Severian

You might find these threads useful: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=12538 http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=8190 http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6986

My name is a character from a Gene Wolfe novel (he is an executioner). My avatar is a cow (I like cows).

On the whole academics are a bit too willing to compromise I think. For example, last year in the UK we went on strike. We walked out for one day, which we publicised well in advance and then rerganised our lectures on that day to other days so that the students wouldn't miss out. We rescheduled meetings, so that important academic decisions wouldn't be sidelined, and then we went home for the day, and logged on remotely to make sure that our research didn't suffer. No-one noticed. It didn't even make the TV news. What we should have done was to go on strike for the 2 week graduate exam period. No-one would have been able to graduate and everyone would have had to resit. Imagine a mother's outrage when little Johnny's career plans are set back for a year? But it might have got the politicains to sit up and take notice!

You should all write to your Senator/MP to encourage more spending on education!

Religious bias may effect what people regard as more worthy endpoints of research and therefore must influence science funding, if there are limited resources. For example, who is to decide whether finding a cure for cancer is more or less important than finding the origin of mass? That is not a scientific question, but an aesthetci one. My problem is with politicians who abuse scientific research for their own ends, either by distorting science to claim it supports their worldview when it does not (eg. anti-nuclear protesters), or by using science to manipulate the voters (eg. Bush's promise to go to Mars), or demonize science as immoral when science is in fact amoral and requires separate moral decisions to be made (eg. stem cell research). I also see and increasing tendancy in science funding to promote spin. It seems that funding is not given to the most worthy projects any more, but is instead given to those who shout the loudest. This is understandable to some extent because the ministers who decide what should be funded are not scientists - they must listen to sicentists opinions and whomever shouts loudest is most likely to be heard. For this reason I think we should have a requirement that all science ministers should have scientific training. And to counter pcs argument, it is more important that blue skies research be funded by governement. The practical applications of blue skys research will naturally be developed by private companies in order to make a profit. But blue skies research has no definite practical end goal, can take an undefined amount of time, and may not lead to a profit in the end, and therefore will not get funded by private companies. If governments (actually consortiums of governments) did not invest in research on particle physics for example, we would know nothing about quarks and the strong interaction. There has so far been no practical applicatation of this knowledge which has taken over 30 years to find out (and therefore would never have been funded by the private sector) but I am 100% sure that it will be a foundation of many many practical applications a hundred years from now.

OK, fair enough. I was indeed mislead because I (mis)associated the word 'church' with Christianity. I was prepared to be morally outraged at you passing yourself off as a Christian minister, but since it is not a Christian 'church' I cannot complain. You do need to get some clearer nonemclature though...

And you are a church minister? Which church would that be?

I particularly like this bit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4748292.stm

I find that rather disturbing. Would you care to comment in what sense you do (or don't) believe in God?

Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has been suspended on full pay for 4 weeks for calling a reporter a 'concentration camp guard'. Given the recent discussions we have had on inciting racial/religious hatred, what do people think of this. Ken made an interesting comment himself I thought: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4746016.stm Hmm... I wonder if I could get suspended on full pay for 4 weeks if I make an offensive comment....

Your place or mine?

Here is an example from someone respectable: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0511/0511267.pdf

Which bit were you having trouble following?

I don't believe in free speech. I think you can do a lot of damage to a person with words, and I don't see how that damage is any better than physical damage. I will be arrested if I punch someone in the face, but a punch in the face can be a lot less harmful than verbally attacking someone. Preventing abusive hateful language is not stiffling self-expression - any point of view can be expressed in a constructive non-damaging manner. If you cannot express yourself in a civilized manner, you shouldn't be opening your mouth. The difficulty (as with all things) is knowing where to draw the line. For this reason alone, I don't like the bill in its current form. It needs to be a lot more explicit about what is and what is not permissible.

Why is it different to laws againsts the incitement of racial hatred? I can hide what I believe more effectively than I can hide my skin colour, but I am as incapable of changing what I believe as I am of changing my skin colour. So by inciting religious hatred you are persecuting a particular subset of our society.

I mean at energies higher than the Planck scale. Or alternatively the space-time lattice separation distance would have to be shorter than the Planck distance.

