Severian

Of course it would be. But I would not be willing to throw away the predictive power of our Standard Model. Predictivity is more desirable than conceptual and mathematical consistency, in my opinion.

Well, with a name like ParanoiA...

That assumes you are always going to use that ability to better your society.

It is reasonably believable in normal quantum mechanics if you have a finite range force. In QFT is is more problematic since even your vacuum state changes when an interaction is present, so the effects can never be isolated. I would view it on a more pragmatic level. We make predictions with QFT with this sort of difficulty in mind, and are surprised that our QFTs do so incredibly well at predicting the outcomes of our experiments.

Muons decay via [math]\mu^- \to e^- \bar \nu_e \nu_\mu[/math] almost 100% of the time. The decay you point out is not impossible though, since all the vertices are allowed. It is just disallowed kinematically, so the muon would have to be virtual.

I don't have much of an issue with it, and I think many Christians go to far great lengths to mystify something which is actually very simple. In my view, they are just different manifestations of the same being. I have no difficulty in thinking of myself as a scientist, and as a father and as a husband all at the same time. They are three separate parts to me, and I don't have some multiple personality disorder by being these things all at once. Of course, God is a bit different, because there is a clearer physical separation between, say, God the Father and Jesus on Earth during the time before (and during) the crucifixion. But I think it is only a matter of degree. The me of today is not the same me as I was 30 years ago, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't still me - just that I have changed the way I interact with the world. If you are willing to accept God as omnipotent (or at least incredibly powerful) then you must be willing to accept the idea that he can be in three forms at once.

That is a circular argument. You need to explain why 'surviving' is a good thing. For example, if a patient is in extreme pain, and has no prospect of living without that pain, it may be deemed better to end it. So surviving is not sufficient in itself. To return to the topic, I can certainly imagine technology creating a world that I would not want to live in.

I would agree with that. In fact, this would be my only reason for putting someone in prison or (better) in a rehabilitation centre or institution. I don't believe in outdated concepts like "justice" or "fairness" or someone deserving to be incarcerated.

That is not a very good argument. Many of the fine tunings are not just fixing chemistry, but fixing very much more fundamental things. For example, if you get the cosmological constant wrong, the acceleration of the universe ends up being so fast that particles don't even get to interact with one another. So unless you believe in mono-particular life, that universe couldn't lead to life forming. Similarly, the wrong charge on the electron would stop atoms forming; the wrong gravitino mass would prevent big bang nucleosynthesis, the wrong dark matter content would stop galaxies (and stars) forming. Having said that, I don't see these problems as evidence for God, since they are just evidence that there are other mechanisms out there that force these apparent fine tunings to be natural. We just don't know what they are yet. Some of them may also be coincidence (like the fine-tunings of Earth's moon). While I agree in principle, I suspect there are some which are truly coincidence, and will never be explained.

That argument seems very arbitrary. One could equally well say "if S is self-sufficient, then S is not perfect," if one views self-sufficiency as undesirable.

I would definitely say so (though I suppose it depends on the quality of the masters, and of course all other relevant skills being equal). I didn't say that the science minister should be trained in physics to make decisions on physics funding, but I do think they should be trained in science. It is important that they are able to assess evidence for themselves, and have a reasonable understanding of how scientifc research is carried out. A related question might be, would you want someone like David Tredinnick, who is a believer in "medical astrology", in charge of spending on health care? (I realise that our new science minister is not that much of a looney, but the principle remains.)

Are you saying that you can understand science with no science training? Or are you saying that understanding science is not necessary for deciding which science to fund?

Why?

Bah - another science minister with no scientific training. Why should I take him seriously?

I am screwed then, since I rarely get 6 hours sleep a night.

Why does that make them less happy? I am not disputing that our standard of living has improved with technology, but that is not the same thing. I was trying to ask the question if technological advance had made our lives better or not. If we gauge "better" according to happiness, then I think the answer is not clear. Is there any point in surviving if there is no happiness?

Can you back that up? The initial state in this thought experiment is an electron and a photon, while the final state is a single electron. Have you ever observed something in between, which is neither initial nor final state?

