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Responding today to the thread in Speculations, it struck me I don't know how to treat the stored energy in a static EM field, according to E² = (mc²)² + p²c². Since, unlike the situation with EM radiation, there is no motion involved, I presume the second term does not apply. But does a static field gain rest mass, as its stored energy increases? Seems weird if true. I've a feeling I'm missing something here. Can anyone help?

The difference is in intensity, not so much likelihood of infection. Boosted? You suffer a strong cold / flu and generally feeling like total crap for a few days. Unvaxxed? You likely will need ventilators and fluids to avoid death… IF there’s room in the local hospital to accept you.

I read a book in 2020 on pandemics that was written several years prior to COVID. In it they described different pandemics and the reaction to them. Governments tried to enforce lockdowns. Foreigners were blamed. Businesses minimized the impact so as to not lose revenue. Individuals complained about loss of freedoms and government overreach. You could easily have changed the name of the pandemic described in the book with COVID-19 and no one would have noticed.

They get halfway into the article, and all the way through the section on the US, before mentioning vaccination rates. And it ignores booster rates entirely. "Just over 63% of the US population is fully vaccinated, much lower than in the UK (71%) as well as Italy and France (both 75%). In Canada, almost 79% of the population is fully protected." The US lags these other countries in booster rates, too. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccine-booster-doses-per-capita?country=CHL~RUS~USA~URY~OWID_WRL~GBR~FRA~CAN~ITA We already know that vaccination, and boosting, lowers the chance of hospitalization. But yeah, this is is puzzle. </s>

One thing that gives me pause is the phrasing "acquire mass" If you have a charge, the field is already there. Nothing is "acquired" If you are creating a field by rearranging a charge configuration that has no field into one that does, you are doing work. In that sense mass is "acquired" because you are adding energy, and thus mass, which is stored in that new configuration.

I would be a bit cautious about making dust out of leaves. It would be wise to avoid breathing in any of the dust at least. A friend of mine caught legionnairs and very nearly died, from breathing in spray from jet washers. They used a pool of standing water as a reservoir. You never know what you are breathing in, it's best to take precautions.

Du Sautoy is definitely into symmetry. He has written at least three books. The Alhambra stories are in the Finding Moonshine one. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Symmetry-Journey-Into-Patterns-Nature/dp/0060789417 Here are the relevent pages from Ball's Tapestry about mixing drums. My apologies for the poor scans due to the spine of the book.

I think it is still very much open. GR is an accurate and very valid description of gravity (within its domain of applicability), but it isn’t an explanation, because it has nothing to say about the underlying mechanism. We simply don’t know yet how and why macroscopic spacetime with its observed degrees of freedom comes about; we can only describe its dynamics. This is why research into quantum gravity is so important.

The thread topic seems rather trivial until you consider that "possibility", much like the set theory problem above, is really a non-referential linguistic operation that describes our use of language rather than any particular referent or experience except the experience of using language. A statement of possibility describes a hypothetical validity rather than a factual validity because it pertains to the unknown, but as the unknown becomes known then the hypothetical possibilities narrow toward the factual reality. Thus "possibility" pertains to knowledge rather than reality. Even your set theory problem makes more sense after considering that "sets" are a useful product of psychology and language rather than empirical investigation of the world, and insofar that a set is imaginary a set is free to produce the sorts of contradictions that are necessary to guide a logical operation toward its appropriate conclusion. err "factual *veracity*", not "validity" A good analogy is a wrench that doesn't fit any bolts. The wrench still exists, it just doesn't work. If my cult happened to worship that mis-shapen wrench, however, that wrench would suddenly become an important aspect of my world in the minds of myself and culties. 😋

The truth of the matter is that reality would not be that tight a tissue. It does not hesitate until you take the most shocking phenomena or dismiss our own imagination's most possible figures. Perception isn't a science; it's not an act, it's not an intentional takeover; it's the context from which all actions come and are meant to emerge. Hhhmm ??

As per Scottish philosopher David Hume, nothing we envision is totally unlikely. We will describe the skills required to bring these images to life—to allow them as technologies—once we have the capacity to shape images in our minds. Our imagination produces only representations of hope based on our observations of the world surrounding us. It's true that anything that is unlikely is often unthinkable.

None of the above applies. We are not literally standing on any shoulders, and there is literally no scientific evidence for the existence of giants, or the proposition that if they did exist, they would allow billions of people to climb up on them.