If I'm not mistaken, all molecular motion ceases at absolute zero, not atomic motion. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but don't those itty-bitty particles keep whizzing around the nucleus regardless of the temperature or lack thereof.

Something just occurred to me: if any object could travel at the speed of light, Einstein says its mass would become infinite. Photons travel at the speed of light; why then is a photon's mass not infinite? It isn't, right?

Photos are massless "particles" (and I use that term loosely). For that reason, there is no initial value to adjust with the lorentz factor that would yield any kind of mass whatsoever, much less infinite mass.

Hmm, a particle without mass is difficult for me to bend my mind around. I can't quite see how a physical 'object,' 'particle,' whatevuh, cannot have mass. That's a really weighty (no pun intended) concept. Will have to do some reading in that area and discuss it with the astronomers at the Carnegie Observatories.

Isn't it 'convenient' that the only particle that can travel at the speed of light is massless? "Hmmmmmmmmmmmm!"

Einstein's theory is flawed, though. Granted, his theory works for that which he could see and understand, but it's like looking at a light bulb without the knowledge of the vacuum sealing the burning tungston. Yes, it works, but there is a great many variables yet to be discovered, yet to be seen that makes this difficult to grasp. Simplicity is bliss, and that makes his equation similar to a ballerina, but I'd rather have an ugly perfection than a beautiful mess. Even the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but that hasn't stopped it yet...I believe we need to change our approach to these radical problems. Only then will we find our truth, our theory of everything.

Bumblebees = brute force method

"According to Oxford University research published this month, bumblebee flight really is different from that of dragonflies and other insects. Using a smoke-filled wind tunnel and cameras snapping 2,000 images a second, researchers found that bumblebee flight is surprisingly inefficient. For example, a bumblebee’s left and right wings flap independently of each other. And instead of using the varying air pressure at its wingtips to provide some lift, bumblebees use “brute force” to fly and hover. Bumblebees, say scientists, are the “tanker trucks” of the flying insect world, using incredible amounts of energy to lumber (charmingly) through the sky."

Time travel is possible but who can actually or in what form would they come back in is the question.If we could diffuse our atoms that are in our body and reconfigure them back together at the speed of light that would be an incredible task.Some type of magnetized system or something like rubber that could diffuse electrical current from generateing throughout the body would have to be an option for live humans to be intact when endureing the actual travel process at that velocity.

Something that could defy the laws of gravity to the point of bending and shifting while altering within the current time or demension.Its known that human kind can create phenomenal amounts of energy but keeping things from breaking up into particles from a solid mass would have to be studied in great detail.Wich would come to the conclusion of different minerals to create different reactions.

Here's something to think about. We all talk about the "SPEED of LIGHT". As light travels in a straight line, it is a vector and its more appropriate to call it the "VELOCITY of LIGHT". Since Space/Time is curved, then light must conform to the curvature thus change its vector. This means that light is no longer travelling at a constant velocity.

Einstein states in his work that the speed of light is the optimum speed one can travel. This can be solved by using a Wormhole in order to pass the velocity of light "roughly 186 282 m/s^2". The object would deform from it's original form if it did fall into a wormhole. And to be honest, it is impossible to travel at the speed of light for a constant period of time. "It's just like saying as if an object will fall continually at the same speed through different mediums".

Einstein's Theories have become the religion of science. We have no conclusive proof, yet most physicists will die before admitting that Al was wrong. Even though his math does have holes in it, even though we have no idea what light is, even though we seem to always overlook that mass is our perception of gravitational force even at the atomic level.

Was he a great leap in the right direction? yes. did he open up science to the concept of relativity and our perception of reality? yes. But just like most great scientific discoveries throughout time, 2 steps forward, one step back. Just because the car is rolling it doesn't necessarily mean that anyone is driving. note to all those who wish to become physicists, an overcomplicated idea is worth a lifetime of respect from those not intelligent enough to see through the bullshit. I'm talking to you Stephen Hawking. I hate to insult, but I've got to be honest, the field of theoretical physics is no more than the mathematics of philosophy.

