Severian

The problem with all these media hyped stories is that we really don't know what actually happened. The media may be blowing it out of proportion to create sensation. What is he had punched her in the face? Would that be deserving of prosecution? I would say yes, although it is still silly to put him on the sex offender's register (which I disapprove of anyway).

The problem is that there was no centre (as has been discussed many times on these forums in the past). Everything is moving away from everything else at the same speed, so there is not prefered spot. (There is however a prefered frame, caused by the CMBR, but that is a different issue.)

Do you have any evidence for this, or is this just pointless unscientific speculation dressed up as fact?

I don't think anyone really understands what happened at the the Big Bang. Extrapolating back in time to t=0 is equivalent to extrapolating to infinite energy, and our theories currently don't work for such high energies because we don't have a quantum description of gravity. Our current theories can get very very close to t=0 (in a linear time sense), but cannot get to t=0. It may be theat the final theory we come up with has no singularity at all - who knows?

Heh, except I completely failed by misreading the poll title. I thought it said in twelve months but just noticed it was 2 years. I think that will make your 500 a better guess (but leave mine at 620 for fun).

Xenu

How sure are you that this effect is not just your choice of words? Some word become fashionable in the titles of papers while others die out, but that may not be indicating a shift in field as such. For example, as research continues, the term M-theory may be too general to include in a title, and a more appropriate title would have a greater degree of specification of the model (to distinguish it from the other 1000+ papers). You probably need to investigate other keywords too.

First of all, different particle state in string theory aren't just different vibrational modes. That doesn't work because it would only predict zero or Planck Scale masses. So the masses of the low energy particles have to be made in a different way. Secondly, the Higgs boson has very little to do with String Theory.

No - they have more differences. This comes back to the thread the other day about how do you define a particle. Is a quark just a quark or should we say 'down quark' and 'up quark' etc? Really up and down quarks are past of the same isospin doublet. Think of it as a vector with two entries - the upper entry we call the up quark while the lower we call the down quark. We distinguish them in this way because they have different values of 'isospin'. (Technically the up and down quarks are different fundamental representations of SU(2).) But really there are three different colors of quark: red, green and blue. So there are 3 up quarks and 3 down quarks. (Tehnically, each of these is a different representation of SU(3).) Then there are 3 copies of this repaeted at hight mass - we call these generations. So totalling it all up we have 2x3x3=18 different quarks! Although only 6 different names since we class the different colors as the 'same particle'. Goodyhi11 is partly right in that the reason that we don't call the different colored quarks as different articles is because they have the same mass, and we are a bit prejudiced about mass. We still don't understand why they have different masses.... A side not: even though the quark is classically point-like, since it have a color charge it will have a constant cloud of gluons around it, so in terms of observations the quark has structure (as does the photon, electron etc).

I agree. Their accelerations weren't identical because there were different pauses between them. Sorry, maybe I explained that badly before - what I was trying to say was that the acceleration lets you tell the brothers apart. If the accelerations are such that you cannot tell them apart then they must have aged the same amount.

This is actually a rather interesting statement because it is almost correct. The mass of fundamental particles has nothing to do with their vibrations that we know of. The mass is just defined by their coupling to the Higgs boson - we just make a conjecture that that is what (fundamental) mass is. But this is just a small amount of the visible mass in the universe. Take a look at the proton. The proton isn't fundamantal - it is made up of three fundamantal particles called quarks. Its mass is about 1000MeV (no need to worry what an MeV is, its just a unit), but the quarks only have a mass of a few MeV. So where does all the other mass come from to provide the mass of the proton. This is dynamical mass and it is a bit similar to what you were suggesting - it comes from the vibrations of the quarks. Remember the relation between mass and energy, so if you have vibrational energy, that can look like mass when you stand a bit away and squint at it. As already pointed out though, the vibrations don't create gravity itself. It is just that the gravity acts on the mass/energy of these vibrations. To answer your initial question, one could in principle create mass via the interactions of other particles. So you can write down an interaction with the graviton which contributes to the mass of a particle (I think, but I would have to check to be sure). But since gravity is such a weak force, this contribution would be tiny and no where large enough to provide an explanation to where mass comes from. (My gut feeling is that it would be E2/Mplanck where E is the energy of the particle and Mplanck is the Planck scale, but I am not sure about this.)

I would rather say that the velocity makes the age difference and the acceleration lets you see it.

I am using "appear" because age is not a frame invariant quantity. They have different ages depending on the frame of the observor. Feel free to us 'is' if you like but I tend to think of true age of a person as being in the person's frame ('rest age' if you like). That depends on who does the accelerating. Basically, if you can't distinguish the motions of the two brothers (so they do the same accelerations) they should be the same age when they meet.

Yes, obviously the IRA funding didn't come directly from the US government, but I am fairly sure that if a rich UK businessman started giving money to Al'Qaeda very publiclly, the US would be baying for his blood. And I am quite sure the UK would arrest him. Why should we help you with your problems when you turned a blind eye to ours?

Only in the minds of pseudoscientists....

So why is everyone picking strange? (Other than because is is 'awesome'....)

So if Americans knew about IRA atrocities, why did the majority of the IRA funding come from the US? It seems a little bit empty to be fighting a war on terrorism with one hand whilst funding it with the other.

If there is no acceleration how will you compare their ages? One or both must be in a different frame from the observer so you cannot do a fair comparison. For example, if the observer is on the Earth's frame, the travelling twin will appear younger, but if he is travelling with the spacefaring twin, the twin on Earth will appear younger. If he is travelling at the average velocity of the 2 twins, they will appear to be the same age.

You directly link Christianity with ID and then ridicule it.

Don't you think that equating a spagetti monster with christianity might be regarded as offensive? Shall I start a similarly offensive thread about other people's beliefs in say democracy? The fact of the matter is that Chritian creationism should be taught in schools, along with the saliant aspects of other major religions. It should not be taught as 'science', but an understanding of other people's beliefs is something the west could really use right now.

I'll stick to my home made nukes thanks....