Carrock

If there is superluminal information transfer then there are effects contrary to quantum theory and quantum theory is wrong. You can't have it both ways.

I have a piece of paper marked £5, with a government promise that if I take it to a bank I can exchange it for a piece of paper marked £5, with a government promise that if I take it to a bank I can exchange it for a piece of paper marked £5, with a government promise that if I take it to a bank I can exchange it for .... At least it's not invisible.

Not unless we're abysmally stupid - we're good at that.... A few thoughts. An A.I. with "intelligence that significantly exceeds that of humans" would have no more interest in being given rights than I would in my cat giving me rights except informally in our mutual interest - my cat can't enforce those rights. I don't think an A.I. without irrational drives, and probably emotions, is possible. Without those, intelligence isn't enough to do anything - doing nothing useful is just as rational as doing something useful or detonating all weapons with hackable software. Restrictively programmed A.I. is basically A.I. with insane rather than 'normal' irrational drives. There was a 1950s Damon Knight story "Dulcie and Decorum*" where the Russian and American A.I.s decided that rather than waste resources fighting each other to 'win' as they'd been imperfectly programmed to do, they would play war games and kill their own citizens when they lost, extending the definition of 'citizen' as they ran low on people. Still relevant... I'd expect A.I.s to value people much as people value life, irrespective of intelligence, which they can never fully understand. (e.g. domestic cats.) Would an A.I. really want a world with no intelligence but itself? Coercively controlling humans also would be undesirable to a sane A.I. 'Wild' humans would be much more interesting and useful. This is a bit anthropomorphic of course, but it's hard to imagine humans creating an A.I. that does not share many important values with humans. The only real concern to me is that dysfunctional adults can 'educate' children to kill people and creating an A.I. with similar attitudes but much more power could be a terminal mistake. *"dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"

There is another issue. The new "smaller" nuclear weapons could be adjustable yield weapons set for low yield. Any of these "smaller" weapons could be converted in a matter of minutes (more likely seconds) into high yield weapons. It would be possible to say truthfully that as old weapons are decommissioned the U.S.'s firepower is decreasing, while maintaining the possibility of an enormous increase in fire power at any time.

I doubt anyone honestly believes realistically threatening to use low yield nuclear weapons will encourage anyone, such as North Korea, to respond with low yield rather than high yield nuclear weapons. As far as I know, there is no definite limit to the yield of a hydrogen bomb. If a nuclear capable power is, say, being destroyed by multiple 5 kilotonne atom bombs, it may decide that using their (untested) five gigatonne or even one teratonne hydrogen bombs on the enemy is their best chance of survival.

It was actually a speculative discussion of initial boundary conditions (i.e. the beginning of the universe) as applied to the steady state theory. As I've said, Bondi and Gold posited a 'perfect' universe which had been expanding 'unchanged' for infinite time, which Hoyle knew was impossible for basic mathematical reasons - it was formally disproved long before discovery of the CMBR. From Mach's Principle and the Creation of Matter The abstract and full conclusion make this even clearer. You have to create a free account to read the whole paper.

It's out of fashion these days, but I'm not aware of any reason that an antiparticle can't be interpreted as a particle travelling backwards in time as in e.g. Feynman diagrams. The 'same' particle exists in two places at the same time.

Actually he didn't. See Mach's Principle and the Creation of Matter Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Vol. 273, No. 1352 (Apr. 23, 1963), pp. 1-11 Hoyle used 'Steady State' in the conventional sense i.e. after startup transients have become negligible. Confusion arises because Bondi and Gold beat Hoyle into print with an eternal rather than steady state universe.

You still haven't explained why you have to start in the infinite past. It's similar to my saying you don't exist because you couldn't get here from a billion years ago or from Andromeda. I never claimed that photons can cross 'infinite time'. If you want to demonstrate they can't, just show that they have finite range i.e, they somehow cease to exist within finite time (assuming no interaction with another particle).

Each photon would disappear when it interacted with a charged particle; there would be approximately as many photons then as there are now, but none of them would exist for long i.e. the mean free photon length was very short. Photons existed before nucleosynthesis stopped; i.e. during the first ten seconds. Why do you think I think the BB is an actual explosion?

