timo

No need to restate. Everyone knows that people who are posting on the most international platform there is (the Internet) without being aware that there is a rest of the world talk about the US

...and country. Germany and the Netherlands, for a start. Or more specifically (assuming you do have a rough idea where countries lie on a world map): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prostitution_laws_of_the_world.PNG

DieDaily: If you consider the moving charges a good equivalent example (most physicists would indeed consider it being equivalent in the limit of weak gravitational fields), then the problem with your inherent assumptions is perhaps best highlighted by the question where the magnetic field is. The electromagnetic field of a moving charge is not simply the superposition of a lot of electromagnetic fields of non-moving charges along its trajectory. Same should go for the gravitational field. I don't see what you're trying to say there. What I said is that I don't know under which conditions one can sensibly talk about global conservation of momentum (*). This does, and I should probably have said that explicitly, include the question whether one can sensibly define such a thing as global momentum in the first place. You seem to be saying that the existence of global conservation of momentum is not clear in general, which seems to be the same statement. Did I miss your point? (*) and to be honest, I don't care as much as to work it out myself.

Three comments: a) your assumption about the gravitational field of the two objects and their reaction to this field is just that: your assumption. It is not entirely clear that a proper treatment would yield the scenario you envisage (though it might). b) the gravitational field can in principle carry energy and momentum. This is also true in simpler field theories like the electromagnetic interaction in which it is widely known and accepted that electromagnetic waves carry energy and momentum. c) I'm not entirely sure under which conditions momentum is conserved in general relativity at all. The standard expression for the conservation of energy and momentum is a local property, which can be "expanded" to a global property in a flat space. But in a non-flat space it is not clear (to me) that you still have conservation of momentum. My personal guess is towards problem a). Replace your masses with the electromagnetic field two electrical charges, and the same argument should hold (unless I missed an important part of your argument). But in that case you can go to a coordinate system where the charges are at rest (except for the motion towards another), and see that they just attract each other normally, there. Since momentum is conserved in this center of mass system, so it is in the original coordinate system. I would imagine the gravity case to work equivalently.

Not only will people realize that without your help. I would go as far as to claim that there's going to be a movie with Keanu Reeves that centers around your unique idea that the world as we know it is just a computer simulation.

As a matter of fact, that is not a good thing. We've long reached the point where the problem is not lack of information, but abundance of. For instance, the number of new articles on arXiv (the number one resource for downloading papers in the physics area) in the field "condensed matter physics" is about 50 (EDIT: today's new articles, that is) - even before counting the cross-posts. And I don't even want to know the numbers for fields which are more publication-heavy like cell biology. No one can process this amount of information. And most is not needed. The problem is not acquiring information, the problem is filtering out the little valuable content in the huge amount of noise. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why I believe that working in a strong group at PhD level makes a distinction: because you have people who know the important facts in their field, because you do meet the people with the valuable ideas, and to some extent also because your first steps as a scientist may be given some credit in advance, since people may see that you come from a group that knows their trade. That would be an "advisor", I believe.

Glad it helped you. Note that the trick does not work for a=0. And indeed: If I remember correctly then [math]0^0[/math] is commonly considered as not being defined.

The Latex mode is switched with [ math] and ended with [ /math], the commands in between are Latex (there is a tutorial thread on latex somewhere in this forum). There are pocket play tricks to justify it, such as [math]a^0 = a^{1-1} = a^1 a^{-1} = a/a = 1[/math], but I'm not sure if that's what you were looking for - I certainly couldn't tell you at the moment which underlying assumptions I made for this trick to work, so it's possibly just a cyclic argument.

Just go through the list of recent Nobel Prize laureates and see where they got their PhD from (the "recent" is important, because past scientific achievements may well have been what caused the university's reputation in the first place). I looked at the list of the Physics Nobel Prizes of the years 2007 till now, and found a mix of top and very average universities (e.g. the Ecole Normale Superieure Paris and the TU Darmstadt, respectively), and possibly no university that you'd count as top. That said, the quality of the group you're doing your PhD in does matter a lot, in my experience. But I'm afraid I don't have the time to elaborate on this point.

