No. 1 is 1.0000 and .9999 is not. .9999 will never equal out to 1.0000. It could either stop at .9999 or have an infinite number of nines following it. The same with 1.0000. An infinite number of zeros.

I would have to say that there is a definite distance between 0.999... and 1. 0.999... implies 9's carried out to infinity and, if applied to a physical distance, any physical distance, it would boil down to an infinitely minute amount of space between this fraction and the whole decimal 1. What this means is that two objects would be very nearly touching, with the distance between them being somewhat nearer than the particles that make up a single proton. To all mathematical intents and purposes though, these two numbers, 0.999... and 1, are considered to be one in the same, simply because of the minute distance involved. How minute? Well, regardless of what distance you start with, the idea of breaking it down to 0.999... would end with the exact same minute distance, the very limit of infinity (in whatever dream you could possibly find that one in). Whether you look at a light year, a million light years, a googolplex light years, or even a millimeter, 0.999... of each of these would be exactly the same. But then, this is reaching extremely far, delving deep into spheres of the remote (or near) unknown. Also, I find that I must point out the gravitic impossibility of ever attaining such a close distance. The push/pull effect of gravity, atomic weight, density——these will result in either total attraction, or total repulsion of the two objects to or from each other. Forcing such an unnatural position as 0.999... the initial distance to exist would result in a cataclysmic event (the irresistible meeting with the immobile). In short, a very large KA-BOOM!

No, I don't think they are the same number. And I disagree with Eric when he says there is not distance separating them...there is still an immeasureable ammount of distance there.

Well, for all intents and purposes, they are two ways to represent the same number. The difference between them is 1x10^-x as x approaches infinity. And the limit of that expression is 0.

No, think about it if you have percentages, 100% and 99.9999...%, even though you are VERY close you don't have the full thing. And if you were to do math with the numbers.

                  1                       .9999999999 * 
         x    50000                       x     50000 
         ----------                       -----------
              50000                      49999.999995

I believe that as pure numbers they are not the same number. As comparitive measurements of anything, they would be the same number. For example, Take any object of any size and give it a value of 1 (The sum of all distinct masses in our universe, for example), and then try and remove 0.00000...(insert infinite zeros here)...0000001 from it (infinitely small chisel required). It can't be done because there is a limit to how small you can go, if I recall correctly.

No they are nothe same however there is not distance separating them. I don't think that disqualifies it from be different numbers. They also both indicate different ideas. 1 is whole and it is an integer where as .9999..... is the closest you can get to.

I've never understood why most people think this technology is going to create a whole slew of moral dilemas. I mean, it's basically just a way to create an identical twin of someone. And everyone who has met a pair of identical twins knows that they are not all that identical except in appearance. At least the two pairs of identical twins I know have very different personalities, interests, and abilities. So if you cloned Albert Einstein, you wouldn't necessarily get another brilliant physicist. In fact, you'd probably get a kid who hated physics because it was shoved down his throat since birth. I think that's the biggest danger if we allow human cloning: the kids are going to be expected to do just what their "parents" do, and when they don't enjoy it or aren't as good at it, their "parents" are going to be disappointed. And kids who think they've disappointed their parents tend to not have happy lives.

