Severian

As a brit, the thing that pisses me off most about the whole thing is the American attitude. They seem to think that they are on some kind of new crusade - that some unholy evil has been unleashed on the world and it is their job to 'cleanse' it. But lets be honest, the terrorists are a lot less of a threat than communism ever was, or even N Korea of many African countries. They are less of an issue even than the drug cartels imho. The only reason that they are being pursued so vigourously is because the 911 attack was taken so personally by the US people, and the only reason it was taken so personally was because it was so visually striking. Not a lot of people died in the scheme of things (much less than the number of civilians killed in Iraq since the end of the war). Restricting civil liberties to curb terroists is in my opinion much more damaging to the west than anything the terrorists could do.

Erm... well... they were terrorists! [my empahasis] lol! That is an interesting way to put it. Don't you think they stood for anything?

I am not sure what you mean. Are you confusing symmetry breaking via that Higgs mechanism with symmetry breaking in superconductors?

Neither did I. In fact I was screaming "Sink, God-damn-you!" at the screen... The bloody thing seemed to sink in slower than real time.

Top obviously. Is it probably the large top quark mass which initiates electroweak symmetry breaking.

If you could send information faster than the speed of light by using entanglement, then you would be able to send a message into the past too. But since you can't send it faster than the speed of light, you can't send it backwards in time either.

YT makes me feel all warm and fluffy! (I'm going to regret that, amn't I?)

It generally makes me uncomfortable. I find people often misread me (because I don't show my emotions often) and think I feel some way that I really don't. (My wife does this a lot.) I quite often don't correct their misunderstanding which just reinforces it I think. I was a bit mollycoddled by my mum when I was a boy, so I think I have developed an aversion to people showing me sympathy if I am a bit down or ill.

Well, the third one won the prize, so one would assume that that is best. (I am biased, so not a very good judge.) But they all have merit.

I think there is a difference between being perceptive to other people's thought and feelings, and actually feeling their feeling though some sort of empathic link (whatever that may be). I think I am quite perceptive, in that I know when people are down or worried or whatever, but I certainly don't empathize with them. (To be honest I am not a very 'nice' person, so it usually doesn't change the way I behave to them either.)

So no-one wants to know more about the Higgs boson or supersymmetry?

Nah, we don't want loser 'intellectuals' anyway. We only want dedicated nerds! (Who am I trying to kid - we'll take anyone!)

Actually, I am surprised by how 'normal' it all looks - my over-riding impression was that it looked just like modern conferences do (minus the hats). People get hyper because of the social interaction rather than anything else - you are cooped up in your office most of the year and finally you get to speak to people about your work. They looked like people who have just got out of a session of lengthy talks and are about to go off to the pub to chat about their work.

There was an excess in the expected signal for the Higgs boson at LEP at about 114GeV, at one point as high as 3 standard deviations, but with more data it went away again, so it must have been a statistical fluctuation. They will definitely see it at the LHC though. The Standard Model will not work above about 700GeV in energy if the Higgs boson does not exist and since the LHC will probe higher than that in energy, it is guaranteed to find something. Athiest is correct that supersymmetry puts a limit on the Higgs mass too. For the minimal model it is about 130GeV, but you can get it up to about 165GeV for non-minimal models. One of the more interesting things though is that you can decouple the Higgs boson slightly in these extended models, so that it coud be much lighter than the Standard Model 114GeV bound and not have been seen at LEP. As for the theorized Z' mass increasing with time, I must point out that the same thing happened with the top quark. Go look at papers from the eighties and you will see numbers like 20GeV banded about. In fact, the top quark was often used to criticize supersymmetry because supersymmetry needed a very high mass top quark of about 200GeV or so. People thought that was unnatural and therefore supersymmetry must be wrong. That is until they discovered the top quark at 180GeV....

Yes, but that is true not just of the surface but all the bits between the surface and the object casting the shadow. The shadow has to fall on something to be seen, and the interface on which it falls has non-zero dimensions.

Irrespective of the mechanism, it is still a projection. This is nothing different from the usual view of extra dimensions. If M-theory is correct, we are just a 4d projection in an 11d space. The shadow is still not perfectly thin though - like all physical manifestations it has a very small width - too small to see but there nevertheless.

In principle a foucalt pendulum would demonstrate a rotation, but in practice how fast it would rotation would depend on how quickly the universe where rotating. I would suspect it would be too slow to measure. More significantly, a rotation would be identical to an outward force eminating from the centre of rotation (since you have no external reference). I am fairly sure that this would be seen in the data if it were in any way sizable. Indeed, there doesn't even seem to be a centre in the data, nevermind a force coming from it.

It should have zero mass actually (otherwize gravity would have a speed of propagation < c, which would screw up lots of astro measurements). And the LHC has pretty much no chance of finding it - it could only see it in very special circumstances.

Uber genious at your service... 1. It is the complete opposite of a black hole. 2. Do you mean when a particle and anti-particle collide? If you do, then they annihilate and the energy goes into creating another particle. What particle they turn into depends on what the original particles were. For most particle-antiparticle pairs this is usually a photon, but it could be a gluon or a Z-boson or even (hypothetically) a graviton. Either or both of the particles could be virtual. 3. He dies. Long before he reaches the event horizon he would be ripped apart by the gravitational forces.

It could never be a method of generating energy, but it could be a means of storing it. I personally think we should be spending more money researching proton beam driven Thorium fission.

Lol! Have you been drinking? Your first and second sentences have no link to one another. If movement through space were absolute you should be able to measure it. You still have not explained how to do it - all you have explained is how to measure velocity relative to another object.

A photon mass wouldn't be enough. The limits on the photon mass are now very tight and it could not provide enough mass for dark matter. Also, as pointed out already, the rotation curves of glaxies would be wrong (although you could say that you have 2 types of dark matter). Also, what right do you have to be 'annoyed' by the inclusion of exotic matter? Quarks were 'exotic' when they were suggested - were you annoyed by them too? In fact most modern theories of particle physics need new particles in order to work (and explain current problems) and one of the problems is that they often predict too much dark matter. It is really easy to have dark matter in a theory - all you need is a neutral, colorless massive particle. As for photons exerting a force, what do you think electromagnetism is?

Of course gravity is a force. Anything which produces an acceleration (in any frame, inertial or not) is a force. Gravity definitely produces accelerations, and is therefore a force. (So the Coriolis force for example is also a force.) You are really questioning whether or not it is a fundamental force, ie. not just the result of some coordinate transformation. This is a better question because it looks to the untrained eye that it may not be, since everything is travelling in a straight line in a curved space-time. However, that is not the full extent of GR - you also need to change the curvature depending on the energy-momentum tensor, and it is this property which makes GR's gravity a force.

I had some little prick partially slash my tyre. It was just enough to make it weak but not actually deflate. The bloody thing exploded when I was doing about 60mph and I hit a tree. The cops treated it as attempted murder... (interestingly enough, with attempted murder you still lose your no claims discount)

You can't measure motion through 'space' because what are you going to measure it against? You can only measure movement relative to something else. And whether that something else is also 'moving' is a frame dependent statement. In your first post, if your train is moving towards the station at constant velocity, then it is not accelerating. Then, as Einstein pointed out, you may as well say that the station is moving towards the train.