StringJunky

Yes. With my little knowledge I'm also inclined to think it has a property in common with the other three and they mutually emerged via some phenomenological path from a more unified source. Still, as you say, the cognitive leap is still large and gravity is smooth whereas the other three are not ...a very big bridge to reconcile I would imagine for those that are trying to. Is this the primary problem, that it won't chop into pieces?

Should it follow that gravity has to be quantised because the other three are ...may scientists be trying to group a vegetable with fruit?

I wonder what the ratio of land area required for nuclear and solar plants respectively is for producing equivalent output.

Are gravitational effects significant within quantum domains i.e atoms in the presence of the other three forces?

AFAIK the photon frame is not a valid frame.

...and this is as good as it can be. 'Truth' is for philosophy, metaphysics and religion. If a scientist said "this is true" then he has closed his mind to possible future falsification in the light of new evidence. Maintaining persistent doubt as a matter of professional habit is what stops scientists becoming complacent. Time is defined as what clocks measure ...it's just a parameter. You don't see people cogitating about 'length' do you?

Light does not need a medium. The electric field generates a magnetic field and vice versa oscillating orthogonal to each other ..,it is a discrete phenomenon AFAIK.

If a book had to be a pre-defined length then the creative possibilities are finite but they are not so the permutations are endless. The number of words may be finite on any given day but new words or meanings to existing ones are being added thereafter ....language - especially English - is not in stasis.

What it means is that I don't have a clue because if those two parameters were absent there is no framework to place things in to make sense of their position or order. Yes it could have happened all at once but taken an 'eternity' to do so! Sorry about the oymoron but we can't be sensible about this because two mainstays in this scenario are missing i.e. space and time.

Pre-BB, things might not have happened in the familiar temporally/spatially sequential fashion as they did and do post-BB... these two parameters may not have even emerged before then yet the universe existed. This way you can have an eternal universe that didn't 'pop' into existence and yet the clock started at a particular moment in its evolution.

I sense more than a hint of a Galilean complex going on with you here... you alone against the establishment. I don't have a horse in this race and am really quite ignorant of the subject matter so don't have an opinion either way but this does stick out to me.

So have I and it's small but important gestures like this that shows the site's members care about fairness.

I think it should remain. The system saves a lot of unnecessary posts by allowing a short symbolic reprimand or positive gesture. It helps preserve thread continuity.

I think you'll find in time that the regular members negate unfairly given negative rep and would report a vendetta if they see one. On balance, over time and a lot of posts, a person's rep count fairly reflects their attitude.

I'd rather have the odd out-of-place humour than no humour at all. Excessive formality would make the site stifling.

You can have empirically derived faith based on past experience of that object or person. For example; That person did a good deal with me the last dozen times so the chances of a positive outcome are good the next time.

Well, he decided that it wasn't going to be given on a plate. How can you know happiness without experiencing it's opposite ...one needs a reference.

I don't think a hole exists per se. It is an abstract concept like and probably related to the idea of 'nothing' ...it is a particular state of absence of something.

What about using a ball-bearing as the golf ball and putting an elastic surface on the golf club face of appropriate stiffness and depth such that the elastic surface doesn't fully compress on full contact?. There should be more inertia in the travelling ball to punch through the air resistance.and hence gain more distance.

What's the point of creating a universe and already knowing the story that will unfold within it? Boring. Put some variables in it and you've got a story you don't know the ending to. The essence of religion it seems is about the testing of commitment so it makes sense to me for God to make the universe autonomous and design it with that remit. You can't know happiness without knowing unhappiness and vice versa so we need awareness of both states to appreciate the positive state.

I suppose the overarching improvement in adopting a vegetarian mindset is that one is consciously/proactively trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle which has beneficial spinoffs like reducing alcohol consumption. cutting smoking, more exercise and reducing saturated food intake etc. Regardless of whether there is confounding factors in determining the healthiness of a vegetarian diet specifically, vegetarians do generally live longer.because of all the other personal changes that go with it it seems.

Yes, there's nothing in between.

I think it means something which has no discrete divisions i.e seamless

I nicked this from Swansont in another thread and find it perfectly acceptable because there is no way it can be interpreted as a personal attack yet he's saying the idea is crap. I think the trick is to use words that can't be denoted as a person. You don't call someone 'a bollocks' or 'a crap' but 'idiotic' can be construed as 'idiot'.

I think calling an idea moronic, dumb, cretinous, imbecilic etc is insulting a person in a 'curve-ball' manner such that it looks like one is attacking the idea but is in fact insulting the person. Using descriptions like these can only invoke negative feelings - via the back-door - in the receiver and hence a discussive impasse. It's rather sly imo and not conducive to further rational and dispassionate discourse. Criticism should directly and explicitly describe the nature of the error. This is specific to when conversations are serious in nature but erroneous not when someone is deliberately just being a troll or idiot then they deserve all the colourful adjectives one can muster.