Mr Skeptic

Imagine you have a pump pumping any volume of air at a certain pressure P into a chamber through a hole of size A1. On the other side of the chamber, there is a hole of size A2 larger than A1. What will be the pressure in the chamber at equilibrium pressure? Will it be the same as P?

Well you got that right: I misused an equation and got a singularity. Is there a singularity there? Does physics break down? No, I just misused an equation. This is a false dichotomy. Instead of correcting you, I shall let you try again. If you are unable to figure out a correct dichotomy, please tell me and I will give you the answer. Well good thing that there is no reason to expect that we should explain the universe from an infinitely dense point. In fact, that suggestion doesn't even make sense. In any case, we can describe an infinitely large reality, infinitely large in several senses of the word. So is larger than that?

I guess that makes me a top-notch historian. I too know how to use correct words, and can correctly name the leaders of a country! And with my new-found status as a top-notch historian, I can say with confidence that the miracles attributed to Jesus were not really that miraculous.

Well, I think you should call it something other than "Paul's Force" or "Bend Inertia". How about you name it "centrifugal force", after the centrifuge?

The mass-energy of the universe is the same now as it was at the start. What that number is, no one knows for sure. We don't even know if the universe is infinite or finite.

Yes, there are many equally rude words that could be used. That one person is being rude does not mean us moderators must allow everyone to be rude. Passive rudeness is very hard to deal with properly. Note that it is also somewhat rude to gang up 4 vs 1 or so in an argument and yet expect the outnumbered one to dedicate as much time to answer all questions. Incidentally, it is just this sort of situation where a one-on-one "duel" would be appropriate. In a one-on-one discussion it is very difficult to ignore a question, especially if repeated, since the other can force them to answer the question or end the discussion. On the other hand, the other is not outnumbered and flooded with questions and eventually demands.

There's only one possible source of morality -- the values which the individual chooses for themselves. Now, these choices will be influenced by things -- our evolutionary history as social animals gives most of us a set of inbuilt moral values and both the capability and desire to match the values of society. Of particular interest is mirror neurons, which help us understand others including the ability to feel what they are feeling (empathy). Empathy more or less necessitates a version of the golden rule, since making others feel bad will make you feel bad too. (eg, "love your neighbor a 10th of what you love yourself"). Another aspect is social conformity. To function as a social species, certain sacrifices to individuality are necessary or at least highly desirable. For example, people's vocabulary "naturally" drifts towards the vocabulary of the groups they spend time with. The same is true of values. For example, foods eaten as a baby tend to be preferred as an adult. Once you know a person's values, you can deduce moral behaviors for those people. For example, if you have two individuals, one of whom likes vanilla and chocolate equally and has empathy (or wants social standing), the other prefers chocolate. Suppose the first individual is in a situation where he is in charge of dividing a chocolate and a vanilla cupcake with the second individual. The correct moral choice is to give the second person the chocolate cupcake. Were the first person not to realize this on his own it would be extremely easy to convince him of it by rational argument based on his values and the values of the second person. As you can see, the morals are entirely determined from the individual's values, the situation, and reasoning. In many cases there is a conflict between values. In this case, finding the right moral choice will require more detailed knowledge as to which values are most important to the individual.

Hm, you're right. I think silicon-based life has an undeserved position in scifi. However, in a very hot or high pressure environment the solubility problem disappears. According to wikipedia, ammonia would be better than water for silicon life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

Wouldn't a neutron decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino (assuming a neutrino isn't its own antiparticle)? Would that be distinguishable from a slight error in the core temperature?

Well there are plans to have some cleaning done too (eg on the panels for our next Mars rovers). If we're making solar panels on the moon I'd think we'd be able to scrub them down every decade or so. On earth washing will be easier but will need to be done more often for efficiency. Another factor is wear and tear. Dust storms or hailstorms will do nasty things to your solar panels, for example. On the moon there's none of that, but micrometeorites might be a problem instead.

You don't even know what "living" means. Also, that's off-topic. And might as well try with silicon analogues too.

