Yes, it does. I have not the slightest idea of who or where it occurred, but I seem to recall an experiment in the late 60’s early 70’s that involved two laser transmitters and a mote of dust. Two college level physics students were attempting to prove that light, while being a source of wave energy, was also made up of solid particles. One laser was set to focus a beam straight up (gravitically speaking), and the other was set to focus a beam horizontally across the first. The vertical beam was activated and was able to support a mote of dust. Now this could have been explained away as a buoyancy created by laser-induced heat, but by transmitting a beam on the mote horizontally with the second laser, they were able to push it from the vertical beam, whereupon the mote dropped to the display table.

Yes, I believe light has mass. But only when it's moving. (It's basically Albert Einstein's view on the subject.) Let me explain . . . Einstein won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for something he called the "Photoelectric Effect". In essence, it says that if you shine a light on a piece of metal, electrons "bounce off" as if something hit it. He reasoned (and it has been shown) that energy alone could not produce this effect, but that there must be some sort of PARTICLE in light that did it. However, if you try to "catch" light, there is nothing there. Once light waves STOP, there isn't a trace of the light there. Even something as small as an atom would be detectible, but there's NOTHING. So how does light have this mass? Again, Einstein comes to the rescue. His formula E=mc^2 explains it. Energy IS mass. Mass IS energy. They are INTERCHANGEABLE. So a small portion of light energy is changed into mass when it is traveling, and there is no mass when it stops (called "resting mass".) This is why it behaves like a particle in the "photoelectric effect". I know this is confusing. And who's to say Einstein is even right? But this is his view and (until I can find reason to change it) MY view as well. If this isn't clear or you have questions, e-mail me. I'll try to explain it better. Ricky Duval ricky_duval@hotmail.com

Of course it has a mass. Mass IS energy. Light can not be pure energy, because if it were - it would not be visible. The fact that it is visible tells us that there is certain amount of energy being exchnaged in a way of photons shooting in all directions. Photons are a particles of matter changing state from one energy level to another. If light was pure energy, then it would have no particles of matter to speak of, which means that no energy exchange would be possible, since there would be no particles from which the energy could be extracted. As such - pure energy can not be visible. The dark matter of the universe is one such phenomena, where its presence can only be detected by the way it affects ordinary (visible to us) matter. Example: According to "Big Bang" theory star clusters are kept together by the gravitational force of the the stars themselves. However - based on calculations, that take into the account the mass of those stars, their gravitational force is far inferior to what it has to be in order to keep the star in a particular formation. Therefore - scientists are now trying to detect what they call "dark matter", which, by the way, should account for the 98% of the "missing" mass in the universe. Technically speaking, we are made of the same stuff that light is made of. Energy is what is responsible for maintaining each and every sub-atomic particle of our bodies in their bound state. Particles of light also exist in a bound state - it is just a different level of energy that is required for light to exist.

I'm swayed toward the energy paradigm (paradigm is a fancy way of saying "way of looking at things). Basically, Einstein's relativity says that you cannot go faster than light because as you accelerate, you increase in mass exponentially. The equation that says how much you increase in mass shows that your mass would be multiplied by infinity when V=1 (velocity = speed of light). I don't have the equation on hand at the moment, but I'll have it on hand in case you want to email me. Anyways, acceleration requires energy, the more mass you have the more energy you need to counteract the inertia. Therefore, you would need infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, an amount of energy that we don't have at the moment. The point of all this? If light had mass, it couldn't go at the speed of itself because it would need infinite energy to get there. The reason why it travels at that particular speed (about 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second) is sorta puzzling! . This doesn't mean that you absolutely CAN NOT travel faster than light, because light is slowed down by air for some reason. This means that if, say, it was slowed down to 184,000 miles per second by the air, you could travel at 185,000 miles per second.

Yes, think everything is composed of mass and energy. The mass of light is obviously small but large enough so that it is pulled in and distorted by the gravitational force of very massive objects.

You have to have two hands to clap, but if you had one hand making the motion of it clapping, then it would sound an awful lot like wind. Move your hand back and fourth by your ear. Thats what it sounds like.

I tend to agree with Eric. Here's my reasoning: "Clapping" is defined for TWO (or more, I guess) hands. It's not DEFINED for ONE. Saying "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is like saying "What is the area of a four-sided triangle?" There isn't (and CAN NEVER BE) such a thing as a four-sided triangle, so it cannot have an "area". and There isn't (and CAN NEVER BE) such a thing as "one hand clapping", so it cannot make a "sound".

