timo

How rich exactly do the publishers get?

Are you really trying to argue that the Higgs boson is a boson or was that a typo? And why would "any quantum description of a field, whether scalar or vector, predict the existence of virtual force carrier bosons"?

I don't see having scalar particles and spinor particles in a theory as a hint that a spinorial superpartner is needed for each scalar (and vice versa). In principle, you can just write down scalar and fermionic field theories and quantize them, and I see no reason why everything should be explained by one of the two structures. The only reason I see for having spinors only is that they properly reflect the known matter particles. As said, I consider distinguishing gauge fields and matter appropriate (rather than gauge fields, matter, Higgs fields), but that is only a personal feeling of style. Note also that the "chemist's definition" by which matter is the SM fermions and the structures containing them is not the only definition of matter being used. In astrophysics I've seen taking the relation of mass to typical kinetic energies as the criterion, i.e. particles with a mass much greater than their kinetic energy are matter, particles with a kinetic energy much greater than their mass are radiation (and approximated as massless for their contribution to the energy-momentum tensor). The German Wikipedia version defines matter as "everything object of observation in natural sciences that has mass" (dunny how they came up with that definition, but apart from bringing tears to the eyes of everyone knowing the SM it doesn't sound too unsensible).

For a conventional particle physicist the distinguishing feature of the gauge fields is that they are the result of keeping the action invariant under a local gauge transformation. Since that is not the case for the Higgs field I don't count it as a gauge field, which is the term I use almost synonymously with "force" (except that I don't use the term "force" at all unless I talk about "F=ma"). Some time ago I would have put the Higgs Boson under "something else", but today I tend to consider the Higgs Field a matter field just like the others, except that it happens to have a different spin. Susy seems to only strengthen that view since then the Higgs and the conventional matter superfields are even structurally equivalent (chiral multiplets - or at least I think they are), while the gauge fields are in a vector multiplet. In most of physics (and its partner disciplines like chemistry, biology, ...) the characterizing feature of matter is its fermionic nature, since that is what allows to build up stable non-trivial structures. Calling the Higgs boson matter would violate this. But then the Higgs boson doesn't play a role in this kind of physics, anyways, so who cares what it's being counted as, then?

I complain about the lack of a definition of "poor country" and you claim that Saudi Arabia is no exception from that undefined pool of prejudice? I can assure you that reports about poverty in the US are much more frequent in German TV than reports about poverty in the oil countries. I wouldn't call the US a poor country because of that. Would you? If "no": what's your point? I'm not going to waste time here with a discussion that is not at least based on quantitative statements (even if they are as shallow as the graph presented by DJBruce).

Assuming you are correct: what's your point?

Distribution is not a property of addition but a property of a combined addition and multiplication. You'd have to say what your multiplication is. In mathematics one defines a vector as an element of a vector space, which is a set of elements (that do not need to the the tuples (x,y,z) that you are familiar with but can also be more abstract) that adhere to certain calculation rules. Among these rules is that v1 + v2 = v2 + v1 (commutativity) and x*(v1 + v2) = x*v1 + x*v2 where x is a "scalar" (think of it as a real number). This latter rule is of course a form of the distributivity. So in some sense all vectors adhere to some distributivity by definition. But you possibly need to be a bit careful what you mean by that. In case you meant "associative" instead of distributive: yes, vector addition is associative.

a) What does "doing" mean? b) is that really a homework question? c) [math] \exp X := 1 + \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{X^n}{n!}[/math] is sometimes extended to X being matrices; and so is the logarithm. You could hope that the common calculation rules for exponentials, powers, and logarithms still hold true for matrices (or check the ones you need individually).

Is there a justification for your claim? I wouldn't even know of 1000 elementary particles being known in the first place.