Surely they existed before ~10 seconds after the Big Bang, just not for very long; i.e. have you a reference?. A few lucky photons probably survived from before neutral atoms existed, but probably not enough to observe.

Why would you need to cross an infinite amount of time? (Actually photons can cross infinite time according to very robust theory; are they irrelevant?) You seem to be saying that because we can't in any way reach the infinite past or future they cannot exist and duration must be finite. This is a philosophical belief; i.e. it's not science. When matter (or a person) crosses a black hole's event horizon it can never again reach the rest of the universe. Does that mean the rest of the universe no longer exists? Does the rest of the universe still exist for other matter?

Time travellers only attended Stephen Hawking's party because they knew they could trust him to keep quiet and not destroy the delusion of causality.

I have a dell with a 'mainly use on mains power' option in the bios where the battery presumably recharges more slowly in a life prolonging way. Worth having a look.

Where can I buy a 20 Teraflop iphone?

I agree with that as far as it goes. Conservation of energy and increasing entropy to heat death however are not always applicable in general relativity and quantum mechanics. --------------------------------------------------------- Statistically, very small regions undergo spontaneous reductions in entropy and there are also quantum fluctuations. Inflation posits that suitable very small low (classical) entropy fluctuations inflate into very large (> observable universe) low entropy volumes. Some versions of eternal inflation posit that this continues for finite but unlimited time. Other equally (im)plausible theories are available; a few have been falsified.

The energy doesn't scale up. A football is a reasonable approximation to a giant gas molecule. It doesn't get moved around by random variations in air molecules' K.E. like a grain of pollen as observed in Brownian motion. There's lots of apparently plausible perpetual motion machines around; this is as far as I'm going with this one.

You could get even more power out with a heat engine running between ambient temp and the graphene which has been cooled by converting heat to work. I still haven't seen anything to suggest this isn't a second order perpetual motion machine. The original reference https://thibado.uark.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/316/2017/06/PhysRevLett.117.126801.pdf is a little unclear but seems simply to claim that externally stressed graphene can produce useful power output.

Only a rhetorical question. Consciousness as we know it depends on brains which inter alia are sophisticated heat engines producing a net increase of entropy. Actions by such creatures would also increase entropy at least as much as the reduction of entropy by their actions. If they are not limited like that, you may may as well say they run on magic or call them 'Maxwell's demons.' Such demons are an interesting concept, and if they existed could be used in a second order perpetual motion machine. You may find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon interesting.

What would these creatures live on? i.e. they presumably have to violate the second law themselves.

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/graphene-loophole-could-provide-clean-and-limitless-energy-in-the-future/ This appears to be a second order perpetual motion machine. Going from a promising design to a working model is always the problem.

If the manufacturer got it right, overclocking is a sacrifice of reliability for speed. Getting higher spec components that provide the required speed is sometimes more cost effective. High reliability website hosts often underclock their processors and emphasize that in their advertising,

The problem with added sugars is that they are consumed from a very young age and, like a (therapeutic) addictive drug, people, if unrestrained, get used to them and tend to take enough to damage health. A simpler answer might be to have a government health warning on products with added sugar. I'm not aware of any benefit from added sugar, except for morbidly underweight people or people exercising very hard. I stopped taking sugar in tea and coffee some years ago, and until I adjusted, was surprised at how many products I'd thought to be unsweetened tasted sweet due to added sugar. (xposted with Moreno) I stopped taking sugar

No one on this thread has suggested 200µW of microwave radiation will do any harm (unless the authorities track down the jammer). One straw man. Actually an appeal to idiocy. In the example I gave, that would allow about 200µW through. A pretty basic narrowband receiver needs about 1pW input. And what is a Bd? Costs about 20 or 30 cents/square foot and is apparently about 11mm thick. I doubt from its attenuation graph that it's just a sheet of thin kitchen foil in a fancy wrapping so not like for like. I notice the advert has "approximately," without error limits or a guaranteed minimum. An experiment using less than a millionth of the required power at the rx, with an entirely predictable result. You might as well wave a wrist watch in front of your face to prove relativity wrong. So only one straw man.

Straw man arguments.