I depends on how you clap. If you just wave your hand in the air, the most sound you will get is the sound of the breeze you create blowing past your ears. But little kids presented with this question tend to find a different answer. They bend their fingers into their palms hard and fast enough to make a faint clapping sound.

I agree with you, Eric. Clapping is two hands coming together and making a sound. With one hand, you don't have anything else for it to make contact with and produce a sound, therefore you get no sound. There is no sound of one hand clapping for this reason. If you had something to clap the hand against, it would be a different story, but you just said one hand clapping, and this doesn't mean AGAINST anything, just clapping by itself. This is an impossible action.

Sometimes things are useless if everything is not present. Clapping is something where you need two hands. There is no sound.

This is a "certain" unknown. Several experiments involving time and atomic clocks used on NASA space probes say that time is constant, while other NASA tests invariably disagree. Perhaps Time moves at different speeds in different Solar, galactic, even universal locations. Perhaps atoms decay at different speeds in different Solar, galactic, even universal locations. We just don’t know. This falls back to your question of "What is Time?". Also an unknown. We know that Father Time exists because we feel his passing and the clock and calendar both agree that it’s another day—or was that just the rotation of the Earth and my own body’s atomic decay? Unknown. "Does anybody really know what time it is?"

Though I'm not fully educated about what other smart people think about this topic, I believe that I have a somewhat qualifying theory of my own. Time is elastic, it is effected, at least, by space, gravity and accelleration. Akay, this is not my theory, but I think about it, and other possibilities, a lot and this one surely seems to be most likely.

Relative to what? When we address the issue of time, what we have to keep in mind is that Time, as a medium in which we exist, also constitutes the infinitely small intervals between each and every millisecond of our physical existence. Unfortunately, the notion of interval presupposes two stopping points between each event. Consider Zeno's paradox. In reality, the flow of time is only perceived by us as flow because that is how we relate to the process of being. Physical limitations of surviving matter, to which we are attached, places their constraints upon our understanding of the composition of time. It is quite interesting to trace the development of the human scale for the measurement of different time cycles. Keep in mind that, as humanity developed, the instruments we employed in understanding of recurring processes of the universe, have changed to represent a relative scale to which they were applied. Egyptians, sumerians, ancient hindus, mayas, olmecs, all the! way down to the Arian tribes that gave us Sanskrit had a much grander scale against which to set their cycles. They observed the movements of celestial bodies, juxtaposed them with the natural phenomena in the world around them and drew their conclusions based on those observations. And, according to them, just as we are fairly certain about the sequence of day and night, seasons, life and death, they were certain that, besides that which is traceable by the human in one lifetime, there are different co-relations between the cycles in the celestial alignments as they relate to time spans much greater than a single human can ever observe. Generation upon generation, for milleniums, they painstakingly compiled their observations into a system of knowledge, in which the insight was gained not by theorizing about the natural phenomena in view of accepted method of thinking, but by adjusting that method of thinking according to the natural phenomena. That is how they built calendars with a margin of error of plus/minus TWO HOURS in FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. With all our supposed tec! hnical superiority we haven't done that just yet. But the point of the whole thing is that Time doesn't exist outside of the physical phenomena. It is through that phenomena that the time has any hope of ever being recognized. If it weren't for the fleeting moment of our existence and our understanding of the shortness of it, we wouldn't be compelled to create a measuring stick to relate to our own process of aging. How long does light live? How long does matter live? How old is time itself? When the Big Bangers peer through their telescopes in the depth of the universe, what they are seeing is not the present of it - they are seeing the past, something to which they refer as the "beginning of time". However, any object that can be viewed, can only be viewed in its immediacy by the subject, and as such, represents the image of the "now" in the eyes of that subject. Which means that, regardless of how much time they say it took for the light to get to their eyes, they don't know whether the flow of time itself remains consistent throughout the visible space. They were very surprised to find out that the ages of distant galaxies discovered by HST Deep Field Survey turned out to be much greater than they anticipated. The reason is that the universe is not an expanding, or contracting, for that matter realm. It is stable, and Time is not fixed and distributed evenly throughout that realm. Just like there are different densities of space, there are different dens! ities of Time. When we apply our own measure of density of time to the space that is not in our immediate vicinity, what we in fact are dealing with is an illusion of correctness as we understand it. Yet, if we presuppose that time gets "stretched" following the configuration of space, then our very illusions get stretched within that fabric of time, which leaves us with nothing but a scale of measurement, relative to the position in the universe in which we happen to exist. And speed as the measurement will forever dwell within that scale, unless we find the means of affecting the distribution of space in the Universe.

