Martin

not to be sorry no urgency (I have a lot on my plate at the moment too)

http://www.allmoviescripts.com/scripts/10272177763f326892cd160.html I'm not saying it's a great script, or that it's not a great script. I'm not saying to rent the video or not to. I feel I know some of the people in "As Good as It Gets". And some of the dialog is (for good or bad) engraved in my memory. Like this----to see the context, scroll down about 45 percent of the page Zoe is a fan of Melvin's romance novels. She been dying to talk to him in person and finally gets her chance. Melvin is a hermit who writes hack purely for the money and hates real-life emoting. You see him trying to get away by pushing the elevator button---and wiping his finger to get rid of the germs he might have picked up from contact with the button. ZOE ...... You have no idea what your work means to me. MELVIN What's it mean? ZOE That somebody out there knows what it's like to be... (taps her head and heart) in here. MELVIN Oh God, this is like a nightmare. ZOE Aw come on, just a couple of questions -- how hard is that? As he hits the button, wipes his fingers, hits the button etc. ZOE How do you write women so well? MELVIN (as he turns toward her) I think of a man and take away reason and accountability. --------------- I find the scene memorable yet appalling. I wouldnt say it is a favorite. Does anyone else remember anything from this film?

to get the summary of Hawking's planned talk you go to that site and on the sidebar you click on "plenary abstracts" (where it says scientific program) because Hawking's is one of the plenary talks the summary is not terribly informative, here is a bit of it: "The Euclidean path integral over...[technical stuff]... Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon." *

Hi all, Here is the website with the program of the GR17 conference http://www.dcu.ie/~nolanb/gr17.htm the conference starts the 18th, next week there is a short summary of Hawking's planned talk available if you go to the site and click under "scientific program" where it says "plenary abstracts" Roger Penrose is also giving a talk (Friday 23 July) at GR17 called "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in theoretical physics" He gave a talk by the same name at princeton and you can listen to it online with some bad video. If anyone wants I have the links somewhere. It is a good talk, I thought it was really interesting. So they plan for that to be one of the public lectures at GR17. Hawking's approach to quantum gravity is called the "Euclidian Path Integral" or just "Path Integral" for short. It has some kinship with LQG, Simplex, and Spinfoam approaches. It would be great if he actually can resolve the paradox---which is a famous outstanding one. I am pessimistic that he will succeed in resolving it in a generally satisfactory way---but at least he will spotlight it. (I would advise him not to consider the bet decided and not to give Preskill the Encyclopedia yet, it aint over till its over)

OK' date=' then how do you square that with the fact that the deformed Poincare group converges to the usual symmetries for kappa large (as kappa goes to infinity) this is the point I originally tried to ask you about: You said: And I replied:

could you give a source please? this piques my curiosity because it is at odds with what I know of LQG

I like your vigorousness in reading the article (and sympathise in that respect) but I think you may be confused about something very simple. Your equation (12) is on page 11, right? On page 11 kappa has dimension of an inverse length-----or an energy, units permitting. You say kappa is an inverse energy. ----------------- but in an earlier post you spoke of kappa as an energy and said that for things to work it had to be small ----------------- now you are saying it is an inverse energy and for things to work 1/kappa has to be small ------------------ neither of your interpretations seem consistent but if you formulate a consistent one i'll try to understand. again I point you to page 3 where kappa is (as usual) an energy i.e. an inverse length (in geometrized units) and where kappa has to be big, not small, to get the classical limit of course i could be mistaken too---in any case hope you can sort the confusion out

so who is teaching the undergrad string course at Toronto this fall?

thanks whew!

hooray for the arXiv! hooray for preprints in PDF! sorry about that (it is really great to have immediate access to the latest research papers, though)

neat to have a university physics department nearby I'm just speculating but there might be a maximum size for spirals and if so, probably someone has tried to use it as one of the "standard candles" they use to check the distance scale a physical limit on the size for ellipticals would be less likely, I imagine, because astronomers see very massive elliptical-type galaxies formed by having smaller (typically spiral) ones collide and merge----superlarge ellipticals might be very rare because collisions are, but if you waited long enough you might see the big one in, say, Virgo Cluster gobble up all the others and be huge. horrible thought a maximum for all types might be too much to hope for (again I'm speculating) but a maximum for spirals might actually exist and be extremely useful as a check on the distance scale I should stop guessing and wait to hear some expert input. really nice that you have a neighborhood Uni

