timo

There is no graph below that I could see. But if I understand you correctly you say that the neutrinos get some faster-than-lightspeed kick when they are produced but then proceed flying with lightspeed (or slow down to it over time)? That is a statement compatible with both data sets (I think the error bars on the MINOS data are so large that you can ignore them for the debate). But: It's just a fit on the data that has no other motivation than the desire to hit the data points. I don't quite see why you put MINOS and the supernova in one pot and OPERA in the other. MINOS is an experiment like OPERA, and they also measured v>c, just with error bars that made the measurement inconclusive.

Dark matter is not proven, but there is rather solid evidence. I think today most physicists believe in the existence of dark matter. Considering the evidence for dark matter you may consider using this talk by Laura Covi as a starting point. The velocity relations of clusters and galaxies (slides 4 and 7) were already mentioned. I'd point out the interesting result on slide 6 which, if I recall that correctly, is a result of a cluster collision that -if only the visible matter which I think is the pink clouds was there- should not happen like this according to classical gravity. But if one adds a component of invisible matter with a low interaction with ordinary matter (blue clouds, but don't take my word for it), the simulations fit what is actually seen. The result on slide 5 I hadn't heard about before, but it seems rather straightforward (except that I don't know which temperature is spoken of and how dark matter comes in there).

Well, your English spelling sucks, too. I don't see any bright future in occult matters in the sense of being able to feed a family from it. I'd recommend keeping it a hobby. If by chance the possibility arises that suddenly a lot of people want to pay you a lot of money to make contact with their dead then you can still go that route even if your original "professional" education is something else. Since natural sciences have developed in the last 500 years I am not sure that modern chemistry would be yours. An interest in computers is rather unspecific, but you are bad at math then anything beyond designing homepages may be off limits, too. Keep in mind that practically everyone your age uses computers often. That leaves philosophy. A university degree in philosophy is not particularly renowned for being a sure ticket to work in philosophy later on. But at least you are doing something that you enjoy for some years and get a degree out of it that it more widely respected than having learned from the greatest witch of Newcastle. It might help to know how many years of schooling you had, and possibly also where you come from. For example, proposing a university degree in philosophy is rather mood if your school degree does not quality for university.

You may want to have a look at the website and find the "award winning publication" that was talked about earlier. It has been published in a conference proceeding of presumably the conference where he won the award. Conference proceedings are reviewed (at least mine went through the normal process of being reviewed by two referees). To what extent the review process of a non-physics conference counts as a peer-review for a paper that supposedly is about physics may be up for debate. But the publications can all be found on the website of "the Resonance Project". Happy reading .

There is, to my knowledge, not a single accelerator or detector in the world that was built to find gravitons. What comes closest is probably LIGO, which tries to detect gravitational waves. The graviton is the (expected) result of a quantum mechanical theory of gravity. There is no quantum gravity theory around. General relativity does not feature gravitons, only the elusive gravitational waves (in approximations of the theory).

Not if the florist mis-advocates his cancer treatment experience with a former "prestigious position at Harvard medical school" when he actually was the gardener there .

No, I've not heard about "Black Whole" before (I actually though it was a typo of yours until I realized that is indeed the intended spelling). I am in fact not interested to hear more about it, and I am about to tell you why: Since I have never encountered a "best paper award" before I looked around a bit what that actually means. It turns out it refers to an award being given at a non-physics conference for the best physics related talk, out of ~8 talks in total. Now, best out of eight talks is not so bad, and as a matter of fact an academic outsider making the first place against professional physicists or professionally-guided PhD students would still be quite impressive, right? Well, I don't know the conference but I checked the backgrounds of a few of the potential competitors for this "best talk/paper in the physics section" prize. I could only find the program of the 2011 conference, but it seems that that conference's physics sessions hosts speakers which are not exactly mainstream. For example Gilles Nibart, whose affiliation is given with "Laboratoire de Physique Theorique Fondamentale de Paris" ("Paris laboratory for fundamental theoretical physics"). His workplace is extremely prestigious as I have not even heard of that elite lab before, and seems to have only two scientists with a total of zero publications in the traditional sense (meaning publishing in a journal rather than putting a pdf on your homepage). Next randomly-picked competitor is Franz-Guenter Winkler who actually has two papers on arXiv, presumably from the time that one didn't require an endorsement to publish there. According to NASA ADS he accumulates a total of one citation on his scientific work: the later paper cites the earlier one. The other people I checked did not have very strong academic affiliations, either (to say the least). Now, nothing against people without a mainstream academic background. But it seems that this CASYS conference either is a conference for academic outsiders or that it is a proper conference and "Physics" is the crackpot session, that some conferences have. So Mr. Haramein won a "best talk/paper out of eight laymen" prize at a conference. All nice and fine so far. Now here comes my problem: When I go to the homepage of "The Resonance Project" this prize is being sold to me as the "prestigious 'Best Paper Award' in the field of physics, quantum mechanics, relativity, field theory, and gravitation". Such a description for me indicates a lack of either honesty or sanity. In either case that is the point where I stop considering.

