Severian

Why do you think that is "great"? It was completely content-less! His pretty pictures are meaningless until he can tell us what masses that we might expect for his new particles at the LHC; tell us how they are produced; how his "theory" breaks electroweak symmetry; tell us about its impact on electroweak precision observables. He may very well throw up his hands when someone mentions string theory, but at least the string theorists have a mathematical formalism in which to perform calculations. He has... pictures.

If that were the case, then it would be ruled out, since we would 'see' them via gravity.

They do. Maxwells equations are simply the equation of motion generated by the photon's kinetic term in the QED Lagrangian. Maxwell's equations obey the rules of relativity, including $E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4$, whether you like it or not. That was one of the things that led Einstein's to his theory.

That is a really horrible way to put it Gilded. It is much better to use the general, non-rest frame, equation: $E^2=p^2c^2 +m^2c^4$ Then you can see that even if $m=0$ (as for a photon) the particle still has momentum from its non-zero energy $p=E/c$.

Why not?

How old are you?

Much as it pains me to agree with bascule, he's right! Furthermore, the most sensible energy policy right now would be to treat the development of commercially viable nuclear fusion as a top priority goal for our society, just as sending a man to the moon was in the 60s.

I have lived in the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland, and I had experience of the health care in all of these countries. I can categorically say that the worst health care I had was in the UK (with Switzerland being the best). It is also true though that the NHS was the cheapest, even if I would consider all my NI contributions going to the NHS (which it doesn't). But irrespective of cost, I find it unacceptable that the NHS is touted as providing universal health care, while withholding drugs that would improve someone's life.

No. Interestingly in Quantum Field Theory you can show that particles with positive energy always must move forwards in time in order to preserve causality. This seems fair enough, but perhaps more oddly, you can also show that particles of negative energy must flow backwards in time to preserve causality (weird huh?). This is actually where antiparticles come from since a negative energy particle moving backwards in time is actually identical to a positive energy antiparticle moving forwards in time. This is called the Feynman-Stueckleberg interpretation.

We put time on (almost) the same footing as space because it makes good sense to do so. The resulting structures are representations of the Poincare group and space-time has a larger symmetry than space alone. In physics we usually seek to describe things in as simple and connected ways as possible. Pretty much all the fundamental theories we have are simpler to write down in 4d space-time than in some manifestly non-covariant form. Maxwell's equations in vacuo spring to mind as an example.

If you are offered a full-time place by a UK University, it shouldn't be a problem to get a visa, irrespective of where you are from. (Unless you have done something naughty in your past, of course.)

My biggest insight (not really a best or worst thing) about teaching came when they sent me on a training course, to teach me how to teach. The insight didn't come from the course directly, but from the realization that I really didn't want to be there. I didn't engage; I didn't pay attention; I didn't do any of the homework exercises and I just generally resented the teacher, everyone around me and just generally being there. I was a total grump. Then it suddenly hit me. This is how a large proportion of my students feel. They don't really want to be there, so they don't engage with my teaching at all. I had never realized this because when I was at school, I did want to be there, so I engaged, paid attention and got a lot out of it. It took this course to make me realize what it felt like to not be a model student.

I can see why he thinks it is wrong. Mr Skeptic is saying that it is the rate of earning which should be taxed, not the actual amount, since that is what determines your "earning power", and I sort of agree. My problem with it would be the innate assumption that Mr $1000-an-hour could work for that rate all week if he wanted. There probably are jobs where you have to wait around for ever, and then get one big job which is over quickly but you still need to survive on for the week.

Barack Obama 76% similarity Cynthia McKinney 74% similarity Ralph Nader 71% similarity John McCain 65% similarity Bob Barr 44% similarity Who the hell is Bob Barr? He must be a complete loon!

You might want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation

I did come out of a GR exam once thinking I had totally screwed it up, and everyone else was saying the same thing. I was almost suicidal after that because I thought it had lost me the class prize. It turned out that everyone else had done so bad that I was still first. In fact, my mark was good enough that they didn't feel they could rescale the mark to let more people pass, since I had demonstrated it was doable. They publicly said that, and then everyone hated me.

For another course I am giving lectures using an electronic whiteboard. It displays my PowerPoint and then I can write on top of it with an electronic pen. The lecture is videoconferenced so that it can be attended by people in another city (actually, my audience is in 5 different locations) and they can see a video-feed of me lecturing, plus the PowerPoint and annotations. I can also see and hear them, so they can ask questions, and they can even write on the whiteboard at their end (which is showing my PowerPoint + annotations) and it shows up for everyone. It is quite impressive and seems to be working well.

They don't travel faster than light, so, no, they don't violate causality.

This is actually what I am doing at the moment for a lecture course. I don't think it is going as well as my normal lectures though where I use PowerPoint. I am teaching a course with lots of maths, so I am constantly writing on the chalk-board, and I find it much harder to engage with the students. When I use PowerPoint on the other hand, I find I talk a lot more around the subject because I am not concentrating on writing as fast as I can, and have more time to think. It will be interesting to see the feedback, but I suspect it won't be as good as my usual feedback.

$5 billion liabilities? Pah - that is much less than any high street bank these days.

But you still haven't defined what you mean by the Higgs boson. The SM Higs boson? Any spin 0 object which couples proportionately to mass? A fundamental scalar? What? Also, by definite proof, I presume you mean a 5 sigma discovery? But a 5 sigma discovery of what? Is a resonance enough, or do we need to test all the couplings?

You will have to define what you mean by "the Higgs" first.

Anything which cannot be scientifically proven (that is tested with the scientific method) is opinion. From a scientific point of view, no opinion is better than any other. From a societal point of view, some opinions are better than others because they encourage or discourage the sort of society we want to live in. However, everyone has a different view of the society we want to live in, so what opinion one supports is somewhat arbitrary. I am sure the society I would like to live in is quite different from that Pangloss, iNow or any other poster would want to live in. But I hope we would all agree that our society would be a better place if we were all a bit more tolerant of each other's opinions. We can discuss our opinions and encourage friendly argument on their relative merits, but ridicule is simply not constructive, irrespective of which opinion it is directed at. But of course, that is just my opinion...

LEP (after the upgrade) was about 208GeV, which is why the Higgs limit is 114GeV (it was supposed to be produced together with a Z-boson, which has mass 91.2GeV, so the maximum Higgs mass they could reach was 208GeV - 91.2GeV - a couple of GeV to see the particles = 114.2GeV). But the most powerful linear collider was the SLC at SLAC, which was tuned to the Z mass, 91.2GeV. The protons start as hydrogen in a cylinder. They are ionized and put in a small accelerator, accelerated a bit and passed into a bigger accelerator and so on until they are passed into the LHC. To investigate all the other great things we will find with the LHC of course!

That is a real bitch to print though.