timo

I don't understand that legion-empire thing. But it's rather funny that apparently you are trying to argue against analogies by using an analogy.

Actually, given that the net force between two two dipoles averaged over all orientations is zero the proposal technically does quality as an inverse square law (if you interpret "two magnetic fields" as "two magnetic dipoles"). Characterizing a zero vectorial force as a "net attractive force" seems more debatable. I'd rather call it non-repulsive and colorless. And since gravity is also non-repulsive and colorless it is obvious that gravity must come from magnetism.

If you are incapable of understanding a reply, it's not necessarily the fault of the one who wrote it.

Yes. You can evaluate the time dilatation factor yourself: Plug the mass and the radius of your Neutron star into the 00-Component of the Schwarzschild Metric (readily found on Wikipedia or via Google); the square root of (the magnitude of) the component is the time dilatation factor. This value X will be smaller than one, in some sense (that I don't want to specify to keep the post sufficiently simple) meaning that for each second passed in the "outside world" only X seconds passed on the neutron star. Just look at the ratios of the time dilatation factors. For identical neutron stars it is one, meaning there is no relative effect.

Neurons can adapt their coupling to connected neurons as a result of being excited (or not) by those connections. I learned the term Synaptic Plasticity in this context. Of course, a neuron does not directly work like a desktop computer. But from experiment it is known [*] that artificial stimulation of a neuron can change synaptic growth or shrinking depending on the frequency of the stimulus. So in this sense a neuron can also store patterns. [*] That's only what I recall from attenting a Neuroscience lecture a few years ago. Sadly, I cannot offer a reference to the experiment.

I think "how can I bend a sheet without using gravitation" and "should I use an antimatter ball" may qualify for the biggest discrepancy between complexity of a task and complexity of a proposed solution I have ever seen. As a side remark, and since that seems to be your question to some extend, anti-matter behaves exactly like matter with respect to gravity.

If the energy density with respect to the ground state is non-zero and the field has the same non-groundstate value everywhere, then in an infinite universe the total energy difference is infinite. I don't see where temperature, a magnetic field, or the acceleration of an asteroid come in.

What do you expect "both doing rotational and translational motion" to be? The rotational motion a moving charged object undergoes in a magnetic field is not around its own axis - it is a form of translational motion.

Popcorn time!

I have some experience with Povray and Pymol. The former is rather mainstream, the latter a specialized program that people outside the bio/medical field probably have little use for. Povray can be quite useful, especially if you create your sceneries with a computer program explicitly written for your purpose, but it rather does not fall into the "quickly get a result" category. I cannot really recommend it, as I don't know your background (in computer graphics), your purpose, or the Povray alternatives. It's somewhat fun to play around with it for a while, though.

I think the reason it may boil down to is that physics foots on consistent mathematical models, not the syntactical consequences of two randomly-picked sentences about traits of this model. Even if they were grammatically correct.

Tachyons are particles. More precisely: Tachyons are defined as particles that have a speed greater than c. That said, we are talking about the word for something that, to our best knowledge, does not exist. So the same name "Tachyon" may be used for other fantasy products, too (e.g. there is no guarantee that the term "Tachyon" in the context of Esoterics refers to the same thing as in Physics - but that of course already is the case for less exotic terms like "Energy").

"Tachyon" does not fully define a particle, so there is no unique answer to this. In principle, "extracting energy from" Tachyons should not be too different from "extracting energy from" particles that move with |v| < c. No. Again, that's not so different from "regular particles" that cannot be "accelerated" to |v|>c in a black hole. The mass of the black hole should not play a role in this, anyways.

... guess interpreting "when you switch off the light" as "there is no light" was too much common sense and not pedantic enough.

They don't exist, as photons are light (at least in some sense). To pick out what probably is your conceptual problem: Unlike what you expect from a particle like a rubber ball, photons can be created and un-created in physical processes.

