exchemist

For a new hypothesis, the first thing to look at is how it differs from any currently accepted hypotheses and what advantages it offers in comparison to them. How would you compare your hypothesis to the current view of the causes, for instance as described in the Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder, which ascribes 70-90% of the causes to genetic factors and the remainder to psychosocial factors, often involving some experience of traumatic events earlier in life? Are you rejecting that view and if so why?

Sure. It's funny: when I was at university in the 1970s, the older dons were recommending anyone aspiring to do research to learn German, since that was still considered by them to be the lingua franca of physical science. But it was already becoming an obsolete view. I did however learn my first proper quantum theory, in my first term, from Gerhard Herzberg's "Atomic Spectra and Atomic Structure", in a translation made in 1937. Herzberg emigrated to Canada in 1935 because............he had a Jewish wife - and consequently lost his job as a lecturer. Another one. I still have that book, a little paperback. It was a classic in its day and I would not be surprised if it is still used by undergraduates today. I see from Amazon it is still in print.

Oh sure. But from Hitler's point of view they were Jewish and therefore they had to get out. He described QM as "Jewish physics", and he was, er, sort of right, actually! But then he and the party tried to stop it being studied. Heisenberg carried on, but was hassled so much that his mother had to call Himmler's mother (!) to get the SS dogs called off. The film did not include the British contribution to the bomb project, which was called Tube Alloys. In fact at the start of the war Britain was ahead of the US. It was two British scientists that worked out you could make a bomb (i.e. achieve critical mass) with only kg quantities of U235. But they were emigrés who has taken out British citizenship and were called Rudolf Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch and they of course.....Jewish, by ancestry, and thus at risk. It was quite clearly an intellectual disaster for northern Europe to lose so much talent - and not only in the field of science.

I saw it at last weekend. Very interesting, though to me somewhat annoying in the format used (lots of short, intercut scenes from different points of time, and relentless, hammering music). I'm told that's just Nolan though. I had no idea so many well-known names were involved or what a large proportion of them were Jewish. Of course, that was partly because the original impetus was to defeat Nazi Germany by getting a bomb before they did and partly because a huge proportion of the quantum physicists of that era were in fact Jewish: Oppenheimer, Bohr, Schrödinger, Born, Teller, Pauli, Wigner...... I had no idea Oppenheimer's postwar career was screwed by this guy called Lewis Strauss, out of personal spite.

Also, carrying a sculling boat on your head, as I used to do in my younger days. And driving open topped sports cars, which I also did..... Or maybe it was just the testosterone levels implicit in both activities that is responsible....

You are confusing the labels with the entities that the words represent. If you carry on doing that it will be pointless trying to converse with you.

Incidentally, I had not previously realised rapunzel is the name of a plant, a bellflower once grown in Continental Europe for its leaves and root, but which also has pretty flowers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campanula_rapunculus

But words “are” not more words. What they are is labels for objects, actions, ideas etc. that allow us to share our experience and thought with others. While all, or almost all, words are serious, certain combinations of them can be silly.

Hahaha. “Pubg Name Generator” is something of a giveaway.😀

Grimm J & Grimm W : Rapunzel .

Yes. We also need to keep aware of low quality, predatory or pay-to-publish journals, like those published by SCIRP for example. These are a new disease that has spread to an alarming degree among science publications. Caveat lector indeed.

Don't tell me, the road PQ goes over a bridge, at a place called Wheatstone. 😀

This is explored in Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity which I read as a teenager and was much impressed by. His solution was small, compact beings.

I’ve certainly read that if a certain distance is not maintained, one vehicle braking will cause the one behind to brake more sharply, due to human reaction time, and several vehicles back you have them resorting to a full emergency stop in order to prevent collision. So the braking wave is progressively compressed, eventually into what amounts to a shock wave. But I’d like to see a summary of the effect referred to in the OP, as I’m still not clear what we are discussing.

Well you refer to an "effect" but without describing it. Just describe what the effect is on which you are building your hypothesis. (One of the forum rules is people should be able to follow a discussion without being sent off-site to other links. So a précis of what the MIT link says should do the trick.)