Well, look at it this way. Using the Newtonian representation of gravity you can come up with a formula for earth's gravity of F = GMm/r^2. Now if you go to r=0, you get infinite gravity -- a singularity! OMG THERE'S A SINGULARITY AT THE CENTER OF EARTH!!!! Or not. It just means the equation doesn't work in that range. In this example, the error is that the above equation only works so long as you are outside the sphere of mass, and as you go deeper you have to subtract from Earth's mass whatever mass is outside your radius. Thus, using the proper equations, earth's gravity at the center of earth is zero. If your equation gives you a singularity, it almost certainly means your equation is wrong not that there's an infinite point sitting there in reality.

Do you care what country you study in? I don't think many of us will know anything about universities in India. Maybe you can look through this website: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges

Maybe "commitment" would be a better word for the above. Love would have to have an emotional component, even if it is accompanied by commitment.

Well, we do tend to think of crooks and robbers and such as evil people, but they aren't necessarily as bad as people think. Some of them may have only turned to crime due to bad choices, such as owing a big debt to nasty people. Getting stuck with them you can get to know them As to why then it would relate more to intensity than length, when people are under a lot of stress but don't crack, they can earn a lot of respect. Oh, and I think you meant adverse rather than diverse

I think I would classify psychology as a "soft science", where the "soft" part is because of the difficulty in making rigorous predictions due to the complexity of the system being studied. Whereas in the "hard" sciences making a wrong prediction trashes your theory, in psychology a wrong prediction could easily be due to bad luck in your sample. While this sort of problem could theoretically be fixed by increasing the sample size, it turns out that humans are expensive to experiment with, so sample sizes must be small despite the high probability of getting poor results. And so, while many psychologists try their best to do science, it really isn't all that obvious if someone is instead just making up a bunch of BS. This will eventually change as the science matures and as more technology becomes available (see work on mind/machine interface, neural net simulations such as the Blue Brain Project, etc) that will give us more direct access to the brain.

You said a large asteroid, not a tiny one. So take for example the asteroid Apophis, which has a slight chance of hitting Earth a few decades from now, and is big enough that we would want to deflect it if it were. It weighs about 2 X 10^10 kg, and to hit it with an amount of antimatter half that would be an explosion of 1.8 X 10^27 Joules or 430,000,000,000 megatons. Where you would get that much antimatter or how you would throw it at the asteroid would both be insurmountably problematic. The escape velocity of a large asteroid like Apophis would be about 0.14 m/s or 0.31 miles per hour. So long as you can get the fragments to move faster than half a mile an hour, they aren't going to reform into the same asteroid. This perhaps gives you an idea of how much overkill half its mass in antimatter would be.

A tank doesn't have a nuclear reactor. Using explosives in the rail gun round would reduce the explosiveness of the round and increase storage problems.

The bright side of the moon is the side that is in full daylight. This is why you only get lunar eclipses during a full moon and solar eclipses during a new moon.

It's not really all that surprising. We change decay rates of things all the time, by well-understood methods. Nuclear decay is hard to change because the nucleus is rather inaccessible. Silicon-32 decays by beta decay into Phosphorous-32, producing electron anti-neutrinos and electrons. If you were to provide the process with electron neutrinos, this should lower the energy barrier to decay. Although it is not entirely clear from the article what effect they're saying the neutrinos have, it would pretty much have to be speeding up of the decay.

You see if you can get back to where you started.

Values are subjective. So long as you know someone's values, you can objectively derive moral behaviors to maximize those values. For example, if I know someone who's values are doing whatever the Catholic Church says is good, then I can objectively derive moral behaviors from those values, even ones that they didn't think of themselves and then convince them of them through reasoning.

Well, anything that could wipe your memory will have to mess with your brain. How do you know it was specifically memory that was responsible for the change?

I don't think it's a realistic scenario. When people go hungry, their desire for sex and probably also fertility will drop. What you are suggesting is that we'd all die out due to spreading the food out evenly, and then actively killing people so they don't starve. Why not let the starvation kill people to save you the trouble? At least that is a passive system. Anyhow, the other solution is called Soylent Green.