One wouldn't exist because that entire mass of non-refractive glass would need to be within that little radius to form a black hole. Until that point an event horizon wouldn't exist.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'lasik, eye, eww, myopia, nearsightedness' to 'lasik, eye, eww, myopia, nearsightedness, medicine, refractive, surgery, ophthalmology' - edited by mauz15

This bit from www.penny-arcade.com and the ever eloquent Tycho reminded me of you guys:

"Peter Molyneux has no credit with me - he must always pay in advance, cash only. I am completely impervious to him, so when he says that he's invented some kind of digital boy this firm assertion is refracted into harmless light. Illusions of the kind he proposes are tremendously fragile - it's hard enough to maintain them in raw text, without the idiosyncrasies of the nested recognition systems in play with Milo. Please understand: I love the future, and I long to live there. I want very much to simulate a cognizant digital imp. But this man has broken my heart so many times that it can no longer contain love."

>> ^Drax:
>> ^robdot:
if I where to shine a flash light in the direction I'm traveling then the light emitting from that flashlight should travel (relative to me) at the speed of light minus 500,000 mph. Otherwise the light would be traveling faster then the speed of light to someone not onboard the magical cosmic space
I think your wrong on this point, the speed of light is a constant. it will measure the same to all observers.

Then it -would- travel at speed of light minus the speed of the train to me, otherwise for someone "standing still" (whatever that is) the light would be traveling the speed of light plus the speed of the train.
I'm just gonna stop here before my HEAD ASPLODES.

This seems to be correct. Light travels at a constant speed through space. Unless your magic train is outside of space (and time) the light from your flashlight would travel at the speed of light, period. It is not affected by the speed of the emitter. The speed of light is a constant (yeah, refraction can make it SEEM like it changes, so can space expansion, but it's really a constant), and is not cumulative.
My question to math teachers was always..."If I'm going the speed of light in my chevy nova and I turn on my headlights, do they work?". Sadly, they never answered me, but the correct answer is "...kind of, define "work"." They would emit photons, but those photons would not go faster than the nova through space, and so they would not "light up" the space ahead of the car (as long as it traveled at the speed of light). My hypothesis is the photons would remain between the emitter and the reflector, and the "relative" speed of the car and light would be between 0 and twice the speed of light, but actual speed of each would remain the speed of light. There would not be a beam of light, but a point (or 2 points, one in front of or at the emitter, one in front of or at the reflector) where photons were traveling in the same direction, constantly gaining in "density".
A good question here might be, would there be a point where the photons reach a maximum "density" (where no more photons can occupy the same point in space time), and, if so, what happens when this point is reached?
Oh no! (head expands and pops!)

Just like the government. Originally, refraction was just going to be a war measure - only implemented during national emergencies. And then they said it would only affect foreign water.

Now there's rainbows everywhere. I don't even think the government can control it anymore.

These materials actually do not require a camera.

They bend the light around the object, in effect rendering it invisible. These materials are called negative index metamaterials. Metamaterials are named as such because they are often composed of two or more different materials that give the composite material an effective material property. In this case, we are talking about a negative index of refraction.

Until the 1960s, no one thought a negative index of refraction was possible- for a number of reasons that are not entirely necessary for our discussion. The predictions made by V.G. Veselago were largely ignored until J. Pendry 'rediscovered' negative refraction. After D. Smith invented the first negative index metamaterial, the field has taken off.

So what is a negative index of refraction?

The basic idea is that these materials have a simultaneous negative permittivity and permeability...

Ahhh... what does that mean?

That means that a time varying electric and magnetic field or wave which has one phase in a free space, will be exactly out of phase in a negative index material with n = -1.

See this video:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Cloak-of-Invisibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_refractive_index#Negative_refractive_index

That phenomenon is caused by the cloaking device of the alien ship refracting sunlight in the Earth's atmosphere.

the refraction of light -- and the human animal's response to it.

I was totally waiting for this to happen. I was so excited. I saw the promos for this show months ago. Now that I've seen it, it feels like the refraction period after hate-f@#cking by best-friend's wife (I've never done that--THAT ANSWER IS...TRUE). Awful.

Definitely not fake, seeing as the mythbusters showed you can start a fire with a ball of ice water refracting the sun light, before ti melts.

There Are plenty of available satellite images of the north pole. Here is one of my favorites:
http://www.weather.com/maps/activity/holidays/northpolesantasatellite_large.html

Oh, and about that 'shadow zone'.. the common explanation is refraction do to earth's solid and liquid core layers... but hey, maybe it's the crab people?

"but the refractions are wrong"

hehehe.... yea.. pretty cool... they forgot to add '++ sunlight'.

yeah not fake, you can see him refracting the light.

"There is already a distinct etiquette surrounding downvotes, particularly for posts still in the queue, which is that downvotes are generally used only for those posts which are most objectionable."

What planet are you on? Downvotes are sometimes random anomaly, personal hang-up refraction mechanism, or spiteful and witty gestures of faith?!

As promised, here is the transcript, to the best of my transcripting abilities. I've shrunk the text size to keep it from being any more gigantic than it has to be. Copy and paste it if it's too small to read.

