Severian

They may not sell as pets, but with a little garlic and wine sauce....

No - not really. I just said "appears" because cosmology has traditionally not been a very exact science. The 14.2 still has quite large errors on it (and quite a lot of inherent assumptions) but it is looking pretty firm. Of course, the need for dark energy in our current cosmological models may make some people uncomfortable.

If you mesure time as in the conventional Big Bang model (with a singularity and a creation of time) then the Planck time is 10-43s after the big bang. We don't know what happened at this point since we would need a theory of quantum gravity. We start to know what is going on after about 10-9s. Earlier than that is just speculation. Incidentally, the universe appear to be 14.2 billion years old or so.

Kinoshita, Maskawa, Wu, Yukawa, Ting, Koshiba, Tomonaga, Yang, Chandrasekhar, Bose, Giri, Raman ....

How wonderfully niave! Why do you think the US won the cold war? It was because capitalism was more successful as an economic system than communism. The US did not win because its citizens are more patriotic. Money is what drives world events....

I think you guys have the wrong idea about the big bang. (I think you have been reading too much Hawkings.) The model of the big bang which you seem to be discussing is the one where there is a singularity at the 'big bang' itself. In this model, time is created along with space, so there is no 'before the big-bang'. There are lots of other models too though, and in many of them there was time (and spce) before the big bang. The problems is really that certain scientists, who are more interested in money than in truth, try to sell books explaining their opinions by misrepresenting them as fact. The fact is, we don't know what happened when we go too far back in time....

Well, it could have been a race between capitalism and communism.

That is hardly a valid concern. I am sure that a Nazi would find the desire to wipe facism off the face of the Earth offensive' date=' but who cares? There are lots and lots of people who were born in the land now occupied by Israel who are not Israeli citizens and who are not even allowed to live there. There is also rampant racism enshrined by the state against anyone who is not Jewish. No it wasn't. The holocaust was fuel on the fire (so to speak), but Israel in Palestine was being seriously proposed way before WWII. In fact, Israel was created mainly because Britain, who controlled the territory, caved in to terrorists. Do you honestly think the Jewish people in Britain or the US were in any danger of another holocaust?

Well... yes. At least it was stupid to do it for nationalist reasons.

Why would I support someone who has a viewpoint contrary to my own, just because they are of the same nationality? When I say 'stupid' I am meaning that it brings about a course of action which is disadvantageous to my wellbeing. If I supposrt someone who disagrees with me because they are the same nationality then I risk having their viewpoint brought into practice, which in turn disadvantages me. Imagine a southern black man during the civil war. I would call him 'stupid' if he supported the confederacy just because he was a southerner - wouldn't you? You may find that you agree with the view of your government and therefore support them 100%. That is fine, but then you are not supporting them because they are British - you are supporting them because you agree with them.

Yes, it is a racial slur to say 'blacks play ball better' because it is creating an artificial segregation in an area which it is not relevant. Rather than seeing people as individuals the speaker has implicitly created a racial segregation - a 'them and us' mentality. In reality, there are large fluctuations in people's abilities to "play ball", irrespective of race, which will far outweigh any racial (dis)advantage. A possibly true (?) statement could be that the genes determining skin colour and ability to "play ball" may show a correlation in genetic samples, but this is badly misrepresented by the phrase "blacks play ball better".

Nationalism is also stupid. I have much more in common with my wife, who is German, than I have with the vast majority of UK citizens. So why would I back the UK over Germany? It doesn't make sense. If I want to reinforce my viewpoint on the rest of the world (which I don't) then I would be better backing an ideology rather than a nation. Since Isreal is already established and has already developed, then there is no need for zionism any more, is there? Or perhaps you want them to "develop" a little further eastwards?

Yeah, I know this book. It is a nice balance between popularisation and rigour. I would recommend it (to a non-specialist).

The conference title seems OK to me. Since Zionism is a form of nationalism and I see nationalism as a bad thing, I think "A World without Zionism" would be better than we currently have. The remarks about wiping Israel of the face of the Earth were a bit out of line though.

Yes, Kepler's 3rd Law is just a relation between the period and the semi-major axis length. You need Newton to incorporate masses.

This is a very good question, and I am not sure how they know. They can in principle measure the red-shift/blue-shift of an object, but this will only give you the velocity along the line between the object and the observer. Since the rotation is so slow, they obviously can't wait for it to move around a bit to see where it goes! There is probably an assumption of continuity somewhere, so another star in a similar orbit close by should have a similar velocity. Since the direction is slightly different, this should give a limit on the velocity of the original star in the direction perperdicular to line of sight. This is just a guess though...

House is good though.

84 here. The family history of heart disease shifted it down

There is nothing physical which would prevent this. After all, this is what is thought to happen in the period of inflation. He is also correct in saying that we don't have up to date information on the movements of galaxies since it takes a lot of time for the light to reach us. (As I am typing this, the sun might have vanished, and it would take 8 minutes for me to notice!) However, the idea that we would not be able to tell the difference is just ridiculous. We have amazingly accurate galactic surveys (e.g. http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/2dFGRS/ ) which would look completely different if the expansion had been recent.

To be technical, the "strong force" is really the residual force left over between the colorless hadrons (analagous to the Van der Walls force between nuetral molecules, which is a residual of the electromagnetic force). The fundamental force between quarks and gluons is really the "color force" or more properly Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD). The weak force has nothing to do with the strong force.

Only my virus scanner is scheduled and I want to keep that.

They are things like iTunesHelper.exe which is definitely not needed by windows!

Funnily enough, I am just teaching a course on relativistic quantum mechanics. It is a bit waffly because I wasn't allowed to use QFT, but the pdf is here: http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~dmiller/lectures/RQM.pdf (Please don't email me.)

Hmm... I tried the build in windows startup manager (via msconfig) but there are still loads of things that it starts up without asking (even though nothing is ticked).