Carrock

Have only a few minutes to correct a handful of the errors you produce at amazing speed: Took longer than 10 seconds to check there was no mention of matter and antimatter photons in the wiki; in your next post you seem to claim that photons and antiphotons have opposite spin (or does helicity have a special meaning to you?) I'm not going to trawl through the rest of your references for a possible source ref. I notice you have now gone down from 'Feymanns golden rules' to 'Feymanns golden rule'. It may help you if I point out that while 'Feymann' is not the same as 'Fermi', it is not true that 'Feymann' is the same as 'Fermi'. If you read through the above quote very carefully you'll notice there isn't even a 'Feymanns golden rule,' let alone, as I wasted my time typing earlier, 'Fermi Golden Rules, Feynman Golden Rules and Feymann Golden Rules don't exist AFAIK.' (You do seem to have corrected some of your references in your penultimate post.) Of course, with only one 'Feymanns golden rule' instead of at least two, the end results will now be determined differently. I pity whatever has to move the photon around as the determination of the end results keeps changing.* Seeing you quietly correcting errors you've made without acknowledging I pointed them out is getting tedious. Quite right. I've pointed out several times that things which are the same as each other are not also different from each other. I have clearly not made this clear enough for you and to do so is quite frankly impossible. I started having a glance through your equations; thanks for the obvious errors in these two which made me realise that was a waste of time. It seems your equations go from textbook to forum without engaging your brain except to remove explanatory text and symbol definitions. I'm done wasting my time here. * using your concept that equations determine end results

How particles scatter, or form new particles etc etc always depends on their cross sections . That uses the Breit Wigner equations along with the Feymann golden rules. It not some case of a photon knowing anything. When it encounters another particle the cross sections and Feymann golden rules are used to determine the end results. Granted we also have a table that is helpful . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Clebsch–Gordan_coefficients Sorry about delay.... I don't think your passive voice alternative for 'distinguish' is any better than my anthropomorphism, which is hard to resist when you claim photons are their own antiparticles but also different from their antiparticles. Saying "Breit Wigner equations .... and Feymann golden rules are used to determine the end results" raises interesting questions. Who or what uses the rules to determine the end results? You stated it's not the photon. I agree that photons don't know the rules, but I also think that such rules are only (imperfect) descriptions and prescriptive rules are at best only a statistical guide to the end result and certainly don't determine it. As Fermi Golden Rules, Feynman Golden Rules and Feymann Golden Rules don't exist AFAIK, is there an end result? A reference to anti-photons and matter photons would still be appreciated.

With e.g. electron/positron annihilation photons are normally produced. Photons with sufficient energy colliding could become an electron/positron pair etc as I said. Gravitons are the only possibility I see for low energy photons. A longer quote to show what I find problematic: "A photon is its own antiparticle." .... "anti-photons will annihilate with matter photons." How do photons distinguish between anti-photons and matter photons? Presumably if two high energy matter photons collide it is impossible for them to create a matter/antimatter pair. If you have a reference to there being both anti-photons and matter photons please share it. It can be the particle or anti particle which falls in. It has, loosely speaking, negative energy which reduces the energy/mass of the black hole.

Just a note on singularities: in physics they are places/situations where the currently used theory is not valid. If "the equations do lead to the infinite density singularity" the equations fail where they predict a singularity i.e. fail to predict anything. "Singularity science" is as scientific as Scientology. There may or may not be an unknown theory of black holes with no singularity but that theory or any other will not change what goes on in black holes. Saying they contain a singularity is no more meaningful than saying there is a singularity in Donald Trump's brain. From Halc quoting Rennie "The whole point of a singularity is that our equations become singular there and cannot describe what happens." Maybe some confusion? Photons produced from matter or antimatter interactions can have the same or different polarity etc. Photons can (rarely) interact with each other but not annihilate each other (except by creating a matter/antimatter pair etc. A photon can destructively interfere with itself but this only affects its observed location, not its existence. Some cross posting...

