Out of Pod Experience

The meaning is asssociative.
Context matters, pay attention.

P.S Come to think of it, on second thought, I have this nagging suspicion that you didn't actually get what's being implied with the Newton's Law vs Relativity comparison. What the heck are they teaching in school nowadays?

sorry, that was not what i got from your post. we can predict the effects newtons laws will carry at relativistic velocities just as the ICARUS team can predict (based on the current models) how neutrinos would behave at FTL speeds. you are correct in that this prediction would be the basis of a hypothesis, not a theory, because it is currently untestable.

the tools bit is a good question. there are serious ethical concerns when talking about the mixing of financial backing and scientific progress. you might think that a corporation would have more problems with inaccurate results, but you would be wrong in the context of physics. poor results lead to poor products, so corporations have a great deal of interest in providing and even developing the most precise tools and practices available. the down side is that they own your results. it's proprietary, which might unnerve some. the university setting however allows for a great deal more creativity, though, at the cost of less financial security. both settings could very easily develop the best tools.

Cheers for the answer, could you recomend further reading regarding my quaestons if I find time to look into it further?

You have a very immpresive knowledge of your subject (though I still haven't tackled the whole threadnaught yet) Kudos to you

Your a Scholar and a Gentleman Sir

wow holy **** dude, this wasnt a troll at all. I was hoping you could offer some real debate on this, and the first 2 is actually something i am really interested in... Jeez. Perhaps you need to take meds...i was actually impressed with your knowledge, shame you just let yourself down...perhaps now answer a new question

like why do all the idiots like yourself come to play eve..

Because the Devs invite us to. More Idiots help grease the wheels for them.

How often does the rivalry between theoretical (mathematical) and experimental physicists come up in your work? I know at least from folks like Peter Woit, there's always been a bit of a rift between the two 'schools.'

I've always been wondering and have never gotten a clear answer on this:

What constrains the speed of light? I mean why does light travel 300,000km (ish) in one second rather than 1,000,000,000,000km in 1 second, or infinity km in 1 second?

the speed of light comes directly from CLASSICAL electrodynamics, which might be somewhat surprising given it's importance in relativity. maxwell's equations, which describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields, yield a solution to something called the wave equation. the wave equation is a general, mathematical description to all wave phenomena, and the properties of any wave it describes can be determined by examining the behavior of this one equation (the velocity is one of these properties). the solutions produced by maxwell's equations describe a self propagating wave and the derived velocity from the wave equation is the inverse square root of the product of the permeability and permittivity of free space.

the permeability and permittivity of free space are usually denoted as mu_0 and epsilon_0 (greek letter lowercase mu, with a subscript 0, read as "mew" naught and epsilon naught). these are two very important constants in electrodynamics because they describe, in very loose terms, how much magnetic and electric potential energy you can pack into a vacuum (mu for magnetic, and epsilon for electric). they have the values of...

epsilon_0 = 8.85... E-12 F/m (Farads per meter, or in SI m^-3 kg^-1 s^4 A^2 where A is amps)

mu_0 = 1.25... E-6 H/m (Henrys per meter, or in SI m kg s^-2 A^-2. as an interesting side note this is exactly 4*pi E-7. this comes from how we have defined our units.)

and sure enough...

epsilon_0 * mu_0 = 8.85E-12 * 1.25E-6 = 1.10625E-17

1/sqrt(epsilon_0*mu_0) = 1/sqrt(1.10625E-17) = 300,658,411 m/s

we have made very precise measurements of both of these constants, and the more precise values we use, the closer and closer the calculation approaches c.

from this we can see that the speed of light being constant in all frames is a direct manifestation of it being defined based on the properties of the medium through which it is traveling (be it vacuum or matter), and these properties are completely independent of the velocity of the observer!

telekinesis would be something we refer to as a force demonstrating "action at a distance", like magnetic repulsion or attraction. in truth, all forces demonstrate, at a fundamental level, action at a distance. in the language of particle physics (the standard model) we would say that the momentum imparted on the object is transmitted by a "force carrier" particle (a photon, gluon, w or z boson, or a graviton). so, if you were telekinetic, and if you follow the standard model, you are transmitting and receiving virtual radiation to and from the object you are moving in the form of these particles.

imagine you and a friend are standing on a very smooth ice rink. you take out a baseball and toss it to your friend, who catches it. when you throw the ball, you also start sliding away from your friend. this is conservation of momentum. when your friend catches it, they start sliding away as well for the same reason. assuming we can think of the ice rink as frictionless, the more you toss the ball back and forth, the faster and faster you will slide apart. you're accelerating in small, discreet quantities every time you catch or throw the ball.

the fundamental mathematics of the "force carrier" particles are the same, but they also allow for attractive effects (that there is some way the ball could be thrown such that you both slide closer to each other).