Posted on 06/18/2025 12:46:24 PM PDT by Red Badger
No work, means no engine. No such thing as an engine without it producing some form of work. It's pretty much definitional.
If you are in a car...traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights, what will you see?
Taillights?
Einstein was wrong? I Knew it! I knew it!
That silly question derives from two problems:
1) Popular temperature scales (eg: celsius and fahrenheit) that place zero at an arbitrary temperature that has no particular physical significance.
2) A failure to understand what "twice as" means.
3) A failure to understand that "cold", "hot" and similar terms have no objective meaning.
4) a failure to understand what kinetic temperature is.
So, your question can only be addressed in a rational way by first expressing temperature on an absolute scale. "Kelvin" will do just fine.
Second, one must understand that the kinetic "temperature" of an object or substance is a measure of energy in motion of its component atoms or molecules.
Third, one must understand that on an absolute temperature scale, "zero" means a kinetic temperature at which ALL molecular or atomic motion has ceased.
Therefore, a temperature below zero on an absolute scale is meaningless, and your question is also meaningless.
If they're not arrogant and stupid, they'll call it "the foundation on which everything we know rests. Pretty much the same as what intelligent and humble people call the science of 1525.
What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
-Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke 1675.
> If you are in a car...traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights, what will you see? <
Ha! Great question. Einstein thought of something similar when working on his Theory of Special Relativity (1905).
His conclusion: The situation you described cannot happen. Any object having mass (“weight”) cannot reach the speed of light. And any object moving at any lower speed would see that headlight beam moving at exactly the speed of light (c).
Time and space would adjust (relative to you) to make any measurement of that beam’s speed equal to c.
Weird, huh? So weird that Einstein did not get the Nobel Prize in Physics for his amazing work here.
In high school and teacher explained relativity by pointing out a fly can buzz around in your car while traveling 60 mph.
Simplistic? Yes. But it was 9th grade.
I'm sure there's a liberal judge out there what will rule that law unconstitutional.
I think today’s Physics dark matter and dark energy will be the butt of future jokes like ether is today.
> Pretty much the same as what intelligent and humble people call the science of 1525. <
Yes, your Newton quote was spot on. Newton built his work on Galileo’s results.
Einstein showed that much of what Newton said was wrong. However, Newton’s equations are pretty darn good for most applications! So good that Newton’s simpler gravity equations are used by NASA when calculating gravitational effects.
The key is verification by experiment. The ancient philosophers like Aristotle never did experimental work. So much of their “science” is garbage. But Galileo, Newton, etc. experimented. Their work has meaning.
So maybe Einstein’s results will later be shown as close approximations. But I doubt very much if they’ll be shown as nonsense.
Possibly ... or possibly viewed the same way we today speak of “phlogiston” and the “luminiferous aether”: Theories that sort of seemed to make sense at the time but ultimately failed. That, as opposed to Newtonian Mechanics which truly is foundational.
For a variety of reasons, I think physics has stagnated and we’re due for a “catastrophe”, as we had a bit over a century ago.
I started out as a physicist, but I have strayed from the True Faith into mere engineering. 😁
The big issue of modern physics is that the equations of the very large and the equations of the very small do not play well together.
That means that some fundamental mistakes were made—either in one of those categories or both of them.
Since modern science pays scientists very well to support the status quo science is “stuck”.
It will take true creative genius to find ways out of the mess.
That’s just it. If it’s 0.0001 Kelvin (you don’t use degrees when talking in units Kelvin), “twice” as cold presumably means half as much energy, or 0.00005 Kelvin. But you can infinitely keep making it “twice” as cold without reaching zero.
Alternately, you can think of cold as the ability to rob heat. In that case, you can only get twice as cold as long as you’re no more than half-way towards zero from whatever your basis of measurement is.
I have to politely object to calling Newton "wrong". As you note, his equations work very nicely for "reasonably sized" objects and slow speeds. If you calculate the relativistic terms (I have done this, aeons ago) for, say, a fired artillery shell, they're negligible ... corrections are way out into the insignificant digits. When you get to planetary or stellar masses, or particles doing a meaningful fraction of light speed, the relativistic terms become important.
In effect, Newtonian mechanics is a special case. Einstein takes over when things get really big or really fast. Quantum takes over when things get really small.
Indeed. That's why I think we're due for a "catastrophe".
Neither relativity nor quantum are "wrong": they both explain available observations, they both predict the outcomes of experiments ... and yet they cannot be reconciled.
We're missing something ... some of us realize that.
It will take true creative genius
I pray "we" didn't abort that kid ...
> I think today’s Physics dark matter and dark energy will be the butt of future jokes like ether is today. <
I don’t know about evidence for dark matter or dark energy. But awhile back I read a paper on string theory. The author was a believer, and presented some fancy mathematical equations to back the theory.
But near the end of the article he mentioned that there is no evidence for string theory, and because of its nature there never will be.
Now that should be the butt of jokes… and right now.
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