Severian

You were the one who made yourself the subject of discussion by claiming you are censored. So your status as a loony is directly relevant to your claim and not an ad hominem.

Tell your teacher that forces are a consequence of insisting that the universe be symmetric under the local transformations of particular Lie groups. Ask your teacher to explain that statement in detail.

It has nothing to do with String Theory. It is special relativity. And you are not censored (are you censored at all) because you criticise String Theory (who would care). You are censored because you are a loony. And that is a relativisticly invariant statement. You are a loony in all frames, and in all models.

The predictions to which you refer are nothing to do with the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. They are caused by the model's reference to the relative motion of Earth and (non-local) stars. For example, the original geocentric models said that the 'firmament of the stars' were held in a fixed sphere around the Earth, so they could not accommodate paralax. But all you need to do is let the stars move about and you are fine. At the time of Galileo, parallax was actually supporting the geocentric model with a fixed firmament - since no parallax had been observed, it was reasoned that the Earch must be stationary with respect to the celestial sphere. It is only modern observations which see the parallax. The point I was making (or trying to) was that one can think of modern astronomy from a completely geocentric reference frame (as DH pointed out) and match observations perfectly well. Physics is independent of your reference frame, so it makes no difference were you consider the origin of the coordinate system to be. Galileo's argument should not have been about whether the Earth goes around the sun or vice versa (since both are true) but whether the other planets' orbits are more simply described and better predicted when described in a sun-centered reference frame. The ironic thing is that if Galileo had argued for the Copernican model, against a geocentric model, on purely observational grounds, he would have lost the argument, since the Copernican model made false predictions. It only agrees better when you consider elliptic orbits. So even on scientific grounds, Galileo was wrong, given the current data (though it is admitedly harsh to threaten to burn someone at the cross for making wrong scientific predictions).

That is all very well, but where is the objective quantification of that harm? Emotional distress as a result of someone else's lawful words or actions cannot count since it is completely subjective.

The speed of time is always 1. [math]\frac{\partial t}{\partial t} =1[/math]

Is it just me, or does the term "BS in Psychology" hold extra meaning?

I was not advocating the Tychonic model. It seems though that you are advocating the Copernican model though, even though it has now been thoroughly disproved.

This is true, but it is not that it is being delayed by the absorption and re-emission itself. In fact, the absorption and re-emission is instantaneous (I am not talking about exicting an electron up to a higher energy level, which is a different process). You can think of it as a particle or a wave property, whichever you prefer. When thinking in terms of waves, imagine that the interaction is in fact altering the direction of the particle, and then another interaction will later on put it back on course. All the time, it travels at c, but has traveled further than you thought so appears slower. However, the more correct way to think about it is via its wave property. The scattering scatters part of the wave backwards (and to the sides) and part forwards (a bit like the reflection/transmission of wavefunctions through barriers in basics QM classes). The backward flowing wave interferes with the forward flowing wave coming in (assuming it is a continuous beam of light) and makes it effectively slower. You can see this in experiments - for example, the first few photons of light will come out of the medium as if they had traveled the whole way at c, which of course they did, since they belong to the forward scattered part of the light (though the intesity will be a lot less).

The technical definition of a vacuum is simply the lowest energy state of space-time. If the Higgs mechanism is correct, then the vacuum is not really empty at all - it will be filled with the Higgs field since this is more energetically favourable than nothing at all.

57% here. It would have been more interesting if they had told you which ones you got wrong.

Hmmm - maybe you should post a warning for people at work. (I had a good chuckle though.)

I am inclined to agree with ku - I think his argument is logical. And indeed, one can use the same argument to argue for many other changes in the law, eg to support bigamy, incest, assisted suicide, consensual mutalation etc. However, I would reject the initial premise that "You are free to do whatever you want so long as you don't reduce other people's freedom to do whatever they want", or at least interpret it differently. I submit that there is nothing you can do (and have publicaly known that you do) that does not effect the society that you live in. Your morality (or lack thereof) effects people around you and directly alters the world that people are living in.

No he didn't - he discovered evidence that the Earth-centered frame is non-inertial. It is still a valid reference frame. In fact, the Sun-centered frame is also non-inertial.