Oh, bravo, Eric! This one took a bit of brass. So, what’s wrong with cloning, other than the fact that we would be brining more mouths into an already overcrowded world . . . mouths that would doubtless have designs on our cloned lamb chops! But seriously, I’m afraid there is a bit more to the issue than this. Who are we to say what is and is not right for a society whose mores seem to change with the tide? Should cloning of human beings (please note the choice of the "H" word) be considered a blasphemy? Is the very idea of such an occurrence so repulsive that it would destroy all social balance? Perhaps, but I would like to consider something else. This is a little something I recall from the fifties and sixties (not everyone was doped out). Seems there was a lot of cross-burning on neighbor’s lawns and church hangings going on. A lot of good people were horsewhipped . . . that means their very flesh flailed from their bodies . . . in a bloody rampage that fairly covered these United States of America. When you start talking about what is and is not socially acceptable, I’ll go so far as to say you should keep an equitably clean yard and your home in relative repair. When you start talking about human beings being blasphemous creations, you begin to take on the cowling of vigilante forces, roaming the land and playing judge, jury, and executioner at will, which, by the way, is a rather severe federal crime these days. Whether it is right or wrong to clone human beings will remain a moot point for many generations to come, while at the same time the practice of such clonings will come to light, of this I have no doubt. I also have no doubt that there will be a bloody reckoning to face when the Pro’s and the Con’s of this issue meet. You mentioned that "Cloning is not necessarily taking the place of God. That is impossible for us to do but I think it is disrespectful to God, and our human race." Here is where I shall have to disagree. As I have stated before, I do question the existence of a God . . . I always have and I believe, to the anguish of my mother, I always shall. There is nothing I can do about the way I think and feel. This is me. Throughout history, man has recreated gods in his own image. He has envisioned that the All Mighty once flew through the air like a majestic eagle, for he knew what an eagle could do . . . that He strode the Earth like a great bull, for he knew what a bull was. These were tangible transitions of strength and splendor, easily recreated in the mind of man to a supernatural configuration. Today, interestingly enough, you can even find ministers and preachers who actually give Him a sort of fourth dimensional aura of presence. God is omnipotent. God is everywhere. God is everywhen. This century has seen so many leaps and bounds in medicine and the sciences, mostly due to that horrid war of wars WWII, that mankind feels lost and without a guide. There are so few people who can actually grasp the growing world around them that they feel a desperate need to turn to the supernatural, to the divine host, to the holy of holies, seeking an answer. I find my answers in the sciences . . . but they are always inconclusive. There is always something beyond what can be seen, beyond what is known. Cloning human beings is a very frightening endeavor, true, but one which will come to pass and will bring to us so much more in medicine. Is it possible, for instance, to clone only limbs instead of whole bodies? Organs? Eyes with which to see? Ears with which to hear? How far could we go? The DNA of Albert Einstein is still available . . .

I think that cloning humans is a good thing, because it helps us learn more about cloning, but if the technology gets into the wrong hands, the results could be devastating. I don't see any practical purpose of cloning people except for evil purposes...well, come to think of it, you could clone people that are very good at one particular thing...but that's about the only one I can think of. But the thing is, bad people could clone MORE bad people, and then have a whole ARMY of bad people, and that would be very bad. Very, very bad. So I guess it was a good idea that Clinton passed that no-human- cloning law. I think it would be good for people to clone humans, but they'd have to be VERY careful that only they knew how, so no bad people could do it.

I agree with Eric: It is disrespectful to God. And added upon that, it is abusive to humans. Scientists will start to alter genes in the clones to make them stronger, less creative, and more controlable to create worker people, and make them slaves.. a perfect slave race. That's the kind of thing that this will boil down to.. we have to draw the line somewhere. Yes, I think making organs and the such to help people is fine, but messing with real cloned people is going a too far.

A good topic suggested by Tim Groves. I don't think Humans should be cloned. Even though I do think that sugeries such as transplants and reconstructive are acceptable. Cloning is not necessarily taking the place of God. That is impossible for us to do but I think it is direspectful to God, and our human race.

If the information being relayed traveled at infinite speed . . . If the signal could remain intact . . . If we had the availability of infinite bandwidth . . . Well, theoretically, all things are possible. There are even reports that state telepathy is instantaneous. Here’s an excerpt of a message I had recently sent to one of your theorists (Kat and her topic of "Mental People in Time and Space"): ". . . What you said about the human mind transcending time is rather interesting, though. According to theory and test, the mind does exactly that. There were tests run in the seventies along this line in which base measurements were made of an average houseplant. The owner of the plant was a psychology student who traveled half way around the globe for his experiment. With his houseplant wired to electrodes, he subjected himself to various conditions, from joy through minor pain, documenting the precise moment of each changing condition. Upon his return home, he and his project team reviewed the results of the test, finding that the plant was reacting to each stimuli he encountered, thereby proving his basic premise that plants interact emotionally on a psychic level with people. What he also discovered, however, was the fact that the plant’s responses were almost instantaneous in reference with the stimuli, which was induced several thousands of miles away from the plant. Using modern communications media, a transmission from Hong Kong to New York City would still have about a 4 second delay, and it would take a whole quarter of a second for light to travel the same distance. This, then, could easily be calculated as the speed of thought . . ." This particular student went on to challenge NASA to launch one of his plants to a distant orbit, preferably Mars. He suggested that where the recorded responses would take at least six minutes to reach Earth, the plant would be receiving from him instantly on the emotional level. There have been several instances where a person’s houseplant shows a particular response to its owner, even if the owner happens to be away at the time. Apparently, instantaneous communication among average houseplants and their keepers is already in existence. --FYI— I do know it takes only an eighth of a second to circle the globe at the speed of light. Sorry about the above error, but I copied the document unedited, just as I had sent it to Kat.

