Severian

That sentence structure doesn't say much for the High Potentials Society, the Poetic Genius Society or Mysterium... I am completely lousy at IQ tests - I think I don't have the patience. Since I think of myself as above average intelligence (doesn't everyone?) I have to conclude that IQ tests are flawed.

erm... what is this for exactly? PS: If you are going to include me (heaven forbid) please remember that I am merely a dancing cow.

The strong forces has two properties: confinement and asymptotic freedom. Asymptotic freedom happens when you look at the strong force at very short distance scales (or very high energies) and is saying that the force is becoming weaker and weaker as you go to shorter and shorter distances. This is as Greene says and actually won the Nobel prize a couple of years ago. It is somewhat counterintuative, since it is the other way around from quantum electromagnetism (QED) (where the physical picture of a cloud of particle anti-particle pairs around the charge works nicely). In fact, it is the opposite way around from QED because the force carrier of the strong force (the gluon) is has a 'color charge' and therefore interacts with other gluons, whereas the photon is neutral and doesn't interact with other photons. However, although the strength of the force increases as you separate color charges, eg a quark and a color matched anti-quark, it is still not manifest over macroscopic distances. This is because as you pull two color charges apart, you need to put an increasing amount of energy into the system (to overcome the ever increasing force). Eventually you will have put enough energy into the system to spontaneously create a quark-anti-quark pair (of the same color but not necessarily the same type) out of the vacuum in between the two charges. The anti-quark will shoot off towards the original color-charge while the quark will shoot off to the original anti-color charge, and form color neutral systems (mesons in this case, but more complicated things can happen forming baryons too). The anology which is often used is of a peice of elastic. The tension in the elastic increases as you pull its ends apart, until the energy you are putting in is enough to eventually break the strin, forming two new ends which snap back releasing the tension again. Therefore we can never have free quarks - they will always pair up as neutral hadrons (mesons and baryons) and this process is known as hadronization. The overall property is confinement, because quarks are always confined within hadrons. Since the macroscopic objects are neutral, the strong force is only observed at close range. The weak force is a bit different. Its force carriers are also charged (under the weak force) so it naively has the same properties as the strong force. So it decreases with decreasing distances too. However, there is an added complication in that (due to the Higgs mechanism) its force carriers are very heavy. They are so difficult to make and move about that doing anything with the weak force at range is basically impossible. This is also why the weak force is 'weak'.

You can find his paper at http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/other/ext/ext-2003-042.pdf Seems like bollocks to me - typical mumbo-jumbo of someone with no physics background getting confused about the semantics of words. (Notice there is no maths in the paper.) Now, it could be that he has a brilliant idea and is not very good at communicating it, but the obvious question to ask is "Is your theory testible?". Well, it probably isn't since one cannot ever make an infinitely precise measurement of a continuous quantity. The only possibility to disprove this assertion is to prove that time is quantised, which is the opposite extreme for Lynds p.o.v. This isn't going to happen in our lifetimes though. In fact, since Lynds theory has no mathematical footing to stand on, it isn't even really science....

I have been playing some mmorpgs lately (Everquest2 and World of Warcraft) but they are such a time sink - not really suitable for the casual gamer.

I remember in one of my final school exams I was the only person taking the exam. They passed round a list of all subjects available anywhere in the country and asked us to tick the ones we were sitting. I saw a subject that sounded cool and though 'yeah - I'll give that a try' even though they didn't teachit at my school. No-one noticed, and I got to sit the exam. Anyway, it was just me an the invigilator, who was the local church minister and knew me very well. The only problem was, he wouldn't bloody well shut-up - he nattered on all through the exam, despite me asking him several times to keep quiet....

You can't have a convincing evil laugh whilst being called Susan Gobblehat....

I would have called it the exponential attenuation law. I even taught this this year to a first year class - never new it was called 'Beer's Law'! (I thought Beer's law was describing how brain function declines exponentially with beer consumption... (jk))

Good luck! (Which University are you at?)

SO(3) is also isomorphic to SU(2), which is one of the fundamental guage groups of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Funnily enough, I am marking exam scripts today (which is why I am posting so much, I am bored silly). Marking exam scripts is always very depressing....

Interestingly, in your example, Dak's comment is also a strawman, since scientific evidence is not applicable to creationism.

If the voltage is proportional to the decay rate, then it will drop exponentially!

A layer of tin foil is enough to block beta particles (which are themselves electrons), so they are no more danergous than normal batteries.

Hopefully not for long. If it is there we will see it at the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to switch on in 2007.

For me it was fire. I have always liked to set things on fire and watch them burn. Then I wanted to know what fire really was, and it went from there.

Well, you have to ask what mass is first. In modern particle physics we think the fundamental mass of a particle is simply how strongly it interacts with a certain particle - called the Higgs boson. Since the photon doesn't (directly) couple to the Higgs boson, it has no mass. The Higgs boson (or rather, to be technically correct, the vaccuum expectation value of the Higgs field) holds the particle back, stopping it from travelling at c. Without the Higgs boson, all (fundamental) particles would be massless and travel at c (dynamical mass would still exist, but that is another story). Now, with that definition, it is much easier to believe in massless particles - they are simply ones which don't directly interact with the Higgs boson. This happens all the time in particle physics - for example, the photon doesn't interact with the neutron either.

I always find that slightly ironic. If their experiments had been better at the time, they could have detected the Earth's movement with respect to the CMBR, which would have confused things horribly. They basically came to the right conclusion by having the wrong experiment.

No. Just as QED itself does not cause the speed limit (ie there would still be a speed limit even if the photon didn't exist), gravity cannot cause the speed limit either. It is a direct consequence of Special Relativity.