As before, I''ll use values which produce easily described effects. e.g. 50 Hz A.C. to a 1kW convection heater - the wire to the heater, as well as the heater, will always be warmer than the environment. In this example, most power will be dissipated as IR radiation but a small amount will be 50Hz radiation from the wiring etc. dc current is in practice current which has been constant long enough for transients associated with such as inductive or capacitive reactance to become negligible. 'Instantaneous' is not a meaningful concept for measuring e.g. current (coulombs per second) or power (joules per second) - e.g. 0 coulombs in 0 seconds could be any current i.e. not defined. Calculus, which involves indefinitely small nonzero quantities, is used rather than 'instantaneous' but if applied, everything including inductive and capacitive reactance has to be included. In particular, alternating current in the wire, and magnetic fields will not be calculated as constant even using indefinitely small nonzero quantities. You might better consider dc or ac separately rather than trying to consider ac as 'almost dc.' Or perhaps you just want to consider A.C. circuits where reactance and radiative loss are negligible.

There's been a bit of conflation in some replies between A.C. and D.C.. D.C. is conserved but A.C. isn't. So: V.H.F. A.C. whose effects are more obvious than 50Hz. You could have 100 meters of 50 ohm coaxial cable with 10db loss per 100 meters. Connecting A.C. power at say 100MHz 100V to the (resistive) cable gives I =V/R = 2 amps input (200W). Connect a 50 ohm resistive load to the far end and you'll get ~ 31.6V at 0.632A i.e. 20W output. If you use a 200 meter cable you'll get 10V at 0.2A i.e. 2W. The input is still 200W into 50 ohms. The current drops exponentially along the cable. The main power losses are I^R losses in the conductor, dielectric (insulator) heating and radiation from the cable. There is no A.C. current conservation; some of it charges and discharges the dielectric and current is also involved in creating magnetic and electromagnetic fields. One way of dealing with reactance is to consider the effect of a load impedance mismatch. e.g. terminate the cable with 25 instead of 50 ohms. This will cause a power reflection back into the cable to compensate for trying to connect a 50 ohm cable to a 25 ohm load. If 20W output then 20 *(50 -25)/(50+25)W i.e. 6.7W is reflected back into the cable and after attenuation 0.67W reaches the source. You'll get standing waves on the cable; every half wavelength (About 1.5m) you'll get maximum voltage and minimum current; between these nodes you get a minimum voltage, maximum current node. A.C. current can be created and destroyed without breaking conservation laws. Some energy is stored in various fields and doesn't reach the load; sometimes it's called imaginary power(it can be treated as 90 deg or sqrt(-1) out of phase with 'real' power) or reactive power(capacitors and inductors have reactance). This is sort of real; there are meters which measure forward and reflected power in coax cables... I didn't want to oversimplify too much; this post ended up much longer than I intended.

If a predator's reproductive success is greater than that of its prey, high reproduction rates definitely are a major negative contributor to a species survival in most cases. Predator numbers would closely track prey numbers as they increase; in bad times for prey reproduction, prey and then predator numbers would crash as prey was eaten by faster breeding predators. Eventually, perhaps after a few repeats, the predator and/or the prey would become extinct. In practice, e.g. introducing feral cats on a small island, most of the prey species are driven to extinction but the predator often scrapes a living in an impoverished environment.

Unless Atiras asteroids cross Venus' orbit no flyby assist is possible. It would be necessary to change the payload's orbit such that its aphelion is at earth's distance from the sun. This would generally require a lot more than 10mph or even 100mph delta v. Similarly for Amor asteroids which don't cross Mars' orbit the payload needs to be decelerated for an earth distance perihelion. There is only one convenient planet to aim for and if the asteroid's orbital period is similar to earth's you may have to wait years for a lowish energy/fast transit window. That Aten asteroid does look quite promising... Within reason you want an asteroid from which as many planets as possible can be reached occasionally by a low delta v burn. I suspect, without (years of) calculation that asteroids from which Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can sometimes be reached with low delta v would be good. Several asteroids in different orbits could effectively spread out the windows. The point of planetary flyby is to donate to or abstract from the flyby planet's velocity and momentum with a very small initial delta v rather than obtain it all from burning fuel. You would only need a tiny amount of fuel (tons of payload per gallon of fuel) which I expect would be present in adequate quantities in most asteroids. b.t.w. I'm still very dubious about asteroid mining....

