Severian

There are four renormalizations in QED: the electron and photon wavefunctions, the electric charge and the electron mass. So once you have measured these, everything else is a prediction.

If you have understood all of Griffiths you should move onto Quantum Field Theory. You could try reading Bjorken and Drell, reading their QM book first to break you in, and then going onto their QFT book. Alternatively read Weinberg.

I am not a resident expert, but... It is actually caused by the gluon-self-coupling. The photon isn't electrically charged so doesn't couple to itself (not quite true, but almost). The gluon, on the other hand, carries a color charge so does couple to itself, and it is this extra interaction that flips the sign of its energy/distance dependence making the strong force increase with distance. I am not sure I even understand the question. It is perfectly reasonable to have a free neutron. It is neutral and colorless.

If the US seizes BP's assets, can the UK seize the assets of the big US mortgagors that caused the credit crunch?

There was some earlier in this thread, eg, post 25.

I ask myself the same question every day. A similar issue is one of my biggest problems with Christianity. Namely that I don't think oblivion sounds so bad. I don't think I really like the idea of heaven because I have the nagging suspicion that I would hate it. Intellectually of course, I understand that heaven will be a wonderful place, but I find that hard to believe on an emotional level. I watched the movie "Knowing" the other day, where in the end the Earth is completely destroyed by a solar flare, and I found myself wishing it would happen in real life. I can't help feeling that I would be a bit pissed off if I was to be resurrected afterwards.

It is quite odd to see people you know well in a documentary.

Cheating is always wrong and never justified.

It is difficult to tell from your post what you are actually asking. Am I correct in thinking that your question is whether or not particles like kaons and pions exist outside of hadron colliders? If so, then yes. They are also formed in collisions of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. However, they are quite heavy, so decay very quickly. Since they are not stable, there are none in our normal everyday environment.

Bah humbug! I thought this was going to be asking where the string tension in string theory comes from.

Yes, that is how it is normally phrased. Normal matter can also be non-baryonic, for example the electron, but that takes up a relatively small amount of the mass of the universe.

Baryonic matter is any matter made up from quarks.

I don't have time right now to respond to your entire post, but let me respond to this bit. Yes, it is still sinful. The fear of your own death is causing you to sin. If you remember Jesus on his way to the cross, he never fought (and rebuked Peter fighting) or lied. All he had to say was that he was not the son of God and he wouldn't have been killed.

Its actually not so clear to me. We will find something at the LHC, but if it is just the Higgs boson and we have no deviation from the Standard Model, I am worried that we will not get funding for another collider. We got the LHC because we were able to give a guarantee of finding something. The Higgs boson, or something else, has to be there by 1 TeV otherwise the theory breaks down. (There are a few models now which have new effects that would be very difficult or impossible to see at the LHC, but these are more recent than the funding allocation.) If we find the Higgs boson and confirm the SM, there is no guarantee that the next collider will find anything new at all. We would have to build it with the motivation of studying the currently known particles more precisely and I am not sure that the politicians will understand the value of that. Even if they do, a new collider would not be approved until all the corners of parameter space had been explored by the LHC. Let's say that is 2022. It takes about 10 years to plan and build, so we wouldn't have a new collider until about 2032.

I really don't know what D0 are doing making so much hype about this result. The effect they see is (iirc) 3.2 sigma, so it is 'evidence' rather than a discovery. We have had plenty of other 3 sigma deviations from the Standard Model which went away with better statistics or error management. In fact, you would expect a 3 sigma deviation for one in twenty experiments even with the null hypothesis (that the SM is correct). So this is way too early to get excited.

I think you are missing my point. God's actions are the definition of good. So it doesn't matter what your philosophy says or the outcome of your discussion, if you come to the conclusion that any of God's actions are not good, then you are in error. Now of course, no-one really thinks that way - even the bible tells us that God has given us an in-built sense of right and wrong, so we would be very uncomfortable declaring something as good that we thought (deep down) was really evil. But this philosophy is self consistent and well defined (though admitedly sometimes a little difficult to use in practice). Actually, my intellectual view on this is a little separated from my probable actions. I think the "good" option is to confront the rapist with love (brotherly love, not sexual love) - to try and make him stop by persuading him that what he is doing is wrong and he can be better than that. If he refuses to listen, then firmly but non-violently pull him off. If he kills you and continues the rape, that is his sin, not yours. In practice, I would probably kill him. But I recognise that that would be a sinful act. Again, the correct action is not to lie, but to confront him with love. Tell him that you are not going to tell him where his girlfriend went and persuade him to calm down. I think sometimes our fear is what prevents us from doing the right thing.

I know you meant this to be flippant, but I think this has to be a Christian's working definition. In other words, by definition God's actions are good, and any action He makes perfect.

Yes, to both questions. Though I do have one caveat. Remember that we have never proven that there is any difference at all between a neutrino and an antineutrino. If there turns out to be no difference (the neutrino would then be a Majorana neutrino) then you should really remove the bars from your antineutrino states. Then the process you mention could come from the standard [math]\mu^- \rightarrow \nu_\mu W^-[/math] with [math]W^- \rightarrow e^- \nu_e[/math]. (Majorana neutrinos can of course result in lepton number violation, and are indeed one possible mechanism of generating a lepton asymmetry in the early universe. This is a topic that has seen a lot of research papers in the last few years.) Again yes. The cross-section for a neutrino scattering off an electron is very low, but is in fact the way that neutrinos are detected in many neutrino experiments. The decay to the muon and its neutrino is only possible if the kinetic energy of the neutrino and electron in the initial state can make up the difference in the mass energy. But if it does, then this process can happen. (If neutrinos are not their own antiparticle, it would need to be [math]\bar \nu_e[/math] and [math]\bar \nu_\mu[/math] in your process though.)

To answer Widdekind's Questions, Question 1: As swansont points out, this is not kinematically allowed, since the masses in the final state are more than the mass of the initial state. Question 2: This decay is more interesting because it depends on how you define your states. In the strictest sense, i.e. that in which the Standard Model is usually defined, no, it can't happen because neither vertex in your diagram is present in the theory. However, the mass eigenstate is not the same as the flavour eigenstate for neutrinos, which causes neutrino oscillations. We define the electron neutrino to be the one which you get if an electron absorbs or emits a W boson. However, that electron neutrino can then oscillate into a muon neutrino giving the decay you conjectured. Question 3: Again, not allowed by kinematics.

I don't dislike her music, but it is not something I would listen to. I also quite like that she is not classically beautiful. In fact, she is a bit plain. But that adds something I think, because it shows that someone who is a bit plain can still be incredibly sexy and successful if they have enough charisma and... for lack of a better expression... balls to pull it off.

I like her too. She is a bit whacky and weird, but I think that is a good thing, even if I am not very into her music. She reminds me of Madonna when she was younger (whose music I was also not into). And lets be honest. All those kinky outfits are kind of sexy.

There are also facts which it can be beneficial not to know, for their own sake rather than for application. For example, it may be better not to know that your wife had drunken sex with your best mate one night 3 years ago; it may be better not to know that there is a big but harmless spider under your bed.

No. When I said it needs to be very virtual, I mean that it has to have an energy which does not respect [math]E^2=p^2c^2 + m^2c^4[/math]. Whether or not a muon is highly relativistic is only a matter of reference frame, so irrelevant to the decay choice (though it will of course effect the lifetime, via time dilation).

By your definition, all societies are 100% crime free!

I think that last sentence is the key. You need to have interactions. But to have interactions you need to have clumping of some form. The universe is so huge, and the amount of "stuff" so small that if you spread it out there are no complex interactions. With most of the fine tuning problems you don't even get clumping.