Without having checked your calculations: If you have a scenario where the limit depends on the path (which indeed can happen) then no unique path-independent limit -or short: no limit- exists.

I think it's rather obvious that there are rules you can formulate mathematically that nature does not follow. For example the inverse-cube law, by which the gravitational attraction of an object to a spherical mass is proportional to the distance from the object cubed (F ~ 1/r³), or the inverse-charge law, by which the electrostatic force between two objects is proprtional to the inverse product of their charges (F ~ 1/(q1*q2)).

A slope of 8 means that at this point if you increase the x value by some small about A, then the y-value will change by roughly 8*A. The smaller A is, the better this approximation holds true (technically it is defined as being exactly 8*A for arbitrarily small A, but that's too technical to be helpful). Somewhat more abstract - and possibly making the whole background more clear: A function gives you a relation between two properties. For a given pair of values for these two properties, the derivative gives you information how one of the properties behaves if the other one is slightly changed. There is one technicality that possibly make derivatives seem less useful to you than they actually are: The whole issue with derivatives becomes really interesting if you don't know the actual function (such cases are very common in physics, for example) or if the function is too complicated to handle. Of course, those are not the cases on which you introduce derivatives in school. So I do have some sympathy for not immediately seeing the point in derivatives.

You could know that it is the local trend of the function - I just told you so. But let's try it differently: What kind of answer do you expect?

I think that a question as broad and non-specialized as "what is a derivative" is better suited for Google and Wikipedia than for a discussion forum. The derivative is the local trend of a graph, but there's arbitrarily more to say about it. So I strongly advice reading the Wikipedia article or your school book (if you have one).

What I experienced is that I have much less seemingly great ideas than when I was much younger. That's quite simply explained, though: I now have a much better training in spotting the flaws in ideas and a much more realistic assessment of feasibility. That is, however, something different than actually having solved math problems in the past. So maybe it better relates to another experience I had lately: I tried to program something in Java, which I had done last about five years ago and remembered as completely trivial. While my programming skills in general have undoubtedly increased over the last years, I found the whole working procedure much less straightforward than I remembered it. The reason for this is rather simple, and -afaik- a well-know fact about the human brain: My image of the past (and Java) was more positive than the past actually was (not to confuse with my memory - technically, I can still remember that not everything went as smoothly as in my image). Well, not sure if that is of interest for you. But if that just was a waste of time for you, then at least I can still claim that you wrote more than twice as much

The mainstream view is more the other way round: Mass adds to the total energy. This is true for any speed of an object and indeed applies to large objects, too. But since many processes involving large objects leave the total mass constant, this is of practical irrelevance in many cases. Asking for a "why" is not exactly very physical. It seems to be a fact, so any argument against this would merely prove that nature cares little about human reasoning. If you mean "why" in the sense of "how can I make sense of it?" then I recommend considering mass as a form of potential energy. EDIT: And btw, this has nothing to do with Quantum Theory.

Pretty firm, though perhaps not as good as with Wikipedia, for which I have written a few physics articles. One thing you learn in writing Wikipedia articles is that most physics terms are not as sharply defined as the average stamp collector may think. I believe understanding how the velocity distribution in a gas, its density and the number, and the resulting hit frequency on the container walls interconnect is much more important than knowing what the "kinetic theory of gas" is in detail. Even if that means having to use additional physics basics like p=mv to transfer from a kinetic theory to a dynamic one, first.

I don't know what "kinetic theory of gas" is (I'm usually not very good with names of concepts). But if you know the velocities of the particles in a given direction and the density of the gas, then that looks like a straightforward thing to calculate.

The Pakistan result certainly sticks out, especially for the sum. My guess is that everyone hates Obama for the drone attacks, no one expects Romney to stop killing Pakistani that look suspicious on a satellite image, and 20% of the people just made a cross somewhere because they thought they are expected to. For the record: Personally, I am much less interested in the vote than previous times, and I don't have any real preference.