timo

How about a decay over time, say 10% of every point above 10 every two months or so? To make this clear: I am explicitly talking about a percentage, not a fixed amount of points. This balances past reputation points and current posting style (I think the detail of the balance does not really matter), calms down inflation of points (to constantly keep a certain amount of rep. points you need to be constantly credited) and works without need for explicit negative points (I did not like the idea of negative points in the first place and certainly do not now but one could consider them them having been an interesting experiment, too). Just an idea, though. I personally don't use the system so perhaps my opinion is not the most important one - it's mostly the people using or caring about it that should matter.

Must have been my browser, yes. It now shows up. I am not harsh for the sake of it, I say that I found the proof badly readable. This might just be my personal impression, strongly influenced by missing characters of course. But there also is the "or" which must be read as an exclusive or for the statement to still make any sense and still not being very elegant. If you're fine with it, then that's a good sign. To quote an old math prof of mine: "A proof is an argument that people understand and agree with." It might admittedly not have been Triclino's question whether the presentation is ok (although no one really expect something miraculous to happen in the proof, I guess). So -also in the light of the missing symbols now showing up- let me rephrase my initial post: It is not complete crap. But if I were given this as a homework solution (without missing characters, of course) I would not give full points (except perhaps one of one).

The Gamov factor did not show up on my screen which made your statement word-salad. I guess you used some non-standard character that did not show up properly in my browser or on my computer (now is magically does). Hint: I've not seen TeX to cause any trouble, yet. So what I meant: I found it funny that someone said "why is it that no one understands <something that does not make any sense at all>".

It is confusing to say the least. For example: Do you think that anyone not willing to spend a relatively long time de-cyphering what you wrote understands what "for all ,nN:" means? You probably mean "for all n in N" or even simpler "for all natural numbers n", right? Then, technically a proof for "A <=> B" usually consists of two steps: a) show that A=>B, b) show that B=>A. I am not even sure if that is the path you take here. Bottom line: I don't get what you are writing there. At least to some extent it is because your presentation is sloppy. Don't be afraid to use words.

Because neither of the two sets of words divided by the period form a sentence . EDIT: At 2nd though: if you wanted to say that at rest v=0 and v=1 then the 2nd one might be - but that probably wasn't your message.

Installed, realized it does not support my WLAN stick (over which I access the internet without alternative access methods), reinstalled 9.04. Effect: I spent approximately day killing my old system just to reinstall it later. I'm not yet completely finished reinstalling all programs, though. So in my experience -which of course is not expected to transfer to everyone else- 9.10 is a complete waste of time. Oh, and naming the version "karmic koala" instead of "9.10" is also a pain in the butt (not 9.10 specific, of course). I always know which version I have installed but never remember the animal associated with it. This makes google searches just one step more complicated because I always have to figure the name of the system I want to google for, first.

I don't think it really matters; "modern and theoretical physics" might have the larger audience - if you're willing to justify how your paper relates to N-theory (one step beyond M-theory, whatever that may be) or 42-dimensional loop-brane energy fluctuations . You could also put it in the less-preferred section and then ask an admin or moderator to move your thread. This should leave a link in the original location. Since it is kind of a test of a new sfn feature/idea I think it would be fine for the staff to have this thread linked from two places. I'd put it in math and move it to physics in this case.

I don't think you can copyright an idea (how would you make sure that I am not thinking your copyrighted idea?). You can patent ideas in some sense by proving it to work in general and then having the patent also covering similar devices. Copyrights exist for publications. Usually when you publish a scientific paper you give away the copyright to the publisher (but in practice they often still grant you some rights, particularly to also publish the contents on a free-to-download server). I am not sure what you mean about the quotes. I think if I say something in public then I can hardly charge people for repeating what I said in public.

You should really not phrase it like this unless you can show me a point in space that is infinity meters away from a source of your choice. If there is no such point then statement about the gravitational field at a non-existing point is somewhat pointless (pun intended).

