^

Oh also... I forgot to mention that the flat universe that we live in when modeled... it is implied that we live in a universe that was a closed universe (-1, big crunch universe), but that thing when you leave a beer in the freezer happened and so we broke out of closed universe doomed universe and into a flat universe.

A good video touching on some of these topics of what happened before, at, and after the Big Bang, including what the BB means if the universe is infinite (i.e. was the universe ever compressed into a point).

I like the recent contributions!

@lykopis: Lies. You hate logic.

Logically speaking, that's a lie.

It's the thread that keeps on giving. =)

For science!

Did you know you can torch someone with a flashlight?

Engage! Warp Drive Could Become Reality with Quantum-Thruster Physics

Warp-drive technology, a form of "faster than light" travel popularized by TV's "Star Trek," could be bolstered by the physics of quantum thrusters — another science-fic...tion idea made plausible by modern science.

NASA scientists are performing experiments that could help make warp drive a possibility sometime in the future from a lab built for the Apollo program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A warp-drive-enabled spacecraft would look like a football with two large rings fully encircling it. The rings would utilize an exotic form of matter to cause space-time to contract in front of and expand behind them. Harold "Sonny" White, a NASA physicist, is experimenting with these concepts on a smaller scale using a light-measuring device in the lab. [Warp Drives and Transporters: How 'Star Trek' Tech Works (Infographic)]

"We're looking for a change in path length of the photon on the interferometer, because that would be potential evidence that we're generating the effect we're looking for," White told SPACE.com. "We've seen, in a couple different experiments with several different analytic techniques, a change in optical-path length. We're making one leg of the interferometer seem a little shorter because of this device being on, versus the device being off. That doesn't mean that it's what we're looking for."

While these results are intriguing, they are in no way definitive proof that warp drive could work, White said. The scaled-down experiments are just a first step toward understanding if these concepts can be taken out of the realm of theory and applied practically.

Quantum thrust through space-time

Quantum-thruster physics, another technology White is looking into at NASA, could be the key to creating the fuel needed for a warp drive.

These electric "q-thrusters" work as a submarine does underwater, except they're in the vacuum of space, White told the crowd here at Starship Congress on Aug. 17. The spacecraft is theoretically propelled through space by stirring up the cosmic soup, causing quantum-level perturbations. The resulting thrust is similar to that created by a submersible moving through water.

The technology produces negative vacuum energy, a key ingredient for an exotic-matter-powered warp-drive engine.

"The physics models that tell us how to construct a q-thruster are the same models we'll use to generate, design and build a negative vacuum generator," White said. "The quantum thrusters might be a propulsion manifestation of the physics, like the big ring around the spacecraft. If you looked in there, there might be 10,000 of these little cans that are the negative vacuum generators."

White wants to try to apply the quantum-thruster physics models the researchers have been working with in the lab to their work with warp drive.

"We have measured a force in several test devices which is a consequence of perturbing the state of the quantum vacuum," White said. The effect has been small but significant in his experimentation. Going forward, White hopes to do more robust testing to possibly magnify those claims.

Do the time warp

The warp-drive ship itself would never be going faster than the speed of light, but the warped space-time around it could help the spacecraft achieve an effective speed of 10 times the speed of light within the confines of White's concept.

When first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the warp drive would have required huge, unreasonable amounts of energy, but White's work brought those numbers down. Previous studies extrapolated that the drive would need energy equal to the mass energy of Jupiter.

"In the early epoch of the universe, there was a very short period known as inflation," said Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar. "We believe that during that inflationary period, space-time itself expanded at many times the speed of light, so there are tantalizing questions when you look at nature as a teacher. Is this something that can be duplicated around the vicinity of a spacecraft?"

