AlanF:
So when you say that "Einstein's equation does not preclude an object traveling FASTER than the speed of light", you're quite right, because it has nothing to do with velocity at all.
quite right, it deals with momentum actually. Usually, it is convient to square both sides of the equation. I'm not cutting and pasting the whole damn thing into here and then trying to reformat it. Do a Goggle search.
Do you have any idea what an imaginary distance is? Or an imaginary time? Of course not, and neither does anyone else.
Well, first off their NOT imaginary numbers, oh enlightened one. They would be complex numbers (with real and imaginary parts). You know just like the intelligence of this conversation has real (my part) and imaginary parts (what you say).
A brief quote from Stephen Hawking taken from A Brief History of Time (don't have the phyiscal copy in front of me, found the txt OCR'd on the Internet, so no page number. look it up yourself if you think I'm making this up):
"one must use imaginary time... That is to say, for the purposes of calculation, one must measure
time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on spacetime:
The distinction between time and space disappears completely... we may regard our use of Euclidean spacetime as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real spacetime."
gee, AlanF, I guess the Lucasian (sp?) professor at Cambridge (a position once held by Issac Newton himself) is a regular nobody. You need imaginary time for singularities to exist. And you need singularities for black holes to exist, (which as far as we can tell they do since they have been observed in nature).
Now, what do the imaginary parts of the complex roots exactly mean? As far as we can tell NOW, they have no accepted physical meaning. (just several discredited ones including stuff like negative mass) But, that doesn't mean they never will.
Inductors and capacitors have a complex impedance. Remember a complex number has real and imaginary part. Resistance is only the real part of impedance. The imaginary part of the impedance is call the reactance. (I had a dash of EE in school too.)
Just curious AlanF, where oh where did you get your PhD in physics. You sound like you'd have trouble handling the intro physics class at your local community college, brightboy. And man that Stevie Hawking is just some crackpot fundie at Cambridge I guess with his imaginary time. btw, last I heard he was a devout atheist.
well, it's safe to say you have no idea what you are talking about and I await your Farkel-like response of picking out all my typos and grammatical hiccups b/c you know everything else I say is abso-freaking-lutely correct.
you better give up physics and go back to washing the windows. Oh, and please keep whining to Simon to get me banned after I showed you up earlier. Real manly of you I must say.
smile
freeATlast