timo

There is no formal criterion for something to become a "law" in physics. The amount of testing required before something is accepted varies greatly. The people proposing something are often convinced after their first experiments . Things become interesting after the first other groups/people can reproduce the effects. Wide acceptance probably comes when many people successfully apply the idea for derived work (like successfully hitting towns with artillery ).

Radioactivity typically is associated to the nucleus of an atom, not to the configuration of the electrons surrounding the nucleus. The binding between atoms is an effect of the electron configuration only and does not affect the nucleus. If you were to break the binding between the H and O atoms, i.e. change their electron configurations, you'd not affect their nuclei. You'd still be left with the same level of "contamination" as before.

That causes three immediate questions: 1) How long is "a long time" 2) How many years are "many years". Particularly, what time span is left after I substract "many years" from "a long time"? 3) What experience are you footing your statement about lack of applicable results on? I happened to attend a cell biology conference 1-2 years ago. The hottest topic seemed to be the new microscopy technologies invented in physics. I'd also count CPUs as somewhat recent applied results.

That's because bartenders don't understand it. On the other hand: Who really goes to a bar to chat about relativity with the bartender? Perhaps they do know relativity.

There's no significance to it. E=mc² is the statement that mass is a form of energy (that can be converted to other forms of energy), and that the proportionality factor between units of mass and that of energy is c². It's not a mystical entry point to the understanding of the nature of physical processes (although admittedly knowing that mass can be converted to other forms of energy is required for certain processes to make sense).

Not being much interested in others' revolutionary theories I may not be the target audience to discussing this proposition. But I do not bother with text walls, and I do not see how increasing the length by an abstract is making me more likely to read it. And I would expect this to be similar for others, including those bothering with text walls. Also, I somewhat share EdEarl's viewpoint: Ideally, threads in speculations should be an attempt to start a discussion. Not be a platform for presentation. For that, I don't see how an abstract is helping. For me, taking the concept of an "abstract" from the field of scientific publication/announcement and putting it into the realm of (laymen) chatting/discussion has a feel of actively enforcing cargo-cult science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science).

The clock on my wall, while nice to look at, has been broken for years. So I am quite certain that clock indeed doesn't confirm relativity.

A "force field" in molecular dynamics is the interaction rules between the simulated objects, which is only vaguely related to a force-valued function over space (which is what the meaning of "force field" would be in most physics). The answer to the question asked depends on the actual force field. Force fields of atomistic simulations should not depend on the temperature. The effect of temperature on the system comes from thermodynamics, which is still captured in MD simulations even if the force field has no temperature dependence. Essentially, the temperature comes via thermostats, that give the particles suitable random kicks to keep the whole system at the target temperature. That said, force field parameters can depend on temperature, at least in principle (at least that is what I think - I am not a super expert on MD but I have some background in scientific computer simulations). For example, consider a so-called coarse-grained force field, where 3-4 atoms are combined into a single simulation point for performance reasons. Force fields for such simulation points may well try to catch some of the internal dynamics of the multi-atom point which, in turn, depends on the temperature (at least in principle). I am not sure if such theoretically imaginable dependencies play a role in practice, though. I'd certainly be careful to perform simulations near absolute zero with a force field that has been designed and tuned for biological applications. Or even more radically: A force field for beads of 3-4 bound atoms certainly won't be applicable for simulations of plasmas, where not only the force field's parameters but even underlying assumptions (bound states) break down. EDIT: Thinking of it: Even atomistic force fields make assumptions and approximations that hold only within some temperature range. So the simpler answer is: The applicability of a force field and its parameters depends on the temperature in principle. For a given problem at hand, the temperature effect may or may not be irrelevant (especially compared to other reasons for getting results that are not 100% exact).

Not sure if you are gibbering. But at least even after a few attempts I still fail to parse the sentence "I now find that, in the case my vector space is not finite-dimensional, then the basis set may contain 'only finitely many non-zero elements'". You are saying that a vector space of infinite dimension has a basis with a finite number of elements? I believe that is wrong. Strangely enough, you even seem to contradict your dubious statement in your follow-up sentence saying "on the assumption that a non-finite vector space has a basis set of non-finite cardinality ...". I assume there is a typo somewhere in your post? To answer your two questions despite not having understood the context: 1) I think we do care quite a lot. In fact, in QM you often assume your basis to be orthonormal. 2) In an infinite-dimensional vector space you can still pick out three vectors (or two, or four, or ...) and have a notion of them being linearly independent or not.

