Severian

Considering that SR is derived from first principles in pretty much all undergrad physics degrees, I very much doubt that there could be a mathematical mistake. This is without having to mention the overwhelming body of scientific evidence to support SR.

CP-violation (and thus T violation) is extrememly well studied now. The evidence for it is overwhelming. Would you care to explain your reasoning? The Standard Model is the best tested theory in science ever! There has never been an experimental test of the Standard Model which has failed. In fact, one of the major problems in particle physics today is that the Standard Model is too good, that it leaves very little room to find more aesthetically pleasing (or more predictive) models!

Let's have a couple of examples of why I don't trust anything that Dawkins says. From the first page of his book, 'the selfish gene': I don't think these really need much explanation. If he talks this much bollocks in the first page.... (That, of course, doesn't make ID in the creationist sense any less absurd.)

A particle travelling backwards in time is an anti-particle. This has nothing to do with attractive forces.

It emerged today that the Police were lying. He didn't look suspicious and he didn't run from the police, or jump the turnstyle or anything. All he did was run for the train. They just grabbed him and shot him 8 times in the head. I think they should crucify the cops responsible. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4159310.stm I voted no by the way. Can anyone who voted yes justify their decision in the light of the new info?

An electron will emit a photon, which will be absorbed by another electron. The photon passes momentum from one elctron to the other. It is a bit like firing a gun: since the bullet moves away at high speed it has lots of momentum, so the person who fired the gun feels a recoil and the person the bullet hits feels a push. The gun analogy breaks down a bit when you have different charges attracting, but if you imagine that the bullet could carry negative momentum, then you can imagine that the photon can create an attractive force too.

It's not tonsolitus - it is completely normal. Your tonsils are just collecting bacteria like they are supposed to do, and it is normal to have white build-ups. Otherwise that bacteria would be inside you, where it can do more harm. Just spit them out if they come lose - don't poke them with a q-tip. They can cause bad breath though...

I find this sort of thing absolutely appalling. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? If the 'sexual predators' have done something illegal which indicates that they are a danger to society, then they should be off the streets in a prison or mental asylum. They should only be let out when they are thought to no longer be a threat. That is what the legal system is for - to protect society, not to serve vengence. The very fact that they have served their sentences implies that our society has already judged that they are not a threat and that they have paid their dues. We can't just turn around and change our minds about the decision. and it is not good enough to lock someone up or restrict their rights simply because we think they might commit a crime. Hell, I think MetaFrizzics is a dangerous nutter, but I would defend his right to live free from persecution.

I nominate Cap'n Refsmmat under the 'idiotic' and 'troll' category, for this post: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=197431&postcount=1

I haven't heard of photons being produced necessarily in pairs, since an electron can emit a single photon. For fermions though (with half integer spins) you usually need to produce them in association with an antiparticle in order to satisfy conservation laws (eg charge conservation). So if you create an electron you usually create a positron along with it. Ignore Metafrizzics - he is talking bollocks again. The theory of particle anti-particle pair creation is very well understood.

Even if you could show that the MM experiment had flaws, you do nothing to explain why every application of special relativity could work if special relativity were wrong. The entirety of particle physics is built apon specail relativity and particle physics is being tested to incredible precision.

I want to comment on the old bugbear again: it is bad form to define mass in a non-covariant way. The mass of an object should not change with reference frame - the mass of an object is defined as what you would measure for its mass in its own rest frame. Let's call this 'm'. Then momentum of the object is [math]p=\gamma m v[/math] where [math]\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}[/math] and v is the velocity. Certain text books/teachers have a habit of absorbing the [math]\gamma[/math] into the definition of mass (lets call this m'), so [math]p = \gamma mv = m^{\prime} v[/math] where [math]m^{\prime}=\gamma m[/math] While there is technically nothing wrong with this, it is rather bad form and at odds with all the conventions used by scientists. It is better to define properties of objects which do not change with reference frame. So, mass does not change with reference frame, but the relation between velocity and momentum is non-linear.

It would have very small differences because the electroweak interaction does not conserve CP, but you probably wouldn't notice.

An antiparticle has the same mass as the particle.

Well, yes, in my line of work you need a PhD and 10 years of postdocs to get a professorship. So that is 10 years with temp jobs (after your PhD!) on crap pay, only to get a permanent job with crap pay. So if you are not doing it for fun, you need your head examined.

As far as fundamental physics which is currently being probed is concerned, the biggies right now are the Higgs boson, supersymmetry, dark matter, dark energy, the baryon asymmetry problem, and neurino masses/mixings. We think gravity is mediated by the graviton. This would be a massless particle which would travel at the speed of light. Light is the fastest thing out there because it have no mass. We understand why it has no mass - it is due to the imposition of a particular symmetry in the universe. Anything with no mass will go at the same speed, and anything with mass will go slower.

Yes, that is fine. Something with mass provides energy E=mc2 and then that energy is radiated away via E=hf. So the mass lost (by whatever gave the mass up to provide the energy) is hf/c2. (BTW, the lost mass is coming from several different fusion reactions.)

Good grief. If one more person asks this question, I think I am going to scream!

It's not my model. I was explaining how it is from a Quantum Field Theory perspective. As you can tell from the name, QFT describes everything as fields, which can thus display wave-like properties, but the fields are quantised so their energy comes in lumps, so we can think of it as particles. The fact that the fields are quantised is actually a big step. In plain old quantum mechanics, one only quantises the operators (the things which make the measurements) - this is known as first quantisation. So the position and momentum operators have weird commutation relations but the wavefunction (the field) is left as a classical object. In QFT they go one step further and quantise the the field itself. The field is then composed of 'creation and annihilation operators' (they are basically the coefficients of a fourier series) which now have commutation relations and can create or destroy quanta of the field itself. This is know as second quantisation. (Some people don't like calling it that, because we really should have quantised everything in one go rather than going down the blind alley of one-particle quantum physics.) I think the term particle is misleading because we tend to think of a little cannon-ball like object, which it definitely is not.

No - the field is still quantized.

Yes. It would be nice to write 9x1016J though.