timo

While we're trying to be realistic: has anyone ever heard of an amateur whose great idea was stolen by an evil scientist? See, ... we are that good .

Well, in QFT you have a fields that mediate forces. Then you quantize the fields, giving rise to elementary excitations of the fields, which you call particles. I'm not sure if that's a "yes" or a "no" to your question, though. I tend to "no", since QFT is not based on particles, but particles are a result of the QFT approach.

In the field of professional science, this is not really a problem since you can trace who wrote what and when. Beyond the time stamp on your publication, there is no mechanism for ensuring people get the recognition they consider appropriate. In my experience, professionals tend to worry less about such things than amateurs. In practice, getting people to bother about your idea at all is usually the bigger problem.

The mainstream way to publish research results is writing them up in a proper format and then offering them to a scientific journal (a publisher) for printing and distribution. In principle, scientific ideas (or "theories", if you prefer that word) would probably go the same way, but in practice, the science community is more interested in results than in ideas. If you are a professional researcher, there is pretty much no way around this standard procedure, and you can be pretty sure that at least some people will read the title of your writing, then. For non-professionals, optional alternatives are writing a book, creating a page on the web, or discussing in forums. The procedures depend on the medium, of course. For professional publishers, it is listed on their homepages. For books, you have to find a publisher or self-publish and self-distribute. For discussion forums, it would be nice to read their board rules, too . About legal issues and copyright issues: First off, I consider it a perversion to desire presenting a scientific idea and at the same time wanting to deny people profiting from it - just don't present it, then. That said, in the mainstream way of publication you usually transfer the copyright of your writing (in its final version after it's been typeset by the publisher) to the publisher. Copyright in this case does, and I think that is a point that most laymen do not properly understand, refer to the text in its final form. It does not affect the content of the work. Say I'd write something about a great algorithm how to speed up some standard computer calculation, and say I'd hold the copyright. You'd then not be allowed to make copies of that publication or distribute it. You could still implement and use the actual algorithm as you please, since this is not affected by the copyright on the publication. What you possibly meant with copyright is a patent. About other legal issues: you basically don't have to worry to run into problems by accident. Of course, copy-pasting from a copyrighted text is no ok. But if you write something without being aware that someone else wrote the very same thing long ago, you wouldn't run into legal trouble. Properly referencing the relevant sources is required as proper style, but not by law.

The keyword you are looking for is "proton decay". And to quote Wikipedia on that: They don't. The lifetime of a free neutron is in the order of 12 minutes (or maybe so-is the half-life time; just look it up if you feel the exact number matters). The decay is into proton + electron + suitable neutrino (an anti-electronneutrino in this case).

There's quite a lot that could be said there. But I guess it all boils down to: scientists' lives simply aren't (entirely) defined by rationality and evidence. Only the jobs are.

Any chance to get a more competent or helpful statement about the relevance of this news than "this might help us understand the nature of antimatter and the origins of our universe"?

A slightly unrelated remark that just occurred to me when reading "making sense [...] is no longer a criterion". Historically (not sure if it was meant that way), I'm not convinced it's ever been. I'd think that historically, the stance that things must be like <that> because it makes sense really was a driving force. What happens is that we are very good at actively making sense of how things are. I don't find it a completely ridiculous idea that in some future, people will see QM as the obvious way how it is, similarly to a role that the existence of atoms and elements plays in our society. And from that perspective, the idea to apply classical mechanics to subatomic structures might seem as strange as the elements fire, water, ... as a basis of chemistry seem to us today. So what I am trying say is that this barrier that Tom speaks of isn't necessarily inherent to QM, but moreso to leaving the grounds of common knowledge, where education has giving you the illusion that things are "logical" or intuitive (because you never really were in the situation to be seriously confronted with an alternative). Not exactly related to the thread, though, but I found the though interesting (and found an excuse to procrastinate preparing my talk tomorrow ). EDIT: err ... ohh ... I meant "... was not a driving force." above . Point is: one is very tempted to see that things were easier before (even I know that there's a correlation between rats and the spreading of the Plague, so it cannot be so hard to figure out!) and only now we've hit the point where research is completely counter-intuitive and hard to understand. In first approximation, there is no reason to assume that is actually true.

