assassin_696

My love.

Did you read that in Unweaving the Rainbow? I thought his explanation of it was brilliant. :)

I'm no engineer, but i'd be very surprised if someone couldn't think of a way of making a giant "C" work.

Woah. :shock: How do they come to that conclusion if they don't make an observation? A condensed version would do. :D :P To be perfectly honest, there's still a lot of debate over this, with some thinkers reasoning that the cat's own consciousness is enough to collapse the wavefunction. It still works with a bacteria though, and I think that the implications carry over. Basically, we until we observe a system we cannot say with any certainty the nature of the result. In the classic light slit experiment, a light source being fired at a sheet of metal with two holes produces a pattern that shows that until we actually observe the system we cannot know which particular hole a photon went through. So, we can say it went through hole A or hole B, but we cannot say which with any certainty until we observe it. So, the wavefunction is the collection of possible states that the photon exists in, passing through hole A or B, but only by us observing it does it collapse into any particular state. So, (ignoring consciousness collapse) until we observe the cat in the box it exists only as a wavefunction of possible states, alive or dead. I'm sure you can see the implications of this, does anything really exist without us being there to observe it?

Welcome to relativity :) (no) Oh, and the plane takes off by the way.

Has it not occurred to you that maybe our telescopes just aren't powerful enough?

Vacuum fluctuations could explain the Big Bang. I've been reading a book about quantum mechanics lately, and once you get to grips with its implications it will blow your mind. Look up the Copanhagen interpretation, it basically states that until we actually observe something it exists only as a wavefunction, a collection of all possible states. So with the famous cat in a box (Schrodinger's cat) experiment, until we actually open the box the cat doesn't even properly exist, only as a wavefunction of possible states, and only by us observing the cat can it collapses into an alive or dead cat. That wasn't the best of explanations, but it's not hard to see why so many deep thinkers don't like it. Causality is thrown out of the window in quantum mechanics, as well as locality and the concept of "the arrow of time".

You speak about the world as if you can speak on behalf of "all of us", who've "all" tried liberalism, and who've "all" tried to love one another. If you think a fraction of a percent of the world has ever stopped thinking about itself for a second then you're sorely mistaken. We are by nature, selfish, and have been throughout history.

Because when it comes to the end, if we don't stand up for what we think is right thing, what are we good for? If everyone thought like you i'm afraid to say the world would be a sorry place.

The Second Amendment is all very well, but it was written when America was a frontier country, and to some extent largely lawless. Can't you see that the law will have to change at somepoint if we are ever to make progress as a civilisation? It won't ever be overnight, but the first step has to be breaking the myth that it's a God-given right to possess an instrument designed to kill.

Haha, that's the best bit by far. :D

It's not my job to care for each of you as it's not your job to care for me. Oh, forgive me for having love and compassion for humanity. You should try it sometime.

What on earth do you mean by "protecting yourself from the government"? You live in a country that is absolutely democratic with enough failsafes and checks in the system that you don't need protection from the government. Protecting yourself from criminals I could almost buy, but the government? Comeon.

It's irrelevant whether or not you can in practice try and get rid of all the guns in the world, the fact is, if we don't try and make a stand against instruments designed for killing what are we? How can we ever have a peaceful society if guns are legal?

Come back to us when you've got cancer. And the point flew over your head. I don't want to be FORCED to donate anything! Fool. Forced donation is an oxymoron, perhaps you're referring to some kind of tax that goes towards researching cancer. In which case my point still stands, don't be so selfish and heartless.

The British are so bad at Eurovision it's embarassing. Other than that I dislike it because Dr. Who and the Russell Brand radio show have been cancelled next week because of it. Oh, I've moved this to M&M because that's where I think it should go. It's on the TV and is about music.

Americans are so sensitive about guns because it's your constitutional right, that sacred document that was written a few hundred years ago when America was a frontier nation. Judging by the amount of gun crime in the US, the policy of "if everyone has one no one will shoot" doesn't work, because invariably not everyone has one and is capable and ready of using one when the time comes. Therefore, you have a society in which the dangerous criminals can easily and legally acquire a weapon designed to kill and use it against people who nearly always aren't similarly armed. I fail to see how it can be justified. In the UK, gun control is tighter, yes there is a black market but because guns aren't freely available they tend to be much rarer, and hence gun crime is rarer. But guns only tend to fall into the hands of the most determined criminals, not the would be psychos or people who might go on revenge motivated killings etc.

Come back to us when you've got cancer.