Einstein's work centered on perception of physics, yet nobody seems to take perception seriously. Like the current state of our civilization; we are convinced that we are the most advanced beings in the universe, that we are soo advanced just because we are the most advanced that human civilization has ever been, of course we are! There would be something horribly wrong if we weren't the most advanced that civilization has ever been. We can't bump up the future to now, nor are we living in the past...well, some of us aren't. It seems to slip the mind of every scientist that the evolution of intelligence is directly related to the evolution of science and mankind's perception of reality. At the moment, 90% of the world believes in some sort of religion that was created over 2000 years ago, seems like we have some distance to cover. bottom line, it's time for the human race to start drinking in moderation.

Last one then I'm letting it go, but I'm a bit frustrated with the current state of thought in a field that I've dedicated so much time to.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy are merely more ways of remaining in denial about one thing... Einstein was wrong in many aspects, but his theories are a wonderful starting point for the next generation of physicists to improve on... if they decide to get off their asses sometime and get to work. accepting the fact that the truth of how important and groundbreaking their work is will most likely not be accepted in their lifetime is something hard to come to terms with, but we must in order to start heading in the right direction. Denial is more powerful than any scientific proof out there, let's overcome it together.

Dreams, desires, intentions. Dreams come and go. Desires reside in the heart. If you knew who walked beside you at all times on this path that you have chosen, you could never experience fear or doubt again. To have this knowing that there is a source of all universal intelligence that is available to you that is responsible for all that exists, and you surrender to this source, you begin to realize that intention is not something that you do, but that it is something that you connect to. Connect to this source, and keep this connection clean and corrosion free. Everything that shows up in the material world emanates from this source.

Gravity on the Moon and Asteroids

The Moon has about 1/81 the mass of the Earth, so you might think its gravity would be 81 times weaker. But the Moon's radius is 3.7 times smaller than that of the Earth. When these two effects are combined, the result is a surface gravity 1/6 what on the Earth.

With weak gravity, you might expect people on the Moon to be able to move faster than those on Earth. but it is tricky to walk in low gravity, until you get used to the fact that a person who weighs 150 pounds on the Earth weighs only 25 pounds on the Moon. the astronauts who landed on the Moon in 1969 seemed to move in slow motion. When they jumped they went high ( for people in bulky pace suits ), but when they come back down they came down slowly. They found it easier to hop than to walk.

Imagine now an asteroid with a radius of 1 mile. How heavy would a 150-pound person be on this asteroid? We can use the gravity equations to calculate the value, and the answer is interesting: about half an ounce. That's the weight of five pennies on the Earth. You would have to be very careful on the asteroid. Your escape velocity would be very low, and you could easily launch yourself into space by jumping. To jump into space from the Earth, you would require a velocity of 2700 miles per hour ( assuming no air resistance )l but from the asteroid, only 6 miles per hour- about the speed of a person jogging. This low escape velocity was a problem for a US space probe called the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR). If the satellite had hit its target asteroid Eros with a velocity of 6 miles per hour or more, then it might have bounced right back out into space.

The space shuttles weights 2 tons. If you normally ( on Earth ) weigh 150 pounds and you are 10 feet from the centre of the craft, then the shuttle will attract you with a force of about 1/10 of a gram. That's about the weight of three staples. there is a force- just not a very large one. One of the most common conceits in science fiction movies is the implicit assumption that all planets in all solar systems have a gravity about equal to that of the Earth. There is no reason why that should be so. Pick a random planet, and you are just as likely to be a factor of six times heavier and unable to move because of your limited strength. Imagine a person who weighs 150 pounds on the Earth trying to move on a planet where he weighs 900 pounds.

Utilisation of Gravity

As I said earlier that every object exerts a small gravitational force on every other object. Remarkably, measurement of such small forces has important practical applications . If you are standing over an oil field, you will feel slightly less gravity than the gravity you feel standing over solid rock. That's because oil is less dense than rock, so it has less mass than if the space were filled with rock. Such small gravity changes can be measured using a gravimeter, an instrument that measures the pull of gravity on a weight. A map of gravity over the surface of the Earth can reveal the density of the material under the ground. It is , in some ways, a great way to "X-ray" the Earth, because the effects of gravity pass right through the ground. Geologist commonly use gravimeters to search for likely oil locations. 

The strength of gravity can even be measured from space. A pair of satellite called GRACE ( Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) were orbited to measure the gravity pattern over the whole world. These satellites recently found that the ice volume in Antarctica is decreasing by 36 cubic miles per year! That result is important in the discussion of global warming. Given the remoteness of the region and the complexity of the ice flow, it is hard to imagine any other technique that could have been used to deduce such a key number in such a clear way.

