Severian

What is rep power? A great big circle jerk, if you ask me.

No, certainly not. Obama should feel free to refuse any interviews he pleases. (Also interviews with legitimate news organizations.) I had thought his "calling them out", as you put it, was more than just refusing an interview. Sorry, I am not American, so hadn't really been following this story.

I agree, but why do they have to be an "impartial news organization"? Why can't they be an organization for promoting anti-government protests, if that is what they believe in?

I my opinion, only baisc quantum mechanics should be in the "Quantum Theory" subforum. Everything that goes beyond, i.e. quantum field theory, should be in Modern and Theoretical Physics.

The US government are entitled to their opinion, but it is rather bad form I think to focus in on one news channel. And they would not be justified in taking further action (not that they will). Having vocal opposition to the government is, in my opinion, a good thing. There was plenty of vocal opposition in the media when Bush was President. Besides, the people who watch Fox news are probably lost to sanity anyway.

I suspect you meant to say you don't support the BNP. I agree with the sentiment though (and I also don't support the BBC, but that is another thread).

I don't have any energy on a Saturday morning.

Anyone saying "I know i´m not average, im much more intelligent than the people around me, my goal in life is to figure out the unsolved mysteries of the universe", especially in a forum they are new to, deserves to be mocked. Incidentally, why were you visiting a shrink? It seems we have multiple reasons for you not being average.

Does it have to be something true?

He lied. This is a science site, so let me provide evidence.

I think gravity is rather essential if you are going to start discussing non-inertial frames. I don't see any way around that

Why 'no'? What do you mean by 'in reality'? Whose reality? You have made no statement about the geometry of the space in which you sit (you have not specified a metric), so you don't know what gravitational forces you have. The space could be curved in such a way that you do feel a force, which you interpret as centrifugal and therefore insist that you are spinning and the black barrel not. I think you have implicitly assumed that you are in a flat spacetime, and it is that assumption which is fixing your frame. In a different reference frame (with relative acceleration), your geometry will be different (as given by GR).

That is only in a statistical sense with lots of ensembles. If you only have one, then you always end up with a single entry from somewhere in the distribution. Also, the same thing would happen backwards. If I had lots of ensembles, all of which end in the same configuration, evolving backwards in time, I would find the ensembles would also develop into a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.

I have always really hated these "arrow of time" entropy discussions, since they just seem all wrong to me. Entropy is a property of large ensembles, while time must have a valid definition on a microscopic scale. The usual argument is that if you have an ordered system it will tend to become disordered over time, so you can use the disorder (entropy) to distinguish which way time is flowing. But what do we actually mean by 'ordered'? If I have N identical balls, say, bouncing about in a closed box, undergoing elastic collisions, I can specify the system with 6N numbers (a position and velocity for each ball) at any time t. It doesn't actually matter where the balls are, or what they are doing, every configuration is described by the same number of numbers, so in some sense they are all equivalent. In the macroscopic sense, we then define 'order' as states where balls have like properties. For example, they have the same velocity or x-coordinate or somesuch, and disorder is then when there is no correlation between them. As time passes, this correlation is lost, so they become disordered. The reason they become uncorrelated is that there are many many more configurations where they are uncorrelated than those where they are correlated (as defined by the original set-up), so it is much more likely that the balls will end up in an uncorrelated state. Technically, it is an opening up of 'phase-space'. However, this opening up of phase-space has nothing to do with the arrow of time. It is only opening up as we move further from the boundary condition. We define order according to correlations we set when the balls start out their motion and then define disorder as being different from that. But in actuality, irrespective of what the balls are doing at the end, I could always write down their positions and velocities in a little book and declare that to be 'order' (they are correlations just the same). Then the original state is actually disordered (since it doesn't conform with the numbers in my book) and entropy has decreased with time (moved from a disordered state to an ordered one). In terms of the more formal definitions of entropy, my above viewpoint also holds, since it uses a measure of all possible configurations available to the balls. If I take my boundary condition to be the end state of the balls (call that ordered) and ask what configurations of ball at some time in the past could lead to the 'ordered' configuration, I would find that the number of configurations in the past grew as I moved further into the past. Just as before, I am opening up my phase space. So, in my view, entropy increases as we move away from our boundary condition. It is irrespective whether that is forward in time or backwards. We only consider it as increasing with time because of our propensity to set boundary conditions and watch a system evolve, rather than asking what configurations could have led to a final boundary condition. I therefore come to the conclusion that, as far as entropy is concerned, there is no asymmetry in time, other than one of perception.

