Quantum Physics

are you at least an asterisk to history?

i am worthless to history

Well thats something at least.

you are a huge matter to history, but it will be modern. Long after we are returned to dust things you said here will reverberate like they were just said.
you know Petty tries to be so crabbit but he always comforts all of us, did you notice that. ALWAYS.

Its a trick of the light.

It's like I said, he's a snickers bar.

I'm tempted to make that his new title.

I will never tire of that emoticon.

It should come with the sound of grinding teeth and muttered swearing.

The animation is perfect for imagining that, though!

I like that title. And I love that emoticon though I have never used it. I feel it belongs to you guys. Nora, when is the wedding?

what wedding?


that emoticon is perfect for Petty, that and is Petty in a nutshell (the last one regarding PJ ) I'm always very pleased with myself if I am able to provoke the angry emoticon

Check out the Complaints thread, there's more wedding talk in there.

Edit: http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t436p360-complaints-2#62301

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Vaginas are not the problem Eldo (except once a month)- its their ability to think several moves ahead in several different complicated mind games you dont even know you are playing (until you lose- as by the time you realise you are even playing she is already moving her Queen in for checkmate-this is why you often see husbands accompanying their wives to events wearing a slightly confused, stunned expression- thats because they are not quite sure how they go there when they could have sworn they had arranged to spend the day at the footy with their mates).

For some reason I was prompted to come back to this (I think it was the shoes in some other thread). I'm currently/recently involved in something quite wonderful and totally unfathomable. The cute thing is she thinks I understand what's going on - and is so proud of me for purportedly having the intellect to understand what's going on.

I only have the intellect to understand when it's in my best interest to just smile and nod knowingly, somehow masking the vast sea of bewilderment lurking behind my eyes. If a boy stumbles into something that works, he's best served by not delving too deeply into why it works.

Let's hope she doesn't read Forumshire then.

She thinks I have socially cognizant skills because of my writing. I almost directed her to Forumshire so she could read without me having to write more. Close call I guess.

A map tracing the "oldest light" in the sky has been produced by Europe's Planck Surveyor satellite. Its pattern confirms the Big Bang theory for the origin of the Universe but subtle, unexpected details will require scientists to adjust some of their ideas.


The map shows tiny deviations from the average background temperature, where blue is slightly cooler and red is slightly warmer. The cold spots are where matter was more concentrated and later collapsed under gravity to form stars and galaxies. Image: ESA/Planck Collaboration.

Scientists say its mottled pattern is an exquisite confirmation of our Big-Bang model for the origin and evolution of the Universe.

But there are features in the picture, they add, that are unexpected and will require ideas to be refined.

The map was assembled from 15 months' worth of data acquired by the 600m-euro (£515m) Planck space telescope.

It details what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB - a faint glow of microwave radiation that pervades all of space.

Its precise configuration, visible in the new Planck data, is suggestive of a cosmos that is slightly older than previously thought - one that came into existence 13.82 billion years ago.

This is an increase of about 50 million years on earlier calculations.

It seems there is slightly more matter out there (31.7%) and slightly less "dark energy" (68.3%), the mysterious component thought to be driving the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.-bbc


I f***ing love science!

that cant be all of the Universe surely? I thought it was infinite. and 13 billion years doesnt seem long enough to me, I was expecting it to be trillions and trillions. (thats bigger than billion isnt it? )

If not for something called 'inflation' early on, the calculation would be for an older universe, but I think it would still only come out to about 20 billion years. And in American english 'billion' means what the Brits call a 'thousand million', so it's even worse than you may have thought, Mrs Figg!

I DO find it disconcerting that the earth has been around about 1/3 as long as the whole universe, AND that's even with our sun being a second generation star.

I hope with more observations dark energy disappears completely! I don't really understand it and I don't like it. Dark matter is even worse. I've a gut feeling it's all dust and shit in the observations, and bad assumptions, etc.

no but really I thought it was infinite, therefore why is there an edge? and whats beyond the edge if there is one? and is Dark Matter just nothing? the nothing that was there before the BB. and is that why its scary because its The Nothing like in Never Ending Story. Because we cant contemplate nothing, we call it DM. But we will never find out what it is because it doesnt actually exist to be caught on a timey wimey machine. How come Earth is so old? Its a living organism surely after billions of years it has developed a kind of consciousness?

Not infinite in space or time - which Einstein didn't like either and put a bandaid into his theory of general relativity to try to keep it unchanging. Later in the face of irrefutable evidence that the universe was expanding (and therefore must have started from a point if you run the film backwards) he admitted it was the biggest mistake he ever made.

But nothing forbids the existence of an infinite number of other universes going back in time forever, even if we can't see them. That may be some solace for the loss of infinity in our own universe.

Dark matter. Seen in galaxies rotating faster than they should if you add up all the mass that can be seen in stars and dust glowing in the infrared. So they come up with kinds of crazy shit to explain the undetected mass. I think they'd do better to admit they f&$çed up their calculations and measurements.

I think this is why we still have religion.
Until we can (if we can) work out why there is something instead of nothing- and how you can seemingly have an explosion of super hot stuff from nothing and without anything preceding it to cause it, we always will have religion.

And I guess there cant be anything outside the universe as by definition a universe is where all the stuff is kept- but how can a universe expand if there is no space outside it to expand into?

Astrophysicists define the universe as the sum of all things connected by physical interactions. This allows things we can't observe (beyond the range of a photon travelling since the beginning of the universe) to still be included in our universe by a chain of possible connections.

but our universe does have a boundary beyond which nothing can travel. Gravity warps space: when all mass was compressed into a point it was a black hole. As it expanded the boundaries of the black hole expanded. It is theoretically possible for space to be warped into a kind of 4 dimensional sphere: the surface of the earth has no horizontal boundaries yet has a finite area. This is Stephen Hawking's suggestion, and though we have no proof of it cosmologists have glommed onto it. After all, if the universe is just a black hole we know there is more universe outside, which is unfulfilling; but if the universe is a black hole warped into a hypersphere, it becomes all inclusive.

But if the universe is a big beach ball, nothing in logic dictates there can't be other beach balls. This leads to a metaverse of universes. So it goes in the playgrounds of the mind.

Initiate: Master what keeps the earth suspended in space?
Master: It it held upon the shoulders of a giant elephant.
Initiate:But what then keeps the elephant suspended in space?
Master: Its stands upon the shell of a giant tortoise.
Iniatete: But master what then keeps the tortoise suspended in space?
Master: Oh, thats simple. Its tortoises, all the way down.