Hey, that's exactly what my proposal gives if you assume 8 corners instead of 4. I want my name in the credits, too! B)

Well, there's another thing that goes along the lines of how deep you should dig: I am not sure we both have the same conception of what an orbital is. For me, it is a very practical lie, in which you assume that the solutions for a many-electron state could be properly tough of as a mere product state of one-electron solutions. Strictly speaking, that is simply wrong (and I don't mean simple things like that you'd have to anti-symmetrize the product state, but the huge problem that your electrons interact). But I admittedly lack any deeper knowledge about the issue. Seen from the bottom-up view of a physicist, the issue is pretty simple: we cannot solve the many-electron problem analytically, and even numerical procedures like DFT have to make approximations to solve anything beyond perhaps 3-4 electrons and still be reliable (whatever reliable might mean - I am far from an expert in this, as I said). So obviously, the whole orbital idea can just be a guess. On the other side of the spectrum, there is no doubt that chemistry is quite successful with their orbital view, so at least for me that is a completely convincing reason to take it as "that's how it works" and use it. I am not sure if something in the line of "ad-hoc extension of the Hydrogen solutions" is what you have in mind when thinking about what an orbital "really is". I doubt it for two reasons, though: first, from my experience, only theoretical physicists and perhaps mathematicians tend to take the stance that what they are working with is just a model, that happens to be as good as the model happens to be. When I talk to say experimentalists, chemists, or people from medical sciences, I often get the impression that they feel like the model they are being taught is "how it really is", in the sense of actually being reality and not just a tool that is adequate for the purpose at hand. The second reason is a bit more profane: I happen to own exactly one chemistry book: Atkins, "Physical Chemisty". Sure, it's an undergrad text, but the fact that it says relatively little about it (Chapter 13.4 in my version) seems like an indicator to me, that it might in fact not be standard knowledge of every chemist, that the whole orbital idea is not necessarily the full story.

As you possibly might know, I am not a chemist. But anyways, here's my advice, assuming your goal is to give a good lecture, and not to teach QM: Don't talk about the Schrödinger equation. Don't talk about uncertainty. Electrons can only be in certain orbits. Period. That explains your atomic line spectra, presumably the structure of molecules (I don't know in detail to what extend which approximations you can make and still get your desired statement, though). And I understood the photoelectric effect as a proof for the QM nature of light, which I don't quite see why you'd need that for your class. You will always reach the point where a "deeper" question cannot be answered, so don't even start with details that are not required. That is not to discourage people from asking further questions. But build a solid platform of what has to be understood, and what can be considered as "that's just how it is" so that people do not unnecessarily confuse themselves over information they do not need. (somehow, posting this seems like a deja vu, dunno why).

... oh right ... I should probably have assumed 8 corners above, not 4

I think that Bascule "purposefully changed his account credentials to the point he can't recover his account", and thereafter got the idea that he could at least leave a goodbye message. Of course, as some people would say, we don't know if perhaps he was abducted by aliens that try to cover their traces with a fake goodbye-post.

[math] \frac{1}{5^3} \left( 3^3 \frac{6}{5^3-1} + 6\cdot 3^2 \frac{5}{5^3-1} + 12\cdot 3^1 \frac{4}{5^3-1} + 4 \frac{3}{5^3-1} \right)[/math] would be my guess. But statistics has the nasty habit of fooling me pretty often.