That is an interesting statement. Al coins on Earth feel a centrifugal force from the Earth's rotation. Does that mean they can't spin? ...just a sec... ...just tried it, and they do spin, so you must be wrong. (Isn't observational science wonderful?)

It is a fair enough question I think, and well enough posed. There is no need to involve electromagnetism in the discussion. The 'true' answer (to the original question "Something knows if the rod is turning or, the barrow is turning. What is this something?"), in my opinion, is "the observer". Only the observer 'knows' which is turning, because it is only his subjective opinion. What do I mean by that? I mean that without an observer, there is no difference. The turning of the rod and the turning of the barrel are indistinguishable. And to some extent they are even indistinguishable with an observer, so it is just his point of view that matters. If we only allow Special Relativity for a moment, then we instantly see the distinction. One frame is inertial and one frame is non-inertial. The observer can tell if he is in a rotating frame or not because of the presence or otherwise of the centrifugal force, and this defines whether or not the barrel is rotating. However, more correctly we should invoke GR, and admit that any apparent centrifugal force is possibly not a centrifugal force at all, but maybe the effect of curvature of space-time. So even if he feels the force, he may not be rotating. In other words, the answer to the question is that there is no absolute sense of whether the rod or the barrel is rotating. It is simply a matter of reference frame.

A score of 100 would be average. If you scored 95, then you are below average. So don't worry, you aren't average after all!

Point on the colours: In most of the world red is regarded as left wing while blue is right wing, so they got the colours the right way around. I always think of it as weird that the US puts them the other way around. I really don't like this at all. It is very obviously made from a left wing slant, and basically gives a stereotyped view of what a left-wing person thinks are the values of the right (as bascule pointed out). I think this sort of thing only serves to create mistrust and partisanship, where we should be trying to take the best of both 'sides'.

I agree with Swansont. I suspect this question was set up by a non-native English speaker.

Incidentally, these authors are well respected scientists and I know Holger personally. He can be a little off-the-wall at times, but it is good to have him around to put the cat among the pigeons occasionally.

That would make the Higgs matter then, since the doublet is a fundamental representation of SU(2). Yes, and for this reason I don't like the distinction. Also, it has always bemused me a little that we say that the Standard Model includes 3 forces (QCD, weak and electromagnetism), and we never consider the Yukawa interactions as a force (ie. exchanging Higgs bosons). Although it has a very different origin, it is an interaction of fermions with bosons which allows you to exchange said bosons, resulting in a change of momentum for the fermions. Isn't that a force, by any definition?

Conservation of fermion number is probably a bit besides the point though, since it is just conservation of angular momentum. A more appropriate conservation for this thread would be conservation of lepton and baryon number.

That would be ironic; giving the Nobel prize to someone who doesn't deserve it, only for him to dedicate it to the soldiers instigating aggressive expansionist wars.

What is this thread? Worst videos on YouTube? What a pile of shite.

That is not sex though. It is a completely different thing. That is the anticipation of something that they think they will like. Just as if you might crave some chocolate, and get pleasure about thinking about having some chocolate when you get home. I am also not so sure it is a 'huge number'. If that is all it is, why not just give yourself some drugs? I am not saying sex isn't nice sometimes, and I am sure there are some people out there for whom sex is always great. I am just saying that it is over-hyped in our society because of cultural brainwashing, and most of the time people's motivation for having sex is not for 'fun'. You could also argue that the chemical release is enhanced by that same brainwashing.