Bender

The neurological process happens in your brain, so it is your decision. It doesn't matter whether it is automated or deterministic: it still is the choice you (=your brain) "want" to make.

Eye colour is not determined by one gene, and it is not a clear case of dominant vs regressive genes, so eye colour is in a way a mix, although it can range from father's colour to mother's colour to anything in between to a colour neither parent has. Most physical traits are probably polygenic, so they can be a mix, just not a 50/50 mix.

Hence why QFT talks about "quantised field excitations" which show both wave-like and particle-like behaviour. As far as I understand it (which is admittedly not very much), e.g. an electron or a photon are wavelike excitations in respectively the electron-field and the electromagnetic field. Because these fields are quantised, they cannot transfer part of the energy, but have to expend all of it at one interaction, which makes it appear as a particle. It is still a model, as is everything in physics, but it shows that there are more possibilities than "waves with particle-like properties" or "particles with wave-like properties". That's what I got from this paper another member posted here not too long ago. A lot of it went over my head, but overall I thought it made sense.

I have read in several books and articles that the Copenhagen interpretation is the most common among physicists (latest is a physics textbook from Giancoli). Is that true? If so, why? It requires a boundary between the "quantum world" and the "macroscopic world": when is a system too large and do the wave functions collapse? To me that seems to be adding unnecessary complexity, but I may be missing something. As a side note: a while ago I read about an experiment where they wanted to bring a tiny mirror (i.e. a macroscopic object) in superposition. Does anyone know whether that experiment was ever performed?

Neither. Both are models that have their merit in specific situations. I doubt Newton would have been an aetherist when confronted with the experimental results and theoretical insights we have today. I like your questioning style, but I thought it was useful to point it out more explicitly (and I wasn't entirely sure myself)

So you are a light drinker preferring a pint over a liter?

But the field is still there, even if there is no interaction. I would describe a field a something that has a value in every position in space. There is also a distinction between vector fields and scalar fields - scalar fields only have a value at each point in space, e.g. temperature or gravitational potential energy - vector fields have a value and a direction, e.g. velocity field in a fluid, temperature gradient or gravitational field

If a force is exerted without movement, no work is done. [math]W=d \cdot F[/math] where d is the distance moved, so if it is zero, the work is zero. You have expended energy, because your muscles consume energy even if they do not move. Gravity on the other hand is conservative, which means that it expends no energy when no work is done. The kg of mass doesn't need to sit on the ground to add mass to the planet, it also adds its mass to the planet when it is in the air. The only advantage the imperial system has over the metric system is that you are used to it. Calculating in 10's is much easier, the different units in the metric system are more consistently matched with each other, so you need less conversion factors, there are no multiple definitions of the same unit, the definitions of the imperial system is now even based on the metric system. Also, the speed of light is 983 571 056 feet per second, so 1 billion ft/s is actually less accurate than 300 km/s.

It denotes the equivalence between mass and energy, which are fundamentally the same thing. If you want to include kinetic energy, you have to use [math]E=\gamma m c^2[/math] where [math]\gamma[/math] is the Lorenz factor. and m the "rest mass". But it is only worth the trouble at relativistic speeds. At lower speeds and in absence of nuclear reactions, you can safely ignore [math]E=m c^2[/math]. I don't know what your other questions are about.

There was plenty of change in the beginning, when major collisions knocked over venus and uranus and possibly created the moon. Jupiter might kick out Mercury in the distant future. I've even seen simulation results that predict a tiny chance that Earth gets thrown out of the solar system or into the sun, but I cannot find the reference.

Isn't usually assumed quarks and electrons have no size? Also, is the "size" of a quark relevant if quarks cannot exist alone, due to colour restrictions?

Science isn't about believing is stuff and natural phenomena don't care whether anyone believes in them. Feel free to believe in whatever you want, but I hope you are aware of the fact that the aether was never found. You definitely are not obliged to believe in waves or anything else if you don't want to. Also, even google doesn't know the word "aetherist" and "Einsteinians" is apparently a word in Catalan.

- It allows us to see at night (at least, when it is visible) - it causes moonburn for some people. - then there are a lot of indirect and cultural effects - wikipedia has an article on it, summarised by this quote:

c squared is a constant.

My opinion is that this belongs in either philosophy or speculation Also, I see no reason why you would conclude that space is infinite.

I know of no such association.

There was no experiment done. It was defined by the formula stated above F=ma. Since kg, s and m are defined, that defines the Newton. Now if you are asking about how to calibrate a force sensor, that depends on the required accuracy. The most convenient is with gravity and a well known weight.

The original question was already answered in the second post. Feel free to ignore anything that comes after .

Yes. Ignoring acceleration of the Earth and efficiency of gun powder to kinetic energy conversion: - if the gun is stationary: the useful energy of the explosion goes to kinetic energy of the bullet - if the gun is firing backwards on a riding frictionless train: the energy goes to acceleration of the train. Moreover, the KE the bullet had before also goes to the train - if the gun is firing forwards on a riding frictionless train: the energy goes to the bullet. Additionally, the train slows down slightly and this KE from the train is transferred to the bullet.

correct I did. It was not correct. I don't see how the strength of a human spine is relevant in a thought experiment. A train also doesn't go 2000 mph. This is not the engineering subsection

Any sources on those NEVER's? NEVER is a long time, you know. It is a lot longer than it would take to terraform a planet. It is also a lot longer than it would take us to reach the other side of our galaxy with current technology. Perhaps someone manages to rewrite human DNA in a way that cell no longer age, perhaps not. How do you now it will never happen? NEVER is longer than it would take to manually spell out an entire string of DNA.

Perfectly. Of course, both energies are positive and thus cannot cancel each other out. On the subject of firing in the same direction as the train: now the bullet has 4 times the kinetic energy it would have when fired from a stationary position. It already had the KE from the train, and you add the energy from the gun, but where do the other 2KE come from?

So what is the actual radius of a black hole? If it is 0, then the GPE of the original matter would be infinite. Even if it is finite but still very small, the GPE of stars and galaxies could be larger than their actual mass (contributing even more to the GPE and so on). What am I missing?

The real moral dilemma of self-driving cars I thought this quote in particular was interesting: "the longer we wait to use self-driving cars, the more people will die."

Of course, Mythbusters did it. Sorry, you have violated conservation of energy . To slow the bullet down, you need to absorb energy (so on top of the energy from firing the gun, the kinetic energy of the bullet is now missing too).