Well, the whole point of the theory of relativity is that something moving at the speed of light has to appear to be moving at the speed of light even relative to something moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And the only way for that to happen is for an object moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light to experience less time than the slower moving objects in the universe. So if Einstein is right, the "speed" of time definitly depends on where you are standing. Although, there has got to be a better word for it than "speed." Since speed is a measure of how much time passes while something is happening, asking for the "speed" of time is basically asking "how much time passes while time is passing?"

I think the speed of time is the speed of the photons shooting off of everything we see. Therefore, to travel back in time, we'd have to go backward at faster than the speed of light to catch up to the photons that have already passed us. So we wouldn't really be traveling back in time, we'd just perceive it that way.

I think that time has a speed and that it can change. It explains the famous twin paradox problem. I think time changes relative to the object's speed and mass.

Well, it would have to be someone completely inconsequential—someone who would have absolutely no effect on present day events—to anyone. So why bother? Just to see if it could be done? Then what? Go back and see if you could stop yourself? A rather interesting experiment, wouldn’t you say? Do something worthwhile, folks, or you may find yourself as a temporal guinea pig — or is it already too late?

I really don't know who I'd kill...maybe Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler or somebody. Anyway, that's not the real reason I am writing. I am interested in space-time and the like as I suppose all of you are. I believe that the 4th dimension is as simple as the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st (and possibly 0th?). It is difficult for us to perceive it because we are 3D beings. I try to explain it to people this way-- We can and do travel through time. BUT we can only do it in one direction and at a linear rate. We measure time with a clock. We measure length with a ruler. A being in the 1st dimension would measure length with a clock. If we can learn to understand the 4th dimension we should be able to move back and forth through the 4th dimension as easily as we move back and forth through length (like walking to and from my dorm room). I would really love to get into this deeply. Unfortunately I am a computer engineer. I haven't had time to look through this web site yet, but believe me I plan to do so. The ultimate prize for me to find would be some sort of mailing list where we can all consort at our convenience. Is there such a list? If so, I would love to join in your discussion. If not, we need to start one. Remember: the answer is right in front of us we're just not looking at it correctly. Please, everyone feel free to email me at egumtow@mail.utexas.edu

University of Texas-Austin Jester Center East Eric Gumtow

Most people would go back and kill some big person like Adolf Hitler, but I think this would cause a huge change in the course of time, possibly for the worse. Imagine if Hitler did something, one small thing, that caused something bigger, that caused something bigger, etc. It is just too dangerous. I wouldn't kill anybody.

Well, I don't have very many homicidal tendancies, but if I had to pick one person, it would probably be Hitler because he was just so evil. And because, if I killed him before he rose to power, it might prevent the Holocaust. But that would create a paradox, because if the Holocaust had never happened, Isreal would never have been created, and without Israel, my mother and her family would have stayed in the Middle East, and if my mother never came to America, my parents would never have met and I never would have been born. So I guess I'll just have to settle for the bastard who invented high heels.

I would kill you. Then you would never have existed and you wouldn't have put up this page. But then I wouldn't have been able this message! So how did it get here? And how come you're still around? Arrrghhhh!!! It didn't work! Unless, of course, this is a parallel dimension or something... yeah, that must be it.

I would not kill anyone. I don't like to kill people and I don't want to disrupt the universe by creating a paradox.

Theoretically, yes it does.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, does it make an IMAGE? Whatever the answer is to this question, I believe it is also the answer to this week's topic question. Let me explain what I mean. First, everything that exists, exists in a mind. If there is no mind to observe a thing or at least to imagine it, then the thing does not exist at all. Try to prove me wrong by thinking of something that exists, but which has never been observed or imagined by any person. After convincing yourself that it can't be done, proceed to the next paragraph. My second point is, if nobody is around to observe a tree falling, then our only alternative is to imagine the fall thereof. And what does this involve? For most persons it involves shape, color, and movement. For a few select individuals with "good imaginations," it may also involve sound (the sound of an accelerating crash, followed by a thud), and it may even involve smell (the musty smell of uprooted soil) or touch (the touch of a gigantic oak as it crushes you to smithereens). But did the tree crush you? No. Or did it make the boring image that was in your mind originally, the one involving only shape, color, and movement? Certainly not. You are the one who made that image, because you are the one who imagined the tree falling. Thus the answer to my introductory question is NO, when a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, it doesn't make an image. Consequently, the answer to this week's topic question is also NO, the tree doesn't make a sound, either. In closing, then, let me suggest that this week's topic question is not an appropriate question to be asking. An appropriate question would be, "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, do we IMAGINE it making a sound?" And please let me suggest that this is a decision each of us must make for himself or herself.

