Cap'n Refsmmat

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Because their mass is converted into energy in the form of photons. They aren't made of photons. They turn into photons. (And I believe you meant "an electron and a positron".)

For that to work, the spins of the photons making up the electron would have to add up to that electron's spin. (That's how it works with quarks in protons.) How do you add up 1 (the spin of a photon) and a few more 1s to get 1/2 (the spin of an electron)?

How does one create an electron, with spin 1/2, from photons, of spin 1? Use half a photon? Because I presume when you say particles are made of "trapped light" you mean they're made of photons in the same way a proton is made of quarks. Unless you mean the photons' energy is converted into electrons?

Any representative political system has to have faith in its constituents or the principles don't hold up. We could have dozens of other threads on what's making people apathetic, although the easiest solution is "shoot the media."

I'm thinking some sort of electronic system like they use on America's Funniest Home Videos and so on. Each desk has a Yea button and a Nay button, and the representative presses it at the appropriate time.

So you mean something like [math]y = - \frac{1}{x-10}[/math]

I don't think that relates to the speed of the electrons, only their quantity.

That would be because the current used by the kettle is far larger than the current used by the light.

For your convenience, everyone, I have a link to the New Scientist article in question about Stephen Hawking's bet. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6193-hawking-concedes-black-hole-bet.html That should clear things up a bit.

I've only had that sort of experience with OS 9.

Only when said authority figure is an authority on the wrong subject.

It's useful because they pop up fairly often. It didn't take me too long (but I don't profess to know that many), and you should probably just print out a sheet of the common ones and try to learn them. The more chemistry you end up doing, the more ions you'll be using and thus the more you'll end up remembering. (You remember the common ones easily because you end up needing to know them a lot.)

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/announcement.php?f=59&a=13 That's the Speculations policy. I think the point is that if you're going to make extraordinary claims, you'll need to source them. We're only asking for references because we don't think you're right and want some sort of source to see if you really are.

You were posting in the Announcements forum. A moderator has to approve posts in that forum before they actually appear. Give me a minute and your posts will show up.

I think the problem with many parental punishment programs is that they're only enacted after the fact. If the teen knows exactly what he's getting into before he does anything (rather than just knowing "my parents will kill me"), he may think twice.

That's only an analogy to help explain the theory. Einstein never said that was the actual mechanism by which it worked.

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I added that to the bingo card generator.

I'm with swansont on this one. I attend public high school myself, and I can't think of anything you could do to students to make them start respecting their authorities. That's something you have to start when they're not even in school yet. You can, however, make things a little better by adding in extra consequences when the school sends your kid home. Pick something he loves (the Internet, for example), and cut him off from it for a week. (Being grounded is nothing to a teenager. Virtual groundings may be worse.) Threaten to have the cell phone company turn off text messaging on his phone -- and follow through with it. Of course, you may only succeed in making him hate you.

No. Data that's not written to the hard drive completely cannot be recovered. Fragmentation is a different problem altogether.

What sort of tricks? A computer could brute-force it and eventually find a message that makes sense. You could try posting a message and the ciphertext and let us have at it.

Depends on how your small book works. If it says "A is always Q" and so on, it'd be insanely easy to decode. That's how those "cryptograms" in the newspaper work. If you had a more complex polyalphabetic cipher, it'd take more complex mathematics and a properly trained cryptographer to beat you. However, one-time pads have been in fact proven to be unbreakable. They work by using a random key the same length as the message. As long as the key is secure, the message is too. (And you can't re-use the key.)