This sounds a bit like the kinetic theory explanation for why the viscosity of gases increases with temperature.🙂

There seems to be a link between sleep and rate of beard growth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3442272/ I’m not sure whether this might indicate any link to stress though.

Well, yes and no. It may be a formal fallacy in philosophical argument, but in day to day life reliance on authority is something we all practice, much of the time, in order to get on with our lives without challenging every bloody thing from first principles all the time. Anyone who takes articles published in Nature, or on the BBC, as likely to be sound is relying on authority, viz. the reputation of a well-regarded source. Whenever we learn a theory in science we rely on authority, in the form of the books or the lecturers we follow. We take things on trust, from recognised authorities. We have no choice.

One thing to bear in mind is that light only started travelling through dark space from the surface of last scattering, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, by which time a great deal of expansion had already occurred.

Yes, you have anticipated my reaction too. "Society at large" comprises a mix of the views and attitudes of all the many groupings that people belong to, religious adherence being one. But, of all of them, the grouping that most overtly propounds a view of what constitutes moral values and behaviour is probably religious affiliation.

I'm sure there is a lot of truth in this idea of shame. I'd be intrigued to know where the author thinks the concept came from, from an anthropological, or evolutionary, point of view. Shame does seem to inform a far amount of the thinking in the more fundamentalist branches of the Abrahamic religions. But I'm not sure how much of a role it plays in, say, Buddhism or Hinduism. Does the author claim it is fundamental to all religions or just to those most widespread in "western" cultures ? It's also worth pointing out out that even in the Abrahamic faiths, shame plays a fairly subservient role nowadays. In Christianity the concept of sin remains central, but I'm not convinced that sin has a one to one correspondence with shame. Does the author talk about the concept of sin, or would that be too theologically specific to one faith?

The solid tissues of your body are flexible, apart from the bones. So your body cannot prevent the ambient pressure from compressing it. However, since most of your body is made of liquids, mainly water-based, and as liquids are virtually incompressible, what happens is the compression does not deform your body when the pressure goes up. However all the fluids in your body become pressurised, to the same pressure as the ambient environment. The exception to all this is the body cavity of the lungs, which is filled with gases. These most definitely do reduce a lot in volume when the pressure goes up. So if you were not given compressed air to breathe, your lungs would be collapsed by the water pressure and you would asphyxiate. The pressure regulator in SCUBA gear adjusts the pressure of air you are fed from the cylinder so that it is equal to the pressure of the environment, i.e the water pressure at whatever depth you are. This is also the pressure of all the fluids in your body. So your blood is at the same pressure as the water and so is the nitrogen in the air you are breathing. At higher pressure your blood dissolves more nitrogen than at atmospheric pressure and if you ascend too fast from great depth it does not have time to come gradually out of solution and be breathe out through the lungs. So you can get bubbles - and then you have a bent diver on your hands.

I'm an outside observer on this, being in the UK, but it seems to me the basic problem with the US health system is that it is what is called a "broken market". The consumer has no leverage over the supplier and thus it is not a suitable subject for market competition to deliver an efficient outcome. As I understand it, most people in the US get health cover as part of their employment remuneration. The employer pays a charge to an insurer, who adds a mark-up to the charges it receives from the medical providers. So the end consumer of health treatment is 3 steps away from the provider and has no market power. Nobody in the chain has either the incentive, or the purchasing power, to shop around and drive down costs to keep the providers honest. In theory the insurer might have such an incentive, but in practice it is easier just to accept the charges, pass them on to the employers, with a mark-up, and get out on the golf course. In most other countries there is central purchasing of health provision by the government, by means of large and valuable contracts, professionally negotiated, and hard bargains can be driven. But that involves a role for "government" - which is anathema to all the American rightwingers, brought up on the myth of individualism and Ayn Rand.

There's a bit more information here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/aug/new-measurement-particle-wobble-hints-new-physics Seems it all revolves (haha) around the g-factor for muons, which, by making them precess in a magnetic field, has been found to be 0.2ppm (!) stronger than predicted by the Standard Model. So a technical tour de force in terms of measurement and a very tiny difference, which nevertheless is said to be statistically significant, at the 5σ level. This is a replication of earlier results, but with more data behind it.