pablo d

I assume you're already conversant on the subject but from my limited understanding I believe that the transactional interpretation comes to some of the same conclusions as Bohm's interpretation, all without directly positing non-locality - I like it as an interpretation because I abhor both the many-worlds interpretation and non-locality (except as a hypothetical means to an end, but how satisfying is that eh?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation

http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html

It requires a little mental gymnastics to understand what it means for wavefunction collapse, but that might just be me, I don't have the capacity to articulate it in a coherent manner sorry, but just thought I'd post the links to you just in case you're interested

If the masses of the particles were really coming from the vibrations of the string then they would either all be massless, or have masses of the Planck scale

I thought that string theory started a particle off with having the planck mass, and then via quantum fluctuations most of that mass is cancelled out, leaving the remainder as the total mass.

Also - and sorry for being another pest in this thread - but how exactly does the Standard Model of particle physics determine *why* particles have the mass they do. I was under the impression that the SM just takes these arbitrary values as a given and basically ignores the underlying reason, or am I wrong

When something is in an orbit, gravity and acceleration kind of cancel each other - hence weightlessness. I think the equivalence principle says that such a frame is in fact an inertial frame so that SR applies.

But if you've two things rotating around each other wouldn't this present a similar situation as a giant circular spacestation with artificial gravity?

Let the observer and the spaceship be in the same orbit around a point mass. Let them be on diametrically opposite sides. The orbital velocity is v. Since both of them are in orbit, they are intertial frames and SR applies - by Einstein's Equivalence Principle.

If they are in orbit around something, doesn't that introduce acceleration and thus wouldn't GR apply instead?