Severian

Don't you think it would be easier to get people to accept its removal altogether rather than its enlargement to gay couples?

No - quite generally, but extending the concept of state sanctioned marriage is still a bad thing. It makes it more accepted and 'normal'. We should do away with state marriages altogether and leave them for religious groups.

Tachyons aren't nice because they destablise the vacuum. Rather oddly, as they lose energy they travel faster, so pretty soon all tachyons would be moving increadibly fast, spewing out energy as they went. In technical terms, the universe would not settle in the vacuum state that we observe, but would keep dropping to lower and lower energy states. The only real way out of this is to assume that tachyonic states can't communicate with ordinary particles. This is actually fair enough, because the standard energy/momentum conservation relations prevent the tachyons coupling to ordinary particles. And if they do not couple to ordinary particles, then we cannot observe them (by definition: since we are made of ordinary particles, we need to be able to interact with them to observe them), and they may as well be removed from the theory (Occam's razor).

I am not sure in what sense you mean this. Mass and charge do need to be measured quantum mechanically. The masses of particles even have quantum corrections associated with them. Charge is the coupling of a particle to the U(1) gauge boson the photon, which is also definietly quantum mechanical in nature. In fact, the mass operator is [math]\hat P^2[/math] where [math]\hat P[/math] is the 4-momentum operator, so if you regard momentum as being QM in nature, so is mass - [math]\hat P^2[/math] does not commute with the position-space operator for example. (That depends on your definition of 'mass' of course.) As for charge, imagine producing an electron-positron pair in a collision, but not measuring anything about them other than their momentum - you would not know which is + and which -. But when you measure one, you know the other (exactly analagous to the usual example of spin).

The point is that you can transport the quantum state with 100% fidelity. Swansont keeps making the point that you are only transfering information, but I regard this as a little unfair - you destroy one quantum state and 100% faithfully reproduce it at the other end (with the help of a classical signal, as you say). Since quantum states are indistinguishable if they have the same quantum numbers there is no reason why one should not consider it as 'the same'. I could imagine that being rather useful.

I would regard it as a negative outcome. I think that government has no business telling us how we should or should not live our lives.

This is not something new. We have been looking for this for around 30 years now. The Large Hadron Collider (which turns on in 2007) should find the Higgs boson if it is there. The new thing which was reported on the news recently (to which you are presumably refering) is that the technology choice for the linear collider has been decided. I posted a news thread on this just over a week ago. The LC is not designed to find the Higgs boson - it is designed to accurately measure its properties after the LHC finds it (it is sometimes refered to as a 'precision machine'). It can work. The technology is now well understood, and initial test acceleration modules have been constructed. In fact a proposal for a LC called TESLA has already had a Technical Design Report written. Although the accelaration technology is somewhat novel, the principle of colliding particles togther is not - the LEP collider also collided together electrons and positrons for example. But it is not going to cost $5,000,000,000,000 - you have a few too many zero's. I believe it is something in the region of $5,000,000,000 (the European costing was a bit less, at $3B I think). It is true that there was for a short time a little bit of a worry about this for the LHC (not the LC, but the principles remain the same). If there are large extra dimensions (ie that have not been compactified too extremely) then potentially the Planck scale could be as low as a TeV or so. Then the LHC could potentially have enough energy to create a black hole. It was worried that the black hole would then go on to eat away parts of the detector, or even worse eat the Earth. So a comission was set up with many eminent scientists to investigate this possibility and it was soon realised that even if a black hole were produced, it would evaporate via Hawking radiation very quickly and is no danger. In fact, there are now programs which simulate balck hole production at the LHC, and seeing one would be a major scientific acheivement. So you can sleep safe...

What makes you think mass and charge aren't QM observables?

Reinforcing the idea that the state should need to legitimise people's private sexual preferences....

Hubble was not space exploration.

This is the massless Klein-Gordon Equation. If you put a mass in you would get the Klein-Gordon Eq: [math]\frac{\partial^2 \Psi}{\partial t^2} = c^2 \frac{\partial^2\Psi}{\partial x^2} - c^4 m^2 \Psi[/math] which is directly analogous to [math]E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4[/math] (of which E=pc is a special case).

Right handed, left eyed (and I am intelligent enough to do it right thanks...) Shouldn't there be a corelation between left/right eyed and which eye is best? My left eye is best and I am left eyed.

