Severian

Please don't blame Jesus....

A better question to ask is why are all the heavy charged objects (i.e. the protons) positively charged and why are the light ones (the electrons) negative? After all, you could (in principle) construct a world out of negatively charged antiprotons and positively charged positrons. So where are they? (This is the baryon asymmetry problem.) For that matter, it seems like a massive coincidence that the up quark has charge exactly 2/3 while the down quark has charge exactly -1/3. Since the proton is 2 up quarks and a down quark it has charge 2/3+2/3-1/3=+1 which exactly cancels the charge of the electron making a neutral hydrogen atom. Our physics theory contains no mechanism whatsoever to link the charges of quarks and the electron. If the charge of the up quark had been +1/2 (or 0.6667) say then protons wouldn't form and we wouldn't be here to wonder. (This is the charge quantization problem.)

It is fairly clear that not all systems are chaotic, but it is also fairly clear that some systems are. The determination of which is which is not very interesting.

You yourself pointed out that the US position was bipartisan. You can't have your cake and eat it. In fact you said:

flyboy has just been added to 16 different FBI danger-lists. I wouldn't advise trying to take a plane in the next, say, 20 years or so.

I never mentioned Bush. That seems to be your fetish.

What's the 'ABB bandwagon' and who jumped on it?

Plenty of democratic governments have deliberately targeted civilians of another country in military attacks (the US included). Granted the attacks on Iraq were aimed at military or political targets, but they also killed a lot of civilians. I don't think you can legitimately class an elected government's actions as terrorism though, no matter how evil they may be. I think the US has to get out of this mindset of calling everyone they disagree with a terrorist.

It certainly puts the US in a difficult position. Since Hamas are now a democratically elected government, they cannot, by definition, be terrorists anymore. Any Hamas attack on Israel becomes an attack of one state on another. And the US demand for a democratically elected governement to give up violence just after the US has invaded two reasonably close neighbours of Palestine seems a little rich.

And who is going to pay for this? You? The starving in Africa maybe?

No. Mass is the same idea - it doesn't exist independently. It is simply a property of matter. So when you have a process which changes from one particle type to another you have to make sure that the energy and mass are conserved. They don't have to be conserved individually, but must be conserved together where the mass counts as an energy of E/c2.

no - that is a mistake. I will have to think about it some more.

The funny thing is, this is exactly the view held by science. Energy is solely a property of matter or force carriers (like the photon). It doesn't exist on its own, but only as the property of a particle/wave.

I can see that it is true, but my proof isn't very rigorous. [math] \langle U_P(z,z) \rangle = \langle 0 | \exp \left[ -ie\oint_P dx^\mu A_\mu \right] |0 \rangle[/math] Now expand the exponential: [math] \langle U_P(z,z) \rangle = \langle 0 | 1 -ie \oint_P dx^\mu A_\mu -e^2 \oint_P dx^\mu A_\mu (x) \oint_P dy^\nu A_\nu (y) + \cdots |0 \rangle[/math] But we know that [math]\langle A_\mu \rangle = 0 [/math] since each term is either a creation or annihilation operator which will cancel with either the vacuum to the left or right. Thus every odd term in A will be zero. Also, I can write [math]\langle A_\mu (x) A_\nu (y) \rangle = \langle \left[ A_\mu (x),A_\nu (y) \right] \rangle [/math] since the extra term is zero. Resumming the exponential: [math] \langle U_P(z,z) \rangle = \langle 0 | \exp \left[ -e^2 \oint_P dx^\mu \oint_P dy^\nu \left[ A_\mu(x), A_\nu (y) \right] \right] |0 \rangle[/math] Putting in the photon propagator (in position space) for [math]\left[ A_\mu (x),A_\nu (y) \right] [/math] gives the desired result. There must be a nicer way of doing this without expanding the exponential I think.... possibly by constructing the Wilson Loop out of Wilson lines...

Angular momentum is conserved as long as the laws of physics are rotationally symmetric (just as momentum conservation holds if the laws of physics are translationally symmetric).

I am 100% sure I have broken no-one's heart (although a small part of me would have liked to). I think this statement reveals your true nature - you are an egotist, who thinks his perfect woman is out there just waiting for you, but you lack the courage to go looking for her. Maybe for her sake that is a good thing - she can find someone else and have a happy life without you.

I had no idea that Schroedinger's cat wrote a book together with Gleik. Clever cat!

As it happens, I am happily married. But I wouldn't be if I had had your attitude.

What's wrong with liking the way someone looks? Lets face it, you are not going to meet the person of your dreams on your first ever date. It takes gazillions of dates to meet them, so if you are going to *****foot around getting to know people before you ask them out on a date you are seriously undermining your chances of meeting 'the one'. You need to get out there and date as many people as possible, and dump them as soon as you know they are not the one for you (for their sake as well as yours).

How do you stop the universe collapsing under gravity? Also, what is the 'recycling process' and how does it evade the second law of thermodynamics?

I would dispute that. There really isn't any evidence of this at all. It is simply a nice hypothesis that there is some large symmetry group which fractured into smaller ones as the universe coolled. As for the original question, the electric and magnetci field are as unified as is possible. They are simply different components of the electromagnetic field tensor. So they are unified on a mathematical and a practical level. To break the unification, you would need to break Lorentz invariance.

Thanks

On my home pc, running windows XP, zip files seem very easy to handle. They have an icon which looks like a normal folder but with a zipper on it, and when I click on it, it opens very quickly, just like a normal folder would. All this seems completely innate to Windows. On my laptop, zip files are a pain. I am also running Windows XP, but when I got it, it did not recognise zip files and I had to download the trial version of winzip. Winzip seems a complete pain, and isn't nearly so nice as the other utility on my desktop. Also, you have to pay for it (I am still using the evaluation version). So, does anyone have any idea why my two versions of windows xp handle this differently? Does anyone know how I can setup my laptop to function in the same way as my desktop? Alternatively, does anyone know of a good (preferably free) zipping program I could use?

So what is wrong with 1,2,18? 1*2*18=36 and 1+2+18=21 windows. After all, the other mathematicain may just be an idiot.

You need to change your outlook. I would recommend giving the New Testament a try (why not? What do you have to lose?) but failing that I am sure a lot of people here have some good ideas about uplifting books to read. Oddly enough I have been reading Kirkegaarde's Fear and Trembling and finding it quite uplifting (but maybe I am odd).