Severian

I think this is a good example of Shadowacct's point. Someone who has believed all his propoganda and fallen into the same unscientific mindset. "One of the greatest scientists alive today", please! What has been his overwhelming contribution to science? Some crap idea about 'memes', hardly revolutionary. I don't understand why the atheist fundies bother coming to this site. It is a science site, and as such promotes free-thinking, not mindless adherence to their high priest's teachings. I suspect they just come to troll.

lol. How can anyone make that up! 'sub love bends', awesome!

I don't see what they have against a plain old neutralino.

Well, I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but a parity transformation most certainly IS defined as a Lorentz transformation. The fact that it is not connected to the identity is why it is called 'improper'.

Cosmic rays are incredibly interesting because they are such extreme high energies. Some cosmic rays have 1010GeV energy, which is 6 orders of magnitude more than the highest energy colliders on Earth.

There is a typo in the title of the thread. Presumably it should read " Richard Dawkins: The Enemy of Reason".

Jack, this is a science site and quite a few of the people here have science backgrounds. You can't just make things up and expect to be taken seriously. (delanutrionic sub divergent processes, lol)

Lorentz symmetry IS violated, and it is a well know, experimentally verified fact. A parity inversion is a form of improper Lorentz transformation and since the SM violates parity, it is not invariant under improper Lorentz transformations.

Does all this work in anything other than base 10, or is it dependent on God having 10 fingers?

I would have no problem with a P&R forum if the debate was going to be of the standard seen at: http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/Short_course.php?Course_selection=9&Mode=Old Unfortunately, from past experience, I don't think our subscriber base is sufficiently mature, both emotionally and scientifically, to engage in constructive discussion on religious matters.

Wouldn't a better question be: "What's worse, people who hate homosexuals, or people who hate creationists?"

What makes you think this?

QM is not a good argument for that though. For a physics point of view, there are two options: either the 'random numbers' generated in QM are not random at all (some sort of non-local hidden variable theorem) or they are completely random. If it is the first, you are back to the deterministic no-free-will scenario that you have in classical mechanics. If it is the latter, how can it be your will if it is random? To allow free-will you need to remove the predictivity but retain causality, and that is outwith the realm of physics as we know it.

We have absolutely no empirical evidence to suggest that time is finite (in the past) or infinite. It looks like events which (may have) happened before the big bang (if time existed before) could not have effected those that happened afterwards, but this is not really definite. So one must still admit the possibility that the universe existed before the era in which the universe was very compressed (i.e. the pre-inflationary big bang epoch).

How do you define a 'mental disorder'? Is believing something to be true without evidence a 'mental disorder'? If so, then surely atheism is also a mental disorder. For that matter, how does one define 'creationism'? How does one defined a 'day' before the existence of the Sun and Earth?

If you could undergo a simply gene therapy to change your skin colour, would you make it illegal claiming it was racist? Are you going to ban self-tan too?

No matter how much in favour of gay marriage you may be, you must admit that lagalising gay marriage does effect non-gay couples. It changes the way society works and thinks, and since we are all part of that society it changes our lives and the way we interact or feel part of that society. Now, of course, whether that change is good or bad is a personal opinion. But you should recognize that some people will like their society less because of the change. Indeed, people with very particular strong views will feel alienated from society because they no longer feel that it represents (or condones) their morality. When making a decision like this, one has to ask who we care about less - who are we happier to alienate. It seems that most people posting on this thread have made up their minds who they would rather alienate. Fair enough, but what makes your choice better than anyone else's? Isn't it time to be honest and say that you don't care about the segment of society that you are alienating? Personally, I would rather not alienate anyone. As I have said before, our personal relationships shouldn't need the approval of the state.

That is debatable. Since string theory has made no testable predictions we don't know whether or not it has anything to do with gravity whatsoever. I hear this argument a lot (it seems to be John Ellis' favourite) but it is a little surprising. In principle, one expects effective higher dimensional operators coming from some GUT scale physics, so they are suppressed (for dimension 6 operators) by [math]Q^2/M_{\rm GUT}^2[/math] (where Q is the scale we are working at) and we can ignore them at low energies. But near the GUT scale one would expect them to become important, and affect the running. IIRC Graham Ross(?) wrote a paper on this quite recently. The fact that the SUSY couplings meet at the GUT scale is actually pretty weird. (To my mind this is still an argument for SUSY, and is probably telling us that the GUT physics is (almost) conformal.)

Even if you have something to anchor your 'absolute' frame (and you don't), what makes it any more absolute than any other choice I can make? For example, you quote an 'absolute' frame for the Earth, but how did you choose your Prime Meridian? It was arbitrarily chosen by historical accident.

Then you are simply measuring velocities relative to that point. It is still a relative measurement.

The Star Wars vs Star Trek thread has a lot more reasoned debate than this one. The trouble is, there is no topic. The atheists will never concede that their religion is based on faith, and the theists will never abandon their beliefs, so what is the point of discussion? The OP was to determine the proportion of theists to atheists; that has been established, so it is time to close the discussion.

This is very global. The various n's represent the total number of the particle in the universe. So there are a lot more baryons than antibaryons. (I am not sure why they present it like this. Wouldn't [math]\frac{n_B-n_{\bar B}}{n_B+n_{\bar B}}[/math] be more interesting?) We still don't understand why this is the case. If the universe were created in the Big Bang and CP was conserved then we would expect this quantity to be zero (ie. the same number of anti-baryons as baryons). Since CP is violated in the Standard Model (ie. baryons behave differently from antibaryons), there was some hope that this difference could be naturally explained, but on doing the calculation, there is not nearly enough CP violation in the Standard Model to explain it.

Torque is more analagous to a force than an energy. But since it is basically force on a lever arm, you need to state the lenght of the lever, so Newton-metres.

Sounds like a good idea. Maybe I will do that (expect for the emailing Lucaspa bit). That would give me more time to discuss science, rather than wasting my time with the usual atheist delusions and semantic navel-gazing.

I would have liked an 'other' option so that I could have voted for Ian Banks 'culture' civilization.