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1950s Soviet Russia should be the model for education. Changing classes every hour doesn't help them to learn about their students. Homeschooling is the closest thing you can get to that in the US.

I think it's pretty fair to make the inference that the wealthy have less children from the sources I cited to, as well as empirical evidence. Not strictly, but on average.

I really don't mean to belittle you because I can tell you are a very smart person, but I don't think you have any idea of how hard executives (or anybody who earns a large salary) work. Granted, there are exceptions, but for the most part, CEOs are stressed and work a ton of hours. If you have any sources that state that CEOs are: "not stressed, their jobs are rewarding and meaningful to them, and because they are not stressed they tend to be healthier and live longer." Believe me, the golf trips and private jets get old quickly when you aren't spending time with your family. On those trips you spend your time with people you probably don't like, doing things you don't like, but pretending to have fun.

Production needs to be organized, and if I can organize ten workers to produce twice as much output as any other person, aren't I worth something approaching the economic value of the ten producers? And why is that not production? Again, you still haven't addressed my question as to why the CEOs are in fact paid as much as they are. Maybe there's a reason for it? Based upon a non-conspiracy theory, perhaps?

People are compensated for taking risks and for working hard (a/k/a capital and labor). The people who take risks get lucky, and sometimes people who seem undeserving get wealthy. Society is better off, and those who take unwise risks will fail more often than not. As an aside, except for the extremely wealthy, like the Rockefellers, Kennedys, etc, non-earned wealth is lost by the third generation. See, e.g., http://www.worldscibooks.com/etextbook/6800/6800_chap01.pdf. Therefore, most people with wealth either earned it through the above (risk or hard work), or are only one generation removed.

CEOs take risks because we as a society reward risk taking. I argue idiosyncratic risk is good. Most economists would agree. Idiosyncratic risk can be hedged to eliminate systemic risk to society. I can believe that many risk takers have mental problems because that kind of risk taking is not in the individual's best interest because of the concept of marginal utility, but it is in society's best interest. Also, if you think CEOs are immoral people, enact laws that say what is illegal. Everybody has a different definition of what is moral, and if a majority can't agree on a law, maybe most don't consider the behavior immoral.

There's no right or wrong when it comes to tax rate. There's nothing "wrong" with a 99% tax rate on wealth. There's nothing wrong with a per capita tax. The people with the guns set the tax rate. In the US, we are a democracy, so the people with the guns are the majority. Each tax system modifies incentives. Tax the heck out of the rich. See what happens. Also, where do you think rich people's money goes? Wealth is merely the ability to make decisions about the allocation of resources.

As far as equal access to education: there is no fundamental reason why there should be. (Just like taxes, the people with the guns decide what is fair). We humans are selfish and practice nepotism. If we didn't, our lineage would have died out a long time ago. We work hard to give our children an advantage. Take away our ability to give our children an advantage, and watch our desire to work plummet. Combine that with a high tax rate, and explain to me why you think most people will take productive jobs. As an aside, with the Internet, there is equal access to knowledge.

Desperate workers are a necessary result of the competition for limited resources. In a perfectly competitive market, profit is zero. In the labor market, it means you are indifferent to providing your services: i.e. you are just a hair away from quitting. Unions are a monopoly: they monopolize the supply of labor to a company,

I haven't read your comments carefully yet (I intend to, but it's nearly the weekend!). My comments may be less than coherent (see earlier comment about weekend) but, for now...

Interesting point about matter being the thing that's quantised, and not the light. Pondering...

You may want to look at the derivation of the black body spectrum as evidence of photons. It _seems_ impossible to reproduce observations without quantising the light. (i.e. if you don't, the maths implies something like a hot coal radiates huge amounts of ultraviolet light, which it clearly doesn't) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrop he

(I suppose this could be seen as a quantum effect in matter, not light, but if this is how light is made, it presumably suggests light is also quantised.)

Good point about energy & time -> amplitude & phase; I'll ponder that. Problem, as far as I recall, is that phase isn't easy to extract from a wavefunction (in the way that momentum, position etc can be extracted).