Definitely. Scientists have even figured out the instantaneous part. Now they just need to figure out how to use it for communication. It's been a while since I read the news report, but two groups of scientists were able to do something like this: They took two photons, call them A and B, and made them an entangled pair. Then they took a third photon C and entangled it with B. Now, one of the weird things about photons is they have a lot of either/or properties (like clockwise or counterclockwise spin) that are just probability functions until they are observed, just like Schroedinger's cat. And the neat thing about entangled pairs is that when one photon gets measured and its probability function collapses, the probability function of the other photon in the pair collapses with the opposite result. This happens instantaneously, regardless of the distance between the entangled photons. So when the scientists looked at the spin of photon A, it picked a direction and B simultaneously picked the opposite direction. So C, which was entangled with B, instantaeously took on the same spin as A.

If instantaneous means in 0 time, I don't believe we can do that. Unless we figure out how to break the light speed barrier, but that's a whole other discussion in itself..

By instantaneous I assume you mean, no time at all. Well, for communication to happen, something has to move. And everything takes time to move. Therefore, instantaneous communication is not possible.

Yes but if the method of communicating is going at an infinite speed. So it can't be sound or light but other methods are possible (possibly electricity but that doesn't really move). Or if you shout loud enough.

I read a cool article in discovery about faster than light travel. There's a phenomenon called "tunneling." it is when a photon hits a solid object at one end and instantaneously appearing at the other end. if the tunneling photon had a "race" with photon that didn't hit the solid wall, it would beat it by a considerable amount of time. what sucks is that the thicker the wall, the lower the probability is of Tunneling occurring. but still, the possibilties... anyway, it's the june issue of Discover. the explanation they give for tunneling has something to do with the quantum packets "bunching up" at one end. something like that. pretty cool.

Hmmm...tough question Eric. I think that even if the data being transfered to the person (or thing) receiving it were moving at an infinite speed, that would still be too slow for it to be instantaneous...I think that the information would have to actually go back in time a bit so it would arrive at its destination at the EXACT same time it was sent. It's something to think about.

Yes if the information being relayed traveled at infinite speed. Otherwise, it would have to take up time traveling from one person to the another.

Odds-bodkins, you say . . . These questions, Eric, seem to be getting curiouser and curiouser. I would have to say that the exact center of a wheel absotively, posilutely does not rotate, but not for the reason you state. I’m playing the odds here. Is there anything at the absolute central axis-point of a wheel? Possibly, but not necessarily . . . In fact the odds are there isn’t. The simple fact that the wheel is turning would negate the eventuality of something being there. 99.9% of all space is vacant. This is also true on the atomic scale. Atoms are spaced relatively near to each other, but the space between the nucleus and the electrons is incredibly vast. In a stationary object, you would be very hard-put to pinpoint the exact location of an atom. While rotating, I seriously believe there would be no matter at the exact hub of the wheel, although the matter around the axis-point would interact to keep the matter in one piece. Now, bearing all this in mind, if there is nothing there, what could rotate?

Yes. It does not move (in a circular pattern) and even though if you were to measure the amount of movement from the outside in it would get smaller and smaller until it would not move at all but it would still have to rotate. In a matter of speaking, the center turns the entire wheel so it would have to (you can't have certain parts of a wheel not move).

Well, I think that it might and might not, depending on the conditions. Whatever particles are at the center of the wheel are probably rotating: not with the wheel, but on their own. Thus, they could be rotating different directions than the wheel, or the same. So the answer to this question is yes and no.

No, because the exact center is a line that travels perpendicular into the wheel and it would have to be going into 2 different directions at the same time.

And now for googols! A Googol is a definite number and stating that there are fewer than a googol of particles (even on the super-atomic scale) is setting a limit to the infinity of the universe, an impossibility simply by choice of word (i.e., infinity & universe do not mix well with limit). What infinity and universe imply is unlimited everything. To quote the late Dr. Carl Sagan, though, a googolplex (the figure 1 followed by a googol of zeroes equal to 1^googol) cannot be counted. He was under the impression that you would run out of subatomic particles to count long before you ever reached this rather enormous number. With this I tend to disagree. Infinity and universe remain unlimited in my mind.

What you mean with this topic is incredibly unclear. I think that it's possible for there to be a googalPLEX (a 1 followed by a googal of zeros) of things in the universe as long as you're talking about very small things such as neutrinos and quarks. But if you mean things like planets, stars, and even galaxies, then I don't think there are a googal of them in the universe. I think you've got to get down to small things like molecules and atoms and sub-atomic particles before there can be a googal of them.

