timo

Or just "my thought, exactly", as in "+1". The posts in the "banned and suspended Users" thread hardly qualify as "helpful", "smart", or "particularly well done".

Wouldn't it be more straightforward if you posted your answer so that others could double-check it? As an additional plus, this would even conform with the rules of this forum.

That may actually not be so off-topic as it raises the question whether a thread in speculations ultimately is about the idea presented (as it seems to be your point of view) or about an interesting and productive discussion as it is my line of thinking. My view of "productive", that I already mentioned in my previous post, would actually be that people came out of the discussion having learned more than "others don't see the potential of my idea".

When we discussed the forum structure some years back, I was actually hoping that the typical speculation thread-starters (meaning people whose threads end up in speculations) would engage in lively and possibly even productive discussion with another in the speculations forum (though my expectation of "productive" may be a bit different from the average poster's expectation). I hoped for it, but I didn't really expect it. This was, if I recall correctly, even part of the reason for the name "speculations" rather than e.g. "pseudoscience". It did, as you probably notice, indeed not happen. Instead, the typical structure of a thread here seems to be person A starting a thread and then all others either talking down the idea (nothing wrong with that in principle - just not very productive) or talking about something else that they fancy more (the world should revolve around my ideas after all, not yours ). At least that's what I gather from sporadic reading over a relatively large amount of time. It would be extremely nice if you could bring together some people in this forum that regularly engage in interesting speculative debates with another. I would in fact be very impressed, because in my opinion neither sfn nor any other location on the Internet offers the personal resources for such a discussion - I believe there is a reason why academic outsiders are academic outsiders. I don't quite see what you mean with "private section", given that (a) sfn is a private website in the first place, and (b) the speculations subsection probably already has its "private audience", already (I almost never read speculation posts - the only reason I clicked on this thread was the thread title that promised sensible content). You should probably start to create a recognizable social structure in the speculations forum before you ask for VIP treatment (or lay out the document detailing the sharing of the fame that comes with the Nobel Prize).

I don't quite see how you are saying anything more specific than "maybe something causes something else via some mechanism". I'm pretty sure people came up with an idea of this caliber before . No offense meant, but you have to admit you are not particularly specific (not to mention the lack of quantitative predictability of your text). For a start, and admittedly only in reference to your thread title and not the post text, you could well consider "mass" or "momentum" an intrinsic property of a particle. So, the question about the validity of a particle picture aside, mainstream physics already has particles with "intrinsic properties".

The Big Bang I learned about in university comes from relativity, not from quantum mechanics. It also defines the location as "everywhere". Big Bang means that the distance between all points in space becomes non-zero (if you want to see it "time forward") or alternatively the distance becomes zero (if you see it "time backwards" from today). I feel that recently sfn experiences an increasing number of thread that invite physics discussion based on very dubious premises.

No, it wouldn't. EDIT: And in addition, Higgs Boson also don't explain anything about gravity.

I am telling you that whatever content you interpreted into what I actually said is unfounded. Furthermore, I was trying to express that your insults (*) based on these implications that only exist in your mind are alienating. Since I see no end to this silly discussion otherwise: I do not consider awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU a bad idea. (*) I acknowledge you do not consider your statements insulting. I do - and certainly don't want to discuss that.

I was somehow expecting an apology rather than an insult.

I could as well accuse you of only having read the thread title and not the OP. I find it rather alien that you feel competent to judge my intellectual capacity or my thoughts about the EU (=me) having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize from my statement that giving the prize to Obama the previous time was a joke.

There is an electric and a magnetic field in the space between them. There is an electric and magnetic field at every point in the universe (that this still allows for E=0 or B=0 at some points). Btw.: that has nothing to do with Quantum Mechanics; it's classical electrostatics/-dynamics. @illusio: Not everyone reads posts in the speculations section.

Or Barrack Obama receiving it simply for not being Bush junior. Not completely sure what is so wrong about being in the NATO,.

I wonder about the same. Wouldn't that imply that something can only "really exist" if either (a) there is no (English?) word for it, or (b) it is the same everywhere else? I am not sure that I had a proper concept/definition of "really exists" at hand myself - and I belief the lack of a proper definition is the crux of all such discussions. But that one looks very odd to me. Btw.: Just as EquisDeXD, I also don't understand why the absence of an absolute time (whatever that may mean exactly) is an argument for or against the statement that "time really exists".

The Higgs Boson indeed aquires its mass from the self-coupling of the Higgs field.