There's two comments about going for a physics degree I'd like to make: (1) I certainly don't think that people asking complete strangers with names like "IAmEinstien" and "StringTheoryXXX" for advice are in need of encouragement - in fact, if people need that form of encouragement for doing something they should probably keep their hands off it. So I don't see a point in saying things like "sure you can do it if you try hard and it is what you really want", which is merely a polite but hollow phrase. That said, I don't see how IloveMathematics comes up with the idea that physics was to hard for you. There is really nothing in what you wrote that hints at this. Essentially, if you have been able to follow the physics education in school, been among the top 10% of students in math (the 10% is just a guideline meaning that you don't have to be a genius, but you should really be more talented than the average person), and enjoy rearranging equations and seeing that the mess reduces to more or less simple formula that gives the correct result (this is what physics studies are mostly about) then you don't really have to worry about it. Job-wise there are more competitive, less competitive, and ridiculously competitive jobs. And I think (read: hope) no semi-decent physicist has to really worry about not getting a job in a related field of interest, as long as he is a bit open minded. E.g. if you're interested in scientific computing then getting some job in the field should be easy, e.g. as an engineer with an aircraft manufacturer, while a fixation on a certain job, say becoming a professor of computational physics, is an almost certain path for failure. Starting a BSc at the age of 25 is definitely not too late, except that it may feel strange for you that everyone else in your class is much younger than you and still getting better grades. And having a university degree in a completely different field is interesting, at least. I'm currently supervising a PhD student who is 32 and just started a few month ago (he did an engineering degree, then worked in industry for some time, then went back to university for his masters and now started a PhD in physics). As far as I can remember his age has not been an issue when debating whether he should be employed or not. And he's doing exceptionally well, so far. (2) I do not think that the reasons you list for an interest in studying physics are good reasons. You list quite a few keywords that the average non-physicist would associate with physics. The big problem is: you don't really know anything about those keywords, and so your interest is actually in your imagination of what physics is about rather than what working in physics is actually like. For me, it has paid off to evaluate what I like to do on a day-to-day basis rather than looking at physics from a point of view of an alien chronologist of humanity, a science fiction author, or a science reporter looking for a striking headline. Perhaps most importantly: Physics is absolutely not about philosophical implications. That is not to say physics is nothing for you. You did in fact list a few things that sound like it may be interesting for you (playing with electronics, wanting to design a robot and putting things together), but the points you did explicitly list under your interest in physics are not good reasons to go into it.

I found older figures: from a FAZ article Translation of content: Germany is (at the time of writing, which is three years ago) the 2nd largest donator to China with 441 million dollar in the years 2005 and 2006 annually. Largest one is Japan with 1500 million, 3rd is France with 186 million. That is relatively far from billions per day, and one would probably (arbitrary guess of mine) end up around 3000 million per year, give or take a thousand million.

There is. I even posted in this thread. And I quite enjoy reading it, btw. TonyMcC: you are being ironic about the Englishmen being notorious line-standers, are you? There actually is a (German?) joke about an Englishman at a bus station telling the German who arrives after him: "excuse me sir, this is a line".

Why move it to speculations? People in the speculations forum are usually expected to back up their premises, as far as I see.

Isn't it funny that when I think of "Muslim countries" all the countries coming to my mind spontaneously seem to be the "few exceptions"? Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran, Kuwait, and Qatar, for example. I doubt that the relative wealth (compared to world average) of these nations is related to or even due to the religion of the people there, of course. I checked the five countries with the lowest Human Development Index according to the German Wikipedia: 3/5 have a predominantly Christian population (Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Kongo, Burundi), 1/5 is almost exclusively Muslim (Niger), and 1/5 mainly some local religion with Christianity coming second (Mozambique). So what is the basis you foot your statement that "Muslim countries are poor and generally just doesn't compete that well in the global economy" on, and what is the definition of "poor and generally just don't compete that well in the global economy"? Or are you merely asking why the US, Europe, China, and Japan are not Muslim? @Fuzzwood: Yes, indeed: you do sound very racist (in lack of the word "religionist"). But you're not alone in there.

I don't really know what kind of website or discussion you are talking about so I'll not give a definite answer here. I do, however, have full sympathy for people writing an article about topic X and not wanting the discussion about their article to descend into the old and never-finished discussion about Y that became boring years ago. The standard procedure on this forum for cases like yours is to split the discussion off into a separate thread, so that the original intention of the discussion (economic politics of Bush) is largely preserved while people interested in discussing the other topic (invasion of Afghanistan) can still continue with their discussion.

