On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:58:51 +0000, Stuart Noble wrote:

This thread interests me, not because I understand a bloody word of it,
but because people with degrees in the subject end up squabbling over
what appear to be fundamentals. Is that the nature of the beast maybe?
So far we seem to have graduates from Imperial College and York, but I
may have missed some. Any chance of the others combatants declaring
their credentials? Not as a dick waving exercise, but to give people
like me an insight into the extent to which experts can disagree.

The politest description of much of this thread might be Newtonian v.
Einsteinian physics.

Newtonian physics is good for about 99.99% of what we observe & do as
humans.

Einsteinian physics starts to "kick in" at the extremes. Much of the
physics in this area is still theoretical & difficult to fully grasp with
a strong mathematical background and this is the reason for "discussions"
amongst scientists. Significant sums of money are going into test these
theories with things like the LIGO gravity wave detector and the Large
Hadron Collider.

This is where I duck

BW