Whilst it's very easy to criticise the parents with hindsight, i'm sure there would be times where you might feel it safe enough to leave your children together if you were reasonably close. Don't blame the parents, blame the culture where people who molest children aren't castrated and locked up.

I had this problem with my old laptop, tried everything until I realised it was the fans overheating. Basically, the fans had become all clogged up with dust. The way I solved it was to take the back plate off, and gently dust around with a cloth where I could see dust, even using a nozzle of a vacuum cleaner on some of the more solid components. If it's really tricky to get the dust out you can apparently get cans of pressurised air to blast the dust out.

A personalised google homepage as well :)

To clarify a few things, the coldest we've got is a fraction of 1 Kelvin, as is my understanding. The reason an object would 'dissapear' at 0 K would be (as my best guess) that there would be no EM radiation exciting electrons of the object, thus making it effectively invisible. I doubt it would infinetely shrink; not all trends are constant. Yeah that's right, and interestingly when we cool down certain particles to a fraction of a billionth of a degree above 0 Kelvin, they display curious properties, and all fall into the same energy state, showing superfluid properties. See Bose-Einstein Condensate. Way cool. :D :P Good ol' Einstein had a hand in quite a few things early on last century didn't he. :) I think it's incredible the amount that he gave to the world. Not bad for someone who couldn't get an academic job at first :P

To clarify a few things, the coldest we've got is a fraction of 1 Kelvin, as is my understanding. The reason an object would 'dissapear' at 0 K would be (as my best guess) that there would be no EM radiation exciting electrons of the object, thus making it effectively invisible. I doubt it would infinetely shrink; not all trends are constant. Yeah that's right, and interestingly when we cool down certain particles to a fraction of a billionth of a degree above 0 Kelvin, they display curious properties, and all fall into the same energy state, showing superfluid properties. See Bose-Einstein Condensate.

*breathes* What does anyone want to know? Physics is pretty much my academic hobby, I've read about all sorts and although I'm nowhere near an expert in any area I can bring myself up to scratch with most theories pretty quickly. Right, i'll get started. _______________________________ something i cant get my head around as well. nothing comes from nothing, does anyone know what actually started the big bang? i thinks it something to do with two piecies of pure energy colideing, where did they come from? (dont say god - if god was just always there then so can the energy) as for the universe collapseing in on itself, it could come to a big crunch and then just start again, in the same sequence, which means we may have had this conversation like 10,000 times already \ erm i dont get the expanding part, the iniverse isnt like a box, where everything expands and fills the box, i dont quite get it, there is no wall, and there isnt infinate space, bor is their an edge, because what would be beyond the edge, it cant be round because whats the sepeher in? it must be in 4 dimensions, something we cannot imagine. :-s Thinking about the "cause" of the Universe is indeed baffling, but I believe that the Universe is itself uncaused. If you don't believe that it's possible for something to be uncaused, there are numerous examples in quantum mechanics of uncaused processes, and since the singularity from which the Big Bang expanded would be part quantum mechanical, it's perfectly plausible. For more details read this article on the uncaused beginning of the universe, it talks about two possibilities, and my bets would be on the latter (i.e. vacuum fluctuations). http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... aused.html _________________________________________ I don't want to be pedantic but i'll just pick you up on a few things here and add my own thoughts. To think of a teaspoonful of black hole is incorrect, it's a singularity, so it's infinitely dense and infinitely small. You might be getting confused with neutron stars, a teaspoonful of which would be about as dense as the Earth. The surface is indeed very smooth, the black hole in fact radiates away any deformities on its surface when it collapses in the form of gravitational waves. You cannot tell anything about the star which the black hole collapsed from by observing it. To be honest, quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory (it's not perfect) but it has been proven by many, many experimental observations. String Theory is something which has gained a lot of interest in the scientific community and to some extent the general public. However, i'm slightly skeptical of it and it's claims. Despite its promises, it falls down on a lot of the mathematics, there have been no great insights or breakthroughs for many years and the string community has become too elitist and cut off from the rest of the theoretical community as of late to the extent that it's become a cult that simply makes unfalsifiable claims. It might be part of the truth, but I don't think it's the grand unified theory that we've been looking for, simply because it's not background independant. I.e. the nature and fabric and spacetime is taken as a constant for string theory to work, instead of evolving from the laws which is what we learned a grand unified theory must do to work. For more details read The Trouble With Physics, L. Smolin

It's in effect boosted into existence through the hole's massive tidal gravity, the hole imparts some of its energy into the photon making it "real" and so the hole loses a bit of mass.