[Avian(Admin)]

Yes. I'm going through web sites now that are doing a dandy job of explaining it, though there are a couple that are putting out information that's making the speed limit of light easy to swallow by comparison (IE that "The Big Bang didn't happen as a single explosion in one place but was the simultaneous appearance of all matter everywhere." Huh? I find that even harder to believe).

Yes, that's another misconception about the big bang - that it was an explosion. The big bang didn't just contain all the energy the Universe would use - it also contained the space for the Universe. Before the big bang, there wasn't even space - a void's void. Science cannot yet describe what was there before the big bang. So when all the energy started expanding from that tiny singularity, so did all the space the universe would grow into. And for that matter, time as well. Time is a physical thing - just as much an entity as the keyboard you're typing on. Space and time are intertwined. So we can't describe the big bang as an explosion, since there was nothing for the energy, space and time to explode into - it was something that's not intuitive for us to understand, but that can be described by physics in the ways you're reading about.

Edwin Hubble was the first to discover the expansion of the Universe. He saw that all the galaxies around us are travelling away from us. But it's not the galaxies per se that are travelling away from us - it's the space itself that contains them, and everything in between that is expanding.

OK, I think we've hit on my first bit of misunderstanding. I was always under the impression that matter and energy were interchangable. IE you could make matter from energy (see linear accellerators for an example) and energy from matter (go buy a firecracker for an example of this).

What you say is essentially correct - they are interchangable, but they are not the same thing in their separate forms. It's the famous E=mc^2. A planet does not share the same properties as, say gamma rays, but you can change a planet into gamma rays and other energy through various processes, like sending it through a crushing experience into a black hole.

And herein lies my single biggest problem with the whole thing. This, in my world view, violates the laws of conservation of matter. HOW can one's mass increase simply by virtue of it's velocity?

There are some things aobut physics that stop being intuitive at a certain point. Gravity, momentum, and forces all seem to make sense to us in our everyday world. But there are certainly things that blow our minds, that are not intuitive at all, and seem to be paradoxical. Relativity and quantum physics are loaded with them. You can sit there and ask yourself all day why, and tell yourself it doesn't make any sense. But in the end, you can blame your brain. This is a part of the Universe that we haven't had any day to day experience with, so we reject it as "not making sense".

With relativity, you can get a good start on things by keeping in mind another one of Einstein's greatest discoveries - that space and time are intertwined. Space and time are the fabric of the Universe in which everything is painted. Start speeding through the Universe, you're not only speeding through the fabric of space itself, but the fabric of time.

Yes, mass increases with speed relative to someone standing still. Your time also slows down as compared to someone standing still relative to you. "Why?" No one knows. It's the nature of the Universe we live in. "It doesn't make any sense!" It doesn't have to! Our minds evolved to hunt and survive on the land of this tiny planet. We have only the smallest inkling of the true nature of the Universe. You might say "Of course it doesn't make sense!"

I hop on a plane with a gold brick. 1 lb of pure 24 karat gold. I land in Wichita and pick you up, and we both hop on another plane to San Diego. While enroute, I hand you the gold brick (which is now more massive due to our velocity). Suddenly this 1 lb brick is worth more since it has more mass? When we hit San Diego, do you hand Jim a 1 lb gold brick? Or is it 1 lb plus whatever mass we picked up when I handed the brick to you over New Mexico?

The mass of the brick does change, as does you, me, the airplane, everyone in it, etc. It changes as measured by a person standing on the ground. Your watch also runs slower as compared to someone on the ground. But to you, everything appears to stay the same. With the speed and acceleration loss, your mass and time change as well.

An excellent book on this subject is "About Time" by Paul Davies.

See what I'm saying? It's a direct violation of the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of matter (unless the thrust that was being emitted by the jet engines magically makes it's way into the gold bar).

That's an excellent question! If you converted all your mass to energy while at relativistic speeds, aren't you adding more energy to the Universe that wasn't there in the first place? Doesn't that violate the conservation of mass and energy that states that you cannot add mass or energy to the Universe. You might also take that thought a different direction and ask "If I go fast enough, will I become a black hole?"

Traditional Newtonian physics start to break down at relativistic speeds. New rules are needed. It gets complicated. My fingers are getting tired, so here's a few links onthe subject...

If I go fast enough, will I become a black hole?

Momentum, energy and length at relativistic speeds

I've GOT to be missing something. Something fundimental.

Not really - you're asking all the right questions. The answer is that the rules change when you go very fast. You just need to know what the new rules are (see above). And at speeds that you're talking about, the relativistic effects are extremely minimal.

Yeah, no kidding. I've never liked limits of any kind. But when someone tells me that this or that is physically impossible, I'm reminded of one of the top physicists of the late 1800s who stated that no object would ever be able to break the speed of sound and continue flying. His name escapes me at the moment. Col. Charles (Chuck) Yeager proved him categorically wrong, and the Concorde (and it's Russian counterpart) have proven that wrong.

But that's a thought trap many fall into. Humans can be wrong. But what was really the scientific strength of that argument? Was it based on experimentation, was it accepted by his scientific peers? Did it really hold up to scrutiny? Just because some guy was wrong once about something doesn't invalidate or weaken a scientific principle that has withstood countless attacks and the test of time. Nor does it cast light on what the scientific evidence was of his claim. Did he have a solid argument based on the data at the time? I don't know - I would go and find out though. Are generally scientific notions proven wrong in history? Yes. But you can usually see where the weakness was in the evidence - some unexplained untestable factor that had to be approximated, or a new theory invented to make it work. Each argument HAS to be evaulated on its own merits based on the evidence and peer review of it. Don't fall into this trap.

The second scenario would be my best guess. After reading many sites on some of the new discoveries (www.gsfc.nasa.gov is any astro-geek's friend) that have been made over the last umpty years, it'd be more likely that another branch that takes hold at higher relative energies would take effect.

Again, the state of physics is incredibly advanced - far more than most people realize. There are many lines of evidence pointing to the current view of relativistic physics to the highest energies. The door is always open to discovery, but no one should poo poo the solidness of the current state of things. They are very, very solid. The big thing folks are working on now is tying everything together. Quantum physics must meet relativistic physics somewhere - right now these two seem to work great in their separate special cases (the very small, and the very big) - but something must tie them together into one theory. So far, no luck.