I think that it's simply definition that all within one standard deviation (15-20, I think) of the average score (100) are considered being of average intelligence. Well, I'm not sure to what extent it justifies making fun of people. Particularly if they are likely to be hurt. Also, I was not specifically asked about my opinion. But in case you are really interested, then here's a few points that in my opinion are worth critical consideration: 1) The only objective measure of your IQ is the test you did, giving 95 (I do not to consider tests offered on-line - but that has nothing to do with you). So while it may be possible that the test is flawed, you had a bad day or whatever, there is more reason to assume your IQ is around 95 (one objective reason, to be precise) than to assume your IQ is much higher than that (zero objective reasons). So logically ("logic" meaning without involvement of personal feelings, not as being based on some formal set of axioms) it seems more sensible to assume your IQ is 95. 2) IQ tests measure the ability to answer questions in an IQ test. Of course those tests do not exist for themselves but it is assumed that the skills required to perform well in IQ tests are relevant for other tasks, hopefully even some useful ones, too. I'm no expert on IQ tests but skills being tested do -as far as I know- include things like thinking in 3D (pretty objective criterion, I think), pattern recognition and logical grouping of words and objects. The reason you gave for believing you were more intelligent than the average is that you have a different, in your opinion more important, goal in life than the others. Well, your attitude towards life might be better than theirs - I tend to disagree, but that's just my personal view. But your goals in life are simply not what IQ tests measure so that statement is pretty meaningless, here. So it comes across that you have a very simplified if not naive view of what IQ is, somewhere along the lines of "high IQ = good", "low IQ = bad". That really doesn't make the self-evaluation of your IQ look very rigid. 3) There is no reason to assume that the average reader of your post, say Severian, has an IQ above the average. In fact, there is reason to assume that the average reader has an average IQ (surprise, huh?). So it could be considered somewhat offensive of you to come around and say "oh no, if I really was as stupid as you, then my life would be totally ruined. Please tell me this cannot be true. I don't want to be an alcoholic moron like you." To answer your original question: I don't know exactly what your dreams are. And that they "include rational thinking and natural intelligence" is very unspecific - I assume that your dreams are also a bit unspecific. So just two rather broad comments: - Intelligence might have an influence, say in Mathematics or Physics. But according to my experiences, the contributions from intelligence and from efficient serious work style tend to shift strongly towards the latter after school - in an ever-increasing manner. I also do not see why the skills tested in an IQ test should be the ones required or (most) beneficial for what you want to do later. - At some point you'll get more important objective feedbacks than an IQ test. Grades in university exams, for example. If they are good then screw that IQ test score. Those exams measure more important and relevant skills. If they are worse than you'd think they should be you should not talk them down ("in last year's exam I would have scored much better"), though. Valuing objective measures about how reality is over personal feelings how reality should be is, in my opinion, a very important ingredient (with tendency to "absolutely required") in figuring out "unsolved mysteries of the universe", say in natural sciences.

1) When the wavelength is shifted into the visible spectrum, then the result can be visible. I see no reason why this should be different here. Perhaps someone even knows a real-world example of appropriately-shifted light (emissions from fast atoms or something like that). 2) No. For the observer (or the sender) the relative velocity is not greater than the speed of light. EDIT: Perhaps it should be noted here that there's other sources of shifts in wavelength that can fit to astronomy. Gravitational shift and the shift caused by the expansion of the universe as a whole. My comments above refer to shifts caused by relative velocities since it is what you seemed to ask about. It does not necessarily have to be what the show talked about.

I'd try a rope (on which the weight hangs) and gears.

That scaling seems polynomial (more precisely: quadratic), not exponential.

Some in the rest of the world use calories . Energy content of food is regularly given in kcal which -to my amusement- is usually called "calories" (that is: not "kilo-calories").