I have had publications being cross-listed in other journals and being selected as a "research highlight" by the publisher. But I didn't know that there are actual awards for papers.

I tend to agree with that. My question actually did not refer to your post but to another one that is not there, anymore (either it was deleted or it wasn't there in the first place and I mixed up the threads - dunno).

So what does that mean for the question "are gravitons real. and can they really control gravity?" in your opinion?

What's the definition of a "pseudo-force"?

That's quite a U-turn considering the direction that the discussion in this thread went. I can't resist pointing out the interpretation that the Higgs boson does preciously little. That's what makes it so hard to proof experimentally, after all. A bit more to the point: You have to be a bit careful with terminology: The Higgs field gives mass to unbound elementary particles. The Higgs boson, which is often said to give particles mass, is just a piece of the Higgs field - and ironically the one that is not directly responsible for the mass of unbound elementary particles. That does, however, not exclude that there is other mechanism that may give mass to objects, particularly composite particles. And as I already said a few posts above, most of the mass you encounter on everyday scales is not due to the interaction with the Higgs field, but caused by particles being bound.

It's a bit sad that some people seem to take this thread seriously.

I don't know what "and so forth" is. I would simply multiply by the approximate number of cars you see. And you should probably add up the probabilities for all breeds of dog (or even better: substitute the probability to read a book about Dalmatians with the probability to read a book that prominently features a breed of dog). It is a manner to determine probabilities that works well for low probabilities. A counter example would be the probability to roll a six in six rolls of a dice, which is not 1/6 (for the probability to toll a dice in one roll) times six (for the number of rolls).

Is religion allowed to play with an infallible almighty god?

I think the rule "this thread will remain open until the 2nd July 2010. After that, no more nominations will be accepted" needs to be changed.

The caveat is that the measurement changes the state of the particle. If you had a particle with a definite momentum and you measured the position of that particle to some degree then the momentum of the particle after the measurement would not be the definite momentum it was before the measurement (by virtue of uncertainty). Therefore, your next measurement would not measure the initial momentum. To make matters worse it would not even measure the momentum of the particle between the measurements, because by definition (of having measured the position to some degree) it does not have a definite momentum between these measurements.

The mainstream candidates for dark matter are supersymmetric partner particles. I actually think one may call the supersymmetry breaking a Higgs-mechanism in the sense that the mathematical idea is the same as the one which breaks electroweak symmetry. I vaguely remember having read the term "super-higgs mechanism" in that context. You are right in the sense that the standard model Higgs field is not what causes this symmetry breaking, though. While it indeed means "the likes of photons" the massless photon is perhaps not the very best example of them. In first consequence it means the W and Z bosons, but I faintly recall there also was a reason why fermion mass is expected to be from interaction with the Higgs field.