I think that at that we hane no way of knowing. I'm sure there could be.....It's all in the imagination!

Your definition of particle, I'm going to assume is a structure which can no longer be further broken down. This idea unto itself it, as of yet, undefinable. In the time of the Greece, Greeks thought the atom was the final particle. Right now, scientist speculate that a 'string' is the final particle. Scientists, or at least the plurality of them, agree that about 10^-40 mm is the size of the 'string.' A 'string' is a small coil of, well, string. There are two types...one coils clockwise and the other counter-clockwise. The combination of these 'strings' would create another partical...and so on, until after about 6 iterations of combining particles, we would arrive at the quark...which is the smallest particle we have yet to find. So, if you're using galaxies as your indivisible partical, then no, there aren't a googol in the universe ( although you never know, it is quite a large universe ) however, if you're using 'strings' as the standard, then there are! more than a googol in an average adult's body.

Yes. I feel space is extraordinarily(which is not to say others think space is ordinary) large and in fact infinite or if not infinite, at least it continues forever because of curved space. I have recieved email about this from a man who claims to have proof. Click here to read the whole story!!! Why don't you email him and tell him what you think. Since space is infinite, can't we fit all we want into it. At least a googol? It should be possible. Thanks!

As it stands, everything you or I will ever experience is a matter of perspective. From your standpoint, you are quite right in your assumption of your Mustachio Theory. But here’s my perspective. The closer one gets to infinity, the closer one gets to the edge of the universe, but at the same time, you can never achieve the edge of the universe. The universe encompasses all you will ever experience. If you can see it, it’s within your knowable universe. If you can hear it, it’s within your knowable universe. If you can feel it . . . You can probably see where all this is going. Okay. Space is curved. You cannot reach the edge of the universe because you are a part of that universe, but also because space defeats this ploy with the relatively simple matter of curving back upon itself. And the fabric of the universe is rippled, giving an appearance much like that of a trick-mirror you might find at an amusement park. As we gaze out into the night sky, the tiny pinpoints of light look very small and close together. Are they? Of course not. This is a matter of perception. The same is true with numbers. Standing at our reference 0 line, the large, distant numbers appear to be close together. With the rippling fabric of the universe that allows for the event of momentary worm-holes to hyper-rip through the voids, they may even appear to vary in distance from each other, just as stars do behind a relatively dense body . . . but they do not. All is constant. The space between numbers remains constant. As you approach these distant and large numbers, they will appear to be as close together as 0 and 1, or 0 and -1 appeared at your reference starting point. There ya go . . . I think . . .

I think so and it is the main idea for my new moustche theory. I think the closer you are to zero, the farther the numbers will be. Once you get close to infinity, the spaces get very small. The difference in small numbers is bigger that the difference in larger numbers.

The decision will be made among the people. If the idea of time travel becomes respected and it becomes to be a part of daily life then people will embrace it as they have other ideas. Any decision that effects people in some way for the good will be accepted as a good idea with good intentions.

O, ye of little faith! . . . Well, off hand I would say you could expect every possible reaction. We will have euphoric dancers prancing in the streets, right beside the rioters. Eric, the very premise that mankind had achieved time travel would result in cataclysmic, horrific battles, both internal and external. The fears would be incalculable, do to the very idea, even if it were not a fact of ability, just the idea that someone, anyone, could travel back in time and somehow change it. Think about it. A government science prospector doing grant work at MIT stumbles upon Doctor Emmett Brown’s flux-capacitor (As in Back to the Future?). Where does this neat little device end up? Well, after spending a relatively short life thrilling its discoverer, it will go to the contracting agency, who will doubtless have direct ties in government contracting. And of course nobody must ever know of this discovery because of the potential panic it would cause. Now we have a relatively stable environment for the discovery . . . but for how long? The next election? New hands come into office, all bright eyed and eager to leave their imprints in the "annals of history." The relatively obvious questions come up: How can we make today a better place? How can we make yesterday look nicer? Even, how can I undo that terrible thing I did yesterday? Now there a J. Edgar Hoover wanna-be out there with the power to totally annihilate YOU! That’s right. They found a way to keep the Martin Luther King Jr. And the Kennedy’s alive, but the new flow of time will cause your parents to never meet! Oops . . .

I think most people would be impressed and in shock as well as cautiously optimistic. There will be people ready and willing to exploit this technology and it would become a source of entertainment more than science, much like the internet.