I don't know what determines this strength. In the Standard Model, there is no explanation for it - the couplings are among the model's free parameters. There are certainly approaches that will tell you they give the explanation, but most of them will be extra layers on top of the SM that come with yet some other free parameters. If you take the perspective that physics is supposed to quantitatively describe the world then it is not obvious that inventing a layer above "the couplings have these values - end of story" even is an improvement. From my childhood times I know that at least in communication you can always add another "and why is that?" to the last answer. And at some point it stops adding to the conversation. I can imagine science being similar.

There is no "how many Higgs bosons will join" in the real physics. That's only in the reporter analogy. The mass of the particles that owe their mass exclusively to the coupling to the Higgs field is determined by their coupling strength to the Higgs field. You may think that this is a rather pointless statement: It is. But it is the essence of the Higgs Mechanism in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The Higgs Mechanism is a way/trick/solution to introduce masses for elementary particles without running into too much trouble within the framework itself. The thing about "explaining the origins of mass" is, in my opinion, mostly a marketing issue. Perhaps even just a generous omission of correcting journalists that write this to sell their stories. After the desaster with the SSC, a particle accelerator in the late eighties much larger than today's LHC, the particle physics community realized that they must put much more effort into public relations. Never heard about the SSC? My point, exactly.

The number of press reports the particle itself or its role (-> president) received in the past.

Assuming the sphere has a density that is the same everywhere, you formally use the same equation, with r still being the distance from the center, but M now being the mass contained in a sphere of radius r (rather than the total mass contained in a sphere of radius R).

Imagine the set you obtain by multiplying each real number with a number t. Let's call this set s(t). For all t>0, s(t) is a set with an infinite number of elements that is infinite in size in the sense that any finite interval on the reals is fully contained in it (or just "infinite in size" if you don't understand the "in the sense ..." part). In fact, the set is equal to the real numbers. For t=0, however, s(t=0) contains only a single element: zero (because every real number multiplied by zero is zero). That's pretty much how the whole big bang scenario works, except that many people add statements about "unification of forces", "quantum fluctuations", ... . PS.: Note that "infinity" has only been used in form of the adjective "infinite" in above, not as a noun.

Not sure if you understood me - my post may have been ambiguous at some part. So let me repeat/clarify/elaborate: - Special Relativity (which I tend to call "relativity") is routinely incorporated in QM (except technically saying that QM is incorporated in SR may be more appropriate). Little to no issues left, there. - General Relativity (which I tend to call "our current theory of gravity") has not been formulated on a QM basis, yet. To some extend, one can do QM in a GR background, but (a) I think even this causes some problems, and (b) this is not what people usually mean by "quantum gravity". Quantum gravity, which Sir Penrose presumably refers to (since it sells more pop-sci books than the other real-sci things) indeed is an unsolved issue.

Relativistic quantum mechanics is routinely used in e.g. particle physics. As a matter of fact, it is so mainstream that many people erroneously believe that quantum field theory was inherently relativistic. Notable keywords are the "Dirac equation" and the "Klein-Gordon equation". It is the quantum mechanical description of gravity that causes problems. I don't know what Sir Penrose speaks about - but keep in mind that his interest is selling books by writing things that sounds interesting, not expressing himself unambiguously or making sense.

Yes, if by "relative to" you mean "in the coordinate system of" and if you define "speed relative to each other" as the difference of velocities. In relativity, there is no point of view of a photon, i.e. no coordinate system in which a photon is at rest. So that question is indeed "not possible" in a sense.

Why do I have the feeling that your rather meaningless, or at least incomprehensible, single sentence has the hidden agenda to promote your personal "theory" about quantum gravity?

In your particular case, that would formally be something like [math] \tau = \int_{\Gamma} \sqrt{ \pm \left< \frac{dx}{d\gamma} \right| \left. \frac{dx}{d\gamma} \right> }\mathrm{d} \gamma[/math], where [math]\tau[/math] is the time measured by the respective object, [math]\Gamma[/math] is a path through spacetime, [math]\gamma[/math] a small piece of the path (in physicists' language), x a location in spacetime, and [math] \langle \cdot | \cdot \rangle [/math] the pseudo-scalar-product of relativity (which encodes the structure of spacetime). The plus of minus sign depends on the sign convention chosen for this pseudo-scalar-product (both conventions are used roughly equally often). As you may have realized already, understandig physics is not only about visually seeing the formula, but also about understanding the meaning of the mathematical constructs and the physical concepts behind them. This example may not be the most central equation within relativity itself. Relativity is not inherently about twins in rockets (as well as Quantum Mechanics is not primarily about cats). But as [math]\tau[/math] is the physical time, i.e. the scale on which physical processes happen, it is rather central for relativistic physics (and then appears in much simpler forms, e.g. for [math]\Gamma[/math] being a straight line in flat Minkowski spacetime).

11th grade seems like the most obvious starting point to me.