MigL

After a while you get used to people, and having them around; you almost know what hey are going to post on any particular subject. There are many people I've butted heads with, over the years. INow, Ten oz, Phi for All, and, anyone remember Overtone ? I have developed a great respect for all their opinions, and would love to have a face-to-face discussion over a beer. Some people have left, and sometimes they come back, but post infrequently, as Ten oz now does. Hopefully, when they have time, Mordred and Strange will join us again. Some are gone for good, like Imatfaal, AJB, and Dr Rocket. We are that much poorer for their absence

Ahh, but Kirchoff, and Weins, just had a set of rules. And Stefan-Boltzmann, as well as Raleigh-Jeans, didn't work, and headed for infinity at high frequencies ( UV catastrophe ). Planck was the first to accurately describe Black Body radiation … in 1900 . I wonder... The fact that we all know QM to some degree, leads us to recommend textbooks which are fairly advanced. But to a noob, a lot of material is left out ( or taken for granted as common knowledge ), leading to the confusion that prevails among people new to the subject , or the general population. While the historical approach includes knowledge which is later discarded, a fully modern view leaves a lot of gaps. Maybe a textbook which starts from basic principles, and gives a theoretical ( not historical ) foundation, before tackling advanced material is the best choice.

Congratulations ! You have discovered that all motion is relative ( I.e. relativity ) several centuries too late, In a couple of hundred more years, you might realize that our best theory says gravity isn't really a force, but a geometric distortion of space-time.

Don't confuse the arguments I choose to make with what I would like to see for a just society, Phi. Of course I admired Reagan/Thatcher and McCain. I also admired Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Clinton. They all had their bad, and all had some good. ( even D Trump had maybe 1 % good with that whole lot of bad ) And do you see what you are doing ? Your impression of my political beliefs paints me in typical American terminology, "pre neo-con". Try to separate yourself from American political thinking. People are people; they just want what is best for them and the people they care about; if it also happens to benefit others, so much the better. By pigeon holing them as Libs/Cons, or Reps/Dems, or even elites/deplorables, you are assigning your imagined traits to them. America can be 'great again', they simply have to get past this 'us' vs 'them' attitude between two political parties.

So here you ( and others ) are. Your typical news ( available to all )is polarized, either 'left' or 'right'. You have Trump supporting, people on the right complaining that MSNBC and CNN just hate Trump, and have since his inauguration. And you have Trump hating, people on the left claiming FOX news is just a lying mouthpiece of the Republican party. You have a country where 45% of eligible voters will vote Republican, no matter what idiot they run, and another 45% of eligible voters will vote Democrat no matter what the issues. They have always voted that way and will continue to do so; only a small percentage of the electorate, in 'swing' states actually decide who will be President. You have people on either left or right, hating the other side more and more, as politicians ratchet up the rhetoric, and blame everything on the supporting electorate; never themselves. So much so, that political rallies and protests have become dangerous to attend, and people, afraid for their lives, run over others ( or at least, that is the excuse they use ) for the second time now. You guys are neck deep in this sh*t, live it every day, and it colors the way you see, and live, life. Yet two outsiders who have no 'skin in the game', JC and I, often get accused of not being equitable, and being partial to one side. By no means are we trying to compare/equate the two sides, Republican and Democrat, but simply pointing out that neither side are 'angels'. And, I can easily decide which is 'better' for the people, while also recognizing the 'faults' of the 'better' side. While you guys, being so deep in it, either can't see the problems of your side, or choose to ignore it. Not judging, simply presenting my observations.

It comes as no surprise that you need to ask the question. ( you may need to ask the same about Mathematics )

Ooops ! I still stand by the rest of my opinion expressed in my last post.

When I heard the news I got nostalgic and put on a blu-ray of James Bond's 1995 Goldeneye ( with Pierce Brosnan ). Famke Janssen looked delicious in that, and Aracebo, spectacular.

Hind sight is 20/20. WHY they were disillusioned with Government ( and H Clinton in particular ) does not really matter. Even if those reasons were not factual, or non-existant, they should have been addressed, and people reassured, not dismissed as complaining deplorables ( there were no qualifiers when she said it, Zap ). I was an H Clinton supporter, and some simple considerations for all citizens may have spared us the last 4 years.

M Planck's successful Black Body Radiation law, was derived in 1900, after many unsuccessful ( UV catastrophe ) ones ( since 1860 ? ). But I see where you are going with this. The teaching of QM has always been approached historically, and always starts with M Planck's desperate 'guess' at a minimum discrete energy for a charged oscillator in a cavity, after many previous unsuccessful attempts. It is then followed by the Bohr atom, Shrodinger, Heisenberg and maybe some Dirac. Perhaps it is time for a change, so the student doesn't pick up unnecessary baggage along the way, such as the Bohr atom.

Maybe not important to you, but it certainly was to many people in 2016, who felt that the 'status quo' Government of career politicians, like H Clinton, didn't care about their concerns. D Trump got elected by appealing to those people, by promising to do things differently, and 'draining the swamp' of career politicians and civil servants who were in politics for themselves. The fact that a lot of citizens felt their representative Government wasn't addressing their concerns/needs is literally what disenfranchised means. The denial, or deprivation, of some right or privilege, such as the right to a representative Government. The fact that D Trump turned out to be a jackass, and played those people to suit his own agenda, and has led to even more people becoming disillusioned with politicians, is a different matter altogether.

