Shapes

Somehow -- and I honestly don't know how to do this -- we need to come up with a way to show that the value of some commodity diminishes as the quantity of that commodity increases.

Yes this is what I am struggling with. Also it would seem that an economy such as the UK's could absorb an extra 1 million printed GBP without too much of a devaluation of the currency, I don't think anyone would notice - so her idea is probably sound, but not repeatable (much).

Or we could just let her be a little girl. :-)

Yes! She's gone off early to London this morning, part of her year (year 5) are visiting The National Gallery and The British Museum, I hope she has fun, she was very excited !

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It was a very clear dusk last night and The Moon was a tiny crescent, but one could see that The Moon was round due to prominent Earthshine, Katherine liked the idea that we were seeing the shape of The Moon through Sun light entering our eyes after it had already bounced off of The Earth, rather than directly bouncing off of The Moon. I got to thinking about a couple or three of things:

First, I was thinking more about your Moon Bomb idea; question - would the cable as it was reeling in due to the Earth's rotation, damage the Earth as it wrapped around? Possibly damaging other countries other than the intended target in the process? Or did I get the idea wrong?

Thirdly, I was wondering how different we would be as a race without these strange objects in the skies to look upon, they make us wonder and look for answers to their movements.

Secondly, and this takes longer thus the odd order, I was thinking about The Moon's progress around The Earth. The description Einstein came up with about 4D curved spacetime as an explanation is so beautiful, it made me think it must be correct. My intuition tells me this but I could be wrong, how can I know? I can't. Anyway I got to thinking that if spacetime can be curved then what exactly is "a vacuum"? If a vacuum is nothing then how can you curve it? So my conclusion was that spacetime must have a fabric and the vacuum of space is not simply "nothing".

Then I got to thinking about magnets. As a child I played with and was fascinated by magnets, but how do they work? So then I got to thinking about electromagnetic forces, and forces in general. Somehow these forces act across distances with seemingly nothing in between, but hang on, if a vacuum has a fabric then maybe they are acting on something in between the objects, perhaps the same something?

Then I was thinking, if you could attach a rigid steel rod from the Earth to The Moon and pushed the Earth end slightly towards The Moon, would The Moon end move immediately? Thus signaling the transfer of information in a way that was faster than light? Maybe The Moon is a bad example, take The Sun, put a rigid rod between The Earth and The Sun. Push the rod towards The Sun, does it move immediately at The Sun end thus negatating the fact that The Sun is 9 light minutes away?

Then I thought perhaps the whole concept of "immediately" or "time" was relative, but that's another discussion.

My thoughts were perhaps "forces" are propagated through waves travelling at the speed of light along the rods connecting particles. Maybe two "particles" represent the two ends of a rod. We can't see the rod but it's there and these rods can curve, so perhaps spacetime is made of rods?

Perhaps the pushing of the rod (rather than a wave travelling along it) is what is happening in quantum entaglement where you get what Einstein called "Spooky action at a distance", ie. do something here and something immediately happens over there.

Depending on how you look at rods depends on how you see them, symmetries of rods, but we can only see the ends. I think this big E8 number mathematicians just worked out might have something to do with it. What if there are really 248 dimensions rather than the 10 the M-brane theory has come up with? 248 is the Lie-group limit for some reason, not sure why.