Severian

You don't need string theory for that. Local supersymmetry (supergravity) will do just fine.

Obeying an illegal order is itself illegal. Ignorance is no defense for breaking the law, and neither should lack of a backbone be.

It has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And if you can prove why the strong interaction is the strongest, you will win the Nobel Prize. (The scientific evidence that shows it is the strongest is a different matter.)

I said potato.

The most obvious objection is that dark matter particles are not black bodies, and don't radiate in this way.

I quite agree, but then I am not American. When you view the history of your own country you have to be very careful not to be taken in by the propaganda. While Lincon did not have slaves himself (and opposed slavery) he was still clearly racist (which was probably a symptom of the times, but still): "I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." (Lincoln, 1953, v3, p145-6) Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, etc all kept slaves. On a similar note, did you watch Firefly? I always thought the civil war in that TV show was intended to provoke thought about the US civil war. The winning faction were "preserving the union" but clearly the bad guys since they used extreme authoritarianism to supress the masses; while the losers (the "Browncoats") were trying to secede and were clearly the freedom loving good guys. Despite it being set in the future, it had a cowboy "feel" to it, and it was fairly obvious that the bad guys were the Union while the Browncoats were the Confederates.

I do, but occasionally I get bored and click to view the hidden posts.

We know that Newtonian gravity (or GR) is not a good description of physics when r becomes small. So there is no evidence, or theory, to support the notion of a singularity.

No it doesn't. It has the gravitational attraction as determined by its mass, and this is exactly the same gravitational attraction that a larger object of the same mass would have. (Think Gauss' Law.)

Beatriz was chairing one of the sessions at the UK Annual Theory Meeting which I was at last week. I wonder if I met AlphaNumeric there without realizing.

I have a certain sympathy with that notion, but I would say if it "looks like it was a result of a curvature" then it is curvature by definition. For example, if two people head off in parallel directions (that is, at right angles to the line between them) and after a while they find that they are getting closer together or further apart, then the space is curved by definition. Ironically, I often think that the understanding of General Relativity becomes muddled by thinking too much about geometry.

Yes, they can, though one can show that these solutions are necessarily of negative energy. This has been known for a very long time, but the symmetries of the physics allow a reinterpretation of the backwards-in-time propagating particles - they are antiparticles moving forward in time. This is known as the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation (see the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle).

Maybe you should switch to a proper university

I personally don't understand why there are not more prosecutions happening as a result of the credit crunch. The entire problem essentially came about because of the repackaging of sub-prime mortgages using derivatives. It is quite clear to me that products were sold with misleading information as to their risk. If a car salesman sells you a car that explodes when you hit 50mph, he will be prosecuted, independently of any regulation in the automobile industry (and derivatives have hardly any regulation at all). Likewise, with the bonuses issue. Were the loans given with no formal and contractual conditions? If they weren't, shame on the government. If they were, people should be punished for violating their contract.

One should not be using the Bohr model to discuss atoms, since it is wrong! We should instead use the Schrodinger Equation. (One of my pet hates is introducing atomic physics to undergraduates via the Bohr model.)

And once you have established that you are interested in invariant mass rather than relativistic mass, you have to decide whether or not you want pole mass or running mass...

Maybe that is the crux. In my part of the world we usually don't have separate dryers - we have washer-dryers which do both jobs, and the dryer part spins (at times) as fast as the spin cycle.

John, your story is very common. In fact, in the past I have even been advised to not put much effort into my teaching, because doing it well won't get me much credit and will just distract from my research.

That is fair enough, but are you also going to let straight men get married? How about brother and sister, or father and daughter? Why not let one man have 6 wives (at the same time)? Why are you denying their rights?

There is something odd going on in this thread. Page 9 (in my setup the last page) always redirects me to page 8. So this post is an experiment to see what happens. Edit: Hmm - interesting - I am at the bottom of my page 8, even although there is apparently a page 9. Looks like we have found a space-time anomaly.

I very much doubt that. In fact, I have seen a faulty dryer which had a broken heating element (or whatever it is that provides heat) but could still spin the clothes. Although it didn't get them completely dry, they were no longer wet after the cycle - only damp. Sometimes you get these spinner things in pool changing rooms too. Put your swimsuit in for 5 seconds and it gets spun with no heat. It comes out damp, but is a lot dryer than you could achieve by wringing out.

So do you think it is just a coincidnece that the "missing" mass in fission is related to the energy output by [math]E=mc^2[/math]? Can you provide a better explanation of this? What about the other way? We have experiments where we have created mass out of energy. Where did that come from? Are you suggesting that it was there all along and we just didn't notice it? (And that the amount of mass just coincidentally happens to be related to the newly found mass according to [math]E=mc^2[/math]?) You say that the public "do not want to hear the underlying reasoning, premises, deductions, calculations, etc. because they are far too boring". Well, why don't you provide us with some alternate reasoning, premises, deductions and calculations? Maybe then your post might not be such an empty criticism.

If light has mass, how do you explain the inverse square law of electromagnetism? (We have had this discussion before, by the way. So you might find a quick search helps you answer that one.)

It doesn't really. It is just a mathematical trick. The equations are better behaved in non-integer momenta (essentially because the expressions have things like [math]1/(d-4)[/math] where [math]d[/math] is the number of dimensions). So we do the calculations in [math]d=4-2\epsilon[/math] dimensions and take the limit [math]\epsilon \to 0[/math] at the end. No-one is suggesting that there really are non-integer dimensions. It is just a convenient trick.

I am not sure it is what Yuri was asking, but I do sympathise with ajb's point of view. To put it another way, supersymmetry is a symmetry between symmetry and antisymmetry.