swansont

I think of it in terms akin to collapsing a wave function. You have a distribution that exists over all space, but you've made a measurement, so you get the answer for one particular location.

I can understand why some parents don't want their kids exposed to the books they want banned, too, so parental desire can't be the criterion. For me it comes down to the first amendment protection — if the speech is protected, you shouldn't be allowed to ban books containing it. If parents don't want their kids to read e.g. Harry Potter, then they should exert some parental control. Consider the cleaning bills. Would you want to borrow such material from the pubic public library? The poll is certainly not a scientific one. That's generally true of any poll that fails to promote anonymity or choose subjects randomly. The easiest division is to ban none of them. Then there is no debate over where to draw the line.

I think that conclusion was reached ~30 posts ago.

Once you postulate something that violates physical law, you can justify pretty much any answer you want to.

That's changing the scenario, though. Two identical objects moving at the same speed have the same kinetic energy. Period. There was no "event timer" in the original formulation of the problem or in the statement about energy. That's a constraint that was added later.

A transformer.

However, it becomes a problem when condition A is later omitted from the discussion. And you can't conclude that the model is wrong if condition A never materializes.

Yellow invisible (to the naked eye) dots have been around for a while http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/secret_forensic.html

My speculation is that he hopes there's more physics to be discovered.

Like I suggested — try substituting so that it looks like a form you can solve. u = kx-a du = kdx

Yes he was, and sort of, but no, not really. i.e. yes, he was correct, but no, any complete answer is going to involve quantum physics. Your instinct about absorption is correct — but only for real states of an atom or molecule. But there are ways of looking at the system where the photon is absorbed in what is known as a virtual state; the photon is almost immediately re-emitted, and it follows Snell's law or the law of reflection, depending on which way it goes, from conservation of energy and momentum. This is why, in the QM picture, light slows down in a medium — the absorption and re-emission take time. It also explains the existence of Brewster's angle for (non)reflection of polarized light — a dipole does not radiate along its axis, so light polarized perpendicular to the plane cannot reflect, because the light cannot be re-emitted in that direction. It must be transmitted.

Up until now I thought it was politics.

The "trick" is that you basically get to ignore the integral (pragmatically speaking) [math] \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x) \delta (x-a) dx = f(a) [/math]

I don't believe the remark was directed at you.

Thinking out loud (it's been a while since I've done this) Can you do a substitution for 1-2x? u=1-2x (so x = (1-u)/2) du = -2 dx That moves the ugliness out of the delta, and the integral limits are flipped, so I think that adds another - sign to keep them the same.

Some electron wave functions don't vanish in the nucleus, i.e. the electron spends part of its existence there, where it has a chance of interacting with a proton. The electron isn't confined there, so there's no problem with the uncertainty principle.

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/AltAz.php When the altitude is 0, that's the rise/set, and the azimuth tells you where to look.

Across town? No. Across the US and back? Yes (a nanosecond or two at ~60 mph) You have to decide at what level of precision you want to have the discussion. because while what you say about the rate of the passage of time is perfectly correct, it's also true that we can't discern fractional frequency differences much better than a part in 10^16 or so, so at some point it won't cause any difficulty to say that two objects at rest are in the same inertial frame of reference and not worry about thermal motion of their center of mass. Even if you could, it turns out that they won't stay in sync. You'll have white noise in the frequency, which when you integrate to get phase (time), turns into a random walk. So two clocks that are synchronized and running at the same frequency will random walk away from each other (and the measurement noise in current systems is way bigger than any relativistic effect)

You implied you could (easily) predict the mass of the Higgs. What is your prediction of the mass?

Post split off from another thread. Discuss it here.

You don't predict the mass of the Higgs in that thread.

There is rest mass, and there is relativistic mass. They are not the same, nor are they interchangeable. (In fact, the physics you use changes somewhat if you use relativistic mass — it's a term of convenience) So, which one you are using affects the answer. Using rest mass, there is no mass change of an object when it's moving.

In this day and age, making such work available for all to read is trivially easy. Many people do such things routinely; they have websites and/or blogs. When you are ready to post material with some substance, you can PM a mod/admin to unlock this thread.

My first reaction is that objects are not events. A point object does not become a sphere; what would be spherical is the region of potential causality — if an event happened at t=0 at the location of the point particle, then any event outside that sphere at t=1 nanosecond could not have been caused by that event.

Discussion of light and predestination has been moved http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35085