The double slit experiment works just as well with single electrons, and bigger things such as Carbon-60 molecules.

Quantum Mechanics does explain the orbitals of electrons in atoms. Very well, in fact. Bohr's first stab at a model has been outdated, and orbitals are generally calculated using the Schrodinger equation (where THAT comes from is another matter!) and the electrostatic potential of the nucleus. Things like spin and such are included, and the results agree with experiment. There's no `artificial' constraint on the types of orbitals allowed - they're just the solution to the equation in that potential.

The Bell inequalities really are worth the trouble. They provide some very compelling results contrary to hidden-variables and approachs with suggest the only real probability is our lack of knowledge. I'll refresh my memory of them if I get a chance. Unless something has been overlooked, probability really is a state of nature. I don't like it, but I can't find a way around it.

There are lots of alternative theories to QM, usually proposed by people with no formal training in the field. I don't know your background, but you'd better know your conventional QM if you want to convince someone else to try to fill in the gaps in your theory. There are many people with the ability to either shoot this down, or make it in to something complete. (I am not one of these people!) i.e. I know lots who would be capable, but it mightn't be easy to convince them to spend their time trying.

Some of Feynmann's interpretations seem odd, but his Lectures in Physics series is excellent. The conceptual issues part of Chris Isham's work http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/p001.html is also excellent (I had the good fortune to hear him lecture, and I hope it comes across half as well when written down). He deals with all the maths first, but the Conceptual Issues chapter can stand alone.

"Quantum fluctuations" is a widely recognized phrase in physics, used variously to refer to uncertain outcomes of quantum mechanics:

A book by Edward Nelson of CMU in the Princeton Series in Physics: http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/qf.pdf
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
From a physics lecture at the University of Oregon (the mention is about halfway down the page): http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17. html
From Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-64917
From an article in New Scientist: http://www.ldolphin.org/qfoam.html
A paper from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Roxbury Community College/Harvard: http://www.eduprograms.deas.harvard.edu/reu03_pape rs/Lopez.C.FinReport03.pdf
Theses at Penn State: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/31075.html

A book from the World Scientific Series in Contemporary Chemical Physics: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/5952.html

My argument fits the term as used in any one of these sources, or in the half-million others that can be found with a two-second Google search.

Let's compare old technology (rubber shock absorbing mounts) with new (active maglev shock suppressors):

Old - cheap, zero power requirement, silent, no additional support/control systems needed, simple maintenance by minimally skilled techs, pretty effective

New - expensive, lots of power required, non-silent, lots of additional support/control systems needed, complex maintenance by highly skilled techs, super-duper-extra effective (as soon as they get it to work, which will be Real Soon Now)

All of this... for a seat cushion? For years, I've been hearing about active controls in shock absorbers using electrorheological or magnetorheological fluids in place of regular fluid or gas filled shock absorbers. These would be a lot more straighforward than maglev shock suppressors, but where are they?

The fact is, the control systems still are too expensive and unresponsive, and don't offer any significant benefit over traditional shock absorbing systems. The power requirements for a full-on maglev systems would be ridiculous.

This sort of model is not new, however there is a big twist as the range of forces in normal fluid mechanics is relatively much shorter (Lennard-Jones drops off at r^6) while gravity is a r^2 force. This makes the modelling a lot more complex.

CC Lin has been using this approach to model the evolution of the spiral structure of galaxies for some time (mid 70's or earlier).

http://www.worldscibooks.com/mathematics/0412.html

Read Discovery of Cosmic Fractals. The first half of the book is a history of cosmology written with stunning readability and scholarship. Having been exposed to the history of cosmology from plato, through copernicus, newton, kepler, and einstein many times I didn't find the review the least bit tedious. They have a remarkable talent for showing how scientific problems develop and how they are solved. James Burke would be jealous of the connections these guys make. I am only half way through this book and it the best popular science book I've ever read (and that's saying a lot).