Severian

If you look closely at the pictures we have of him, it is pretty easy to see that he is really Dick Cheney with a fake beard and a towel wrapped around his head.

No - it is not unreasonable. Given the 'evidence' presented by YT (and only that) and assuming predictivity, you would not expect it would ever come up tails. You would have no evidence that it even could come up tails! What you are doing is using your implicit sense of predictivity to decide what is reasonable and what is not. You are use to things being predictable, and you transfer that 'usual' scenario onto your newest observations. That is fine for proving pretty much everything you like, as long as you recognise that predictivity is an assumption of your proof. If you had grown up in a universe where physical laws generally didn't apply (I am not sure that is possible, since I don't think life would form, but this is a thought experiment) then you would not expect past events to be correlated with future ones, and you would not make this assumption. I agree that in our universe it is a reasonable assumption for most things (like the sun coming up tomorrow) but it is important to realise that it is an assumption.

OK - that is fine, but is a little bit semantic. No-one expects SU(5) to be a complete model, but we could have an SU(5) on the way down from E6 or E8. I am certainly willing to believe that string theory doesn't allow everything to be in an SU(5) rep, but I wouldn't say that is a very strong statement. I am actually working on some papers looking at this E6 inspired model at the moment, so I would have been a little concerned if it was inconsistent with string theory.

No - that's the point, and it seems that you and gcol are missing it entirely. It only becomes reasonable when you are willing to assume that there should be a corelation between events in the past and events in the future. You have absolutely no evidence (reasonable or otherwise) that this is the case. gcol's claim that this cannot be true because "the logic of the entire scientific method goes out of the window" is clearly nonsense. He simply doesn't understand the scientific method. Built into your scientific theory is a statement that the theory governs events in the future too, and you can test this statement, so science is perfectly valid. You cannot, however, prove that a theory correctly predicts all events in the future (but I would have thought this was obvious).

You can call it what you want, but it is still a belief in something which you cannot prove. It is even a belief in something for which you have no evidence (since past events only become evidence on acceptance of the thing you are trying to prove).

That is not true. You cannot extrapolate past events into predictions about future events without making an assumption about how the extrapolation should be made. Your belief that the conditions for germination will remain the same as they have always been is based on faith. To put it another way: everytime you throw a ball in the air it comes down. Everytime anyone else has documented throwing a ball in the air, they report that it has come down. So you form a theory of gravity based on past events. But it could be that that theory is only applicable to these past events - you cannot prove that it will be applicable to future events - you take it on faith that it is. If you threw a ball in the air tomorrow and it didn't come down, your observation would still be consistant with your past observations - they just wouldn't be consistant with the theory you formed to make predictions. This is the point that the scientist I quoted was making.

Aren't there any safeguards in place to prevent a conflict of interest in the US Executive branch of government? I would have thought having a President and Vice President sitting on boards of large oil companies would be regarded as a conflict of interest.

I am not sure what you mean by 'big higgses'. I am thinking specifically of models like http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0510419 where E6 is broken down to the SM by way of SO(10) and SU(5). Are you saying this is in contradiction with String Theory?

You can fall out of a plane and survive. You can fall off a step ladder and die. It all depends on individual circumstance. My brother fell off a sixth floor balcony on holiday once, landing on the marble floor beneath. He walked away (though admitedly straight to a hospital). I suspect what saved him was that he hit the balcony on every floor he passed on the way down.

What is wrong with the 27plet? That is big enough to hold an entire generation in it, including Higgs. All you need to do then is give the Higgs a generation index and only let the third generation gain a vev (from the heavy top).

I am sitting here at my desk browsing the latest edition of Physics World, which is the monthly publication of The Institute of Physics (of which I am a member). There is an interesting article on Science and faith, by Alfred Goldhaber of the CN Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, which I think is appropriate to this discussion. In particular, his first sentence seems appropriate: "We need faith to do science - faith that nature obeys laws, and that with time we can lean ever more about these laws."

I think I disagree with the analogy. Imagine instead that this guy had employed a near infinite number of monkeys to bang the keys of keyboards randomly. They would produce many many 'first pages', and given long enough, one of them would reproduce the first page of Don Quixote. This is more like string theory. It can predict anything you want, as long as you are prepared to wait long enough.

I personally subscribe to Sisyphus' reason 4.

It is more than just charge. All the quantum numbers are reversed. For example, the electron has opposite isospin from the positron, and opposite lepton number too. The idea of antiparticles is really coming out of the Feynman Stuechleberg interpretation, where antiparticles traveling forward in time are recognised to be particles traveling backwards in time.

