joigus

Patriotic fervour strikes when and where you least expect it. I know the feeling. I will take a seat on this one too.

Blather cannot be disproved. So much the worse for the blatherer.

Not even pseudo. The Sun is a big factor, and drives many reactions, keeping all those cycles going, as stated before in the thread. Otherwise all those cycles would grind to a halt in geological time, probably.

Far from it.

Thanks, Mordred. I'm all in favour of sterile-neutrino hypotheses. I recently tried to draw attention on Turok et al.'s idea of time-symmetric universe with sterile neutrinos being responsible for dark matter. For very long I've thought the next development is much more likely to come from a wildly new reinterpretation of familiar ideas than the familiar interpretation of wild new ideas.

Today I learned about the existence of ECC (elliptic curve cryptography). A cryptographic method which seems to bee just as efficient as RSA, but with smaller-size keys. Thanks to @Ghideon.

Very interesting, thank you! I'm very far from being an "expert" on cryptography, btw.

Within the confines of propositional logic (binary logic, that is) a proposition cannot be true and not true at the same time. I suppose that's what you're pointing at here. It makes sense to discuss whether a proposition is true or not true. It makes sense to discuss whether a proposition contradicts another, and therefore only one of them can be true. Truth is a value you assign to a proposition. A function, if you will. You do not assign truth/not truth to truth itself. Does that make sense?

The periodic table of encyclopedia entries? Again??

Agreed. I think the reasons having to do with PEP and conservation laws were very robust already. I sometimes succumb to the drive to try to help the idea as much as I can before it dies. I suppose it's because after a while I get too tired of always being quickly dismissive. I sometimes want to make a point that it's not that you have an extreme dislike for the idea. Gravitation is indeed the only interaction that could have neutrinos clustering at some level in some scenario. If you had a universe with no dark matter, no scatterers of any kind, nothing, huge distances before you could find the next galactic halo, I guess at some point neutrinos would start to cluster in huge mega-halos gravitationally... Anyway. As you said, it would fail on so many levels.

Well, they can cluster gravitationally, therefore very weakly. At galactic scale. x-posted with mordred. Plus all the other reasons they're telling you...

Neutrinos cannot cluster. They hardly interact at all.

Wrong. Beta decay must be involved, as said. And, There's a cute explanation in Surely you're joking Mr Feynman, about his father asking him, "when an electron falls from a higher to a lower orbit, where was the photon before it happened?"

Close enough. that no integers a, b, c > 0 could possibly satisfy the equation an+bn=cn for n also integer and greater than 2. Otherwise there trivially are such a's b's and c's aplenty.* I know of no practical applications of it. But I wouldn't rule them out. * Counterexample: n=3, a=2, b=1, c=91/3

Depends. Some time I could do without. Time has a filling, and that's what's of the essence.

You read my mind. I'm not one of those people who can dash off a quick essay over the cellular. I remember having thought of "wannabe philosopher". Quotation marks would have done the job. And your expression certainly does it. The truth is we get a lot of this. People who think they can do philosophy, and by means of their philosophy of sorts, clinch the case of the most difficult (and long-standing) scientific problems: What is time? Did the universe have a beginning?, etc. The truth being they don't even get started doing science. They do very poor philosophy too.

I meant 'another "philosopher"'... Sorry, I'm on my mobile phone and typing is harder.

It probably has to do with a forward-scattering amplitude. Thereby the pi.

Another philosopher venturing into the deepest scientific caves without the lantern of maths...

Mass really is rest energy. That's all it is. You have to think of mass as some kind of cohesion energy. Mass is the energy that a piece of matter still has even if you take it to a standstill. (To understand this you need Einstein's theory of special relativity). A world with no mass is conceivable. It would look the same at every length scale. A world with no energy is nearly unconceivable, OTOH. I agree with @Mordred that those are not necessarily bad questions. They're good --if hard-- questions. Mixing --that Mordred mentioned-- further complicates things: Particles with well defined mass don't have other quantum numbers that well defined. They are quantum superpositions of states with different quantum numbers (analogues of electric charge). Some particles are so-and-so percent of this particle and so-and-so percent of that other particle. And this "mixing angles" (that determine how much of this and how much of that there is) are fixed that way since the beginning[?] of the universe... It's very confusing. My advice would be: Don't think about mixing for the time being. In QFT, mass is a mess. In Newton's mechanics, it's simple because it's a primitive concept and doesn't have to be justified. (Sorry I wrote "sofisticated" instead of "sophisticated". I'm bilingual, and I get the spelling of Latin/Greek-root words wrong when I'm writing in a hurry.)

Why? A world made of photons would gravitate. It's energy that's the source of gravitation, not mass. All fields are quantum fields. They should be. It's just that people haven't been able to make sense of quantum gravitational fields so far.

No problem. You must think of quantum fields as things of which it makes sense to think of them as "being there" but in a vacant state. The field people usually refer to is the vacuum of the Higgs field. One has to spend considerable amount of energy (and money) to take it to an excited state with occupation number = 1.

It's not either/or. Quarks cannot exist as individual massive particles, and protons aren't the smallest hadrons (strong interactive particles). Mesons are short-lived but real enough, and are composites of quark-antiquark. And they are smaller than protons. The so-called Higgs multiplet is actually a quantum field with 4 degrees of freedom. 3 of them are called Goldstone bosons and they're the ones that massless particles swallow up in order to acquire mass. The left over degree of freedom is what we call the Higgs boson. So trying to picture what happens in terms of an actual "swarm of Higgs particles" flying around is the wrong way to picture it. This leftover DOF of the Higgs multiplet is normally unoccupied. Occupation number = 0, in the QFT parlance. So it's not really there. You have to actually provide a lot of energy to make it show up. The swallowed up DOFs are what's dragging the massless particles to make them look as they've got mass. I don't know whether that answers your question, if only to clarify that the actual picture is a bit more sofisticated than particles modifying other particle's trajectories. Did that help at all? It's all energy that's the source of gravity, not only mass, and certainly not just the Higgs field.

Vagueness cannot be proven false, but that is no virtue. Try to contradict this: "There is something about something that could explain something in some cases." It's falsifiable ideas that get the ball rolling. There are other things: Explanatory power, prediction, economy of ideas, etc.

Niels Bohr said it. But he didn't say QM is absurd. To say that QM is extremeley counter-intuitive is one thing. Quite a very different thing is to say that it is absurd. No physicist would say such a silly thing. The quote is frequently phrased as, After a few weeks you're over it, as you should if you want to do physics and complete the exercises. An uneasiness can stay with you for a while, but then you finally accept it. Why wouldn't you? It's the way things behave. Conservation of energy is a local conservation principle, within the allowance of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, even in QM. So we know this not to be true. It is well known that QM introduces a tension between reality (the possibility that the output of an experiment can be predicted with certainty for certain groupings of observables) and locality (the fact that information, energy, angular momentum, and every other conserved quantity must propagate through space, and cannot disappear here and appear there, so to speak). If you want to introduce a model that proposes non-local propagation of the amplitudes, it would be strange, but I don't think it could be ruled out based of first principles. But you've done nothing of the kind. You haven't introduced any hypothesis. You just have a vague idea: Something non-local happens that somehow explains something in some cases. Not the most promising of starts.