It isn't a critique at all. It is a an argument that quantum mechanics is an objective theory rather than a subjective one. Although I disgree at parts, the argument seems reasonably coherent.

I didn't find Doom 3 to be as dark as people seem to be claiming. There are a few dark corners, true enough, but you can always see to navigate and don't really need to use the torch that much. My criticism of the game would be that it was very linear and rather unimaginative.

Finished Doom 3. The Devil was a bit of a winp...

Why not? One of the things that relativity tells us is that every frame is equivalent. If you were in a starship travelling at these speeds the only thing that would tell you you were moving at all would be looking out the window (or the engine noise). You could only tell if it was accelerating from inside the ship.

I posted it the morning it came out. The announcement was made on the Monday morning at an ICHEP (International Conference on High Energy Physics) conference in Beijing. Yes, the LHC switches on in 2007, but it probably won't have any physics runs 'til 2008-2009 (it takes a while to calibrate the machine). Its primary goal is to find the Higgs boson. If the Higgs boson is not found by the LHC then it almost certainly isn't there and the theory is wrong. The good thing about the LHC is that it is guaranteed to see something. Without the Higgs the model breaks down because it predicts scattering of W bosons with a probability >1 (which is clearly nonsense). So even if the Higgs isn't there, something else must be in oder to tame the W-scattering cross-sections. Its secondary role is to discover or rule out low energy susy. This is more contentious, but if it isn't seen at the LHC most physicists will stop believing in it (although it could still be at very high energies). The trouble with the LHC is that it is a 'discovery' machine. It has a very high energy reach (about a TeV) so it should be able to see (almost) anything which is there, but it is not very accurate. Since it is colliding protons together and protons are not fundamental particles but 'bags of quarks' the collisions are very messy and it is difficult to get accurate measurements. Actually, at these energies the protons are mainly made up of gluons, so it is a 'gluon collider'. Because they are inside the proton we don't really know what energy the gluons have, which makes things difficult. The proposed LC is a precision machine - although it won't have such a high energy reach, what it does see it should see clearly. It is colliding point particles (electrons and positrons) so the collisions are very clean, and you know exactly the energy which goes into the collision. The hope is that the LC can measure things so precisely that it can extrapolate the physics to much higher energies. It would be good to have them running concurrently because the specialise in different things, and there is a synergy between them. If the linear collider sees something that the LHC has missed (due to not looking in the right place) then the LHC can go look for it. This is especially important for the LHC because it has a very strong trigger - there are so many proton-proton collisions the electronics can't read out data to disk quickly enough, so there is an initial check to see if the collision is interesting (the trigger) and if it is not it is thrown away.

Go read Franc28's posts on the religion forum..... ....That's how not to do it.

In principle you should be able to make something travel at the speed of light by restoring electroweak symmetry. If you do that (essentially returning the Higgs boson to the mifddle of the wine-bottle/mexican-hat) then locally nothing would have mass, and everything would travel at c. Of course, your particles in your body would then feel a very strong 'weak' force and you would die horribly, but still....

In fact QCD (and its quarks) is the only part of the theory which works as is, without the need for any new particles. (I suppose you could say that QED works too, but since QED probably doesn't exist, that is a bit academic...)

I think the first premise is wrong. What has actually been seen is that very distant galaxies are accelerating away from us (and other galaxies). But the light from these galaxies have taken a very long time to get to us, so they are from close to the time of first galaxy formation. In other words, galaxies were at some point long in the past accelerating apart, but are no longer doing so now (because we see no acceleration away from us in near galaxies). Putting a cosmological constant into the equations is enough to explain this (just as Einstein originally had), so I am often confused as to why this garners so much speculation.

Skoteinos is correct. Entanglement cannot be used to send information fater than the speed of light. You are not sending information - you are just inferring knowledge of the other particle by using physical laws. As for teleportation, you are sending a particle, but it becomes a little subjective as to whether it is the same particle (how do you define this anyway?). The point is that once you measure a property of the particle which does not commute with position, the wavefunction is put in a state which does not have a defined position - by measuring position later, it has a non-zero chance of being a long way away. But it performing these measurements you change the nature of the particle, so is it the same particle? But all this is statistical - the chance of success is very small even for one particle, so for many particles it is really tiny. So you may be able to teleport a human like this in principle, but the probability of success would be 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (or somesuch) and decrease with distance. Would you be willing to risk this?

It is a good question, and one which I think is being too quickly dismissed here. There is a nice review on this here.