Severian

Which bit of my post do you think was in error?

Of course. It is also pretty self evident, since the sun has no net charge. Look back at the text you copied: "...in the form of gamma rays..." Gamma rays are photons. If you measure the mass of the starting particles and then measure the mass of the final particles, you will see there is a mismatch. The mass of the final particles is less. If the difference in mass is say [math]\Delta m[/math] then the energy released is [math]\Delta mc^2[/math], exactly as per Einstein's mass-energy equivalence.

Is it? I have never seen that done. We have been unable to make synthetic life on Earth, so we have only one single abiogenesis event where life came from no-life spontaneously. I don't think we can use one data point to provide a probability.

When you ionise a gas the electrons don't go anywhere - they are just not bound to the protons any more. There are still plenty of them. There are plenty more steps in the pp-chain. Take a look at the Wiki page if you like. There is certainly no energy 'created' at any stage in the fusion process. However there is energy released already in the initial pp interaction, in the form of kinetic energy of the positron and neutrino.

The photon has nothing to do with the strong interaction. In stars, the first interaction in the fusion chain is a weak interaction that turns two protons into deuterium, a positron and a neutrino. The positron then annihilates with a nearby electron to form a photon. That is an electromagnetic interaction, and provides the photons we see (well, some of them anyway - there are other sources from interactions further down the chain).

This is due to confinement. Because the gluons carry a color charge, the strong force behaves differently from QED. In QED, as you move two charged particles apart, the force between them becomes weaker; but in QCD it becomes stronger. (The proof of this won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.) This means that a gluon emitted by, say, the sun would not get very far before being pulled back by the strong force. Strongly interacting particles can be emitted but only in colorless combinations, which are then massive and don't get very far. In other words, the photons escape because they are not charged.

I will go with option A.

I was interested to read today about a vicar jailed for four years for carrying out hundreds of fake marriages to bypass immigration law. In this case, it seems seems that some of the women were taken advantage of, since they were in dire financial circumstances. That alone make the whole episode unsavoury. But leaving that aside, and assuming that both parties are consenting with no duress, how does one define a "sham marriage"? Surely if both parties are willing to get married it should be their right to do so, and they should be given all the privileges of marriage irrespective of their motivations. Why should a couple have to demonstrate that they are "in love" (whatever that means) or have sex, in order for it to be a "real" marriage? We are permitted to undertake binding business contracts with the only motivation being personal monetary gain, so why should a marriage contract be any different. Indeed, I have (female) friends who insist that standard marriage is nothing more than legalised prostitution. I probably wouldn't go that far, but in my opinion, this highlights how the entire system of marriage, and indeed the entire philosophy of immigration laws in our society, are deeply flawed. What do you think? Should marriages between people who are clearly not in love and only motivated by monetary gain be legal and provide the same rights as "standard" marriages? If not, why not?

Anything you do for your own enjoyment, rather than the glorification of God, is sin.

A good rule of thumb is, if you are enjoying doing something it is probably immoral.

Why is this restricted to 'religious' people? Presumably atheists also have a moral code that they 'believe' in, but still do things in violation of that code now and again. Does this then mean that they don't believe in their morality after all?

I agree that it is not contradictory. But it is a little surprising that you would still call it love. Most people who hold that view would simply say love doesn't exist but the appearance of love is mimicked by chemicals. (This is only a semantic difference of course, and maybe your view works better when having dinner with your girlfriend.)

Would you still regard it as "love", in a positive sense, if it were entirely chemical? I mean that only as a personal enquiry, not a criticism, since you are of course free to regard it however you like. You must admit, that is certainly not the usual view of love.

I added mine even though it is too late. I thought I might help dilute the "scientists are not religious" chestnut.

Do we have any observable physical evidence that "love" really exists as anything other than a chemical illusion? I suspect not, which makes it rather difficult to discuss on a science forum.

I think I agree with this position. Everyone should be free to give their opinion. My opinion is that I don't really care whether or not gay people are allowed to marry. I think I do care that they shouldn't be discriminated against in meaningful ways (for example in their careers, medical care and so on) but the gay marriage thing seems like such a hoo-ha about nothing that I don't feel the need to care. However, it does bother me slightly that all the fuss they are making is distracting from real issues that I do care about. It also bothers me slightly that they may be given a tax break for being married, but it also bothers me that heterosexual couples get a similar tax break. In the UK we have avoided this lunacy for some time, by not giving such a tax break, but it looks like our new lunatic leader Cameron wants to bring married tax breaks to the UK as well.

If you are going to take a purely scientific view of everything in life, then you are never going to accept anything as a "miracle". This is just a matter of definition. A "miracle" is by definition unexplainable by science, so accepting that it is a miracle is to accept that it cannot, in principle, be explained by science. If you take the view that everything can be explained by science, then even if you don't have an explanation, you believe an explanation exists and therefore it isn't a miracle. In other words, you guys are never going to agree because your starting axioms are different (and in my opinion this underlined the stupidity of having a religion forum on a science site).

Inflation does indeed cause an acceleration, but it is only active for the first first fraction of a second. It wouldn't work for the late time acceleration we see now. I have no idea what you mean by the last sentence.

That works well. Thanks.

This is a test. Yes, turning off RTE fixed it. Thanks. Edit: and I suppose I am a statistical anomaly since I have only had one sexual partner despite having both an iPhone and an iPad. I don't like sex much. (Apple will probably come around to my home to confiscate them now.)

That is certainly not the cannonical scientific description. And neither is that!

Really? Only £500k. That seems quite cheap.

It seems to me that you are rejecting the model for purely aesthetic grounds. Fair enough, that is entirely up to you. But don't you think it better to have a working theory which may have aesthetic problems than no theory at all, or one which makes wrong predictions?

These days I am occasionally reading and posting on SFN via my iPad. However, I am having problems with the posting. When I click, or rather tap, on the text box at the bottom, I get no keyboard coming up like I would do on most sites. Therefore I cannot post. The same thing happens with tapping reply - I get a box with the quote in but no way of inputing my own content. I am actually posting this message from my iPad, because I realized if I choose the style IP.Board Mobile, then Afind everything works ok. I get a keyboard and can post normally. However, it isn't a very functional style and I would much rather browse on my iPad, which has a reasonable size screen, with a non-mobile style. I wonder if there is just a bit of code in the mobile style which could be copied to the normal styles in order to pop up the keyboard for iPad posters?

I presume you really mean spontaneous symmetry breaking? The Higgs mechanism is an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking, in that case breaking the weak gauge symmetry. What I was asking was, which symmetry are you proposing to break?