Royston

Relative to other careers in the public sector, and with the amount of study and responsibility teachers have, the wages are pretty poor in the UK, and there's been much debate about this over the years. I have a good friend who is a teacher, and some of the difficulties he has certainly doesn't reflect his earnings. I think the issue here though is that students are showing a lack of interest in physics and so this has a knock-on effect to the amount of placements for teachers. I'm wondering if the subject just seems too hard for many...maybe because there is a growing trend of the population just wanting the easier option, or that physics has come to a point where it's almost impossible to make a real impact, maybe someone in the field could answer that ?

No that would be a small hard lump on the testicle, not one bigger than the other, whatever side it was. What are you trying to do, scare the crap out of us all ?!

Same again...with particular thanks to 5614 and Martin who have given me clear and informed advice on issues that would of been really hard to grasp, and showing a great deal of patience where I've overlooked a small detail. Needless to say YT2095 for being a wealth of information, and his posts are always a pleasure to read. Bascule for his thought provoking McKenna type musings and the incredible language he uses...also a joy to read. I could go on, but I'll just include the people who have directly kept me coming back to SFN on an almost daily basis. Oh, and danny8522003 for being a thoroughy nice chap when I got f'd off with something, some time ago.

Thanks a lot for making that clear 5614. So if it wasn't for relativity, the implications of quantum mechanics would be a lot stronger with regards to uncertainty and determinism, which is reassuring. Having said that, it's a kind of a catch 22 situation for both theories to gel.

Mutate was a poor word to use...sorry about that, probably best to read the article.

Apologies if this seems slightly off topic, but there's something I need to clear up. I've been trying to get my head round the discrepancy between relativity and quantum mechanics with regards to determinism, I understand both are correct...and quantum mechanics only threw out indeterminism because it deals with very small scales, this all makes sense so far. What I keep on slipping up on is when people refer to the double slit experiment and say that an electron only appears to be in more than one place at a time, is when it's observed...surely if you set up the experiment and there was no-one there to observe or measure it, the electron will still behave the same. Sorry if this seems like a dumb question.

More news on research that is studying the mechanisms that cause the flu virus to adapt from bird to the human strain...if the research is successful they'll be able to identify how the virus will mutate before a pandemic arises. Please find the article here.... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051124114447.htm A vaccine (however big the needle is) sure beats eating some fermented cabbage, IMO.

Well if that's your take on wildlife programmes...I'm not one to judge

The 'springtail' footage was also one of the highlights...you can see them in action under the same link.

If anyone was fortunate enough to see 'Life in the Undergrowth' last night, a brand new documentary hosted by Sir David Attenborough then you would of seen the amazing courtship and mating ritual of the leopard slug. I guarantee you'll never look at a slug the same way again, myself and my house mates were transfixed and makes our mammalian sexual practices seem almost primitive and clumsy. Please find a video clip below... http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/lifeintheundergrowth/video.shtml The documentary was unique as it plotted the ancestory of insects from early crustaceans and molluscs to the modern day mini (and not so mini) beasts we see today, and used digital high speed cameras which produced some incredible images. I'm sure it will be repeated soon on BBC 3 or 2 but I'm yet to check, can't wait for the next episode.

That's kind of the rationale behind this. They're trying to limit the amount of people on the streets at pub closing times...around 11:00 - 11:30...in a hope to alleviate the amount of clashes between the 'beer monsters.' There's been a lot of controversy about whether this new system will work...I personally think it's a great idea, as incidents 'should' in theory be more isolated and not involve huge groups of moronic thugs 'having it out' on the streets...where more often than not innocent people end up getting hurt. This side of night life in the UK makes me sick...you can go out and have a great night, but you have to be quite selective where you go. This is fine by me, the kind of places where you get trouble are meat markets of no-brain ignorant pricks, who bumble around to regurgitated accessible mainstream house and R n B pap (they need to be told what music to be into), sizing each other up, and who think that 'big brother' is a thought provoking psychological experiment...I hate generalizing but unfortunately this makes up a hell of a lot of people in the UK...sort it out Britain. But yeah 24hr licensing...woohoo !!

