Severian

I am being perfectly serious. You just think it is fun because you have been brainwashed to believe it. But if you really think back to any encounter you may have had, can you honestly say it was as much fun as everyone pretends?

It will be particularly ironic if he now orders the 'surge' in Afghanistan.

General public and politicians mainly. It is intended to show the public that particle physics is important, so that they can insist that the politicians give us more money.

I was recently involved (though my activities with the Institute of Physics High Energy Particle Physics Group) with the production of a booklet called "Particle Physics - it matters", which is trying to publicise a little why particle physics is a worthwhile thing to study. I would appreciate it if those of you who are interested in this sort of thing could take a look at it and give me any comments. I will be discussing it in an IoP meeting on Monday, so now is your chance to be heard!

You prove my point. You are conforming to societal pressure by pretending you like sex, so you can appear cool, and implying that those who don't are uncool.

It is a complete ****ing joke that utterly undermines any authority and worth of the Nobel Peace Prize. When someone first linked me to it, I was expecting the link to go to The Onion.

I suspect we may be getting a rather distorted view of sex in this thread, since I am fairly sure most of our members are not very typical sexually (nerds, geeks, frustrated teenagers and middle aged men). I think most people don't have sex for fun, and I don't think they actually have fun while having sex. They have sex because of social pressure - they are expected to have sex or be labelled a weirdo loser, so they pursue sex as part of being normal and fitting in. Then they rationalise this to themselves by convincing themselves that sex is really great, when in fact if they are honest, they find it disappointing and unfulfilling. They tell their friends how great their sex is because they think it makes them cool and liked, and eventually they believe their own lies. It would be nice if we could all just be honest and admit that sex, while nice now and again, is ultimately not all that society tries to persuade us it is.

Yeah, I am really going to take advice from someone who has completely lost all his top front teeth. In fact, that was completely gross.

I am a theoretical physicist, so as 'pure' as you get, but I think this year's Prize was very well deserved.

Hmmmm. I posted another reply about this earlier, but it is not there now. I was in a bit of a rush, so maybe I didn't hit the submit button. Silly me! Anyway, I was wanting to point out that in Einstein's original 1916 GR paper, he doesn't talk about elevators at all, but talks about a relativistic spinning disk. This is directly analogous to the OP's post since you can think of the distant stars as the rim of the disk with us at the centre (although you should take the mass of the disk to zero to eliminate the stress tensor over its body). It is also intimately linked to the Ehrenfest paradox

Of course not. I also wouldn't burn their book even if they said that Jesus was a venture capitalist. I don't like burning books. I think people should be able to say what they want, even when I disagree with it. And I think people should be careful when they buy any book to understand the context in which it was written, and if translated, should make an effort to understand the subtext, agenda and credentials of that translation. I disagree that they should be laughed at. They don't provoke any more laughter than atheists being outraged by a bible translation.

The link you quoted (which seems to work now) doesn't really present evidence of that. I thought their 'ten guidelines' all seemed fair enough, and their 3 examples didn't seem too bad (though they would need to present evidence for their first one). Isn't their stance that the bible has already been mistranslated for the benefit of liberals, and they want to correct for that? Edit: Places where I might expect them to go wrong are Matthew, 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, but of those only 1 Timothy is there yet. 1 Timoth ch 6; vs 9 looks OK though with: "But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition." Edit 2: For the record, as a Christian, I think you need to be very careful making any translations of the bible. It may well be that these guys are crap and their bible is useless, but on the evidence you have presented here, I don't think I can come to that conclusion yet. I think this seems on a par with something like the Green Bible.

In what sense are they not? GR tells us that all frames (whether inertial or not) are equivalent. Therefore, the frame of reference in which the stars are orbiting Earth is perfectly acceptable. In fact, I always find it amusing that Galileo reputedly made such a fuss rejecting the claim that the sun orbits the Earth, when in actuality, it does! Being slightly less flippant, I think this question is deeper than you guys give credit for. As I already mentioned, it is a valid frame, so I don't think you can just say it doesn't count. Your frame compensates for the acceleration by having an additional gravitational field (ie curvature) so I think the answer is probably something to do with the weird curvature of spacetime you get in this frame. Any GR experts around?

I may be missing the point of this thread, since the link in the OP doesn't work for me, but what is wrong with trying to present a more accurate translation of the bible? I agree with Mr Skeptic's assertion that it would be better done by skilled translators than by amateurs over the internet, but there is probably some value in engaging amateurs in discussion. Wikipaedia is also written by amateurs, and people use that all the time. Also, the discussions ydoaPs quotes sound rather reasonable to me. You do need to be quite careful when reading the bible to make sure that you get the right cultural context.

I don't think so. I think they are just taking the piss.

I disagree. I understand Quantum Mechanics, in so much as I understand the formal theory of quantum mechanics. I don't understand the mechanism of wavefuction collapse, but QM doesn't seek to describe that, so it is a separate issue.

While I agree that manned space flight is probably not the best way to spend the money, I think you need to put it in perspective. The NASA budget is something like 4% of the money that was spent on the financial bail out. I personally think scientific research should be one of our top priorities for spending, not some backwater getting any lose change we can spare from somewhere else.

I think it is fairly obvious that this would work better than threats of physical attack. I don't think countries are that different from people. If you try to get someone to behave by threatening them with violence, you are just going to incite them to more violence. You need to include them, make them realise that you care, but also make them understand why you find certain behaviours unacceptable and that these actions will have consequences.

Exactly! So no-one should be allowed a gun (including the police).

So, in other words, it is fine to make off-topic posts as long as they are correcting the misconceptions of others? The only problem with that is that you define the misconceptions and only you are allowed to get the last word. Well, you are most definitely a hypocrite, but since this is off-topic, I suggest that we all just accept that fact and move on. Please don't make any more off-topic replies refuting your hypocrisy.

The Wiki article seems very flawed to me. The Casimir effect is supposed to be a vacuum effect, but their derivation starts with standing waves.

He was probably meaning this sort of statement, which, as far as I can tell, is complete drivel. (And yes, I am Scottish too.)

I still don't understand the Casimir effect. Can someone please run through a proof for me?

So why is your worldview relevant, but no-one else's? Your last post was completely off-topic (at least, just as off topic as tar's), and you have the cheek to complain about other people? What a hypocrite.

Firstly, do you agree that your definition of mass is frame dependent? Depending on which frame you measure it in you will get a different answer. So it isn't really a fundamental property of only the object, since it is also dependent on you. That makes it a not very useful quantity. But instead, when someone asks you the mass of the object, you could instead tell them what the mass would be if you measured it in the same frame that the object is moving in. That way, they can work out the 'mass' (in whatever definition they like, without worrying about your frame - you don't need to send them as much information. This quantity is known as the 'rest mass' because it is the mass as measured in the rest frame of the object, but it is now used so exclusively in serious science that people just usually call it the mass.