posted on Mar, 30 2012 @ 03:49 PM
According too poster --- 10810 ---- on this thread: "The only reason for the sonic boom is because the air cannot move out of the way at high speed.
Compression of the air in front of the craft, will lead to very low pressure behind the moving craft. The equalization of these two mismatched
pressure areas causes the sonic boom."
A quoted paragraph from the Scientific American, April 2012, by Steven Carlip
"Today the biggest missing link in this quest is the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics. Einstien's theory of gravity, describes the birth
of the universe, the orbits of the planets and the fall of Newton's apple. Quantum mechanics describes atoms and molecules, electrons and quarks, the
fundamental subatomic forces, and much besides.
Yet in the places where both theories should apply --- where both gravity and quantum effects are strong, such as black holes --- they also seem
incompatible. Physicist's best efforts to combine them into a quantum theory of gravity have failed miserably, giving answers that make no sense or no
answers at all. Despite 80 years of work by generations of physicist's, including a dozen or so Noble laureates, a quantum theory of gravity remains
elusive.
A final set of questions revolves around the most mysterious beasts known to science: black holes. They must offer our best window into the ultimate
nature of space and time. In the early 1970's Stephen Hawking showed that black holes should glow like a hot coal ---emitting radiation with a
so-called blackbody spectrum.
In every other physical system, temperature reflects the underlying behavior of microscopic constituents. When we say a room is hot, what we really
mean is that the molecules of air inside it are moving energetically. For a black hole the "molecules" must be quantum-gravitational. They are not
literally molecules but some unknown microscopic substructure---what a physicist would call "degrees of freedom"---that must be capable of changing.
No one knows what they truly are."
Except for maybe the ETI's,
Erno86
edit on 30-3-2012 by Erno86 because: deleted a couple of words