I don't want to derail this thread, but since Marat's time in Germany has obviously been a few years ago, here's a small update: Opening times have extended significantly within the last 10-15 years. They are not as customer friendly as in many other countries, but even in the worst case (Sundays or around midnight) you'll at least find a gas station that's open and sells food. Standard opening hours for supermarkets are something like Monday-Saturday, 8:00-22:00. That has changed a lot. Intellectual level nowadays ranges from "braindead" (private channels) to "average pensioneer" (public channels). Commercials range from "whole channel is a commercial" (shopping channels, so-called music channels) over 3 commercial blocks per 20 minute episode of Simpsons (private channels) to "annoying" (public channels). At least the public channels are forbidden to show commercials after 20:00, but "the weather is presented by xyz bank" messages still appear and annoy.

It took S2 one year longer to return to the station.

They seemingly can, so perhaps you should elaborate where you see a problem. "Infinity is infinity" is a nice tautology but not exactly a well laid-out scientific argument. Acceptable grammar and punctuation would help understanding your issue, too.

It might somewhat help if you described what an "undergraduate special problem" is, what you are studying, and possibly what topic you want to do a "3d simulation" on.

In Andrew's case it's due to the field. "Theoretical physics" is not a field (a theoretical particle physicist will have more trouble communicating with a theoretical biophysicist than with an experimental cosmologist), but "mathematical physics" is. And it's the field which offers the least superlatives to describe its results ("we create a mini big bang" is silly, but it sells), the least amount of publications per time, no fancy promises (e.g. "build better computers and solar cells" (solid state physics), "understand cells better and heal people" (biophysics)) beyond an improved mathematical structure of physics (*), and as a consequence attracts pretty much no external funding. I haven't heard of any colleague having trouble finding a post-doc position (but of a lot of colleagues not making the jump to a permanent one). (*) And most physicist don't really want to hear that from a mathematical point of view their beloved calculations are rather questionable for a whole zoo of reasons. On topic: The typical fields for a theoretical physicist (and indeed, there "theoretical physics" is what matters, not the field of physics) outside of academia that I know of are consulting, banking, insurances, and software development (not to be confused with programming, although that may be part of it in smaller companies). I should note that this refers to Germany, and to people with a PhD in theoretical physics, since this is the de-factor standard degree for a German physicist.

Oh my god, stop that program before it creates an earth-destroying black hole!!!

I can't help you with deciding what you want to do. I think that in times of the Bologna reform (it may be that Switzerland does not participate in it), pretty much all universities in all European countries offer their post-bachelor courses in English, so language should not be a problem (you should learn the language of the country that you're living in, anyways). I don't know much about international programs in your field, but for Germany the strong recommendation -if you are looking for a research-intensive environment and can live with sub-optimal contracts as an employee- is the Max-Planck society. In your case the Max-Planck institutes for biophysical chemistry (Göttingen) and the one for biochemistry (near Munich) may be interesting (I only listed those who look very related; there's much more, including some with a more medical orientation).

I don't see why "...so it would be overwhelmingly probable that the universe would start out in a high entropy state..." seems to be a contradiction to the 2nd law of thermodynamics to you. What exactly do you think the 2nd law of thermodynamics states? My first guess is that you mistake the big bang scenario for the one point where distance between any two points in space becomes zero and the theory breaks down. The big bang scenario is everything except this point. My 2nd guess is that you expect statements like "dS>=0" to trivially hold for non-equilibrium states and non-quasi-static processes. I'm absolutely no expert on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but the assumption seems a bit naive to me.

Until your questions are a bit more specific than "can someone shed some light on the fields" you best just read the Wikipedia articles on the topics. Apart from that: it is definitely not impossible to switch fields from biology. One of our post-docs (in the theoretical physics department) is a biologist by training. But: He's working in the theoretical biophysics group, not with the cosmologists. The big issue is: why should anyone take you as a PhD student over anyone else? Excelling at math is good, but I think you'd need something to formally show that, like having achieved a top position in the math Olympiad or something like that.

I didn't really mean you should plug in x=0.62, I was just too lazy to type in all digits of your solution. You'll find that with additional digits you type in your result will get closer to 6. The calculation steps look correct to me, too. EDIT: Oh, and the solution that your pocket calculator gives you is probably not the correct solution, but only the approximation to the number of digits that fit to the display. If you want the correct solution then it's simply [math]\log_32[/math].