Hello J, I have inserted the authors of the articles you cited, to get an idea of what "introduction to DSR" you mean---I see a lot of articles and can get confused unless i see authors name, title of the article, and link. I think what you are reading is fine, though personally i would not recommend the 2002 one by A-C. If I had a chance to talk with John Moffat I would ask him about his latest paper, and the recent paper by Girelli, Livine, and Oriti which cites it. Here is the John Moffat article: Modified Gravitational Theory as an Alternative to Dark Energy and Dark Matter http://arxiv.org/astro-ph/0403266 Here is the Girelli Livine Oriti paper Deformed Special Relativity as an effective flat limit of quantum gravity http://arxiv.org/gr-qc/0406100 Here is another recent, closely related one by Lee Smolin and Jerzy K-G Triply special relativity http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0406276 Please dont misunderstand. I am not urging you read any of these three papers. but if I could talk with Moffat i would ask him if he sees any connection between Triply Special (either Smolin's or Girelli et al's) and what he is interested in. Girelli et al suggest a possible tie-in, but it seems very tenuous. i would like to know Moffat's take on it. I believe I personally would not want to read anything written about this stuff before 2004----but I might change my mind. It has been written about for many years but what I see happening now looks like something new opening up. However I'm open to suggestion so if you find anything you think is particularly enlightening on it, written earlier, please let me know. BTW If you really are posting from Toronto then I shall consider you to be the (not winkler!) whom i recall from other forums. the style and turn of thought is familiar but I now realize it is that of you and (not winkler!)

you may be on to something one could say "what's to explain?" but then one could say that about star sizes too (and I think with star masses the feeling is that one ought to try to explain why they fall in a fairly narrow range, a few orders of magnitude, instead of varying all over the place) have to think about it massive ellipticals form by merger of spirals, what one wants to know is why spirals are pretty much the same size---it might be as you say. maybe someone here knows

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=65900#post65900 here is an example of someone expressing a low opinion of people at this site----or declaring that they do not understand such and such, which the person assures us he does it is possible that the delusions of superiority exhibited are just that, delusions but that doesnt matter the population at a science board is volatile. It doesnt help to knock the site and say there is no one here who can understand whatever. Maybe someone does, or maybe someone who does will drop in unexpectedly and comment! Having you around saying "Nobody here understands Quantum Gravity!" does not make the place more inviting to newcomers and visitors. But maybe they will not pay any attention to you and join in regardless. I think this paper by Chryssomalakos and Okon is fascinating and i would like to find someone here at SFN who wants to discuss it. I will say more about it, I guess, to make it clearer why it is so interesting. there is a move afoot to extend special relativity and observational astronomers are getting set to test the premises of any extension it doesnt do any good to disparage those working on extensions--- like Lee Smolin, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman, Etera Livine, Daniele Oriti, Florian Girelli, these people (Chrysso and Okon)---and say they are not "first rate scientists" We will see. Something besides status is at stake. People are going to try to extend relativity so as to keep the Planck length invariant (as well as the speed of light) because several approaches to Quantum Gravity appear to call for this. And the observational people are going to test it.

yes there we are! post #5 in that thread, by swansont explains the energy between two conducting plates! http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=58951#post58951 the key point is that it varies with (as the fourth power of IIRC) the separation so that pulling the plates apart, ever so slightly, increases the vacuum energy between them----and requires work, implying an attractive force now I have it, thanks Sayo, having trouble with the url

did the Casimir effect get discussed in this connection? it seems to me IIRC that the vacuum energy in the space between two conducting plates varies as the fourth power of the separation between them, and this was checked experimentally maybe we dont know how to calculate the vacuum energy (or perhaps someone does and i didnt hear about it) and there seems no reason to imagine that we could utilize it, in any case! but even tho we may not be able to calculate it or utilize it we still know something------that between two conductors the amount of energy is affected by the dimensions of the gap IIRC the experiement was done with two gold spheres----could have used flat plates too I guess anyone want explain or clarify? is this relevant to the thread-starter's question on ZPE