For something like the Voyager grand tour, less than one a century... For a slow journey, all you need is the delta v to get to the first flyby and for course corrections; any asteroid chosen with this in mind would have frequent low delta v options, I'd guess one every year or two. Planetary alignments, possible journeys and required delta v would likely be all worked out long before any mining. There would be a balance between the cost of rocket fuel etc to minimise journey time and the cost of mined resources unavailable during the journey. NASA manages these flybys regularly and, it seems, generally chooses to keep time to ultimate target at less than ten years.

and similar comments... There are a lot of issues with mining asteroids but I don't think this one is significant. All the delta v you need is sufficient to arrange a first planetary flyby, with slowing and deflection towards another flyby planet, basically the reverse of the many flybys used to get spacecraft from earth to e.g. Jupiter. The minerals would also need entry protection to survive entry at somewhat more than earth's escape velocity. e.g. a package which would miss a planetary flyby by ten million miles in 10 years' time would only need a delta v around 100mph.

As Strange mentioned a long time ago, confirmed by some of my friends, the Mensa lower membership limit is 148 and Mensa pass scores range from 149 to 152 - at least from 5 samples (6 including Peterkin's example). Explains the fact that an an improbably large number of apparently intelligent people think a good use of their time is to hang out with people who, like them, are good at 'passing' IQ tests. The test has to be optimised for an IQ range. The highest IQ for an individual test corresponds to getting all the answers correct.

As you've mentioned reciprocity a few times in this thread, just a clarification that reciprocity is not always valid. From Electromagnetic Reciprocity This is commonly used in radar, when the transmitter and receiver are both permanently connected and are effectively part of the aerial; output power to the rest of the aerial is from the tx, while input power is to the rx, isolating tx and rx. Using the ionosphere for radio communications similarly sometimes produces non reciprocal paths.

A win-win question from you. It's in the public domain that Britain's Official Secrets Act is pretty draconian and signing it is for life, not just Christmas. So if I answer 'no' I'm lying or telling the truth. If I answer 'yes' I'm lying or breaking the Official Secrets Act. A few people who had very high level clearance: Burgess, Philby, MacLean, Blunt, Cairncross, Fuchs, Gold, Greenglass, Hall etc. In case there is any truth in what you've said, this is my last post on this thread.

Except when your son is carrying clear messages to the captain or other crew. As someone who chose not to start WW3 by faking messages, I'm surprised he didn't end up as chief of naval operations. Silly me, I didn't for a moment believe that was true. Like you, I'll go with vicarious achievement. Best I can come up with is my dad was on various merchant ships escorting U.S. - Britain convoys in WW2. Only got his feet wet once when the wheelhouse windows were smashed by a nearby shell. BTW none of my close family, including my father, were in the military, so you 'win' on that. So the unimportant things like ship's orders are fine for the radio operator to know. Next post Is the radio operator trusted not to make his own private copy? If not, whoever searches him when he leaves would need the same clearance as he might see a decrypted message. Much better of course for the radio operator to memorize the messages.

That's interesting. I know a few people who were radio operators on commercial ships decades ago and none of them were able to decrypt secure messages not addressed to them. If, very improbably, the captain gave decryption information to your son, he deserved to be court-martialed and his security clearance revoked. Even worse is the idea that there are people in the U.S. military whose job includes having unnecessary access to highly secret information. 😧

I don't know but probably just some saddo annoying me. It's the first time anyone's ever made even a token effort to hack me AFAIK. Updating my password on my various devices was tedious but probably very low security risk.

Nor me. However, hacking my email enough (more if competent) for my ISP to change my password and inconvenience me was a lot simpler/cheaper. It's rather sad that mentioning public domain work by Frank Miller (1882) and Hedy Lamarr (1942 patent) is considered worth this response.

