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This issue is notorious, and you will find large numbers of papers written about it, many of them arriving at diametrically opposed answers. To make a long story short - yes, the electron in "free fall" does in fact radiate. The equivalence principle does not apply to electrically charged test particles, and when one does the actual maths for this (which turns out to be a surprisingly complex and subtle endeavour), one finds that the electron does not actually trace out a geodesic of spacetime (so it isn't truly in free fall), and is in fact surrounded by a radiation field. Perhaps even more surprisingly, an electron at rest within a curved spacetime background (e.g. an electron confined in a vacuum tube at rest relative to earth) does not radiate, even though a comoving accelerometer would show non-zero proper acceleration. In some sense this is expected, since anything different would violate local conservation of energy; nonetheless, it is somewhat counterintuitive result. This is one of those cases where common sense and intuition are at odds with GR, and one has no option but to work through the (extremely tedious, in this case) maths.

We’ve gotta make a decision. We leave tonight or live and die this way

I think there is no universal answer, for some people this may be true for others not. I have a friend whom I've met 40 years ago when we were sat besides each other on our first day in first grade primary school. He ended up solely owning an industrial manufacturing company worth more than 100mln USD right now, his 21 year old son just left the psychiatric hospital again last week - drugs, street life, severe depression, suicide attempts, etc. Is this caused by a mindset? Probably, partially yes but there are so many angles and factors to take into account that this kind of generalization is only good for rap songs imo.

Akala the rapper clearly states that the ghetto or the "hood" is in the minds of the people who live in these areas and that it is more a state of mind in rich Western countries than a reality. I agree with him. What do you guys think?

This hits very close to home and while you are certainly not a teacher I'd say was part of the problem, the apology is appreciated even though you're clearly one of the consistently good ones and not the one who needs to apologise. That being said I completely see where you are coming from vis a vis aspirations. I am glad you posted this on the ethics forum however, as I don't think it is anywhere near so cut and dry as what you say here; You've made excellent points and I feel that most of what you are saying is true and pertinent. That being said, it's not the whole context but together we can come to a greater understanding of the structural context at hand. There are indeed mindsets which will contribute to stagnating or negative growth. Now you said, "Most of my colleagues accepted this without comment." Did you accept this without comment, reject without comment or did you openly object at the time? Obviously you rejected this in action but I want to know if you openly argued with teachers about this at the time? I know at the time that I should have lodged many formal complaints, both during Primary, Secondary and higher education. In one extremely violent and traumatic instance I could have straight up sued the school in question, I still can since there is no statute of limitations in Scotland on child abuse. We've entered into the ethics topic of Responsibility now. Of which there are two kinds worth mentioning. Causal responsibility and moral responsibility. Where blame is concerned, there is plenty of causal responsibility to go around. I was hurt by teachers and student. I didn't do a good enough job self-advocating to the schools or my parents. My parents didn't do enough advocacy for me at school, neither my parents or teachers got me help for ASD (Aspergers in the UK still) which I was diagnosed with at 23 due to my own actions of following it up with a psychiatrist. I chose to leave school at 16 before my exams due to my own perceived inability to be able to take bullying at school anymore. There is lots of nuance and lots of instances where I could draw on here, but it would make this comment far too long. Dealing out moral responsibility, where children are concerned should be done with a light hand. A three year old using a derogatory racial slur is probably not morally responsible for the impending harm of said slur, same with swearing in general. The words the three year old were exposed to was causally down to someone else and the child can't reasonably be expected to know the history, meaning or intent behind the slur. The adults in the childs life are morally responsible for it. All children are aspirational Not all aspirations survive childhood Our aspirations become our responsibility once we are old enough to truly know better. The problem. If not all aspirations survive childhood, how morally responsible can we hold each individual adult if they must be judged based on their knowledge and experience? This means, to me at least, that the onus of moral responsibility is on higher education and other forms of adult training programs, need to be reminding people that they once had Aspirations and that the people who told them they shouldn't have had those particular aspirations, were mostly wrong. How can I be sure of this? Well I just described what you are currently doing as a teacher. You remind me of Samuel Beckett. In terms of what is and isn't an adults fault; Damage to their aspirations during childhood was not their fault. Not listening to you or others who are trying to repair those aspirations, is their fault. Also I'd really really like to thank you so much for starting this discussion. It's helped me realise some things and you've helped me come up with a solution to the Is/Ought gap problem in moral philosophy! Will start a thread on that soon. Edit: Self-Correction, this is in the general philosophy thread not the ethics thread. Should maybe probably be in there.

Heeeeeey ! So did Clint Eastwood in 'Gran Torino', but he turned out to be a stand up guy, in the end.

One day we'll realise, that privilege is not hereditary; any more than a ghetto makes one tough. We evolve, if we're lucky, from where we start... The world will change, so look on ye mighty and despair...

I have several issues with this statement, and other careless statements like this. First and foremost, GR does not predict the existence of CTCs; it's rather the other way around, in that CTCs are consistent with the laws of GR, in the sense that such spacetimes are valid solutions to the field equations. The problem here is that a) not every solution to the field equations is necessarily physically realisable, and b) spacetimes containing CTCs are known to be highly unstable under even miniscule perturbations of initial conditions - and those conditions are only approximately true in the real world to begin with. Personally I would be very surprised if CTCs existed in the real world, and they are certainly not "predicted" by GR. Secondly, in what sense would a CTC be a "time machine"? A topological construct like this would connect an event to itself via a world line of non-zero length; not only would you not be able to travel forward or backward in time with this in a global sense, you would in effect be doomed to just 'loop through' that same event over and over again, without any means of ever escaping (neither spatially nor temporally). To me, this is actually the opposite of a time machine - it's like a Groundhog machine, if that reference makes sense. In ordinary spacetime, we age forward in time, so at least we travel through time in that (very limited) sense; when trapped in a CTC, you can't even do that much, you can only repeat the same cycle again and again. Thirdly, they seem to forget to mention that CTCs can exist only in vacuum; so even if you could physically realise such a spacetime (a possibility at least in principle), it would be impossible to introduce any kind of test particle without collapsing the spacetime into some more conventional geometry.