Chryssomalakos and Okon just posted this paper http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0407080 I think it has an important result that completes a major paper by Kowalski-Glikman and Smolin called Triply Special Relativity K-G and S show that you can jack relativity up to where 3 quantities are constant (same for all observers)----speed of light of course, that was the original circa 1900 modification, bending the square newtonian framework so that c is the same for all observers----but then you can further bend the symmetries so that two more quantities are invariant: a mass and a curvature Now C and O have shown that you cant jack it up any farther. What Kowalski-Glikman and Lee Smolin did last month is the limit Here's the link to K-G and S paper from June 2004. http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0406276

If i remember, most galaxies are within a few orders of magnitude of ours in size a lot of galaxies (most I think) are greater than 1/100 of Milkyway mass and less than 100 times Milkyway mass Why should that be? http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0407238 There also seems to be a tendency for stars to be between 1/10 and 100 solar masses. I dont know of any stars bigger than 100 solar masses. Why are stars that uniform in mass? I know there are some simple answers in the case of stars. Too small and fusion wont start and it wont shine. too big and its own starlight blows it apart. But what about galaxies? Has anyone thought through why galaxies are so similar in size? I'm not talking globular clusters----they are globular clusters why arent there lots of little spiral galaxies with only a million stars apiece why arent there lots of galaxies a million times more massive than ours? James Binney an astronomy professor at Oxford has some ideas, in that link I gave just now, maybe some other people do too. I dont. the question just occurred to me to wonder about.

glad you like it! around page 7 if I remember right there is a metaphor of animals on the back of a whale the gravitational field because it is the geometry of spacetime in a certain sense IS spacetime and is a good place on which to define the fields and particles of matter this can be a hard idea to grasp, I found that metaphor or parable, although very simple, helped me and so it remains one of my favorite parts of the book I like the history of attempts since 1940s or so to quantize general relativity (in effect to quantize gravity since GR is the prevailing theory of gravity)------the history section is at the end in an appendix a lot of the book can be read without attending too much to the formulas and it still conveys insights--I think he's a good writer anyway, hope you enjoy it!

no problem! I hope the impression I'm getting (of rapid SFN growth) is well-founded regards

I thought that would be obvious. I like the site and want to watch it grow right now there is no regularly updated indicator of activity that is easy for an ordinary citizen like me to check total posts since inception doesnt mean anything to a newcomer so probably the best index of activity is some running-average posts-per-day.

SFN is in a period of rapid growth IMHO A small stat box has been taken down, i see. but can't attribute any meaning to that Between 11 November 2003 and 9 May 2004 the average posts per day was about 139 In the last 2 months it has been 232 (by my calculation) Here's the data on which that is based: total posts on 5 November 2003 was 25,000 total posts on 9 May 2004 was 50,000 total posts on 9 July 2004 was 63,937 a monthly average posts-per-day seems like a good measure of activity (or a bi-monthly average) Here's what my sig has been lately (I think I might change it so this is just to save the information) [acr=82 on 6 July, 12:30 PM]most users I've seen online[/acr] [acr=16 on 21 June, 3:10 PM]most members online[/acr] [acr=405 on 7 July]most posts per day[/acr] this 405 is what I've noticed firsthand----there is also an official figure of I think 628 posts on 29 June 2004 (no reason to question it, I just recorded what I personally happened to notice) I'm now thinking that running average posts-per-day are the most straightforward way to track growth. so I am going to change my sig to reflect that

your question about Ch and J? there does not need to be any difference in tongue or lip positions in phonetics there is a difference between "voiced" and "unvoiced" consonants and between "aspirated" and "unaspirated" consonants to make Tee and Dee you can use the same tongue position, but you must vibrate the vocal chords in your throat to make it a Dee Dee is the "voiced" version of Tee Also between Ch and J----like between Church and Judge the J is the "voiced" version of the Ch when you say Judge your vocal chords must already be vibrating at the start of the word but with Church you wait---no vibration at first---and the throat only starts when you make the vowell sound "ur" Between B and P the difference is "aspiration"----how much air you blow out while your lips are doing essentially the same thing P is the "aspirated" version of B -------------- so moral of story, everclear, is that tongue and lip positions arent the whole story----it was a "systematic" question: sign of an orderly mind?

Not Even Wrong math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/ John Baez: This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html Ned Wright: Cosmology FAQ http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html Usenet Physics FAQ http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/