MigL

I'm a firm believer of the rule " your rights stop when they start infringing on the rights of others ". Yet this rule is often broken by laws, because some rights are perceived to be more important or fundamental than others. A lot of countries have Good Samaritan laws that require a person to provide assistance to another person in distress ( see the last episode of Seinfeld ). IE your right to go shopping is temporarily suspended if a person is having a heart attack beside you in the Mall. I can almost 'see' the same reasoning used to suspend a woman's 'non-biological purpose' to guarantee the survival of an infant.

Doesn't seem like too many people on this site are learning anything from this election. Delta1212 seems to get it, but everyone else is simply blaming voters for exercising their right to a vote, or D Trump for being the tool that he is. D. Trump didn't win the election, he simply rode the movement against 'establishment' politicians and the status quo that H. Clinton represents. People in the US, like miners in W Virginia, steel workers in Pennsylvania, auto workers in Detroit, and all the other places that the Government has ignored for the last 20-30 yrs, want a voice and their government back. They are tired of career politicians like H. Clinton making promises and then ignoring them for 8 yrs, of the lies and subsequent denials, of being called 'deplorable' because you have concerns that the 'enlightened' politicians deem too pedestrian. They are tired of urban centers on the east and west coast having the only voice that shapes America. I, myself had thought H Clinton would win. That disenfranchised American voters would bring us to the brink and allow us to look down into the abyss, before drawing back, and electing Clinton. I, and many others, were wrong. They got to the brink and jumped, and we had better concentrate on making as soft a landing as possible: not finding blame. The people wanted to send a message, and Democracy allowed them to do it ( ain't it grand ?!?! ) Its too bad they chose to do it by throwing a loud, boorish, intolerant rock named D Trump through the front window.

We already have the cash based voting incentive, but its actually party specific. Every election, party platforms are geared to offer tax cuts or rebates to specific groups. In Canada, where the PM isn't as tightly controlled by other branches of Government as the President is, they even have a slush fund which they start dispensing prior to an election. Of course, after the election, party platforms quickly change, and the outgoing party is usually blamed for leaving the economy in a worse state than previously thought. Politicians and used car salesmen will say and promise anything to get you to buy their product. I wonder how long it would be before we heard... " B. Obama left the country in such bad shape that we can't really make it great again. We'll have to settle for mediocre. Oh, and those lazy Mexicans won't build the wall as its hard work."

What Strange gave you are properties of QM which 'allow' things to happen. Basically anything that could possibly happen has a probability of happening. No repeatability and no direct link between events. That is not the standard definition of 'cause'.

And why would you think we've been moving in relation to the Big Bang ?

I thought it was an indication/metric of orbital overlap, which is itself, an explanation for some of the 'non-standard' molecular angles. That being my understanding, but I'm no chemist.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you, Mike. ( never seem to have enough time for anything these days ) Looked through my resources and the simplest/most readable I could find was a paper by W. H. Kinney of Columbia University. 'Cosmology, Inflation, and the Physics of Nothing' arXiv:astro-ph/0301448v1 22 Jan2003 The section you want is 2.4 The vacuum in Quantum Field Theory. It doesn't go into too much detail for the solution of the harmonic oscillator. the re-interpreting of the raising and lowering operators as creation /annihilation operators, nor with the fact that the integral over all oscillators diverges due to the non-zero ground state, but it does give a basic understanding and should be easy to find.

There is no illegality in the FBI reading the e-mails. It would be stupid, though, as it would render any findings obtained through those readings, inadmissible to any case they may have.

So you're saying its a privilege to live in a democracy rather than under a dictator ? I thought a large number of people had given their lives to ensure that it was a RIGHT, and not a privilege. ( wear a poppy and remember their sacrifices on Nov.11 )

I have no clue what this thread is supposed to be about... Star Wars episode vIII: The American Empire Strikes Back

Hey, what do I know, I'm Canadian. Watching you guys in the middle of the most embarrassing election ever.

Energy production is a very large part of scientific research. Controlled energy production is beneficial to mankind as it allows us to do things ( work ). Uncontrolled energy production is a weapon and allows us to destroy things. The two are the same ( only difference being 'un', and how we apply it ).