What exactly is your problem here? Recursion as such? Take this example (in laymen-c++), then: Example: The factorial f(n) of a natural number n is defined as f(0)=1, and f(n)=n*f(n-1) for n>0. Calculate f(i) for i=0...5. A solution would be #include <iostream> int f(int n) { if (n==0) return 1; else return n*f(n-1); } int main() { for (int i=0; i<=5; ++i) std::cout<<"f("<<i<<")="<<f(i)<<std::endl; } Try to understand what this code does (the magic trick is that the function f(n) calls itself); your examples should be straightforward extensions, then (though one letter did not render and your function g reads "g(n) = g(n?1)+2n" for me). Caveat: I don't know what "unfolding" is (in case it is a specialized technical term), so possibly above example is not what you are looking for (but it's recursion, at least). But you can probably figure that our yourself.

"I purposefully changed my account credentials to the point I can't recover my account" (1st paragraph) seems to answer these questions.

You are aware that I was making fun by twisting the statement "if your goal is to save time/effort are you going to learn a whole new vocabulary of text terms?", are you?

if your goal is to save time/effort are you going to learn a whole new set of ascii characters?

I think you should leave academia and not go to grad school. Both, for the sake of your nerves, and those of your colleagues whose experiments you sabotage.

Basically, it comes down to this: your question stems from assuming electrons were little spheres that circle around the nucleus, like in the following picture: This is simply not the case.

That seems like a rather trivial fact to me and by definition (of a fact), I agree with that. I do, however, find it extremely likely that he is either lying or -possibly worse- doesn't remember the situation correctly or wasn't fully aware of the situation back then. In public, Schröder (along with the majority of the German population) never supported invading Iraq, as far as I remember. So it wouldn't exactly make sense to promise troops and hope that later on no one in Germany will realize that they are at war with Iraq. And well, that notion seems to be supported by your link; which is why I was a bit confused that it was brought up in a context that I (mis-)interpreted as saying that George Bush probably tells the truth.

Nothing. I just somehow thought you had a point and that your point was that President Bush possibly isn't lying and that Chancellor Schröder probably had promised to help invading Iraq. Must have completely misunderstood your post, then. Did you have a point?

Are you seriously seeing an article explicitly saying that Schröder rejected an invasion into Iraq before his re-election and that "he's still unlikely to supply any troops for the campaign" as an evidence that he promised troops for an Iraq invasion to President Bush?

I suppose having sex is not what you meant with "giving life". The answer to your question, is strongly tied to what you define life and death to be. And that is actually not so trivial as it may sound for a layman. For example, if you define death as stopping of heart beat (in Germany that is called "clinical death"), then bringing people back to life (reanimation) is indeed a standard procedure in modern medicine with an in-principle high rate of success (in practice, this is high rate is reduced by (1) the need to start reanimation procedure soon after stopping of heartbeat and (2) the fact that by merely bringing the heart back "on-line" you haven't yet eliminated the reason that caused it stopping in the first place). If you define something like "true death" as the point where no medical treatment will bring people back to life, then the answer to your question is probably "no", by construction. Abreu: what you are talking about in your 2nd post is roughly what I called "reanimation" above. You are definitely not limited to 5 minutes but can really restore people to their previous state (though for people whose heart stopped beating, this often isn't exactly the most healthy one, either). EDIT: I looked up the term I was referring to as "reanimation". The correct English term seems to be "Cardiopulmonary resuscitation".

I don't get what "if we have a case where the gravity is strong enough to curve light into a circle, this surface would in effect, be flat" means. Considering the light following "a straight line on the geodesic": to make things short, the solutions for paths that light (or any other object on which no force -except gravity- is acting) are called geodesics. Those paths are sometimes referred to as something like the extension of a straight path to a curved space. I'd not focus on this statement, tough. Regarding your statement "black holes are flat from a space-time perspective". If you consider a black hole being a physical object: I wouldn't know what defines whether an object is flat or not. If you consider a black hole being the spacetime of a mass that is concentrated on a single spot: that is not flat in the sense that the curvature is non-zero.