There is no set answer to this question. To answer this question, you must first answer "What is SOUND?" Is a sound the actual WAVES that are produced by an object, or is the sound simply what we PERCEIVE? When does it become a sound--when it's PRODUCED or when it's RECEIVED? If "sound" is simply how we PERCEIVE it, then you must think about this--if you "hear something", can you not say that it was a sound? Now what if a deaf person was in the room with you? He/She did NOT hear it, so by this definition, there was NOT a sound. But how can it BE a sound and NOT be a sound at the SAME TIME? It's IMPOSSIBLE. To solve this problem, I would have to say--To keep things logically consistent, sound MUST be the ACTUAL WAVES produced. That way, whether you HEAR it or not, sound IS produced. Therefore, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, it DOES INDEED make a sound. Ricky D. ricky_duval@hotmail.com

None of us have seen or heard God directly. Does that mean He doesn't exist?

Since I think sound is the waves travelling through the air (or whatever other medium is handy) and not how we interpret those waves, a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it has to make a sound. The thing is, we can never prove it and just have to take it on faith that the universe doesn't get lazy when we aren't watching. Of course, since God apparently has a sense of humor, trees falling in forests when there is no one around to hear them probably don't make the typical loud crashing noises. They make the sound of one hand clapping just to annoy the Buddist monks and other people who spend their lives asking themselves these sorts of questions.

Of course a tree that falls is going to make a sound! Just because there isn't anyone to hear it doesn't mean that a noise isn't produced. Sound waves are produced and go through the atmosphere. Eventually the sound wave will fade away never to be heard by anyone, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a noise at first!! If you agree with me, write Eric and tell him he's retarded. Please, he won't listen to me. Thank you very much.

NO!!!! - It does not make a sound because there is nothing to pick up the sound waves(saying that sound waves are not sound). You need something to pick them up for it to be sound.

I am extremely hesitant to say which came first for certain, however I am quite sure (without reading other responses) that it must have been the chicken. The most simple reasoning for my choice is elimination: whilst it is amazing that a chicken could evolve from (?)whatever(?), it is less likely that an egg could form from (?)somwhere(?) and be self-incubated and protected at the right conditions long enough to hatch, and that the hatchling could find food by itself. Then again, it is still more possible that a genetic disturbance occurred at the time of fertilisation, so that a chicken hatched from the egg of another bird, such as a pigeon exposed to radiation by ancient civilizations. It's really hopeless, isn't it. Still, I bet on the chicken. *Poof* and there it is! Magic!

Dinosaurs were laying eggs long before any of their decendants evolved into chickens.

That is an interesting question. And the one that I can't really answer even to myself. Furthermore, I can't even speculate as to how the whole process takes place. It is, however, quite interesting to observe the process of hatching. I find it fascinating that in order to become alive, the bird needs to break through the shell of its own egg. First, it concieves life inside itself. Sperm, in order to start the process of life, has to break through the walls of an egg. As soon as that happens, sperm looses its tail, and, for all intents and purposes, becomes a different manifestation of this life form. The combination of genetic material, contained in its head is the catalyst, that starts the cellular division inside mother-chicken. Think about it. Whatever the father-chicken eats, drinks, the environment that he is in, air that he inhales - all contribute to the formation of the organic substance of the sperm, including the genetic mush in its head. Which tells me that the nutrients contained in the food and air all have the stuff necessary for creating the composition of the sperm. Now, when the sperm cohorts reach the egg, they have to work pretty hard to get in. In the process the weak ones die out, and only the strongest ones break through. Once inside, the whole new life takes place. While father-chiken walks around cooking up some more sperm, mother-chicken goes in the business of breading a living specie inside of her. Another words, the actual matter, of which mother is made transforms itself into the same matter of the newborn. This is mind-boggling. The living matter, using the specie that it is in, actually clones itself into being. And again, just like with the sperm and an egg, the reward of life as a specie is only given to those who are strong enough to have the guts and the strength to break the calcified shell of an egg and face the light. Interesting, hey? And so goes the life at any level of existence. There are shells around each and every one of us, and who is to say that the evolution is not the process of breaking the shell and becoming a different specie? So what came first - the chicken or the egg? Who cares? Even if I knew that for certain, I would still be buffled, since then I would have to contemplate the actual appearance of the first chicken, the first cell, the first amino-acid, the first atom of hydrogen and so on. It is quite common these days to talk about cloning. What if all life is a clone of a mind powerful enough to control the behavior of matter on any level?

I think the Chicken came first giving birth to the egg. An egg can't hatch itself. God made the animal: CHICKEN