For a start: I think U is not an operator but a terrible mess . Do you know what U means? I don't. Is it really the operator as it is given in the question/book or did you rearrange some letters? E.g. if U was [math] \frac{\sin \theta}{\cos \theta} \frac{d}{d\theta}[/math] then f would obviously be an eigenfuntion.

It's even worse: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2Fx+for+x%3D0 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-1%2Fx+for+x%3D0 To explain why I consider that even worse: 1 is the correct limit for 1^(1/x) when x goes to zero. So the function is not defined there but at least the limit exists. In contrast, the limit of 1/x when x->0 does not exist and can as well be the negative of the value claimed by alpha when zero is approached from the left, i.e. when approaching zero from the negative values. Funny that my links get cast into an [ url] ... [ /url] box automatically. EDIT: Clarified "from the left".

Possibly neither. You cannot plot all the infinite pairs (x,y=f(x)) in an interval but only a few. If the program just draws the function value at some roughly equidistant points x_i, then there's a chance that none of them equals 0.5. Btw.: There is no reason to assume a spike shape. Your function is one everywhere except at x=0.5 where it is not defined -> no non-zero slope anywhere. Edit: Corrected x=0 to x=0.5

Do you consider your points as being required in addition to a university degree or as a replacement for it? And have you ever met a person claiming he/she is not a critical thinker?

What about Pi?

Bosons, not Baryons. Baryons, which Severian mentioned above, are something different: The baryon number is basically the count of quarks in a given substance (divided by three). The lepton number is the number of leptons (usually electrons) in a given substance.

Agreed. As a general comment on other posts: Do not confuse "matter" with "mass". That's two different things.

What's the definition of matter? One relatively common definition is "stuff that contains fermions". So you could say that the number of fermions contained is the amount of matter.

The volume occupied by a particle is the average distance between particles to the third power.

I'd certainly appreciate a higher level of scientific education if it came for free. But I personally see deficits in much more important things on a much more basic level relatively often.Last semester, two of the students on my tutoring group (university students, not pupils) were barely able to write a single sentence that was grammatically correct and had some actual content. I'd claim that the majority of people (including me) would be unable to find most of the world's counties on a map or know what the human rights are or actually say. Considering such ignorance about the world we live in I find it pretty insignificant if someone does not know what DNA, a human cell or an atom's nucleus is. Summary: Dunno it it just you. But it's not me.

Assuming you meant "matter is conserved only in non-nuclear reactions": The example you provided (electron + positron) is a non-nuclear reaction as there is no atom's nucleus involved. In the sense of my understanding of conservation of matter (see below) this would of course still be somewhat true as electron+positron does conserve the amount of matter . But then, I wouldn't know of any nuclear reaction violating it, either. There is quite a few other conservation numbers existing, some depending on context some being conserved in all known processes. Conservation of fermion number seems to be the most appropriate to the question for me. Particle physicists usually call something matter when it contains fermions - to my surprise I've found the same definition of matter in Atkins: Physical Chemistry, btw. If in that spirit you'd take the fermion number as a measure for the amount of matter and anti-particles are given the negative fermion number of their respective particle partners (1), then1) The total amount of matter is conserved in all known processes (2). 2) Matter can in principle be destroyed by anti-matter. (*): This is according to the Standard Model of particle physics. As far as I understand neutrinos being their own anti-particles (Majorana spinors) is at least being considered. In that case, you could probably not give them a (non-zero) fermion number. I could imagine processes like tau -> tau-neutrino + quark + anti-quark being possible. This would then violate fermion number and hence conservation of matter in the sense I talked about. (**): I am not familiar with qft bound states so strictly speaking I can only talk about processes involving free elementary particles. Summary: I think a sensible definition of the amount of matter (if you wanted to count it) is the number of fermions. Since anti-particles are given negative fermion numbers and fermion number is conserved, I think that matter is indeed conserved, then. Alternative measures of the amount of matter already mentioned are the amount of energy which is also conserved, or the amount of mass (which can be a bit delicate) which might not be conserved (depending on how one exactly counts mass).