Questions for people to answer:

[Darkensky]

What is dark matter?

Are there additional spacetime dimensions?  If so, witch one am I in?

Why is the sky dark at night?

[Darkensky]

I do not believe black holes are made of dark matter.  What proff do you have of this!

[Darkensky]

Really, didn't know your father was him.

So tell me, is time travel possiable?!

[xTc the NJ GUIDO]

My chemistry teacher had a lesson on dark matter, but i slept through it because I never thought it would matter in my life to know what it is. But dark matter is definitley not anit matter, because one ounce of anti matter is enough to destroy this planet like 50 bazllion times over.

[Cole]

DO YOU GUYS really want to know?  Cause if I don't have a lot to do tomorrow at work...

[Darkensky]

I have an somewhat understanding of dark matter. But please by all means post what you want to say!

[Cole]

Mathematically time travel is possible depending on the model of the space-time contiunum used.  If you by into string theory, then it is.  You wouldn't survive it though.  You have to dress up like a metrosexual and encase yourself in Gucci.

dark matter is a speculation of sorts.  wikipedia can explain what it is thought to be.  basically, dark matter fills the void in the explainations of the cosmos.  Basically observations were made that made no sense.  They found radiation emmiting bodies that were affected by something, but the couldn't tell what.  It turns out there is this 'stuff' not comprised of atoms but of something else that is affected by gravity, but nothing else.  Recently (~2000) they found an entire galaxy that is so massive and is spinning so fast (as seen by radio telescopy) that it should be bright enough to be seen with an amateur telescope, but it's not there.  Pretty interesting.  Too new to be widely accepted though. 

In the deep vacuum of space, there is little matter, so somethings got to be there.... 

Dark matter could make up a black hole.  Or it could be regular matter.  Either way, it is so massive that photons cannot escape it, so if the point source is emitting radiation or not what does it matter.  All black holes are, are really massive things. 

There are many dimensions, however we are only able to percieve 4, and of that one is relative and the others are spatial.  All are perceived incorecctly.  i.e. a straight line is not a straight line.

The sky is not dark at night.  Our upper atmosphere is just not being excited by the sun's radiation. 

The whole anitmatter thing is interesting too.  When antimatter and matter come together the next energy dissipation is zero.  But it does emit radiation in the process.  Since the particle and anitparticle are gone, the enegry has to go somewhere.  In the proton case it is emmited as a photon.  Since mass stores enormous amounts of energy, if you could contain (but how...) antimatter to that level, it would emitt a lot of radiation.   CERN has been making tons of anti-protons for 3 years now.  You cannot make antimatter without making the corresponding matter.  There is thought to be areas of the universe where anitmatter is "pooled" of sorts.  Areas where there is no matter, but this is speculation..  Most of the antimatter made in the beginning of the universe was destroyed, probably broke down to smaller particles due to the emmense heat and pressure within the first second of the "big band".  This created an asymmetry towards matter, which was more robust (obviously).  After the first few seconds of the big bang, things cooled off enough that antimatter-matter pairs were no longer being created that often.  The leftover matter is what you are today. 

[Darkensky]

That was a nice "post".  Reading stuff like that is always fun, don't you agree?

Just recently they found a way to travel faster then light... did u read about that one.  Ill look for the link again. 

[Cole]

Yeah.  Very interesting.  laser beams,  but not on the heads of sharks.  pulses carrying beethoven or mozart or something like that.  I am wondering though if a mistake was made.  I heard about this almost 2 years ago now, but haven't heard much of it since.  I think they had trouble reproducing the results. 

[Darkensky]

The article that i read was about 3weeks ago on my "Yahoo article posts". I have a crap load of them, space.com, Ap science, Reuters scienc, ect.  One of them i read that they finally made something go faster then light. 

I think that would be kinda funny, some alien hears a mest up version of beethoven or mozart and it sounds like rap muisc.  They would no doubt destory us if they heard rap music.  I least i would.

[Cole]

what they did was take a regular laser and pump it through a semi condensed cesium vapor cloud.  This resulted in what was thought as superluminesence but what was really a differential gain in the wave front of the pulse.  Here is a great article on the refuting of this.  Thanks for the refresher.  I always wondered what happened to this crap.

I would imagine that this is what yahoo was talking about.  It is impossible to even reach the speed of light with anything that has mass.

http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:physics/0010033

[Darkensky]

That is good stuff.  Thanks for that article.  That has a lot more depth then what i read earlier. 

Now if they can make a gas to go faster then light, why can't they make mass go as fast?  What u say about impossiable to reach speed of light with any mass then time travel would be impossiable. 

[Cole]

Well...

They didn't make anything go faster than light.  They distorted the wave front of the laser pulse and slowed down the tail, which made its apparent velcocity appear faster.  The pulse front still actually went the speed of light, it just was distorted and picked up more photons - thus the differential gain.

All mass is, is another way to store energy.  Mass stores a tremendous amount of energy.  Thus the impact of near total energy release of a hydrogen bomb.  That's not even all the energy that could be released, and you're not talking about a lot of matter either. 

mc^2=E  where c = 299,792,458 m / s

photons, maybe quarks, other electromagnectic 'particles' (gamma radiation, etc.) have no mass but contain energy (but not as much as mass).

Now for time travel.  Time is a relative concept.  It is definitely not linear and it is manipulatable by gravity.  Put two identical mechanical clocks on a tower.  One on top.  One on the bottom.  After some time, they will show different times.  This is due to the fact that time is affected by gravity.

Now, how about this.  Is the shortest distance between two points a straight line?  Nope.  It's a curved line.  However, we percieve it as straight because of our frame of reference.  Space time is curved and that curve is dictated by mass.  It is this disruption in the relative space time continum by mass that is gravity.  So, in a space time plane, a straight line will appear curved if there is any mass present on that plane.

[flintlock]

The whole anitmatter thing is interesting too.  When antimatter and matter come together the next energy dissipation is zero.  But it does emit radiation in the process.  Since the particle and anitparticle are gone, the enegry has to go somewhere.  In the proton case it is emmited as a photon.  Since mass stores enormous amounts of energy, if you could contain (but how...) antimatter to that level, it would emitt a lot of radiation.   CERN has been making tons of anti-protons for 3 years now.  You cannot make antimatter without making the corresponding matter.  There is thought to be areas of the universe where anitmatter is "pooled" of sorts.  Areas where there is no matter, but this is speculation..  Most of the antimatter made in the beginning of the universe was destroyed, probably broke down to smaller particles due to the emmense heat and pressure within the first second of the "big band".  This created an asymmetry towards matter, which was more robust (obviously).  After the first few seconds of the big bang, things cooled off enough that antimatter-matter pairs were no longer being created that often.  The leftover matter is what you are today. 

For those of you who actually read all of "Astro-science according to Cole" besides me (and didn't undestand a lick of it), I've hlighted a crucial part I believe.

[Paladin_Godfather]

Cole if you were driving in a car at the speed of light and turned your headlights on, what would happen?

Cannot access offset of type string on string