Delta1212

You seem to be under the impression that probability isn't math.

So then yes, it's the difference between doing math and using a calculator.

You don't. And at the point of detection, you are detecting a point-like particle. You have to fire a lot of them at the detector screen to see the aggregate probability of the particle hitting any given position on the screen. When you are filtering the particles so that you know which slit they went through, the aggregate shows no interference. When you don't know which one each particle went through there is an interference pattern. So while you're detecting a particle, it must have wave-like properties because a classical particle would only be able to travel through one slit or the other, whether you knew which it was or not, and would not be able to interfere with itself.

There are two slits. A wave will pass through both and interfere with itself. A particle will pass through only one slit. If the experiment is set up so that you can tell which slit each photon passed through, there will be no interference pattern. If there is no way to determine which path each one took, there will be an interference pattern.

It sounds like the difference between mathematical modeling and simulation modeling in that case would be akin to the difference between doing math and operating a calculator.

Infinite mass in all directions would balance out, though.

You claim that GR provides no mechanism acceptable to a sensible, rational mind. You also claim that the inability to measure time dilation on a broken clock is a failure of GR. Perhaps we have different ideas of what is sensible and rational.

I gather together 128 friends and give them each a coin. They each flip their coin once every minute. If they get heads, they can leave. After one minute, half of them get heads and 64 are left. After two minutes, half of the remaining friends are left and there are 32 left. After three minutes there are 16. Four minutes, 8. Five minutes, 4. Six minutes, 2. After seven minutes, there is one left. Each coin has an individual probability of "decaying" after one minute of 50%. That leads to an exponential decay rate.

They would not actually be the same species, but you can have different species evolve similar features because of similar selection pressures. Dolphins are much more closely related to hippos than to sharks, but you can see how the environment created vaguely similar body plans despite starting from different points.

There's an on-going debate about that, and I tend to side against the sudden mutation school of thought, myself.

They didn't start next to each other, so they won't agree on when they started moving with respect to each other, and thus will both believe that the other's clock is behind.

The volume of an object has essentially no impact on it's gravitational pull unless it expands to the point that you are inside of it. If a star has 1 solar mass with a center of gravity 1 AU from a planet, the gravity felt by that planet will not change regardless of what the star does unless it changes one of those two qualities. Expansion and contraction will not change the mass nor the center of gravity, so unless the star expands to engulf the planet, the planet probably won't notice anything different about the gravitational pull it experiences.

There is nowhere near enough pressure within the Earth for fusion to take place there.

If the camera is in the box, it would, itself, be in a superposition of having recorded a live cat and a dead cat, and collapse to one of those options upon the opening of the box. An important point to keep in mind, though, is that Schrödinger's Cat is not a practical experiment. It was originally a thought experiment by Erwin Schrödinger meant to illustrate that the Copenhagen interpretation of superpositions was stupid, except that it got adopted as the go to example instead. We can't properly isolate something on the scale of a cat from any interactions for it to enter a superposition state. The superposition doesn't collapse because of an observation by a person. It collapses because it interacts with something else. If that something else is completely isolated from everything else, it will enter a superposition state tied to the first superposition, but the more things you have, the harder it is to isolate them, and a cat is made of quite a lot of things. As for the Schrödinger's Universe question, I suppose at that point you'd basically enter the Many World's Interpretation of QM since you'd have two different versions of the universe simultaneously? I don't know. It's a philosophical debate really, since it's not an actual, possible experiment.

Comparing asteroid impacts with cometary impacts is like comparing fireworks to nuclear missiles. Yes, they're both basically exploding rockets, and yes, you don't want to be next to either when they go off, but the scale is just a tad different.

How? What?

And, of course, a few hours after reading your post in that topic about mentioning Scotty in articles, I come across an article on Google news about quantum teleportation that referenced Star Trek in the first sentence. It also went on to explain quantum entanglement by saying that a qubit can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time, and since it's just one qubit, the 1 and 0 can't be separated so they're entangled. Popular science is fun.

Gravity isn't constantly generated energy. It does not, therefore, need to run out for energy to be conserved.

It'd still mostly be damage to the biosphere and some (geologically) brief climate effects. The planet itself would be largely unaffected.

What is time if not a measure of the rate at which things happen? Saying that time has remained the same but the rate at which all processes take place has altered by the same amount may give equivalent answers, but then how are you defining time?

An orbital and an orbit are different things.

The asteroid belt is not very massive. People picture it as this dense ring of asteroids, but two asteroids being within 100 miles of each other in the belt would be close together. It's very spread out, so the odds of a comet colliding with anything by chance is pretty small, and the odds of colliding with anything large enough to slow it down are even smaller. Jupiter at least has its gravity, but the mass in the asteroid belt is so dispersed that it doesn't generate enough to deflect anything.

This is a self-contradicting sentence.

It's rare that I've heard anyone back up a claim that Santa isn't real with specific examples.

A kilometer always equals a million millimeters. They are different terms for the same distance. Similarly, you can express the speed of light in different units (miles per hour, kilometers per day, meters per second, inches per year, lightyears per century), but it would always be the same speed. Now, relativity does state that different frames will measure time differently (and, consequently, measure distances differently). So on Earth, I might see a star as being 10 lightyears away. I see a spaceship blast off and travel toward the star at around 85% of the speed of light. So I'd see the ship take around 12 years or so to reach the planet. If I looked at the ship, I'd see it experiencing time at around half the rate that I experience it, so for them the trip would take about 6 years. Now, does making a 10 lightyear trip in six years mean that they see themselves as traveling faster than light from their perspective? No, because aside from time dilation, there is also the phenomenon of length contraction, so they only experience 6 years during the time I observe to be 12 years, but they also see the trip that I measure as 10 lightyears as only being 5 lightyears. So observers in different frames will measure the distance and time between events differently. However, the speed of light is always measured to be exactly the same in every frame. It's considered a constant because you will always get the same measurement no matter what frame you are measuring it from.