Now, White thinks the drive could be powered by a collection of exotic mass about the size of NASA's Voyager 1 probe if the rings housing the mass were shaped

shaped like a donut and oscillate over time.

http://news.yahoo.com/engage-warp-drive-could-become-reality-quantum-thruster-114310551.html

@umbrafeline: I've heard between 10 and 32 times the speed of light. I use the lower boundary in my Sci-fi universe I'm constructing along with something called an Infinite Energy Drive which allows for the "creation" of energy from probability. Since there are infinite overlapping universes you can extract energy from these universes and use it as you please. ^.^

Funny thing is that even though this would be the answer to our energy problems it could create another energy problem... Where as we are in an universe that will have ever less usable energy and all that with the flat universe i described a few posts ago... developing something like the IED could change the mass of the universe and cause us to return to a Closed, Big Crunch Universe. ^.^

If you guys haven't found Sci-Show on youtube... here's a link and the latest video...

http://www.youtube.com/user/scishow/videos

Also...

for those of you that deal with time... atronomy, geology, etc, and deal with calender dates... What do you think of my calender?

http://durakkenstudios.com/DateConversion2.html

It the "Transcendant Era" Starts on Jan1 2085.

A year on the calender is 1461 earth days long (Four 365.25 years for practical purposes)

This works like a clock as 1 Year passes it adds 1 which is called a galactic second, when hits 60, that's a gMinute, and so on with the same number up to a year. The only number that doesn't work like this is the gMonth which is 60 gDays instead of 30 gDays with 24 gMonths. 1 full years is 248 million years and is about the time it takes for the solar system to go around the galaxy... The count is always positive save for the gYear which goes counts gYears away from 2085.

Positive numbers I have always felt are better because negative numbers on the calender gets confusing. I made the exception for the gYear because it's a long enough time scale that it doesn't need to come up and we don't know the exact moment of the beginning. All other numbers are positive.

The "date" works just like the julian date* that many scientists use but sets the starting date at jan1 2085 for day 1 of first TE cycle and a date 248 million years in the past as the start of the current BTE date... This can be shortened to the last gHour or gMinute (both are reflected in the converter) the former being 14,400 years ago (Sep15, 12,317 BCE) which is pretty much the dawn of human civilization, and the other is Dec30, 1844, which is 240 years before 2085.

I think this is really useful and allow for as much or as little precision that can be quickly understood as needs be... The only thing that may be odd, imo, is the shortform standard way of writing the date that uses the last 4 digits of the number plus an "A" "B" "G" or "D" or alpha, beta, gamma, delta... because of the letter at the end and the 60 60 thing where year 60 is 0100 rather than 0061. Other than that I find it useful and curious to see what others think...

Also... I think this helps with understanding the scale of time... when you think of this Galactic Year... It essentially points out that life as we know has been around for 1 gYear roughly of 55 and Human Civilization has only been around for 1 gHour. This is in my opinion much much better than the whole if you put all of history in the time span of 1 calender year.

* = Julian Date for those that don't know does not refer to the Julian Calender, but a dating system where all days are counted since 1417 BCE or somewhere abouts so that they all have a positive day number, but there is no week/month/year system associated... It's used for for simplicity to easily get from 1 date to another without trying to figure out all that stuff which with different system can take up a lot of time and cause errors. It's also used for Date conversion.

side note: Someone might ask why 2085...the answer is for several reasons that don't really have anything to do with any scientific thing in particular. It's a year after a leap year. which is the only important part. Julian date's beginning is pretty much just as arbitrary but meh.

The universe has no one begining and no one end.

@willpayton: @sc

I'm pretty skeptical about ghost. The only reason I am not 100% against it is because I have seen the same ghost twice and spoke to it once. I was 6-8yrs old the first time. about 14 yrs old the second time. I don't think i'm crazy. I wasn't experiencing any trauma.But I don't know enough about science to refute what I know I saw. What is the scientific explanation for these occurrences?

@pooty said:

With so little description. Hallucination

Twice? With no trauma involved aka hitting my head. No drugs. 6 yrs old in my basement playing with a remote control car. second time in the same house in the upstairs bath room. need any more info let me know

Basically it's just you having a belief that you saw a ghost one time. Your mind built up the detail. As you aged and time passed your brain provided more details and more exaggeration. Then you saw something you thought was a ghost again. The detail you made applied those details to the new occurrence thus "same ghost". Now that you're older and time has passed you've made up more details and connected it more in your head so now you think it's the same thing. Btw, when i say you "made it up" I mean the brain does this with all memories, not you're lying.