Norman, thanks for your quote from Dirac. I had never heard that before. I am somewhat surprised, but strangely reassured, that someone as clever as Dirac can so fundamentally misunderstand the point of renormalisation.

Hehe.. so Bettina has something in common with Farsight now too. Oh dear, oh dear!

I told you no such thing. I suggested that you might be happier elsewhere since you so clearly dislike everyone else that posts here. And I can't get you banned (I have no special status here). You will have to do that yourself.

That is not how evidence works. Your starting point when examining a system is a set of hypotheses that may or may not be correct. You then apply evidence and use that evidence to remove some of the hypotheses. If you are only left with one possibility after applying the evidence you can be pretty sure it is correct. (Assuming you haven't forgotten any possibility.) But as long as you have more than one possibility you cannot say anything definitive about the system - if you are going to act, you have to act on faith that one is correct. Now of course, you could assign probabilities to each hypothesis depending on the evidence and find that some are unlikely. (In actuality, what you are doing is combining your original hypohesis with extra hypotheses to form a larger set. You then eliminate some and the fraction of variants left is your probability.) But as long as you have more than one possibility, then you have no certainty that one hypothesis is correct and are again making a leap of faith. Just because an outcome is improbable does not make it wrong. After all, one outcome must be chosen and that outcome occupies that same volume of 'phase space' as any other. You only think some outcomes are more probable because you lump together different outcomes as being phenomenologically similar. In actuality of course, most people will disagree with the probabilities you set (technically, they are disagreeing with you giving each of your sub-hypotheses equal weight) so what you think of as most probable, someone else may perfectly legitimately disregard. (Often this comes about through a disagreement of the importance or reliability of the evidence.) As Bascule rightly surmised, this applies to all systems, both noumena and phenomena (to use his terms). If you do not believe it does then you are simply fooling yourself into believing that something is 100% backed up by the evidence. (There are of course, some statements which are 100% true, since you can include a dependence on an intial axiom, ie. if X is true then Y. But this isn't a true hypothesis - this is a statement of equivalence.) With regard to the existence of God, God can be included in one (or more) of the hypotheses about how the universe works. You cannot eliminate that hypothesis because it is not in contradiction with any evidence. So taking the position that he does not exist is as much a leap of faith as saying that he does. Science disregards that hypothesis for a completely different reason. It is non-predictive (it makes no predictions we can test) so is not useful on a scientific level. But that does not preclude it as a possibility. This is a Strawman. If you care to look back, I was criticising your statement that "faith requires the active suspension of both" intelligence and insight. Given my explanation above I hope you now agree that your statement was ridiculous. (And incidentally, do you understand why someone, to whom faith is an important part of their life, would find your comment downright offensive? Was the original statement meant to be a deliberate troll, or was it a lack of empathy?)

By 'living' environment biologist, I am sure he means that the researcher him or herself needs to be still alive. If I put 'environmental biology' into google I get 127,000,000 hits, so it can't be that hard to find one surely.

Perhaps those supporting state run healthcare would care to point out any instance of state run healthcare which has actually provided a decent healthcare service?

Well, that is very noble of you - sticking up for the girl, like a knight in shining armour! Do I detect a pattern in your affections? After all Bettina and Miss Teen South Carolina do share certain similarities...

You can't just make things up you know. Webster's definition of 'intuition' is "the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference". An intuitive leap is not based on evidence any more than faith is. However, we all take things on faith every day. If we have inconclusive data concerning some decision that must be made, we do not (usually) dither about unable to make up our minds what to believe - we make a choice. We put our faith in one possibility being correct and make our decision accordingly. To deny faith is to deny the proper functioning of a human being on a daily basis. Have you never had to do his in your career as a nurse? Yes it does. How can someone who claims that faith (in general terms) requires an 'active suspension' of intelligence and insight be regarded as having a sane point of view?

Photons most definitely do have structure: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=find+t+photon+structure&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE=

That is a very good point, and I share your outrage at this poor girl's treatment. I think the only ethical course of action left is to stand up for your smake your viewpoint and make your protest more explicit by deleting your bookmarks to this site and never returning. That would teach them!

If that truely were his point, then he would be talking complete rubbish. Faith does not require one to suspend intelligence or insight - it only requires an intuitive leap to something that cannot be proven. Quite frankly, your statement seems a blatant suspension of intelligence and insight in this thread so far.