Hutchison effect - Philadelphia Experiment

Edward Leedskalnin had a flywheel with magnetic coils on the inside, he would attach the apparatus to a massive granite block which is mostly quartz. When the coil gets going it produces piezo-electric resonance inducing diamagnetism and levitation. However it only works in places on Earth that have a strong natural Earth Gravity field, such as Coral Castle.

The Hutchinson Effect is the new age Philidelphia Experiment. This is how Edward Leedskalnin lifted the 15 ton stones to built his coral castle. I explain the science behind how and why this effect happens. I also talk about Tesla's Earthquake machine and explain how to exploit the wave-particle duality of objects to move them more easily.

Any time you run current through a wire it produces a magnetic field...

If you run alternating current through wire it produces an alternating magnetic field.

A tesla coil is an arrangement of loops or coils of wire specifically designed to capacitate and permeate strong electromagnetic fields.

As long as you tune the frequency of the Alternating Current to the wavelengths of the atoms you can get them to resonate.

Why Physics? You asked

There a number of reasons (besides the fact that I am interested in math and physics ), here are some of them:

1. Basic literacy issue and critical thinking: the problems we (humanity) face today are getting more global every day. Global climate change, trade, energy, food, population, disease … A lot of these can only be solved with the application of science. There will be a lot of opinion on these issues, one has to go through carefully all the tradeoffs to select the right approach, which depends heavily on quantitative skills and sound science/engineering to eliminate some of the “noise”. If you are the engineering manager/CTO in high technology companies in the first world, you seldom run out of ideas, but spend more time to sort out which are the good ideas to invest in.

2. For Malaysia or any country to move from the third world to the first world, you have to move from low cost manufacturing and resource exploitation to product creation. The one who creates the product also determine where it should be manufactured too. You have to move up in the value added chain. Just take a few examples: MP3 player – the encryption algorithm is highly mathematical. The same can be said of DVD/BR players, HDTV. When you send a message on the internet, read data from your hard disk, there is encryption and error correction at work. It is all transparent to the user, but not the designer. When you drive a car, take a drink … someone has designed the product/system using a lot of math and physics. Are you going to be a payer in any of these areas?

3. Physics without math is not physics, so math and physics have to go together, however physics also is not just plain math. Sounds contradictory? It takes years to master physics and math. I hope some one will reach the point that he/she will be able to do order of magnitude estimation of problems he/she sees in everyday life. When you are in the subway in Beijing, you will estimate the numbers of passengers in the car and estimate the impact it has over cars on congestion, pollution, energy usage and quality of life. While you are at it, see the diffusion rate of disease like SARS, H1N1 in this environment compare to places in Western countries where most people do not use public transport. You will soon get a much better feel of what needs to be done. This will give you the insight (fear) that can happen now going forward, but not much of concern when people are relatively isolated in remote villages.

4. Physics is a field that abstracts large amount of knowledge into a few “Physical Laws”, the ability to see the world, and the discipline to distill knowledge into a few rules, will add clarity to a lot of things. As an example, we all know what glue is, but how glue work? What forces are responsible for the stickiness? From studying physics we know there are only few forces of nature. If we were to look for a stronger/better glue, at least it gives us a clue as where to look. The same trend in abstracting large amount of information into few rules is happening in other fields.

5. If you want to have high value added (better pay) activities, you need to add value. You can have a design or professional knowledge that you can leverage on or machine you can leverage on. Computers are getting more powerful and cheaper. You will soon have personal supercomputers around, can you leverage on these advances without a strong math background? The answer is no. Whenever you search for something on the internet, make a phone call, there is complex algorithms at work. People who work on those algorithms are being paid handsomely, but where do most of our young Malaysians fit in all these? Are there going to be just consumers?

Coming back to glue, physical and chemical properties do give a clue, but if you look for something new, most of the time, their properties are not know or not published.

There are 4 forces of nature (2 of which could be combined): gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak forces. Strong and weak forces can be ruled out because glue does not depend on nuclear interactions. Gravity can be ruled out because glue involves small mass (not like earth, solar systems). Thus we are left with electromagnetic force, of which magnetic can be ruled out because glue is non-magnetic or depend on electric current to work. We are now left with forces that is electric (or electrostatic in nature.