As to what you actually saw could be anything from the most outrageous possible thing to you had a completely fabricated event that your brain has created. You might want to have a brain scan done to see if you're schizophrenic. The earlier you know the more likely it is that you can set up things to help you deal with it. I'm not saying you have it, but it is a possibility. Some people with various mental illnesses have hallucinations so real that they are indistinguishable from reality. It could also just be that an EM field field randomly messed with your brain and you saw something do to it. But again without details and research it could be that you saw something from another universe, or an alien, or an energy being of some sort that we don't know of at all. We can't really say.

There might be a lot of different physical explanations, but without knowing exact details it's hard to even guess. If it's been a long time since then, it might be as simple as you just not remembering it accurately. The brain does all kinds of weird things with memory, and there's been experiments that show it's very easy to plant fake memories in people's minds. It could be a combination of partial real memories merged with later dreams.

@durakken: Not bad. thanks

@willpayton: So we're pretty much ruling out that it was a spirit or ghost?

@pooty said:

My take on your question is that there could be multiple scientific explanations, and you might never actually have one for your experience. I have been in situations where really uncanny things have happened around me, that seemed too unlikely or eerie, but I am also a fairly skeptical person as well. I'll get a bit personal here, but a few years back, my mother passed away from cancer. She had been given about 6 months to live, but she passed away in under 2 months. What was initially eery to me was a few weeks after she was diagnosed terminally, Marvel released a new comic book mini series called 1 Month 2 Live which was about a man with cancer who had one month to live. The book was released, I think weekly so I got the final issue a few days after my mother passed, which was really surreal. The whole situation felt surreal, I have never known anyone close who had died from cancer as young as my mother. I wondered if there was something strange going on, it felt like something strange was going on, but my always appreciated skeptical and critical thinking kicked in and I ran some maths about how many people die each year from cancer and so approximately how many might pass away from cancer each month, the period that that Marvel comic series ran for and the rough conservative number is around 600 000 as far as I can tell.

So potentially a lot more people, hundreds of thousands more people than I, had the potential to find themselves in that strange position of getting a comic series about a person dying of cancer the same month someone close to them died from cancer. So maybe surreal for anyone experiencing such an occasion but thats sort of just life.

Your experiences are very different in nature to mine though, can you remember if you were particularly calm or nervous or fearful or relaxed or just how you felt when you saw what you felt were ghosts? Lots of different states of mind and emotion can give clues to physiological processes that may have affected your senses and perceptions at any given time. How tired or awake you were, your diet, lots of things can affect how you interpret the reality around you. Do you know Galactus very well? One of the earlier ideas about Galactus that is referenced now and then is that Galactus is so incomprehensible to beings that he will appear as what ever race will observe him as. To humans Galactus looks human, to other aliens he looks like their species. It was a cool touch to his character, but this effect actually works as much with the mundane as it does the extraordinary. People have different experiences, have you ever seen a spot on a wall or some thing on the floor when you have been sleepy and gone to hit it or whack it with something because you thought it was an insect? Its pretty common for people to do that before they realize its just some fluff or something else mundane.

Maybe your vision superimposed the likeness of a person and your brain couldn't understand what happened and your consciousness and instinct exclaimed ghost! There are other states besides trauma that could precondition a persons senses to viewing things that aren't actual or physical. Lots of people who are too sedated and calm have claimed seeing ghosts but because they weren't scared or panicked they feel more confident that what they saw was real but that can actually also be a sign that their perceptions and conclusions are impaired minutely as well. Oh and you do not have to worry about the crazy part either, since there is a very large gulf in-between having perfect senses and being crazy and everyone falls in he middle bits, no ones senses are so perfect that that they can't be tricked or manipulated by internal factors and external factors.

I don't know enough science to refute many things that have happened to me, but I am great as questioning myself. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water I'll see a weird shadow in my hallway that makes me wake up faster because I wonder if its an intruder and I get I start to take a defensive stance but the very act of myself becoming more conscious and awake has the effect of improving my vision and senses and I barely miss a stride because I realize that its just some shadow because of outside lighting, neighbors night light or something of that nature. That being said there could be so many situations where if I was too tired or I was experiencing some other type of minute physiological or sensory stress or fluctuations that I may convinced myself there was an intruder and rushed back to my room, then realizing later that the intruder left without stealing anything. Or it actually could have been an intruder. A difference between burglars/intruders and ghosts though is that we have hard and solid records and evidence of one, but not the other, but be that as that might be, it still doesn't mean that all the times at night in my hallway I got spooked by some giant guy in my hallway, doesn't mean there was anyone there at all, and there never actually has been anyone in my hallway. Oh well there was one time a friend was staying over in a guest room but it was so dark I actually just collided with them and got a sore shoulder.