Despite being a scientist and having devoted myself to learning, I am not totally convinced that learning is a good thing. I don't think learning, knowledge or even scientific advance has much to do with happiness. That is not to say that scientific advances are not sometimes good - clearly it is a good thing to be able to cure a disease (for example). But I think that advances which appear to be beneficial may have a detrimental side effect on our lives. For example, the invention of agriculture allowed us to support much larger civilizations. People then started to live in cities with organised government and societies. But it is well known from historical records, that the average health of the people decreased because they had an inferior diet (agricultural crops instead of red meat and gathered fruit). Also large centralised societies allowed for widespread corruption, oppression and wars. Although it is clear that the human population grew after the discovery of agriculture, I don't think it is clear that the people were happier. A more modern example might be smart phones and the internet. It is undeniable that these have increased our productivity, our wealth, and out standard of living. But are we happier? It is very hard now to escape and have down time because your smart phone will inform you of something you need to attend to (mine just did as I was typing that sentence). Life was a lot slower 20 years ago, and is the increase in our wealth since then really worth the cost? I am not saying that it isn't, but I don't think it is such a clear choice as our society would imply.

If I committed the crime then I deserve to be incarcerated, so going free without punishment is the worst possible outcome. Therefore, to minimise the chance of the worst possible outcome happening (to me), I wouldn't tell.

ydoaps: I agree with most of what you say but disagree with "I think the Bible is largely taken out of context as a whole in modern Christianity." My reason is that I don't think 'modern Christianity' is something quite as unified and well defined as you seem to imply. I am a Christian, but I believe that the bible should not be used as a historic fact book, and I think most Christians I know would agree. Even if you were willing to claim that the original writings were 100% true and accurate, there have been modifications and translations since that clearly alter the texts, making them no longer 100% accurate. Having said that, it is still a wonderful (collection of) book(s) full of amazing revelations about God and Jesus, and indeed ourselves, the world we live in and how we should live in that world. I actually think the phenomenon you describe isn't a Christian thing, but a modern western culture thing. Our culture assumes that any book written which looks like it is telling a true story must be 100% factually true. All events must be completely accurate and consistent. The actual events themselves are all important. However, I think when the books were written, this was not the philosophy of the authors. The authors were intending to inform more generally, not about historical facts, but about a particular world view: the interaction of man with the divine and how we should live in that context. They weren't writing their books as some kind of evidence to 'prove' that Jesus was God, or even that God exists. I think it is Western culture's attempt to use them in that light that creates a lot of problems.

This might get a bit technical. A quantum state at one time evolves into a new quantum state at a different time according to something called the time-evolution-operator. This is generally true. So even a ball rolling down a hill has a time evolution operator which tells you where it will be some time after its start. In the ball's case, the time evolution operator will contain information about gravity. For the electron, the time evolution operator contains objects known as creation and annihilation operators. A creation operator creates a particle in the system and an annihilation operator destroys a particle. Which creation and annihilation operators live in the time evolution operator depends on the physical laws of the system. In this case, the relevant combination in the time evolution operator is one electron annihilation operator, one photon annihilation operator and one electron creation operator. The annihilation operators destroy both the electron and the photon, while the creation operator creates a 'new' electron with the combined energy of the electron-photon pair. So in some sense, the electron does not absorb the photon at all - it is destroyed, along with the photon, and a new electron is created.

I do supernatural things every day. Anything that you do which is non-predictive is not explainable by science and thus supernatural. So if I have free-will (and admittedly that is an assumption) many of my actions are supernatural.

You might find this pdf useful, and the continuation is here.

I agree. Jesus actually says at one point that children are sinless. It is only sin when you know it is wrong - when you have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For me, the garden of Eden is pre-sentience. Once we have awareness of ourselves as individuals, we have free-will, and can do evil acts. It is our free will, or rather our use of free will to perform acts which are against God's will, that corrupts us. I think this concept is even built into our western world view. No-one blames a child for breaking a rule they don't understand. No-one blames a lion for eating a zebra.

That is not a true reflection of reality. While it might be true that Labour governments are good at getting us into debt, I don't think the Tories ever get us out of it. The "economic success" under Thatcher was entirely funded by the discovery of North Sea oil, so hardly her doing. In fact, she squandered most of the money.