This always sticks in my mind from atinymonkey... from this thread here...(which is hilarious IMO) http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=13615 From Family Guy...there's so many to choose from but this ones short and sweet... Peter Griffin : Brian, there's a message in my Alpha Bits. It says 'OOOOOO' Brian Griffin : Peter, those are Cheerios.

I'll check it out, thanks Martin. My prayers have been answered, visual models are exactly what I 'get on with' hopefully in a few years time I'll be able to express some of my ideas mathematically, but until then, this direction in physics seems a lot more accessible and familiar with the way I would approach the subject...I'm sure that would go for some other people on SFN as well.

I find this slightly more appealing than some of the QG theories as it attempts to unify particle interactions as well as curvature...many of the QG theories seem to ignore or set aside interactions on very small scales, well from what I've read and understood so far. There's particular attention to the Higgs field in this paper which I like, just wish I could read the equations properly, many of the worded explanations are heavy going alone.

You could buy a 'playstation joypad to USB converter' they take two controllers for each USB port, providing you have two, and you know a couple of people with playstations, you're away. The joypads have more than three buttons, and you can get them quite cheap on E-bay.

Find today's news article here... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4450208.stm It's really quite sad there's a lack of interest in the subject, I'm wondering why this trend has grown over the years.

In theory it has a repelling force (anti-gravity) so it explains the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate...plus dark energy supposedly makes up 70% of the energy in our universe. Look up the 'cosmological constant', and 'quintessence' for more on this...as well as obviously 'dark energy'. The reason you still get black holes is because they are formed by large stars collapsing, so you get a concentration if you like of the attracting force of the gravity we know, in fact the larger the mass then obviously the greater the attraction of gravity. 'Dark energy' doesn't affect this because although there is more of it, it's impossible to have uniform shapes made of the stuff due to it repelling rather than attracting. So it has an affect on the overall cosmological background, but doesn't affect large masses being created or collapsing. Basically there's expansion of volume between bodies, but when a body acquires a certain mass gravity is stronger. It's important to remember that stars are relatively sparce compared to the amount of dark energy / matter between them, so expansion is possible on large scales, but on smaller scales the other three forces come into play along with gravity, and stops everything literally breaking up.

You're forgetting that hallucinations effect more than your sight.

Excellent !

Why do medicines have to taste so bad ? Please see the link below... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/13/nsauer13.xml I'd of thought even poultry would turn their beak up at sauerkraut...think I'd rather suffer with the flu for a week. I'm not sure how conclusive the findings are, but seems to be quite promising.

That's exactly what I thought...I'd personally be running around after them in happy abandon, like Homer after a squirrel...tee hee

11 years of research well spent... http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0a03b5108e097010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html some good pics and a video can be found here... http://zubbles.com/gallery/zubblesPhotos.asp

Maybe I should put it another way, why are the current cosmological models based on isolated sytems if the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. I realise this has nothing to do with classical mechanics now. Could it be possible that something like the Higgs field or maybe dark energy is non-isolated, and creates an asymmetric model where if 2 systems would normally achieve a thermal equilibrium with each other, this possibility would mean a creation of energy and volume. It just makes no sense to me that the big bang can acquire the energy to start if there isn't something happening before the inflation process for it to expand and increase in volume ? This is why there must be something happening when gravity takes over...maybe. Apologies if this seems like a daft question, but I'm actually loosing sleep over it...and everything I've read so far seems to contradict isolated to non-isolated et.c

The media (mainly newspapers) still have this ridiculous stance on drugs...if this is the general view of the masses, I'm not sure, it's pretty rife in Britain to say the least. The problem is there seems to be no conclusive evidence of exactly how harmful psychoactive drugs are...it depends on the individual in a lot of cases, and what harm they do is smeared by the media, so they are in no way advocating drugs. I can think of a handful of newspaper articles where they've taken a more liberal approach. The rest take a moral high-ground, and when you know these journalists are sniffing coke and getting pissed at their work do's. This is what really gets me...people that drink and smoke that seem to think they 'don't do drugs'...you do, and that have the audacity to look down their nose at someone who has chosen a different substance to escape once in a while.