You might enjoy reading various links and science articles you can find by googling "Humans are pattern seeking animals" and variations of that phrase and looking around. Evolutionary wise, many animals are conditioned to react to danger before its actually apparent as a way to optimize success of survival. Since many other animals camouflage themselves other animals protect themselves by their senses and instincts. Animals are flighty, sensitive and jittery often in the wild when they know predators are around. Hell you can probably see many online interactions with people getting angry, upset and abusive towards each other and the reasons why are not so dissimilar. A commonly used example is that its better for a hominid to climb a tree if they think they see a lion in the grass then doubt and think it was just a deer or the wind, because they can always climb down the tree when its safe but if there actually was a lion then they are done for. Your brain operates the same way as far as instincts and identifying things even if you are wrong, because not knowing and doubting yourself as far as evolutionary wise is a lot riskier. To some extent that is true with my hallway situation as well, because we know there are people who break into other peoples houses, so my body triggers itself to wake up faster to better deal with a threat - a threat I perceive as another human, but then I chill once I realize is just a shadow and carry on. Since I am so sleepy when this happens I always forget all the other times this happens and get alert again, but thats not so bad and it would be really helpful if there ever was actually a intruder to my home.

You have only seen a ghost twice yes? When you were younger? Probably lots of alternatives you can think of that don't necessary have to have good science behind them, like you have probably questioned yourself as far as why you haven't seen more ghosts or why other people don't have hard or solid evidence or proof ghosts exist. You probably have wondered if you were a ghost you would probably behave a whole lot different than most ghosts tend to act. Stuff like that which just makes you more skeptical of an experience even if that experience felt very real and sincere. lol sorry long reply. ^_^

Who knows... maybe it was. However, I've never seen evidence that those things exist. So, given how many claims of ghost sittings versus how many actual confirmed cases (0 that I know of), the chances that any given claim is valid is pretty darn close to zero.

It only makes things worse that the human brain is so susceptible to thinking things that arent real. I mean, I was once in that half awake, half asleep condition one morning, and I heard my girlfriend next to me say something... clear as can be. I heard it, without a doubt. But, she was asleep at the time and I also have no doubt she didnt say anything. It was just my brain messing with me. I felt like I was mostly awake, and I heard her say something, but it was just an illusion.

The hypothesis that life on Earth started on Mars gets a small bit of evidence to support it. Personally I dont buy this idea, but hey, whatever floats their boat.

http://www.space.com/22577-earth-life-from-mars-theory.html

We may all be Martians.

Evidence is building that Earth life originated on Mars and was brought to this planet aboard a meteorite, said biochemist Steven Benner of The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida.

An oxidized form of the element molybdenum, which may have been crucial to the origin of life, was likely available on the Red Planet's surface long ago, but unavailable on Earth, said Benner, who presented his findings today (Aug. 28; Aug. 29 local time) at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Florence, Italy.

"It’s only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidized that it is able to influence how early life formed," Benner said in a statement. "This form of molybdenum couldn’t have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because 3 billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did. It’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."

Organic compounds are the building blocks of life, but they need a little helpto make things happen. Simply adding energy such as heat or light turns a soup of organic molecules into a tarlike substance, Benner said.

That's where oxidized molybdenum comes in. Inserting it or boron, another element, into the mix would help organics make the leap to life, Benner added.

"Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidized form of molybdenum was there, too," he said.

Another point in Mars' favor is the likelihood that the early Earth was completely covered by water while the ancient Red Planet had substantial dry areas, Benner said. All of this liquid would have made it difficult for boron, which is currently found only in extremely dry places, to form in high enough concentrations on Earth when life was first evolving.

Further, Benner added, water is corrosive to RNA, which most researchers think was the first genetic molecule (rather than DNA, which came later).

No indigenous Red Planet organisms have ever been discovered. But it is possible that life on Mars — if it ever existed — may have made its way to Earth at some point, many scientists say.

