Ronald Hyde

It's actually quite a good description. As for the particle-vs-wave dilemma, remember that theoretical physics is just a way of calculating the possible results of experiments. It comes as no surprise to me that you can calculate one way in one circumstance, and another way in another.

I was looking at a picture of Hurricane Issac in the Wikipedia and I was struck yet again by how much they resemble the typical double spiral galaxy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Isaac_Aug_28_2012_1630Z.jpg Remembering well Feynman's Dictum that the same equations always have the same solutions, what equation do galaxies and hurricanes have in common?

Large particle accelerators are synchrotrons, the magnets only keep the beam moving around in a circle by bending it. The beam is accelerated by radio frequency radiation which is synchronized with the beam's traversal of the ring. My understanding of Gauss's law is correct.

I'm thinking that you shouldn't be thinking so much in terms of a wavefunction as a propagator, and maybe trying to find the rules for writing and solving the propagator equation. And no, I don't think that the Universe will exactly repeat itself in Time, and the propagator will be purely a function of time, so that space and everything in it will be a function of time.

Before you even start to build your particle accelerator I suggest you learn and understand Maxwell's Equations. I know that you don't understand them because if you did you would know that a static magnetic field does not produce any force on a static charge.

And how exactly do we know which 'constants' are fundamental, and which are derivative? And are they all really constant. We may find that some change slowly with time, others not at all. And we can't change what happened in the past, regardless of what value the constants have, now or then. So one part of your question isn't really connectable to the other part. When you say 'Tell me how a theorist could derive anything by excluding FC from his research?', you're introducing even more vagueness and confusion. What is his research, building a Time Machine? If so, what would the FC's as you call them, have to do with the construction of it?

You've gotten some really good replies on this question, the 'fundamental' constants have little to do with it, but simple logic and the realization that amongst other things, time is the order of events, has everything to do with it. I'm very leery of using the word 'fundamental' to describe anything in Physics. After all, the job of the theorist is to derive as much as possible from as little as possible, so he should seek to treat as few things as possible as being fundamental.

If you're trying to say that empty space has properties, and can't properly be described as 'nothing', you are probably right, it has an Index of Refraction of one, for example, and that has to be included in any description that uses that quantity. So any physics statements that gives zero for the value of the vacuum will end up being wrong at some point. But you do have a strange way of saying it.

A process that returns the value of an 'observable' quantity, a number related to energy, momentum, field intensity, etc..It usually involves some special instrument.

The Idea that the magnetic field 'contains energy' is somewhat of a paradox, because there are no quantities thatchange with time associated with a constant magnetic field. The magnetic field is B, the curl of the vector potential, and the current density is the curl of B. All of those are space-like. However if we make something change with time, the current in a coil for instance, because the current is made up of conserved charges, and we can 'switch off' the current, energy will be released and can be used to heat up a resistor, for example. All this makes the question of where the energy is in an electomagnet very interesting. We can think of a 'charged' capacitor or inductor as being an excited state of the uncharged circuit element, and and as such an excited state, it has extra energy, but when we ask 'where is that energy' things get a little complicated..

That's only true if the interaction involves 'real' photons such as your flashlight produces. Virtual photons escape that requirement. If you look at is in Feynman's 'sum over possible future histories' way, the system is looking into the future to see what configurations it can have. This is very much in conflict with our ordinary intuition of causality, but it is how the world works, every test that challenges it has proven wrong.

What part is word salad? That's a very vague remark, quite meaningless as it stands.

There are so many possible scenarios on this 'dark matter' business that it's not funny. There could be matter which only interacts with other matter gravitationally, but is otherwise completely transparent to and invisible to 'regular matter'. There could be a 'whole universe' of 'alternate matter' that exists right alongside regular matter but only interacts with its own kind. Maybe regular matter goes 'incommunicado' with other matter after a time, and we have whole galaxies of dark matter, and maybe ours will go dark too in time. Because of its 'dark' nature it would be hard to confirm or deny any possibility related to dark matter. It may have to wait for a competent theory to prove or disprove it.

From what I can find, a Phosphate ion is joined to ADP to make ATP, so the extra energy is potential energy in the added bond. Which make ATP unstable to spontaneous hydrolysis, which explains why it is made and used so quickly, it isn't really stored by the cells. When energy is used by cells, in an enzyme for instance, it is transfered to an electron or pair of electrons associated with a metal ion in a Porphyrin ring in the enzyme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyrin Chlorophyll also uses a Porphyrin ring to absorb the energy of two photons of sunlight, which is used to make ATP. But the exact mechanisms for the various enzymes to 'do their jobs' in the cells, I don't know about. How it's transferred to and from the ADP >> ATP process, and used to make changes in the cell.

We really do exist in multiple locations when you think about it. Our bodies are spread out in space, so all the coordinates that are 'occupied' by parts of our bodies are our locations.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4758

Not really a stupid question but it is for sure that you are interpreting the meaning of the propagator wrongly. It's not to be thought of as a wave function, so the total integral doesn't have to have any particular value, such as 1. What it does is tell how the system evolves with time, so that only how it looks at time t, any given time, is what is important. If the total 'wavefront', if you want to call it that, grows as [latex] 4 \pi t^2 [/latex], then for the probability to total 1, which by logic it must, then the value of the function at t must be [latex]1 /t_2 4 \pi [/latex] . That's for probabilities for positions, for amplitudes or momenta it would be different.

Yes, that is an isomorphism of it, where [latex]2\pi[/latex] is the length of the sides. You can see it is related to SU(3).

I'm actually aware of what you've said, but I didn't know about Greene's book, that would be interesting. For others reading this post, this is not a regular 3d torus with a curved geometry embedded in a 4 dimensional space, it has a 'flat' metric and is only embeddable in a torus of the same type in a higher dimension.

I totally agree on that one. Many have been tempted into believing them a valid physical theory because of the 'pretty maths'.

Here's another shape that it can be in. Imagine a cube, of finite size, but mathematically 'connect' each face to its direct opposite. And it increases in size with time too. If you lived inside it and you went up through the top you would return through the bottom. It's a very interesting space, for translations it is perfectly symmetrical, but it is different in different directions, it has no less that seven different axis, three for the sides and four for the corner to opposite corner axis. Just what you need to represent certain aspects of physics.

I believe that electricity and magnetism play an important role in Nature, but it's a great oversimplification and will result in many errors of description, to simply say that that is all there is to it.

If you are standing in a field of grass with the Sun behind you, you will notice that the grass in front of you, opposite the Sun, will be brighter than the grass to the sides. That is a similar back scattering from the cellulose fibers in the grass.

Diracs large number hypothesis postulates some relations among among large numbers that occur in Nature such as the age of the Universe and the inverse strength of Gravity, expressed in certain units. The Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis Many more references to it can be found by a web search. It isn't a model of the Universe like the Big Bang or Steady State models, but it does offer some guidelines on the building of such models. What do you think its implications are, and what do you think of it in general?

I think they have become a fad, in the same way that a dog breed becomes a fad and the breed genetics is ruined by poor breeding, when a scientific idea becomes a fad people get sloppy and read meaning into every aspect of it. It gets so far off the track of Physics that it has no connection with reality. Which is sad because some parts of string theory are valid physics but their meaning gets lost in 32 dimensional spaces that have no connection with the real world.