There's an arms race between security and hacking in encryption and I hadn't really thought about the internet, computers and O.T.C. The securely encoded data in O.T.C. is actually encode once, send, copy or read many. Only the copies of the O.T.C. key must be held securely. So send an encrypted file via internet to another computer as described by Sensei. DOS attacks etc don't deplete O.T.C. as the same encrypted data can be resent. For best security copy the file to a computer which never has internet access. Plug in a memory stick with a copy of the one time key used by the originator. Run a simple program which uses the one time key to decrypt the file. Don't save the decrypted data , unplug the stick and switch off the computer when finished. The O.T.C. doesn't need to be significantly larger than the total of all files sent.

O.T.C. isn't particularly suited for sending vast amounts of data or for the internet as I hinted at in my preference for cheap and crude over sophisticated and expensive. Fairly secure encryption is pretty much necessary for the internet. To avoid rather than solve these problems, if phones with their metadata are also unsuitable, one of many alternatives: frequency hopping radio with one time code to set the frequencies. This is very hard to jam and a fairly secure version is widely used by the military and other clandestine communicators. One time code isn't normally practical for large numbers of users. Probably civilians couldn't get a license as governments like to eavsdrop.

For some forgotten reason I originally assumed you meant random data from the sender rather than malicious interference. Malicious interference can disrupt any communication; the important point with O.T.C. is never ever reuse it for any reason.

I don't see why anything but noise would cause desynchronization. To (re)synchronise if frequently needed, use a predefined part of the key (different each time) to send e.g. ZZZZZZZZZZafdc74cf to indicate the next byte used for message encryption. Fairly straightforward software could be used to find which part of the key decodes as ZZZZZZZZZZ. Goods e.g. a key can be sent by trusted courier which has been possible for a few thousand years. This code, like any other, relies on physical security. Any finite length one time code code will, if generated often enough, eventually repeat by random chance, in this case (64GB) after at least many billion uses, but that doesn't assist decoding. A recommended way here is to use a noisy reverse biased diode in avalanche mode and an analogue to digital converter to generate the code. With some care, the slight preferential bias for some digits can be made far too small to be useful for decoding. I don't think knowing the algorithm would help. The important issue here is to realize that crude and cheap is much better than sophisticated and expensive. An ancient phone with no internet access and only text and voice can't be hacked without physical access, assuming the phone designer was honest and competent. Some software would be needed for de- and encryption. If the phone was stolen, all its one time code would be compromised but not other phones with different one time code. If you want to annoy a spook monitoring your comms, send this plain text message first. 'To make sure you get the full list of our secret agents in Britain, I'll send it 10 times. Naturally you use different parts of the one time code for each message and actually send it 1000 times. One time code is inconvenient but has its advantages. I recall many years ago hearing people droning out interminable lists of numbers on short wave radio; my first experience of one time code.

Slightly off topic, but defeating quantum decryption is quite simple (human stupidity excepted) and the technique has been known since at least 1882. From Wikipedia In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent. A couple of phones, each with say 64GB identical one time code storage and no ability to change the software without physical access should be fine for a few years of communication. For obvious reasons, adverts for increasingly powerful phones and encryption rarely mention this.

From later in the Truth Table wiki So, I think, this wiki is stating that you can have a truth table with or without the additional steps required to implement it, which seems rather obvious. Complementary to Studiot, I can't see any way to implement a nontrivial truth table without at least logic gates. The Wiki refers to Logic Gate for practical implementation...

Wikipedia is certainly oversimplifying. Like, say, a photon, a virtual photon is calculated or observed to exist from when it is created to when it is destroyed, which for massless virtual particles has no upper time limit. The second sentence is is even more misleading. Oppositely electrically charged particles experience a net attraction by exchanging virtual photons; this attraction does not happen with real photons but the arguably very different characteristics of virtual and real photons in this instance does not shorten the virtual photons' lifetime.

What description? Photons, for example, are stable and therefor virtual photons have infinite range.