Some microbes are incredibly hardy, after all, and may be able to survive an interplanetary journey after being blasted off their home world by an asteroid impact. And orbital dynamics show that it's much easier for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth than the other way around.

Wherever Earth life originated, Benner is glad it put down roots on our blue planet.

"It’s lucky that we ended up here nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life," Benner said. "If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell."

@willpayton: Thanks for your reply . You say zero proof has been found of ghost. Yet, many TV shows(Ghost Hunters among others) have photographed and recorded spirits. Not just orbs but you can see these things moving. You can hear actual words. I'm aware of photo editing etc. So if video and sound recordings are not enough evidence, what kind of evidence would it take to support or prove spirits really exist?

@sc: lol sorry long reply.

We both know you're not sorry about it at all. lol. thanks for your response

I meant zero proof that I've seen. It might be that there's solid evidence out there for ghosts, it's just that I havent seen it.

I have seen programs like Ghost Hunters, but honestly I cant take them seriously. But, even if I did, I've never seen anything in those shows to make me think that they're really looking at anything supernatural. Hearing sounds or words... that's hardly supernatural. Photographs of blurry spots or fluffy light streaks... I mean, what does it prove? Those shows are just entertainment, just like the ancient alien stuff on History Channel and that stupid mermaid show/hoax on Animal Planet.

What kind of evidence would it take to support the existence of ghosts? Some damn good evidence. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan. How about starting with some non-ambiguous evidence. Then get others to confirm and reproduce it. Then show that there's no natural explanation for the phenomena.

Here's a question: What's the best evidence for a ghost that you've seen?

@willpayton: I have seen programs like Ghost Hunters, but honestly I cant take them seriously

Agreed. Hate that show

that stupid mermaid show/hoax on Animal Planet.

That show pissed off a few people because it didn't say it was fake until a few days later.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

understood

What's the best evidence for a ghost that you've seen?

I have seen mediums tell people things about dead ones that only that dead loved one would know. I know some are fake but I can't imagine all of them being fake. The best evidence I have is my own experience. If you're talking about recorded evidence.....none

Everyone has to judge their personal experiences for themselves. I cant tell you whether or not it's valid evidence or convincing, you have to decide on your own. But unfortunately it's no good for everyone else. If we go by science, which is the best tool we have for determining such things, then we need evidence that can be duplicated by others.

One reason why I think that things like ghosts dont exist is that they have been reported for thousands of years, but there's still no real scientific evidence that I've seen. You'd think that if a phenomenon was so common, that it'd be easy to find cases to test. They should be everywhere. But, no, not a single scientifically verified case.

@pooty: The best evidence about ghosts in terms on humans that have died and are not some sort of disembodied energy being is annual Houdini doesn't show up and give the secret code to seance held on Halloween. Houdini thought that all this ghost and spirit stuff was nonsense, but if it really was possible then he said he'd tell someone, i forget who, a secret message that he'll return and tell them this password so that we actually have proof of ghosts that can actually communicate from the other side... It has been how many yearss since Houdini died? And still he has not shown up even though every halloween they try to contact him... and yes halloween was part of the test.

I think that is more than enough to refute "ghosts" are dead people

@durakken: I just recently heard of that event. One event doesn't refute or prove any claim. But the lack of concrete evidence from centuries of trying can't be ignored.

@willpayton: Not including God,ghost etc, what are things people believe in that has none or little scientific evidence?

Id post more but my computers being buggy sometimes and I posted all the science stuff on my facebook page

@pooty said:

The problem is that you are looking at that as one event... It is just the test with the most set conditions.

People say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that is wrong. If someone makes a claim and it fails to produce evidence supporting it, that is showing that whatever their is, they are lacking the evidence to back it up which is evidence that that evidence does not exist. You would expect that the evidence doesn't exist if the claim is wrong.

We're talking millenia after millenia of people making claims and never once producing evidence when people could go check. That is evidence that their claim is wrong. Houdini's seance is just the longest running test of a claim going that has continued to show that all disembodied humans as ghosts is indeed very likely not true, but as I have said in other places, the phenomena that is called ghosts is real. There's no question there. It's just a matter of what caused it in this or that particular scenario.

Time for some fun with science!

Check out this experiment and tell us what you thought the results would be.