It's interesting when people speak of areas of evolution for which we have no explanations. All the fundamental concepts of the evolutionary process are understood at least at some fundamental level. Now, are there gaps? Not gaps in the sense that people think. People, now, speak of gaps, for example, in the record. You know... we don't have fossils from before the Camrbian Explosion, but so what? The record is complete; it's not complete by means of fossils. You see in Darwin's time the only way to reconstruct evolutionary history was by studying fossils, by comparative anatomy, comparative embryology, biogeography. It was 150 years ago; science has advanced tremendously. We can now reconstruct evolutionary history with much more powerful methods; the methods of molecular biology, by looking at DNA, by looking at proteins and with these methods we have reconstructed the record completely. We can go back to the organisms, a group of organisms, called LUCA ('L' 'U' 'C' 'A') for the Last Universal Common Ancestor. We can find the common ancestors of all animals, common ancestors of all plants, of all fungi, of all bacteria. We can find the... we can reconstruct the histories of the common ancestors of plants and animals and fungi and bacteria going back to the very beginning. We don't know all the details, because who wants to know all the details? If you are studying the Rocky Mountains, you don't want to have, necessarily, a map where every st.. every tree and every rock is there. If you want to know the details of a particular area within the Rocky Mountains you can go there and study as much as you want and find every little rock, every little leaf, every little tree, every little plant there. The same with evolution. We can now look at any area of evolutionary history and we can understand it with as much detail as we wish. The methods of molecular biology are so powerful, are so quantitative, and also so redundant, we can study anything we want with as much detail as we want. Now there another way in which the people who propose.. propound intelligent design speak of as... about, um... you know, gaps in the record. How did the eye come about? Well we understand now at the genetic level [unintelligible], we actually understand that at almost every other level, they make the unwarranted and erroneous assumption that if something is complex, and every part depends on every other part, that it could not have come about by evolution. It's like a watch. It does not help to have one little piece, or the other piece, or the other piece. You have to have them all or you don't have a watch, but that's not so with organisms. So we have in mollusks today, these are snails and clams and so.. and squids, we have an example.. an example of eyes which go from the simplest to the most complex. I'm going to speak about eyes because the eye is one example they use, unless you have everything, unless you have the cornea and the lense and the retina and the... and the optical nerve, having one part of this alone doesn't help. Well in mollusks, and in some mollusks called limpids, they have something that you can call eyes. They're just a few pigmented cells linked to single neurons, nerve cells, which carry the information to the primitive brain of these creatures. Just a few pigmented cells. Then we have mollusks which have more pigmented cells and some of them forming a kind of cup which allows to detect the direction of the light. Then we have what are called pinhole eyes which are this cup, still a little more extreme and a little more sensitive-to-light cells, and more nerve cells, and then you have... we have animals, still speaking about mollusks, which have just simple refractive lense as well as the sensitive... light-sensitive cells which eventually in advanced organisms they advanced to the... gave rise to the retina. And you go all the way to octopus and squids which have an eye very much like ours: has cornea, has a lense, has a retina, has muscles to move it, has a.. a optic nerve. Curiously enough the eye of the squid is better than ours in that we have a substantial imperfection that they don't have. For historical reason, that's for evolutionary history of how the human eye came about, the neurons that register the signals in the retina are inside the eye. So for those signals to go to the brain, these nerve cells get collected in the optic nerve, the optic nerve has to cross the retina so we have a blind spot. Now squids and octopuses have the nerve cells connected to what is the retina from the outside. So they collect into what is the optic nerve and they send the signal to the brain without having any blindspot. Well the... the point I am making is that there are complex organs and functions that we may not know in detail, but any time we investigate one of those we discover the details. And it's again, I'm going to put it bluntly, blasphemous to try to think of a God who is there waiting for something from time to time to come and intervene: "now I'm going to make an eye". Primitive organisms don't have eyes so God waited a few thousand million years - 2 and a half, 3 thousand million years - in order to have organisms with eyes, then later on did this and that. This is what the theologans in the old times called the "God of the gaps". Heresy, trying to justify God to account for things we don't know. You know, fill in the gaps. For things we don't know and aren't knowlegable by scientific research... we have science, we should do scientific research. We should not be putting this God as an engineer that is trying to fix little things from time to time. What sort of vision of God is that? Moreover there is another problem and it is that the implication of intelligent design is that God is a very, very bad engineer. Think of the example that I was telling you a moment ago, of the human eye. I mean, an engineer that could have designed an eye with the optic nerve having to cross the retina would be fired. You better do it the octopus way. An engineer that would have designed the human jaw would be fired. Our jaw is not big enough for all our teeth, so we have to pull the... the... the wisdom teeth and very often have to straighten the others and the orthodontists make a very good living straightening the teeth because we have too many teeth, too large for our jaw. An engineer that would have designed the jaw that is not big for the teeth would be fired. God making these trivial, obvious mistake in a universe of design. Well their God does these things, certainly not mine. I don't want to have to worship a God that did this... um, not smart enough to do as well as a human engineer.