Severian

Irrespective of whether they suffer "true psychological damage" they are still disadvantaged by their parent dieing. You have to draw the line somewhere, and where that line is drawn will always be opinion. In your case, that opinion is in the hands of the psychological observer.

You could make that argument for any spending. I would hope that the spending in the stimulus bill went on things that were at least partly useful, and if they were useful you could argue that they should have had their own bill. I suppose you could maintain that the things in the stimulus package were things that wouldn't have been funded under normal circumstances (that is, extra spending) but then you are throwing out the pandemic preparedness because it was too useful. That seems a little bizarre. I wish the UK had a decent leader like Obama, who saw the benefit of science research.

Yes, of course. It is a cop out answer, and is useless as far as science is concerned. (Although that doesn't mean it is wrong.) However, I would say that the problem I was pointing out (which is used by people to advocate intelligent design) is indeed a real problem for science. And one that will have a scientific answer.

The anthropic principle is non-predictive, so it is a bad things for a scientist to fall back on. Since we can never make an observation in a universe in which we don't exist, we can never test if our existence is relevant to the question. So even if the anthropic principle were correct, it should not be used by science since it is essentially saying "We give up trying to find an explanation supported by evidence." But lots of people play the lottery. If only one person bought a ticket, and that one person won, you should start a corruption investigation. If there were different regions of the universe with different laws of physics or different fundamental parameters, and only some of them were suitable for the formation of life, then you would have a valid argument. But our observations don't support that idea, so they would have to lie outwith our horizon (that is, our 'bubble' would have to be bigger than our horizon), and that then makes the theory non-predictive again (anthropic).

You are still missing the point. It is not the intention that is important. It is the relative probabilities of the two situations as predicted by physics alone with no outside influence which is important. Imagine you have two possible outcomes of an experiment, and you can perform the experiment only once. Your theory predicts that outcome A will happen 99.99999999999% of the time and option B will occur 0.000000000001% of the time. You do the experiment and find option B. While it is very possible that your theory is correct and you were just unlucky, you have a rather strong motivation for believing that your theory is wrong or incomplete and something else affected it.

You need to define "hurt" for your argument to work. Physical harm? Reducing the change of reproduction? What is it? For example, in the smoking example, if you smoke 50 a day and die of lung cancer in your 40s you may leave behind a teenager who then has to go into foster care. Your actions have caused psychological hurt and maybe even long term damage. Should that be counted? Irrespective of your opinion, someone will disagree with you, and you will not be able to defend your point of view without using aesthetic arguments. In other words, your attempt to use science to dictate morality fails.

I think I fixed my problem. I think it was a corrupt cookie file. Clearing my cookies via the browser didn't work, but doing into the Profile folder itself and deleting all my cookies manually seems to have worked.

That is the anthropic principle, which in my opinion, is very bad science.

Well, it isn't just life. Maybe we would be better saying complex phenomena. For most parameter choices the universe ends up being an uninteresting noninteractive homogeneous dessert. To put it another way, imagine you threw an open box of matches up in the air, and when they fell down on the table they spelled out "Hello!". You would probably wonder if there was a deeper reason for them doing that rather than simply saying that the probability of it happening was non-zero so it implies nothing. I am not saying that the fine tunings we see (the matches saying "hello" in my analogy) are God, but I also don't believe they are coincidence. They are probably the result of some extra physics that we don't yet know about (in the matchbox analogy, maybe the table has grooves in it which spell out hello and the matches just fell into the grooves).

For moral reasons? How anthropomorphic of you! All sorts of measures have been proposed. In fact, such measures are often used in fundamental physics (I even have a paper on this myself). Not to justify intelligent design, but to allow preference for models which don't need to be fine tuned.

That is quite easy. Unintelligent design could be a universe in which it was impossible for life to form. The argument for intelligent design is usually that, given our current understanding of the universe, there is vastly more parameter space for which life could not exist than for which life could exist. Edit: Note I am using the phrase "intelligent design" to mean intentional design of the fundamental laws, not the anti-evolutionary crap which has been recently popular.

No - it is not checked.

It's complete bollocks.

Anyone else finding that the "remember me" checkbox no longer works? It used to work fine, but for the last couple of months I have to log in each time I come back to the site (if I have closed my browser). I am pretty sure it isn't me - I have cookies enabled with no exceptions and Firefox is allowed to remember password. Also it happens on my work and home computers.

Let me quote Philips Research Director:

Hmm... I wonder if making a bullet curve would make a good student project...

I am slightly curious how you think anyone working on ATLAS could produce their own pictures. There is a high magnetic field in the pit, so anything metal is not allowed inside, certainly not a camera. The only pictures in existence are the official ones which had to be taken in special conditions.

You are right, I am a fraud, since I don't work at CERN. It was meant as a joke. And, unlike you, I am not very interesting.

YOu explicitly said "[math]x^{\mu}[/math] is not (the components of ) a vector". What did you mean by that, and is it not in contradiction with what you are saying in the above quote? I am still not getting this. What does [math]x^1[/math] have to do with it? That is not enough to express the vector - the vector cannot be considered as a mapping of the coordinates onto this number.

Look, you can define the word 'vector' to be whatever you want in your field (it has a very different definition in biology for example), but this is a physics forum so we should use physics definitions. In my field (physics) a four-vector is defined by its transformation under the Lorentz (or Poincare) group. To suggest that the position vector is not a vector is simply proof of daft naming conventions. That much is clear, but what I was asking is, what do you mean by this being amapping to a single number? What is the single number, for example, for the position vector of the Earth at 12am New Year's Day, 2000 with respect to the Sun on New year's day in 1900?

I never said everything did. The object I was talking about is a position vector in space-time which is very much a vector due to its transformation under the Poincare group. Obviously if you define [math]x^\mu=[/math]{frog,sheep,cow,cat}, then it will not transform as a four-vector, so is not a vector. But that is not what we were talking about. I am not sure what you are meaning here. What is the single number you are mapping to?

It is only approximately right. gs isn't exactly 2.

Nature is not at all prestigious for my field (particle physics). In my field the high impact journals are Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, Nuclear Physics B, Physics Letters B, the Journal of High Energy Physics and the European Journal of Physics C.

I find this slightly amusing. I have been advocating that governments should not recognise any marriages (and instead just recognise legal secular contracts) for years. But when I started saying this on these fora, I was attacked from all sides. It is interesting to see how people's views change.

You are forgetting the antiparticles. The Dirac matrices need to be 4 dimensional to have a spin up electron, spin down electron, spin up positron and spin down positron.