timo

I assume that most Germans (they were probably not included in "we", were they?) take some freedoms for granted, too.

I think several reasons for "no" are rather obvious, ranging from the rather general rejection of cheating over conflict with the idea behind giving and doing homework the to the fact that ultimately no one really wants to have a computer, car, artificial hip, ... created by incompetent engineers/physicians/... . But for some reason you say you're not sure what to think of it morally. What do you think would speak for having your homework done by someone else?

When the photon does it, that means it is not illegal. More seriously: I don't know what law you are referring to so there probably is no such law.

The direction is determined by the momentum of the photon which is to some extent restricted (read: determined) by the conservation of total momentum (details depend on the particular process).

He probably was not asking if a=b=c=... but if they are functions of x.

Well, then with g(x) := dy/dx that is exactly my example and the solution is dy/dx = g(x) = C exp (x/a). EDIT: Comment for the sake of completeness: It is not obvious but can be proven (I just don't know the proof anymore) that these functions (parameterized by the C) are indeed the only solutions. Note that if a depends on x then you are screwed.

I do not fully understand your question but something akin to this is a "differential equation" where the derivative of a function depends on lower derivatives and the function, e.g. f'(x) = a*f(x). I am not sure to what extent that suits what you described. There is no general way to solve such equations analytically and the solutions -so they exist- are not unique. A special case are linear differential equations which can be solved. For example, the solution to the diff. eq. I took as an example is any function f(x) = C exp(ax) with arbitrary C.

I think what I said was pretty obvious but I can rephrase it of course: Hundreds of millions of people know about basic gravitational laws and that planets orbit the sun. Tens of millions are able to calculate things like orbit frequencies for a circular orbit (note that this includes the existence of a spherical orbit due to gravity only in the first place). Some of them do physics professionally. None of those people sees the need for an additional mechanism. So perhaps you are just wrong and there simply is no need and also no such mechanism. And I definitely think you should think about that for more than four minutes. Particularly if you feel you didn't understand what I said.

If I'd call the force causing planets to orbit the sun "toaster" you'd still score more crackpot points than me (for naming something after yourself). Did it ever occur to you that most physicists are happy with planets orbiting the sun despite the lack of "Griff Energy" in standard physics? Do you think it could be possible that one or two of the professionals are not complete idiots?

The limit/transition to existing and quantitatively verified physics models.

Yes, but they don't have to. Obviously, there is always the possibility to reverse orders if you just let the signal transfer take suitably long (he can look at a video tape of you and then at the tape your other ET took of Napoleon). That is not what is meant by the order of event changing. What is meant that even with an instantaneous transfer of the information the time order would have changed. That is possible in principle if the two events are not causally connected (in case you don't know the term note that "causally connected" is a technical term with a rather precise meaning). Napoleon and you are causally connected (you wouldn't know of him, otherwise). So the answer is "no".

My pulled-out-of-my-lower-back explanation is that people who are less social are over-proportionally likely to become engineers. Same goes for becoming a terrorist: Firstly, killing strangers is not exactly a social thing; secondly it's more tempting to trade your friends for the possibility of N virgins in paradise (or at least a post mortem headline in the newspaper) when you've got no friends in the first place.

I think the reason for the many worlds interpretation is that your books sell better when you fantasize about parallel universes.

Your post sounds as if you implicitly or explicitly assume that the collapse is due to a measurement in energy. I don't think that is necessarily the case - think the measurement of position on a particle in a box. The measurement of an observable that does not commute with the Hamiltonian does collapse the system to a state compatible with the measured eigenvalue of that observable (called eigenstate and not necessarily unique). This state then is not an eigenstate to the time evolution operator exp(-iH) and hence the measured observable will change its value under time evolution. Why not? It is a superposition of an infinite number of monomials, for example. [math]C_n \sin(n\pi x) [/math] might be eigenstates to the observable measured, true. In that case, I would not call sin(x) a superposition of states. But they might as well not be eigenstates to the observable measured. In that case, sin(x) can only (if at all) be constructed as a superposition of 2+ eigenstates to the observable measured. In effect, the question whether a state is a superposition can only be answered if you have (defined) a basis for your vector space. And to rephrase my point: As long as you haven't specified the observable you measure (whose eigenstates form the basis) it's pointless to talk about a state being a superposition of (eigen-)states or not.

No one can force you to publish your idea. I am completely ruthless when it comes to keeping my ideas from society. I even turn away people who come visiting me to tell me theirs (Jehova's witnesses et. al.). As for your personal morals/ethics or whatever the correct term might be: You probably have to decide that for yourself.

Under a measurement a system goes into a state (just think of a state as a wave function if you don't know the difference) compatible with the measurement result. That's pretty much all that happens. In particular, the system is not forced to stay in that state forever after. The state will evolve normally according to the equation of motion (Schödinger equation) - it's just not considered the reverse of collapsing. As an example: Assume I'd measure the position very exact. The electron will then be in a state compatible with the statement that it is in the location just measured. That does of course not prevent the electron from moving away later. As a remark: Saying that a state is a superposition has no meaning unless you specify what it should be a superposition of: Is the wave function [math]f(x) = C \sin x [/math] a superposition or not?

The average age of PhD students in our institute is around 30. So technically: No, I've got no experiences with starting a PhD when being so young .

But to be honest, neither has "I worked on this for 40 years, it's my attempt to understand the universe and based more on philosophical aspects than on natural sciences".

I'll take the chance to reply before someone starts mentioning that surely something must happen at whatever that person's favorite unit's Planck scale. If the two objects are at rest wrt. to another then for any finite distance they will attract and collide within finite time. However, when the objects are far apart then already a small relative motion can exceed the escape velocity and the planets then move apart for all eternity. In effect, the distance does not change anything qualitatively, it only shifts the numbers.

I think you don't fully get the concept of homeopathy: Negative effects (the negative energies?) of a substance do get weaker under diluting the solution. Only the positive effects are amplified by diluting the substance. Also, it's the water that remembers the molecules that were in there, not the container.

Yes. I don't know what the limit is but I think you need around 10 or 15 posts in the science sections before you can post in politics. The idea behind this is that this is a science forum and not a politics one and people joining here should do so because they want to discuss science.

It seems to me that as soon as you don't understand a basic thing you are complicating the picture so that the lack of basics does not show too much. What I am trying to do is give you the coordinates of the important events in one of your examples (in both coordinate systems). From those, a lot of questions you might have on the physics can be answered - provided you are humble enough to sit down with a pencil rather than approaching questions with the attitude that your intuition as a summa cum laude graduate is sufficient to solve problems. But if you do not understand the coordinates I used then that is somewhat pointless.

Shouldn't it run to the same corner from both sides? I think you are mixing up continuous and differentiable.

What do you think my units for time, distance and speed are?

The space distance is the other entry in the vector I calculated. But it should be rather obvious that it is zero considering it is the distance that O' traveled in the frame in which O' is at rest.