That it is, indeed. I am not a great fan of meetings for several reasons. Especially meetings for discussing and deciding more technical points: (1) Beyond 3-4 persons, effectiveness tends to massively drop. On top of that, there will usually be at least one person wondering why he/she even came to the meeting which turns out to be completely irrelevant for them. I do not think there is a magic trick to avoid this. Now, I am not sure if a meeting with 3 people is so far away from what effectively is a meeting of two people, which has not had much good press in this thread so far. Admittedly, some of your criticism like "someone singled out" is indeed fundamentally different between talking with one person and talking with two people at the same time. (Btw.: I had a meeting with two people today, and still half of the time the respectively other seemed rather absent). (2) The amount of discussion a topic in practice seems to be quite unrelated to its importance. Large random fluctuations occur. The only true correlation is an over-proportional relation between the number of people who can say something about the topic and the length in which it is discussed. If you want your department meeting to end on time, do pray that no one mentions parking space, kitchen hygiene, or asks how often the cleaning staff should provide new toilet paper (all real-world examples, btw) . (3) Meetings eat up an awful lot of time. Last week, according to my calendar I spent 20 hours in meetings. That's not counting the time to prepare for them or perform follow-up tasks (like scheduling the next meeting ). That's on the higher end of the spectrum of the group I sketched (I myself am not in the picture I drew, btw), but I feel that already four badly-scheduled hours a week have the potential to be a serious impact on productivity. Some tasks simply take a certain amount of undisturbed time (programming, writing texts, proof-reading, elaborate calculations, ...) and three mid-day meetings a week are already quite-likely to hit such a spot. That said, unannounced visits by the supervisor may be equally disruptive and less plan-able. (4) Most people are very ineffective in meetings. People's minds tend to wander off, they tend to grab on single thoughts and put them into their personal context rather than the context of the discussion. As a result, some people stay quiet until explicitly asked for their opinion and discussions tend to wander off if they don't. The latter can in principle be offset by a competent discussion moderator (but of course, reality is a bitch in this respect, too). The former ... well, I had tried to offset it with the not-so-popular direct communication. So much about meetings. Discussing this topic would probably warrant a thread by itself, so I'd say let's not go deeper into this topic. Unless, of course, you think they indeed constitute a relevant alternative to 1-on-1 discussions ("you" meaning every participant here, not only CharonY). That quite well describes what I am currently thinking, including the "or when he was bored" and the main purpose being to "provide the boss with positive feelings about progress". I find such comments much more interesting than abstract ones that sound like they could be taken from a management guidebook, btw (I could just read such a book if I wanted that, after all).

That statement is a bit surprising, sounds rather radical, but seems to fit well with many other comments made so far. So apparently, asking your employees how they are doing is evil, but at the same time it is fundamentally important to know what how they are doing. So if I understand you correctly, you are saying it suffices to monitor performance by some measures, possibly step in when performance is insufficient, and leave the rest to the employees. That sure sounds sensible. But while I am used to quantify processes occurring in nature, I do not find it very appealing to base human interaction on numbers and checklists. Just my gut feeling, though. That's certainly true. But I would like to focus on real-world in this thread, not on hypothetical ideals (unless you are seriously suggesting that a group leader feeling the need to ask their group how they are doing should fire them and hire new staff). Also, while this thread has had more emphasis on the leadership side (overall very interesting, keep it coming!) I'd like to point out that I am also very interested in real-world opinions about real-world situations from the employee perspective (thank you Tom and Tridimity for that).

I tend to agree with "they are unrelated". I don't quite see how arrogance is a manifestation of intelligence, though. In fact, that seems to contradict the first statement.

Thank you both for your comments so far. They are a bit stretching the scope of the question I asked but interesting to read, regardless (it's the lounge after all, not a science sub-forum). I'd still like to put the issue of the group leader actively seeking out the other group members on a regular basis into the light of what has been said so far. And in my original context, I believe some differences are due to the research group being non-academia (I wrote non-university, but really meant being very close to industrial applications): First of all, from my experience it is not realistic to believe that employees will actively seek out help when they need is. Some people walk off to ask someone for help when they are too lazy to put their question into Google, some tend to be stuck for days without wanting to bother other's with their problems. And from my own perspective: I, too, do not always know when exactly to ask for help. But admittedly, I never felt that an unannounced supervisor's "what do you do, how is it going?" visit helped me much, since I tend not to find the proper answers/questions so quickly. I forgot the second point while commuting to work without this post being finished ...