Seems to me to be little more than a distraction from the fact that Trumps approval sank hard after the last debate, according to his own CDC he shouldn’t be anywhere near others, let alone Joe Biden, and that his tactic of serially interrupting a person who has stuttered for decades instead of speaking to issues of policy or debating on the merits wouldn’t exactly work on a zoom call where the mod could just mute him when he refused to STFU. But sure... let’s pretend the debate commission is now somehow biased for canceling a debate that Trump already personally backed out of on Fox Biz News while experiencing ‘roid rage brain and covid fatigue. Bob Dole used to be a statesman, now he’s mostly just yelling at kids to get off his lawn

I don't think he was aiming for nice.

Pretty fly for a white guy

I understand that many married people can experience this at home.

Oh! Awrite mate! Similar situation as yourself, but grew up in Edinburgh, probably too multicultural where I was from to be considered a true ghetto though, that being said, you could argue that some ghettos are based on socio-economic class alone. Up until last month, I was living in a racially segregated ghetto on Chicagos South-west side. - How the US government segregated America. So, I think ghettos do exist. However I want to develop an argument from your point of view that they only exist in the mind (which in some ways is actually accurate since racist and classist fears are all in the heads of bigots) but why that is still a bad thing. I was once trying to get on a STEM course and my interviewer point blank told me "Some people just aren't capable of getting a PhD, so I don't think this course would be good for you if that is what you want to do." (Cow). I had told the interviewer it was my dream to get a PhD in physics at the time, other than my socio-economic background being from a really poor family in Edinburgh there was nothing this person could have known about me that would make her say something like that. Unless, in her mind I was from a ghetto. So, it's all very well to say "The ghetto exists in our minds" but we need to ask, does it only exist in the minds of people from ghettos? Or does it also exist in the minds of people trying to keep us there? If it is both, then the idea of ghettos definitely contributes to making ghettos a reality people from them have to overcome. An extra hurdle for us in comparison to rich people. To the point where it even makes it difficult for people like me and you to get onto entry level stem courses. Note: will be back to edit and complete in 20 minutes, phone is dying. Resumed: Now back to redlining. Do you know where American public schools get their funding? Property taxes. So Schools in redlined districts would have far less funding than schools in green districts. We are talking about decades of over-investment in white neighbourhoods vs underinvestment in minority ones. Take a drive across Chicago and the evidence for it is plain to see. It's like crossing between different worlds when you go from North to South. Why? Redlining. Decades of it. Even ending the practice hasn't fixed much because the effects of it were so potent that those neighbourhoods still have very little money whereas the green districts never experienced these things and their property values just kept rising and rising while red districts were forcefully stagnated. The crazy thing is, whites in green districts were under the belief that if black people moved in, it would lower their property value. When in reality it actually raised it because minorities had to be willing to pay more for a house than white people were in order to actually own property. It was just sheer racism. The damage these policies caused has in no way been fixed because even now insurers and lenders still feel it is too risky to invest in these ghettos. There is still less opportunity for minorities because of the decades of funding and investment inequalities.

I remember a conversation with a Pakistani friend at school where he said he was going to try to become a doctor and that i should do the same. I just laughed at him - i've no idea where i picked it up, no one had ever explicitly said i couldn't, but even the idea of being a doctor was already beyond me. I was, however, explicitly told by my teachers that i couldn't be a pilot or a scientist.

Back to original topic: yes, I think it is very possible for a person to believe in a religion and be a scientist. I, for example, am a science journalist and an orthodox Muslim. I am proficient in vertebrate paleontology and astronomy as my subjects of specific interest in science journalism. Yes, I believe in evolution and that Earth was created 4.56 billion years ago and humans never coexisted with non avian dinosaurs. The only difference is that I believe that evolution is directional and not haphazardly random. One thing that enrages me is that atheists, even ignorant ones, consider science as their dominion and prerogative. When I introduce myself as a Muslim, the instant knee-jerk reaction I get is the treatment of a science-denier. As if being a believer equates to being a neanderthal brute or even baboon. Another, very dangerous trend I have observed is that laymen treat scientific theories and postulates as hard and undeniable facts. In gray areas of uncertainty, they will always, without an exception, take the postulates which run antiparallel with religious teaching and then present it as a fact, decrying criticism from me by calling me a science-denier. This trend is very dangerous. Not only for social harmony and tolerance, but also for the very progress of science itself, as a neutral, unbiased discipline based on objective observations and transparent deduction.

Well of course it was. But please understand my position. When one has acquired a -25 rating, and faces the danger of getting booted off, a degree of unctuousness is called for.

Thanks swansont for clarifying that point. I used to wonder how sailors could die in agony of thirst when surrounded by water. I thought: "Well, even if the sea-water has got salt in it, surely a little bit of it, would at least help relieve the thirst". And you know - I still kind of think that way! But, as you explain in your post, both science and maritime experience testify to the contrary. From the point of view of long-term survival, that is.