Strange

I don't think he says that. His suggestion is that if we could find such a black hole, then we could harness the radiation from it as a source of energy. Clearly, to create a black hole would take at least as much energy as you would ever get out of it. (But creating one is even further beyond our capabilities than safely harnessing one we found.)

It is possible to pay zero (income) tax in the UK as well. Obviously some taxes (e.g VAT) are unavoidable.

The UK version is 10 pages longer but only has 1/3rd the questions.

So Einstein only scores 1 out of 3 for his "spooky action at a distance" (not spooky and not an action, but it is at a distance).

I find this one a little hard to understand / believe. Do you really get an allowance for interest received? In most places income from interest is taxed similarly to any other source of income. Does this mean you could avoid tax completely by having your salary replaced by an equivalent amount of interest from a savings account that the company sets up in your name?

Monkeys evolve. Everything evolves. And of course, humans didn't evolve from monkeys. They both evolved from a common ancestor. Sorry, I just meant I hadn't heard it in relation to evolution.

Only if your tax liability was less than CHF32,000. I imagine there are a lot of people who pay more tax than that. (And I think I might rather pay tax than have five children!)

It sounded pretty implausible. A quick check on-line shows that in France, there are allowances for (at least): mortgage interest, child’s education, adult children, domestic help, nursing/residential care, charitable donations, alimony, investments ... Similarly for Germany: home office, travel to work, professional memberships, student loan, child care, education, church tax, insurance, alimony, charitable donations, mortgage, pensions, investments, … And if anyone really cares about exactly what allowances are available in every country, this may be a good resource: http://taxsummaries.pwc.com/uk/taxsummaries/wwts.nsf/ID/tax-summaries-home

Some of those are tax deductible (or, equivalently, give you extra tax allowances) in the UK. But not 3, 5, 7(?) and 8. Income from pretty much all investments, including pensions, is taxed (although they are about to introduce a fairly generous allowance of the first £1,000 interest being tax free). They got rid of tax relief on mortgage interest years ago. And, as far as I know, there is no longer any tax benefit to being married. For most people tax is taken directly from the salary by the employer.

Of course every number has meaning (or several meanings, for example depending whether you treat it as an ordinal or cardinal). Perhaps what you mean is that a number has no value or meaning to us unless it has a practical application. That is a rather narrow view, but even in that context there are numbers far larger than the one you have invented which do have a use. There is also an ingenious proof that there are no uninteresting numbers! Which raises a couple of points: 1. How have you calcuated (or estimated) the odds against reality? (Naively, I would have assumed it was 0) 2. So you have found a meaning (odds against reality) for a very large number of the sort you say is meaningless.

But, of course, you don't know that. It is just your personal opinion. Please stop stating it as if it were a fact.

What on Earth makes you think that. Where have I made any such claim. (I'm not even sure what it means.) My only contention is that you repeatedly make grand claims about what "we" cannot know and your secret knowledge, such as your recent: How is it that you alone are in such a privileged position to know things that are hidden from the rest of the human race? How is it that, despite your enormous wisdom and magnificent insights, you are never able to do anything other make unsupported assertions? Why can you never provide any evidence or reasoned argument? All you do is repeat the same assertions over and over as if they were fact, rather than just your personal beliefs. Then you decide to leave the forum for a while. Only to pop up again a few months later making the same unsubstantiated boasts. It is tedious and bad mannered. Please stop doing it.

Perhaps if you ever provided any evidence for your claims, they might be worth considering. As it is, they can be dismissed as empty posturing. Back on topic, this might be of interest: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24963

This sounds similar to the way that agriculture (and maybe Indo-European languages) may have spread into Europe. Rather than migrants bringing the new techniques with them in some sort of invasion it appears to have been a gradual process where the children of farmers moved on a bit and set up a bit further east. Then their descendants did the same, and so on.

Yes, I have argued against it for just that reason in the past. (I never claimed to be consistent!)

Repeating a baseless assertion three times doesn't magically make it true. Unless you have some evidence for your claim, you might just have to concede that you don't know. It is very simple to define and represent numbers that are so large that, by your definition, they don't exist. Which suggests that your definition is wrong. (Go on, ask me if I am surprised.)

There might be an element of Marx's "opiate of the people" as well: something to take their minds off their problems.

And it might not actually be all that big: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#The_Universe_versus_the_observable_universe But probably not.

In between the usual "unmarried foreign criminals on benefits cause cancer" stories they do very occasionally slip in a bit of real science every now and again. I expect the science editor will have his pay docked for letting this happen. Does the size of universe matter in any practical sense? I can't really see how. But that is true of many of the subjects that science looks into. It is just a fascinating question. Attempting to answer it might throw up some other interesting questions. What more could you want?

I think it is wonderful the way that some people have such an insight into the nature of reality that they are able to tell the rest us poor saps just what it is that "we" misapprehend. The detailed logical analysis behind your arguments, and the mountains of evidence you provide, has certainly provided me with food for thought and it may take some time to digest it all. This might completely change my life. Or ... just another empty (but typically arrogant) claim from the King of Empty Claims.

It is possible the universe is infinite. So by your logic it can't exist. And just repeating the same assertion is nor proof or even evidence.

I have never heard that term, but I suppose it is reasonably accurate: evolution proceeds by random changes ("trial") that are "tested" by the environment. As a result, some of the changes survive and some don't (the "errors").

Are you asking if the sound travelling through the air can, by itself, generate detectable electromagnetic radiation? I don't know the answer to that... but it is clear that sound must provide some energy to the air and heat it slightly. Some analysis here: http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/poster-coffee.cfm

Note that the Higgs mechanism is not the only (or even the most significant) source of mass. Photons do not interact with the Higgs field and do not have rest mass. But they do have energy. Nearly all the mass of an atom, for example, comes from the energy holding the protons and neutrons together. Only a small proportion comes from the quarks interaction with the Higgs mechanism.

On the other hand, it is nice to see someone arguing that the universe is complex and (if I interpret the "contradictory theories are true" idea correctly) that we can never fully understand it, in contrast to the claim that has been made by quite a few people, that theories like GR and QM must be wrong because they cannot be understood (by the poster, a barmaid, a child, or whatever). Yes, the universe is complicated and it is possible we will never fully understand it.