There are in fact interesting results from supernovas, where neutrinos arrive 18 hours before the visual signal [1] (the optical signal is delayed because it takes time for the repeatedly-interacting photons to leave the reaction region whereas the neutrinos just go through). This puts rather severe constraints on the speed of neutrinos (of that energy) in vacuum that are incompatible with the OPAL results, at least according to the explanation I was given (I never bothered to check the numbers even though it would be rather trivial). However, I do acknowledge that the OPAL result is a reproducible one (a similar experiment already measured v>c some time ago, just with larger error bars) and not a "in one of our tens of thousands results we found a peak that, were it a random peak, would only show with a chance of 1:10000, therefore we might have found evidence for new physics"-one. [1] http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v58/i14/p1494_1

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. But just because I have the newspaper of tomorrow lying on my doorsteps every day that does not tell me by what mechanism it came there, either. Admittedly, in that case it may be easier to trace back the origin and the mechanism because I need less sophisticated equipment and I deal with objects (newspapers) that I know quite a lot about (contrary to neutrinos for which even the mass is not fully understood). Sidenote: It's tempting to call it a CERN measurement because CERN does have to do with it and is a name everyone knows (and it sells good in newspapers if you put that name in the headline). The result is actually from a joint research program with the neutrino source being at CERN and the detector (the heart of such an experiment) being at an underground detector facility in Italy.

Hi alextui, and welcome to sfn (in case no one welcomed you here, yet). There is a general consensus here that homework help is not supposed to give the answers to questions but to help the people solve their problems themselves, so it would be nice if you tried to stick to that. You are of course right that tuinebab88 should give a few more details. Especially on what his ideas are and where and why he got stuck.

You should probably start by assuming that there is some kind of data structure (e.g. an array of 3D vectors or an array or length-3 arrays) that provides the coordinates of the atoms. From that on I would sketch a function // calculate the distance between the atoms with numbers a1 and a2. double-valued function distance(int a1, int a2) // pseudocode comes here and a function // calculate the sum of 1/distance over all pairs of atoms. double-valued function sum_of_one_over_distance // pseudocode comes here

I think it has already been said that the argument with the mass is not entirely convincing. But it is funny that all what you said is completely correct except for the word "mass". Had you said "electrical charge" or "half-integer spin" then your statement would have been a great argument.

I'm not exactly sure what you meant with that, and there are two ways I could interpret your statement: a) "Elementary particles have energy and so can act as sources in GR": Well, my point was that I am not aware of any experiment that would exclude that only gluons act as a source of gravity. b) "Elementary particles are affected by gravity, therefore they must act as a source of it": That's certainly true for e.g. classical gravity and electromagnetism, where the property causing the field and the property coupling to the field are the same. And in terms of Lagrangians for a QFT I'd indeed find it hard to imagine a mechanism for which that doesn't hold true, since on that level both is (usually or necessarily?) just the same term, there. But on the classical level it is simple to imagine a field that is created by property X and felt by a property Y. Or simply felt equally by all other particles; the classical equation of motion in a gravitational field [math]\ddot x = \Gamma_{ij} \dot x^i \dot x^j[/math] contains neither energy nor momentum, after all (although it admittedly does not contain inertia, either).

The interaction with the Higgs field is not what gives all matter mass. It is what gives elementary particles mass. The mass of non-elementary particles like protons and neutrons are primarily (about 95% of it) caused by other mechanisms, but experiences gravity just like the elementary particles (*). More towards you question: The graviton and especially the Higgs boson are mathematical entities. It's not that physicists have spotted some shadowy figures sneaking around the visible horizon and called them "Higgs boson" and "graviton", respectively, and now should ask themselves if this possibly was the same shadowy figure. It's rather that you want, for whatever reasons, a particle with some particular properties, and therefore postulate it. The properties of the easiest incarnation of the Higgs boson are pretty much written in stone (I think the mass is the only parameter that is not fixed, but even that has to lie within some constraints). Since there is no generally accepted quantum gravity model the possible properties of a prospected graviton are somewhat less fixed. Usually, one expects a massless particle with a spin of two. The Higgs boson has a mass greater than zero and a spin of zero. In other words: the Higgs boson and the graviton are two particles that have been predicted for different reasons and have properties that are mutually exclusive. (*) As a matter of fact I am not even sure that there is an experimental proof that elementary particles do feel gravity at all. So perhaps only bound gluons are subject to gravitational force?