My 2nd thread I start in 10 years, I believe. Not sure if it's a worthwhile topic, but beating the last one should be easy. And I found it suitable for getting random input by people I've never met: In your opinion, should the boss of a small group of employees visit the employees to ask them what they are doing and how it is working out (and help solve a problem at hand if required, of course). If so, how often would you see fit? If not, what kind of interaction/feedback do you envision? In either case, what is your good or bad experiences on communication with direct superiors or, in case you are the boss, with your staff? More generally: How would a group go about to find a good solution to this issue. Of course, this strongly depends on the actual group. So for example consider this scenario: - Young non-university research group (programming/engineering, no lab experiments) - One group leader ("boss"), two post-docs, two PhD students, four regular scientists, two students. - Group leader has technical knowledge but is mainly responsible for budget and work resource scheduling and human resource development. The post-docs mainly perform managing tasks and are scientific advisors to the PhD students. The six other staff do the "actual work" and usually need to be told what to do somewhat explicitly (by group leader, post-docs or project managers from other groups). The students are usually given non-critical tasks by staff. - Except for management, even small tasks often involve many people. High dependence on the others' work and progress. This detailed setup is chosen on purpose, of course. So I'd like opinions on it. However, I also welcome thoughts on other kinds of groups/situations, especially if they are thoughts from personal experience and real-world examples. I am also interested in general comments on the topic, but I would prefer them to be more concrete than "have to find out what works best" or "it depends": of course it does depend on, e.g., the employees' personalities, but knowing that is no help for the group.

"Many worlds interpretation" is more an Internet phenomenon than real science, afaik. Anyways: Considering that "and suddenly every matter particle has turned into an anti-matter particle" is not a possible solution for time development in quantum mechanics I would dare saying the answer is "no".

Not really sure what "pressurizing" an atom means. More precisely, what putting pressure on something means on an atomic level. A large quantity of hydrogen atoms in a container will increase pressure when their container size is reduced, and the energy of that system will increase. That is, however, not due to the energy of a single atom but because of their mutual energy (the energy of their interaction, the potential energy). And it's not what you asked, either. To not-answer the question from the other side: Any electron state that is not the ground state has a higher energy than the ground state. I.e., if the "electron orbits closer to the nucleus" (assuming that is possible for a ground state), then the energy is increased wrt. the ground state (the lower binding energy is offset with higher kinetic energy). That does, of course, not explain what would cause such a state in the first place (or if such a state is even possible).

I fully agree. And so should you.

Makes one wonder why such an intelligent being among a crowd of stupid losers can't see the obvious win-win situation and just quietly leave.

Not exactly the Nobel prize that will make history as "biggest surprise by the time it was awarded".

You might want to pay more attention to comments like "or have you suppressed some indices/subscripts?".

I'm pretty sure imatfaal mean cancel in the sense of 2/2=1 or [latex]\frac{5x}{5x} = 1[/latex] or [latex]\frac{\sqrt{1 - 2\frac{Gm}{\Delta E} \frac{M}{r} + \frac{GQ^2}{c^4 R^2}}}{\sqrt{1 - 2\frac{Gm}{\Delta E} \frac{M}{r} + \frac{GQ^2}{c^4 R^2}}}=1[/latex].

Are you sure you searched for entry level positions? Both the salary range and the lack of certificate requirement somewhat indicate your search included senior positions. That said, among the computer scientists in my group I see no correlation between the "rank" of their university degree (none, B.Sc., masters) and their performance. So perhaps a university degree really doesn't matter much in that business.

Is there a way to iterate over the elements of a Listnode?

The logarithm is usually considered as the inverse of the exponential function over the reals. Since exp(x) is never negative for any x, the logarithm of a negative number can never be a real number. It is principally possible to consider the logarithm as a sort of inverse of the exponential function over the complex numbers. Since exp(i*Pi)=-1, one could argue thatm log(-1) should equal i*Pi. This is sometimes done (Mathematica treats the log like that by default, I believe) but comes with some other problems (related to why I said sort of inverse one sentence before).

I assume you meant a random-field Ising model rather than an Ising model (whose ground state is trivial in 2+ dimensions). I'm not particularly familiar with ground state calculations in this model. But maybe this paper, the only one related to your question I ever encountered, is a start (although probably not undergrad level): http://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.5973 @Enthalpy: While admittedly much of modern science is "observe a model no one observed before", "create an experimental setup no one could make previously" or "make a computer simulation larger or more detailed than any before" some science still is about finding basic principles why a system behaves like it does. In statistical physics, some work into this direction is devoted to categorizing systems into so-called universality classes. Systems belonging to the same class are supposed to have similar behavior in some respect, irrespective of their microscopic details. Hence, when it comes to studying the universal behavior of a system, the Ising model and its variations are still being investigated (e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.3299).