salty/quote..""I guess it was always..a stupid idea of mine that maybe,..*just maybe,..the odd behaviour of light..*might somehow indicate the possibility of 'outside' intervention,""

it does[at its simplest level...think of a spark
caused by striking a flint with steel

all light has a cause
no matter how far..the cause seems constant

even the darkest patches of sky..ARE FILLED with light

unseen light[dark matter when moving
light photons...reflecting light bands of colour..when diflected at just the right angle[darn i wish i had the words to explain what im being shown

matter is light..[like a ball of lightening]
which is energy looping up upon itself..so the ball lightening[matter]..loops up upon itself[looped light;captured centrifical forces..in random order

further comes the orbit attound the atom
its going in a figure 8[arround one pole..then the other]'at different distances from the center..as more unite in their orbits
[and get heavier]

""or at least a magical 'design' feature
defying randomness.""

there are
everything must have a cause
evberry action has an equal and oppisite reaction

light is unseen
yet reveals what is there to be seen

just think..we stand loking at a picture
your eyes..recieving the colours
and mine recieving mny image

LOOK how the light from the picture..crossed
on the way to your eyes..with the colours on the way to mine

yet we bothsee it perfectly
thanks to 3 receptors..who generate
chemical like messengers sent allong the nerves..to end up upside down...

...*in thousands of bits within our brain
yet..*one true picture..*in our minds

its amasing how we see that in our mind
by what we expect to see

first people couldnt concieve in their minds..sail;ing ships
they really couldnt see..nuthin on the sea

light..is the result of a cause
that releases,...individual bits..in event waves
no doudt event defines the lights qualities...[but its all vibration]

ie waves

high vibration
lower vibration
and everything in between

its all...
['..8=E]

just different vibes of 'the light*

I'll accept it, Saltpetre but it isn't necessary… I was just hoping that someone better qualified would answer your specific questions.

In a nutshell – light is a constant and is not affected by gravity. Photons IF they have any mass at all have a mass AT LEAST 100 million, million, million times less than an electron. But the kicker is that gravity distorts the fabric of space itself. From slightly warped in the case of the first observational proofs of this during a solar eclipse, through to totally warped back on itself as in a black hole singularity.

This from NASA may help, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/961102.html

You might enjoy checking out the BBCs podcast archive for 'In Our Time', the science programs are surprisingly comprehensible (except the one on Macromolecules – I'm still scratching my head). Then for a change of pace you can dip into the ones on religion or philosophy or history.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iots/all

Enjoy...

It's not my classification, Tony Lavis.

>>It starts with people like Pericles arbitrarily categorising atheists as New Atheists<<

It is a term that has been in common usage for a while. Even Wikipedia has heard of it.

"New Atheism is the name given to the ideas promoted by a collection of 21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that 'religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises'"

That sounds remarkably like the conventioneers to me, as self-described in an earlier article by David Nicholls.

"...ordinary citizens are balking at being a part of its support base, whether that is by taxation breaks or the unseemly indoctrination of young people in government schools. Religion has attempted to keep women as a second class, it denies homosexuals equality, it prevents effective sex-education for the young, it encourages a them and us mentality, it would like to control women's fertility, it is against stem-cell research, it prevents the vast population who wants the ability to end it all if the pain is unbearable, and some of it is in total denial about evolution and would teach that to children."

So it has nothing to do with my categorization - they are self-confessed New Atheists. As they happily explain:

"Wake up people!! We are smart enough now to kill our invisible gods and oppressive beliefs. It is the responsibility of the educated to educate the uneducated, lest we fall prey to the tyranny of ignorance"

http://newatheists.org/

You are probably right in your conclusion, though.

>>it ends with all out war with bloodthirsty sea otters<<

http://myths-made-real.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/creature-feature-sea-otter.html

They certainly look ready to rumble. Watch out.

And chrisdbarry, you misunderstand completely.

>>If you cannot defend your own position in a way that makes your Christian friends feel comfortable...<<

It is not my position I am forced to defend, it is yours.

The blunt-instrument approach, under the banner "educate the uneducated". All thanks to the gathering of your sect under the umbrella term "Global Atheist Convention".

Saltpetre,

More from Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos)

"Einstein realised that gravity and accelerated motion are two sides of the same coin....that the force one feels from gravity and the force one feels from acceleration are one and the same. They are equivalent...[and]...since gravity and acceleration are equivalent, if you feel gravity's influence, you must be accelerating.
...Einstein was able to invoke the equivalence principle to profound effect. Since gravity and acceleration are equivalent, Einstein understood that gravity itself must be nothing but warps and curves in the fabric of spacetime. Of equal importance, since general relativity specifies the detailed mechanism by which gravity works, it provides a mathematical framework for determining how fast it transmits its influence. The speed of transmission comes down to the question of how fast the shape of space can change in time. That is, how quickly can warps and ripples...race from place to place through space. He found that warps and ripples - gravity, that is - do not travel from place to place instantaneously, as they do in Newtonian calculations of gravity. Instead they travel at exactly the speed of light...fully in keeping with the speed limit set by relativity...."

Saltpetre,

On the subject of motion through time and space - from Greene:

"Special relativity declares a similar law for all motion: 'the combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.'

When the parked car you were looking at speeds away, what really happens is that some of its light-speed motion is diverted from motion through time into motion through space...Moreover the maximum speed through space is reached when all light-speed motion through time is fully diverted into light-speed motion through space - one way of understanding why it is impossible to go through space faster than the speed of light.......the effects of special relativity are most pronounced when speeds (through space) are a significant fraction of light speed. But the unfamiliar, complementary nature of motion through space and time always applies. The lesser the speed, the smaller the deviation from prerelativity physics--from common sense, that is - but the deviation is still there, to be sure....In 1971, Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating flew state-of-the-art cesium-beam atomic clocks around the world on a commercial Pan Am jet. When they compared the clocks flown on the plane with identical clocks left stationary on the ground, they found that less time had elapsed on the moving clocks. The difference was tiny--a few hundred billionths of a second--but it was precisely in accord with Einstein's discoveries..."

Pericles, tell me out of this section that you quote, which bits are inaccurate?

"...ordinary citizens are balking at being a part of its support base, whether that is by taxation breaks or the unseemly indoctrination of young people in government schools. Religion has attempted to keep women as a second class, it denies homosexuals equality, it prevents effective sex-education for the young, it encourages a them and us mentality, it would like to control women's fertility, it is against stem-cell research, it prevents the vast population who wants the ability to end it all if the pain is unbearable, and some of it is in total denial about evolution and would teach that to children."