And here's the final results of the experiment:

Why do you think the result was what it was?

I guessed not as high or equal height at first and then I thought about it some more...I said Almost equal height that is almost imperceptible but there is a slight difference... Looking at the results I was right. The "spinning" block went almost as high but it is slightly lower, at least it looks slightly lower to me... I'm not taking a picture and drawing a line to the centers to determine.

As far as the answer as to why I'd guess it has to do with whatever energy is lost by the rotating is gained simultaneously due to gravity is pulling down on one end as the other end is going up thus equalizing it... The reason that most people think it is going to be lower has to do with the block going in an arch meaning that the same motion energy of the object is being used to go up and over rather than just up. The spin however is self contained and is part of the object and not part of the same model. The reason it is slightly lower is because the energy imparted to start the spin isn't that much and the distance isn't that much so the difference is minute.

That's my guess >.>

I thought this is what I said in post #239. If not, this is what I meant.

@pooty: I dunno...probably. I had just woke up lol

My original guess was that the spinning block would not go as high, due to some energy going into the rotation... hence less energy used to lift it as high as the non-spinning block.

For the result video... I also thought that the spinning block went a little less high than the non-spinning one, which fit with my initial guess. However, I think the video is correct that basically we should think of the two blocks going up the same height. The fact that they dont by a little bit is just the normal error associated with the experiment.

So the question is, why do the two blocks go up the same height even though one is spinning?

I already answered that. The reason we don't see much of a difference or any at all is because the scale.

But the answer stems from the question... If the energy of the bullet is going up how is it turned to go down and then back up again.

Assuming you have a force going up enough to beat gravity for a short while why is it that the bullet's energy can be completely stopped and rotated back down only to be rotated back up again. The question for me lies not in the why it gets to the same height but why is the block, with the bullet spinning.

That being the case that the bullet is already acting funny means that there is something funny going on to begin with and anything that we imagine is going to be wrong unless you can answer what is stopping the bullet and get that reaction, let alone why they go the same height. Why they go the same height should be answered by that question. Since I don't know what would stop that bullet i could possibly answer the question lol, nor could anyone else less they know enough about the materials involved or had a good guess about them.

If I understand what you're saying correctly you think that there should be a difference, but we dont see it because it's just too small. Is that correct?

That's not the case. Without any error, the two blocks should definitely go up the same height.

I'm not sure I understand your question. In the case where the block ends up spinning, it's because the bullet hits off-center. In force terms, it creates a torque that begins the block rotating.

@willpayton: I don't think that's the case that they should go up the same height.

The block shouldn't rotate. The bullet is travelling upward at speed fast enough to lift the block straight up. For the block to start spinning it means that the bullet's upward momentum has been somehow converted to downward movement.

What we should see is the block's trajectory rotate a small bit going off to the side, not spin. Just imagine what is happening to the bullet, ignore the block. The bullet has enough force to penetrate the block, but then it stops. That's weird in itself for what appears to be a block of wood. The bullet itself should travel a straight path in the block of would though. That means that in the center aimed block you would say a perpendicular hole to the entry surface where as in the off center one you should see a hole slanted toward the nearest parallel surface to if the bullet was travelling straight ^.^ And while the bullet should travel mostly straight, if the bullet were to keep going it should exit at an angle to the left, from our viewpoint, of the gun

But that's not what happens. The bullet goes in and then travels in a circle while the block itself goes straight up.

There is something fishy going on imo. A Rifle bullet should easily go through that block of wood from a distance, let alone point blank like that. The person was very confident it wouldn't. There is something we are missing about the experiment and it's not the "physics" imo. I would guess that would might be dealing with something like a modified bb gun or something like that where the shot is just strong enough to enter but not enough to exit, but the shot keeps it going up, and that perhaps the muzzle blast causes it to spin.

If this is the case then the round should still do what what I said, but not quite as extreme and it would explain why the bullet doesn't exit...It would then also explain the spin and why we see it go straight up rather than to the side...A bullet would make it arc, but a spin keeps it from arcing and thus all the force of the round continues to go forward...and the reason there isn't any spin on the first shot is the force of the blast is equally distributed and doesn't really do much.

That would be my best guess... wonkey materials and taking into account the muzzle flash.