Sorry I wasn't clear swansont. I was referring to the 2016 election, and why I mentioned to H Clinton, who famously called them "deplorables".

On top of the expert opinions above, I will add my two cents ... The modern picture of a fundamental quantum particle is a point surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles, which grow more and more massive/energetic as you reduce separation. These 'extra' particles add to mass, charge, etc. of fundamental particles, and is their 'effects' that are stripped away in the renormalization of any QFT. A proton is not fundamental, but is composed of quarks, which are; and the quarks are in close proximity. The way Physicist 'dismantle' a proton, is by smashing it at high energies against another particle, and seeing what 'comes out'. High energy protons collisions produce quite a few particles. Even at its lowest energy, a proton is over 98% binding energy; this energy alone is enough to 'produce' a couple of hundred quark/ anti-quark pairs. And there have been scattering experiments done which confirm that a proton acts like a 'bag' full of particles. ( not zillions and zillions )

By 'common folk' I meant people who have become disenfranchised with our political system, career Politicians, and the way government does business. These are the people who, overwhelmingly voted for D Trump, expecting a change, and that he would actually 'drain the swamp'. Boy, were they wrong !

Keeping in mind that 'curvature' is apparent in the geometric model, but not necessarily in reality … It is possible to include Electromagnetism in a 5 dimensional extension of GR, and was first done by Theodore Kaluza and Oskar Klein ( see Kaluza-Klein theory ) in a manner that produces standard GR and Maxwell's equations for the EM field. However, as Joigus points out, This remains a strictly classical theory, and does not take the HUP into consideration. So unless you can figure out a way to make the metric 'fuzzy' ( as the HUP does with observables like position and momentum ), this does not yield a good model at quantum scales. If, on the other hand, you mean do the fields produce 'curvature', of course, the answer is yes. Any field has an energy density, and this necessarily implies space-time curvature due to that energy density. ( fields are mathematical constructs, and so is their energy density distribution, leading to a mathematical curvature, which seems to describe reality quite accurately, as per the first line of this post ).

There will always be people who take advantage of other people, so we will always have the TeleEvangelists, the Jim Jones, and the Donald Trumps. Placing the blame with the "people who are not very educated, not very sophisticated thinkers, and too trusting for their own good" is what got H Clinton in trouble and led to the D Trump Presidency. Those people are voters too If the elitist, career politicians who are " very educated, very sophisticated thinkers" would address the needs of common folks, some of whom are not, we wouldn't be in this situation. Government is responsible to ALL of its voters/citizens, no matter how trusting they are.

So... Assume I don't know the area of a rectangle. The computer spits out two sentences. 1 - Bite an apple. 2 - Multiply length time width. I try both. If I don't know what area is, how do I know the area of a rectangle is not an apple with a bite taken out of it ?? If I know that area is length times width already, why would I need to run this idiotic program in the first place ????

How does it do with Gravitational waves and Black Holes ? Both predicted by GR, and verified.

O ARE YOU A ROBOT ? Please check-off which of the following are numerical bases O : 1 O : dy/dx O : 2 O : -1 O : 10 O : x O : % O : 16 O : 8 O : 4 O : e O : Pi

Same could be said for Popes ( and the Church ) of those times.

We use base 10 for the probable reason that we can count on ten fingers. Computers use base 2 because they can only count on two fingers ( voltage on, and voltage off ). But you can represent any number or math operation in either base. A simple way of looking at base is the number of digits you use. Base 10 uses 10 digits, 0,1,2...8,9. Base 2 use only two digits, o and 1 ( voltage on, and voltage off ).

Population II stars ( first generation but discovered second ) are metal poor stars, hundreds of times larger than our Sun, and consisting mostly of Hydrogen /Helium on formation. They are extremely long-lived ( see Methuselah star ), and may have a core which is Carbon, after 13 Billion years. They would probably have no heavy radioactive elements. Population I stars like our Sun, are the result of compression waves in interstellar gas/dust clouds, as a result of previous Supernovae, and therefore may contain trivial amounts of heavy radioactive elements. My original reply "There is no fission in Stars" was in reply to the following assertion by the OP

Have any of our elderly UK members been vaccinated ? If not could you inform us when you do; we have questions. I don't imagine I'm on any short list to receive the vaccine in Canada, so It'll probably be the summer before I get vaccinated. ( no overseas vacation again, this coming year )

I would have to agree again. All those fields of Government subsidised corn in the Mid-West, which goes to make bio-diesel, could be better put to use as Government subsidised solar panel farms. Why people 'see' one as Capitalist, and the other as Socialist ( or even Communist ), is totally down to the way it is spun by politicians ( for their own gain ).

While students can learn many different ways ( being lectured to, reading online or from textbooks, video presentation, etc. ), the part the teacher plays is recognizing the student's interests and developing them. That is why a lot of people have 'special' teachers that they credit with developing their interest in a certain subject, at which they later excelled. My high school Physics teacher was one such educator. He opened his first Gr11 class with the question "Are you moving ?", to which I was the only one who responded "Relative to what ?" The other was a 'tough as nails' Gr13 Algebra teacher who passed away the summer after I finished high school. I had always been a below average math student, but he developed my interest in it by lecturing us at length about things like calculating probabilities of winning the lottery with factorials, or how plants sprout leaves according to the Fibonacci sequence, etc.