Now, how do we demonstrate this?
If we take a roll of sticky tape, go in a dark room (do it at night), wait until you eyes get used to the dark room (maximum light sensitivity), peel the tape quickly while looking at the boundary of separation. You will see electric sparks! The work you are doing separating the charges has created a large potential difference to cause the sparks to occur. (please try it out in a dry environment). This also means that the glue molecules has to be polar to crate opposite charged areas to attract each other.

If you are looking for good adhesion between two different materials, as an example, if I need a metal to stick well to ceramic, I can use an adhesion layer like chromium or titanium, and the energy of formation of Titanium oxide and chromium oxide would give us a clue as to their relative bond strength to alumina (ceramic).

Physics and Math for life science students:
It depends on which level we are talking about, for the very strong students, yes. Math and physics on top of life sciences would open up new frontiers like biophysics, computational biology, genomics etc. For the average and weaker students, these combinations could be too much and hence depends on how much the student can handle and do well.

Physics or Chemistry graduate, which would you hire:
There are multiple factors involved in hiring, it is about seeking out which candidate has the best match for the job. If the job needs domain specific knowledge and there is no time to train and the job is relatively well defined, get the one with the domain knowledge and the right aptitude. So, if you sell chemicals, then get a chemistry graduate.

However, if the problem is not well defined, and it is new and the scope is wide, get someone sharp with critical thinking skills, a strong back ground in physics and math would be preferred. Please note, some of the best chemists are very strong in math and physics too. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether they are chemists or physicists and vice versa. Have you seen the “Quantum Mechanics” book written by Linus Pauling?

Also note, hiring decisions varies a lot from organization to organization. EDB in Singapore had many engineers among their staff, but SEDC in Kuching had mostly arts graduates, even though both are in promoting economic development.

Which of the following is NOT an example of accelerated motion?

A. Vertical component of projectile motion
B. Circular motion at constant speed.
C. A swinging pendulum
D. Earth's motion about sun
E. Horizontal component of projectile motion

(Direction going up the y-axis is taken as positive vertical motion; direction to the right of the y-axis is taken as positive horizontal motion)

A is wrong because in a projectile motion, the object travels in a vertical motion (in addition to the horizontal one as well). You will notice that as the object travels vertically, it's positive vertical velocity decreases, stops at one point of time, and increases in the negative direction. This can only be as a result of acceleration - more precisely, gravitational acceleration.

B is wrong because an object in a circular motion always experiences centripetal force, which is actually a product of mass and acceleration. Actually the force is measured as F=(mv^2)/r, where m is mass, v is velocity and r is the radius of the circle. A practical way of explaining this situation is that an object which is travelling in a circular motion is constantly changing its velocity (magnitude of speed may be the same but the direction is changing constantly) - change of velocity is affected by acceleration. You can conduct an experiment where you tie a ball to a string and swing it with your hand to make the ball travel in a circular motion. You will notice that the inertia of the ball tends to make the ball travel in a straight line but you are forcing it to travel in a circular path, thus overcoming the inertia. That requires force, which is indirectly related to acceleration.

C is wrong because a swinging pendulum, like the projectile motion, as a vertical component as well as a horizontal component. The ball travels upwards, stops at a point, then comes down again and swings to the other horizontal direction, where the same scenario happens. Gravitational acceleration is playing a role here.
If you look carefully at the swinging pendulum, you notice that when resolving the gravitational force along and perpendicular to the direction of motion, the perpendicular component of the gravitational force is directed radially outwards from the string, and therefore it is not the force providing the centripetal acceleration, which must act radially inwards along the string. That force would be the tension in the string.

D is wrong because, like the scenario where the ball tied to the string is swung with your hand (the ball represents the Earth and your hand represents the Sun), the Earth changes velocity constantly. According to the law of inertia, the Earth tends to travel in a straight line and would eventually fly off its orbit had it not for the gravitational pull of the Sun. The Sun's gravitational pull imposes a centripetal force which acts towards the direction of the Sun and keeps the position of the Earth in place. Whenever centripetal force is in existence, acceleration must be involved. No exception.

E is the correct answer because the horizontal component of a projectile motion is not affected by the gravitational pull. Assuming that there is no air resistance, no friction and no other external forces, the horizontal component of the projectile motion would remain unchanged, thus proving the fact that there is not acceleration involved.