Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a fan of science and the places that it will get us. I agree with Hawking that we need to colonize other planets (can’t keep all the eggs in one basket as it were) especially as we seem to be racing though all the resources we have on this big ball of water and rock we live on. To get to these places will require some hard work and a reliance on a number of people smarter then I to do the number crunching. The physicists will need to work with a number of variables to figure out how to get us from point A to point C without getting crushed to smithereens by an asteroid or consumed by a black hole at point B.
All this being said, people discussing physics are not without some humor or infighting:
Original post~
“I’ve asked this in some of these groups before but didn’t
follow through, so I’m asking again. IMO the speed of light is
constant relative to its *point of emission*. So if an object in
space is moving “at” 1K miles per second (but relative to what?)
and emits light in all directions the light will have a velocity
of 186K miles per second relative to that point in space but the
light moving in the same dirction as the object which emitted it
will have a velocity of 185K miles per second relative to that
object, and light moving in the opposite direction will have a
velocity of 187K miles per second relative to the object.That’s my impression of it so far, but how could we tell what
an object’s velocity is relative to a stationary point in space?
How could we know if anything is “stationary” in space?”
and then a few posts down we have this:
Y.Porat – “see my threads about it”
Inertial – “Don’t bother looking .. porat is full of crap”
dlzc – “He can’t possibly be full of crap. With the frequent expositions of
fecal matter, there has to be some void space.”
Ahh the joys of the spirited discussion. For this and more make sure to check out the sci.physics threads. As for the above discussion I think this picture sums it up best:
