fando

Ok, I'll take a stab!

cfaguss' conjecture: Crap is real.
Fando's principle: Crap is relative.
Sturgeon's law: 99% of everything is crap.

Conclusion: Almost everything is relatively crappy.

Hmm... I think I ended up confusing myself.

Friar Bellows

Yeah, look here:

Some Scientifically Inaccurate Claims Concerning Cosmology and Relativity

Mageth

Thanks, Fr. Bellows. At last, a substantive rebuttal to Van Flandern's claims, which reveals the specific claims for the crap they are!

cfgauss, I now know the site's full of crap, and I now know that Van Flandern's a bit of a quack, but that does not change the fact that one must look at the substance of a claim to discount it, rather than assuming it's "crap" just because of its source.

cfgauss

I'm sorry if you seriously consider people making outrageous claims on crackpot sites. There has never been, in the history of the universe, a crackpot that's been right about anything substantial. Statistics, man. And besides, real scientists have to prove they're right. No proof, no good predictions, then you've got crap. He had nothing.

Answerer

Well, I thought with natural phenomeons like lightning, every scientist will eventually know that there are things like light which will move faster than sound even without the discovery of eletromagnetic wave. However, most of us will probably still believe in the silly fact that Newtonian mechanics is absolute.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken, speed of light is the 'speed limit' in special relativity not general relativity. Surely, any objects near a black hole will accelerate more than 300000 kilometres per second(actually no one know what happen). Lets hope we can have the answer soon.

Oxymoron

No.

Special relativity assumes the speed of light c is constant for all observers; as a consequence of that assumption, there are singularities when v=c (ergo nothing can exceed c). We then verify that c is indeed constant for all observers, and conclude that c is the finite limit of (physical) speed.

Since sound travels at a velocity dependent on the observer, it cannot have this limiting principle.

John Page

Answerer:

Yes, but isn't there something that scientists will discover that are "beyond" light. What I trying to get at is "As sound is to light, light is to Garglewarp".

My thinking is that time is an imputed property (a measure of relative change).

Cheers, John

Osm bsm Y.

ok....soooo

if gravity takes effect at the speed of light....and according to inflationary theory there was a time when (immediately after big bang) energy traveled faster then light, how could the energy cool/fall together to form our masses if it was outrunning the forces that would cause it to do so?

atleast what i understand of the inflationary theory is that the big bang threw everything (energy?) out very quickly and fairly uniformly and that this is why we can see light from matter 13 billion light years away and not from matter 14 billion light years away. basically it explains how we ourselves got here ahead of light traveling from things that are 14 billion light years away and currently outside our "hubble sphere"

but if ever there was a time that things traveled faster then light, how would they ever be slowed down with no force pulling them back that could keep up with them?

Mageth

cfgauss:

I'm sorry if you seriously consider people making outrageous claims on crackpot sites.

You perhaps don't know me well enough to know that I'm one of the more skeptical posters on this site. The fact that I'm skeptical doesn't change the fact that a claim stands on its own merit, not on the source of the claim. I would certainly hope that they would teach you that in your science education; as a scientist, that should be one of your basic tenets.

When did I say I "seriously considered" the article? I'm a layman when it comes to physics. I read the article I posted (I didn't know anything about the site or the author, nor enough about physics to spot its flaws). Based on the gravity speed-measuring experiments, I already knew the claims of the article were highly suspect, but I asked for someone with more knowledge of physics to tell me what specifically was wrong with the claims the article made. Fr. Bellows posted a site that did just that. "It's on a crap site, so it's crap" is, to put it bluntly, a crap argument.

There has never been, in the history of the universe, a crackpot that's been right about anything substantial. Statistics, man.

I'd classify that as a crackpot statement itself. Can you back it up? Remember, "real scientists have to prove they're right."

And besides, real scientists have to prove they're right. No proof, no good predictions, then you've got crap. He had nothing.

And Fr. Bellow showed me that by posting a site that actually pointed out the errors in the claims. Your ad hom criticism did not. Perhaps you could learn something from that. Real scientists refute faulty claims by pointing out the flaws in the claims, not the flaws in the source of the claims.

cfgauss

No, actually, I've never had a physics or math professor tell me I should read claims written by psychopaths! The sciences are cumulative and aggregate. When you demonstrate that you can't do basic physics, then you *can't* do advanced physics. You can't do math when you can't add. This site clearly demonstrated that they did not know basic physics. QED.

And also, I don't have the time or care enough to go through an insane paper that makes clearly false conclusions and point out the errors to people who likely won't understand them, thus "this paper is crap."