I am against sueing in pretty much all cases. If an action is wrong and harms someone in a manner which society disapproves of, it should be illegal. If it is not wrong and does not harm anyone then it should be allowed. I also dislike restricting freedom of speech. If someone insults me or is nasty with me, I should be mature enough to deal with it. They are not doing me physical harm. There are obviously some exceptions, such as disturbing the peace, inciting a crime, or abuse of a position of responsibility. But with these caveats aside, one should be free to insult whomever one wishes. And while I despise the attitude and behaviour of the picketers, I defend their right to protest, or indeed to say whatever they choose (as long as it is not inciting a crime). In fact, I notice a few people here suggesting a 'Smith & Weston" approach. Tell me, if you insult the Phelps' would you be happy paying them millions in compensation for the emotial distress you caused? I suspect not... In other words, I agree with the defense lawyers: "Their attorneys argued in closing statements Tuesday that the burial was a public event and that even abhorrent points of view are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and religion."

Your problem is that employers are not interested in how smart you are. They are interested in how well you can do the job they want you to do. And that job is most likely geared towards 'normally' functioning people. So if you do badly in the usual academic environment, most employers will not want to take a chance on you, and in my opinion that is a rather sensible stance to take.

I have been getting slightly frustrated by the discussion that has been raging lately on the recent Scottish elections. There were a record number of spoiled ballots, and there has been outrage that so many voters were disenfranchised by having a complicated voting system that they weren't able to understand. However, firstly, if they were too stupid to be able to fillin their ballot papers correctly, they are too stupid to vote. Secondly, I have quite a few friends who deliberately spoiled their ballots because they thought none of the candidates deserved their vote. Now they are annoyed that they are bing lumped in with the idiots, and frustrated that their reason for spoiling their ballots is not even being entertained by the media.

The irony of the Galileo/Vatican argument is that the statement "the Sun does not go round the Earth" is wrong - of course the sun goes around the Earth and we see the observational evidence of that every day! I think this is a perfect example of how science becomes a form of religion for many people. The average joe does not understand science and the scientific method - they trust in 'educated people' to tell them that the world all works according to science. While I am a scientist and can vouch that it does (mostly!) all work, I find it disconcerting that general public just believe whatever they are told. Their trust is no more based on reason than the ancient Greeks' belief in Zeus. This was brought home to me recently while in the Glasgow subway. They have been running posters trying to get people interested in science and I saw this one in particular: http://www.glasgowsciencecentre.org/24hours.aspx . As I am sure everyone here realizes, you can adjust your reference frame to make every one of the choices correct! Maybe I am just being picky but I really don't think modern society operates as rationally as we like to suppose.

That doesn't mean that they have no structure though - just that current experiments were too low resolution (ie. too low energy) to resolve the structure. However, I personally would be very surprised to find substructure to leptons (or quarks) before the GUT scale at 1016GeV or so.

Given that choice, and no other information, I would take the other guy. For graduate work, it is more important to get someone who can work well than someone who is very educucated or trained because you can educate them when they arrive (within reason of course). The main reason why people fail PhDs is lack of motivation.

The expression 'false vacuum' usually is referring to a local minimum of a potential rather than a global one. By that, I mean it is a physical situation where the universe (or physical system) is in a state which is not the lowest energy state, but is stable to small fluctuations. So for example, there could be a potential barrier between the local minimum and the true global lowest energy state. Lately there has been interest in models where the universe is actually supersymmetric, with a lowest energy state (vacuum) which is at zero energy, but which also has other local minima separated from the true vacuum by potential barriers. The maths of supersymmetry is such that these 'false vacua' would exhibit broken supersymmetry, and many believe that this is the state we are sitting in. If this is true, then every second there is a finite, non-zero probability that our quantum state will tunnel through the barrier to the true vacuum and the world as we know it will end. Fortunately, since the universe has survived for 13.7 billion years already, this probability must be very small.

Do try not to be such a dick. We know there is plenty of Dark Matter in the universe, and it will cluster around ordinary matter, so it is 'very likely' that there is some in your room. If you want to claim that there is not then you will have to explain why it is not there, since its presence would be the natural assumption.

The speed of time is constant and equal to 1. I can prove this mathematically: [math]\frac{\partial t}{\partial t} = 1[/math]

In fact, energy is the 'time'-component of a 4-vector, so its transformation properties are just like those of time.

Aliastair Reynolds' books usually have fairly reasonable science in them.