Virtual particles are a manifestation of vacuum energy, as per standard QFT. As such, they are governed by rules of QFT, such as the HUP, to 'pop in' and 'pop out' of existence, according to energy and time constraints. If you model the vacuum energy with harmonic oscillators at every point in space, with suitable cut-offs ( boundary conditions ), you end up with values 120 orders of magnitude higher than expected ( I can give you a link to the calculation if you'd like Mike ), which certainly doesn't jive with the expected value for the Cosmological Constant. Virtual particles are, in no way ( or definition ), a medium for this vacuum energy field..

Lets not fall into the rut of the smug intellectuals, by claiming that only the 'enlightened' have a right to vote. EVERYONE has the right to vote. It is NOT a privilege. The revolution was fought over " No taxation without representation ". So we already do something to earn the right to vote. We pay taxes !

I gather from your post #2 that you have teenagers, Ten oz.

Locally, they are the same. Globally, a manifold, a topological space, can be much more complex than a simple grid. ( I believe the simplicity is called 'homeomorphic' )

I don't see why Americans make such a fuss about the e-mail 'scandal', there are other things to worry about a H. Clinton presidency, but still nowhere near those of a D. Trump presidency. Does anyone actually think politicians are careful with government and classified material ? I would think the military is, but they seem to get prosecuted while politicians usually don't. We had the case in Canada of M. Bernier, leaving classified information the apartment of his 'girlfriend', who had ties to a biker gang. Made the news for a while, nothing much happened, now he's running for the Conservative leadership. The FBI director was between a rock and a hard place. If he doesn't communicate to Congress the re-opening of the investigation, H. Clinton is elected and subsequently damning information is found, the FBI ends up with egg on their face for having done an incompetent investigation. If he does, he risks affecting the outcome of the election. Something in those e-mail must have cought his eye, and allowed for the connection to H. Clinton. That, and any other available information concerning the content of the mail should be released immediately, along with any new info, right up to election day, if need be. If its important to them, the people should have the information to make their decision.

Keeping in mind that this is China, and not 'our' society, with 'our' mores and sensibilities... The only reason a Mall would have a bear in captive display, is because they think it attracts more customers. If you, or any Chinese person, are not happy with the situation, don't be one of those customers. And if enough customers feel that way, and stop shopping there, the Mall will send the bear to a local zoo, where it will at least, be treated better and have more freedom.

Gravitational waves are, in effect, changes in the gravity field.

No explanation as to WHY it is so flat. Assuming near-linear expansion, it would have to have been immeasurably flatter as we reverse towards the Big Bang event. The flatness can however, be accounted for by an exponential inflation shortly after the Big Bang event ( see A. Guth ). Inflation would have tended to 'smooth out' any deviation from flatness, and also account for many other unexplained observations. And so inflation has become an 'accepted' cosmological model.

A geometric model of Electromagnetism can be realized by incorporating a 5th dimension into GR. See T. Kaluza and O. Klein.

Yup, all made up just like those damned e-mails. Oh, wait... A little over a week to go in this election, and a Weiner gets tossed into the FBI's lap. I bet you thought it couldn't get any more embarrassing and offensive.

That's the problem with politics... You don't have to be great ( or even good ), You just have to be better than the opposition. So who would you rather have had as president ? ( although I do like J. McCain )

Einstein's gravity, GR, reduces to Newton's gravity in the low space-time curvature limit. IOW where space-time is relatively flat ( absence of deep gravitational potential wells ), Newton's gravity is essentially equivalent to GR. If Mercury wasn't so deep in the potential well of the Sun, its precession would be ( almost ) completely accounted for by Newtonian gravity. Even light travels in what are essentially straight lines in the absence of space-time curvature ( as Newton predicts ).

The driving force ( if it can be called that ) would be negative pressure due to vacuum energy. This vacuum energy would have settled and subsequently fallen from false zero levels at one or more symmetry breaks in the early stages of the universe when the forces separated, and can be used to explain the inflationary period(s). This vacuum energy can be modelled by Einstein's Cosmological Constant. As to the reason for the recent ( few bil yrs ) change that accounts for the speed up of expansion, I don't believe anyone knows yet. ( Mordred could give a better explanation, along with several linked papers )