Recent content by tomBitonti

This seems to have a good treatment of the question of local effects: THE ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 503:6166, 1998 August 10 © 1998. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. The Influence of the Cosmological Expansion on Local Systems F. I. COOPERSTOCK, V. FARAONI...

lol. But, what I meant was the answer doesn’t explain very much. I find that things don’t expand to be fine. Just saying that bound systems don’t expand, except to say that that would cause problems, and is not observed, doesn’t provide much, if any, understanding. If space expands, and...

Thanks! TomB

Sure, but there is a difference between "there is no local effect" and "the expected local effect is too small to be noticed". Uniform enlargement of space seems to imply local stretching. This seems to (obviously?) not occur. The usual answer to that is that space is not stretched in bound...

Mostly in the sense of whether the view expressed is a mainstream view or more "fringe". One of the points that was made (if I understood it correctly), is that defining the velocity of cosmologically distant objects is problematic. (See: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0506032v2 and Velocities of...

So … this was an interesting read. (What parts that I followed.) https://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.1081 (It seems) there is a lot more nuance than is being presented here. Can some more practiced in the field say if this paper is legitimate? TomB

There is symmetry which prevents this. If we are moving towards each other, each of us sees the other’s light as blue shifted, and each of us sees the other having faster time then themself. Relativity leads to paradoxical seeming results. What differentiates the observers is what...

Whether the past still exists or if only a thin membrane exists is not answered. One (apparently) popular view, called the block universe, has all times existing, with time having meaning on space like trajectories within the four dimensional universe. If there is just one block universe, time...

Having equal probabilities to go through either slit is not the key feature. What is key is that the events of passing through one slit or the other are indistinguishable. Then, the event of reaching a distant screen cannot distinguish a photon that arrived from one over a photon that arrived...

I’ve noticed in the last few days an extra ad close to the bottom right. It has what seems to be a delayed close button. The bottom banner stopped having a close button at least a few weeks ago. What is amusing is seeing the adds overlay each other. The new ads seem to have more motion...

Isn’t this a matter of materials technology? An obsidian toothed sword does vicious cuts on unarmored and lightly armored targets. The teeth shatter when a “hard” armor is struck. A big issue for swords is the tradeoff between hardness and flexibility. Hence forging which has different...

New to the thread. Apologies if this has been covered. Considerations: Relative hardness should matter. Striking a golem with the a weapon of an unsuitable material should have a chance of breaking the weapon. Skill should matter. A weapons master should know how to defect blows with a...

The title says nearly all of it. Is the bottom banner ad no longer closable? I can’t find a close control on it. Thanks! TomB

It seemed that she was aware of it, but still has episodes. TomB

That’s the thing. This doesn’t seem, to me, to be a hard decision. The actions were necessary to save the lives of millions of people. Maybe not humans, but I don’t see how that matters. On a quasi-military vessel, the decision seems simple, and not very hard. One should have sympathy for...