What if a little girl killed someone? Should she then be killed? I presume not, but what if the person who killed the little girl killed her because he fell asleep at the wheel of a car? Again, probably not, but what if a drug user killed the little girl while high? This is getting more into your ballpark I think, even though the drug user may not have been mentally capable of knowing what he was doing. What if someone had slipped something into his drink, so taking the drugs wasn't his idea? I suspect this puts him off the hook again. Now, what if the 'drugs' wheren't external but were some chemical imablance in his brain caused by a medical problem? What if the chemical imbalance was caused not by a medical problem as such but by some external source, e.g. a beating? What if the chemical imbalance was caused by the way the murderer was treated in his childhood? The point I am trying to get at is that you need to feel empathy not just for the murdered child and her parents, but for everyone. Try and get to the root of why the bad thing happens and maybe you will not be so instantly judgemental. Personally I don't think it is my place to judge anyone, about anything, because I am just as flawed as they are. And so are you.

Not necessarily. The infinities are arising because you are allowing the momentum in loops to go to infinity. You could cut off the integrals at some high energy (ie. decoupling) but this doesn't work because the theory is non-renormalizable (i.e. you need to renormalize the theory for every different observable, which makes it unpredictive). But there is no reason in principle why the higher scale theory could not do something to tame the divergences, and this could be a purely perturbative theory. We actually have one example of this already: Fermi's theory. Fermi came up with a theory for the weak interactions which involved interactions of four particles at once. It gave good agreement with the data at tree-level (leading order) but was found to be non-renormalizable (the quantum corrections blew up). This is exactly the state we are in with quantum gravity. Eventually people figured out the 'true' theory of the weak interaction, introducing W and Z bosons which 'spread out' the Fermi 4-particle interactions into 2 different 3-particle interactions separated by a W or Z. We found that the W and Z were particularly heavy, which is why they were hard to see, and indeed, at low energies they move very slowly so are not dynamical. In fact, one can 'integrate out' the W and Z modes from the 'true' theory and Fermi's theory drops out. The reason why Fermi's theory gives the wrong answer for loops is that the momentum running around the loops can be very big, and so the heavy W and Z again become important and shouldn't be ignored. Well, this will be true in cases of large gravitational field, so as one approaches the Planck scale you will have to expand about some non-flat classical solution of Einstein's filed equations. Then you will have difficulty because the gravitational coupling is large. But in principle you should be able to do perturbation theory at low energies because the gravitational coupling is very small. If I had any idea, I would be writing a paper, not posting at SFN. (But let me say this: i wouldn't be surprised if space-time itself was quantised. This woud act as a regulator, cutting off all loop integrals and make everything finite. It would have to be quantised on some trans-planckian scale though.)

Actually, they are not really incompatible. You can build a quantum theory of gravity using local supersymmetry. It has a graviton and at first order in an expansion of the coupling gives answers that are reasonable and makes reasonable predictions. The problem is that it is a non-renormalizable theory. What this means is that if you work out the quantum corrections to these processes, you get infinte contributions because the high energy physics does not decouple. This is the 'infinite probabilities' that Yourdadonapogos mentioned. However, this need not be the fault of the theory. This could be the fault of the physics - it may be that the physics at very high energies just doesn't decouple. We have always had decoupling in the past (eg. you don't need QM to use Newton's laws) but decoupling is just an assumption. Then we would need a proper theory of everything to make quantum gravity predictions beyond leading order.

So you want us to accept your theory but your theory doesn't have time dilation? Is that correct? Since time dilation is an observable fact, isn't that rather bad for your theory?

This idea has been around for a long time' date=' and is seriously proposed by some politicians. The actual suggestion was to capture CO2 which is being emitted and pump it into depleted gas fields underground. I think this is a terrible idea. People complain about burying small amounts of nuclear waste and then contemplate burying billions of tons of toxic gasses (which will [b']never[/b] become non-toxic)! What if there were to be a leak while burying it? A cloud of CO2 would kill everything inside it (except plants of course).

I think it is a real shame that google is being cencored in China, but it is better that they get some coverage than none at all. Some info will still get through.

No - it is not hypocritical. Google in china is merely suspending a service. They don't link to certain sites. The US government wants Google to give them information about Google clients, and that is a completely different thing. If the Chinese government asked Google to provide the names of people who performed searches on 'forbidden' topics, I hope Google would refuse, don't you?