You are asking other people to invest their time helping you but don't even spend two minutes of your time to write a proper question? Well, here's my suggestion: Write a spelling and grammar checker that awards a gold bonus to a World of Warcraft character of choice for each properly written message in a forum. Then measure whether this has an effect on overall level of discussion on the chosen forum (my guess is that it will just result in someone writing a bot).

If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn't true. I haven't read the paper, so it's somewhat lame of me to comment on it, and the lot of obvious problems that I see in your simplified explanation may have been addressed there. But I can't help it. My first thought when reading your post was: Somewhat original idea and method, certainly important topic, and a strong and slightly sensationalist conclusion from data that probably doesn't support the conclusion when you're honest => I could have told you it's a Science publication without looking at the paper .

It's not Spain, but it's Europe and it's Neuroscience, and I happen to know of the program. So maybe this is an interesting read for you: http://www.gpneuro.uni-goettingen.de/ . Considering Marat's post: if buying your stamps somewhere else than where you are used to in the US is a problem for you, then don't even consider going to any foreign country for more than a guided tour. Things like bureaucracy may seem scary, but you're probably not the first and only foreign PhD student at the university you apply to. So unless you suffer from a complete absence of social skills you will always find someone who can help you around with such issues (for example, for finding housing it is rather common that someone of your group will assist you with that in making appointments and visiting the flats together with you - at least in the groups that I have been in).

That's interesting because prior to your post I had used "national language" and "official language" synonymously. Since I assume that English is the US official language in the sense that all important documents must be written in English (which does not exclude that they are also written in other languages; Switzerland, for example, has three official languages), I guess I was wrong.

It indeed does not. You've probably mixed that up with the distribution law (48 + 2)y = 48y + 2y.

Escaping a gravity well is defined as: for any finite distance d0 from the center of the well there is a time t0, such that for all times t>t0 the object is a distance d>d0 away from the center of the gravitational well. You are of course right that there is no distance d at which the gravitational potential 1/d^2 is zero, which is why escape is defined in this weird way (it's a mathematical limit), which is essentially "will not be pulled back anymore".

See the Wikipedia article on "computer programming" (link), which happens to be the first Google result for "how can you program a computer". The key information for you is probably the 2nd sentence.

It's remarkable that an almost ten year old thread about computer systems still sounds as if it was recent.

You may want to read my previous post directly before yours, Athena. Also note that the thread is about a year old, and Leumas13 with his 8 posts in total probably doesn't hang around at sfn anymore.

First Google hit on "CellCraft"?

It's an amazing feature of sfn that even an answer as simple as "no" seems beyond comprehensibility, whereas hocus-pocus statements about cutting edge physics are happily eaten up as common knowledge. If I had relied with "no" to "If car is a vehicle, then is it logical to assume that faith is an apple?", would that have been understood? If so: that's essentially what you said, except that the random everyday words were random physics terms. If not: whatever. btw.: Sorry for being rude, also to the others in this thread. It's not my intention to offend complete strangers (why should I?). I'm a little short with time.

I didn't say the Higgs Boson is expected to be stable, everyone knows it is not. I said that your statement is wrong. Had you said that the graviton is stable but that the Higgs Boson is not, I had agreed (if that's what you meant, why didn't say that instead of using terms whose meaning you don't know?). That's just one arbitrary choice out of the many differences between the two particles, though (see my previous post).

The spins of the Gravitino and the Higgsinos are indeed 3/2 and 1/2, respectively. That information is readily found via Google or Wikipedia.

[ math] and [ /math], excluding the blank, of course.

That's not the case. You've mistaking the Higgs Boson for the vaccum expectancy value of the Higgs field, I think. No. Both differ in the motivation to include them in the model, the role they play, and in all properties except for electric charge and color charge (both zero). They are so vastly different that any difference mentioned would just be a random choice, as in saying cats and cars differ in their attitude towards mice. I don't think that "subquantum space" has a proper meaning. That's wrong.

My opinion is that the Einstein equations, which are in principle supposed to determine the geometry of spacetime as caused by the mass in it, in conjecture with the geodesic equations, which describe the movement of objects (including light) in a given spacetime geometry, do explain the effect totally. I don't quite see what you consider missing.