Its easy. Because they're WRONG. Maybe when people stop saying "What about THIS alternate theory!?!" and start taking physics and astronomy classes, making relativistic corrections in experiments and in your data, knowing where teh data came from, and it matching perfectly with everything else, they can talk.
String theory is very mathematical and I have my personal issues with a number of aspects of it -- but these issues stem from the excessively nonlinear requirements on earlier calculations to derive current models. But its a damn sight better than nothing at all -- and even if some of the spin-offs are *almost* religions in their untestability, at least they're looking for a way to test themselves.
By the way: gravity does travel at the speed of light. Its why orbits follow images -- you *never* see something "where it really is", you always see its light-position. Enter Brehmßtralung radiation (a purely relativistic effect). It also does bend space-time; its why there's gravitational lensing. It also does radiate gravity waves: we have detectors set up for them and pulsar orbits can be observed to decay with that energy radiating. We also have detected dark matter where there is no visible matter. Same gravitational lensing I'm sure you believe doesn't exist.
This idiocy-fixing brought to you by basic university-level astrophysics.
The concept of a "God" is antiquated -- its a concept that shuffles off responsibility for your actions to an invisible companion, and and robs you of intellectual vigor as you place thorny questions on his/her/its proverbial shoulders.
How is the Judeo-Christian God any more reasonable than the Flying Spaggheti Monster? Or the Invisible Pink Unicorn?
Or, for that matter, Q, the Lords of Kobol (yes, a modified Olympian pantheon), or any other "fictional" god?
To paraphrase a quote, realize that each and every believer out there is an atheist. They believe only in their God and in no others. When they can honestly tell themselves why they don't believe in Kronos and Rhea, Ra, Thor, or any of the other gods, and only their own -- then they'll understand why I don't believe in their god.
Religion is a completely untenable intellectual position, untestable, and relies on blind faith of the masses to give it acceptence by ignorant popular vote.
Of course, this is aside from the gross physical violation of these immortal, omniscient being, the fact they just foster a creation event onto something else that is uncreated. And the immense hubris of the religious who believe that they are so incredibly special to merit the attention of said being.
As a matter of fact... religion is pretty much repugnant in all of its scriptures, beliefs, and positions, actually.
That said, religious people can be great people, and some of my closest friends are religious (though weakly so at best). But it is certainly not something that should be encouraged or respected in political candidates.
I have not found a single thing that a *nix machine can do that Windows cannot. Just like Linux requires a familiarity with the terminal, Windows requires familiarity with cmd prompt/powershell and where the administrative tools are.
There was a single time I tried to use Linux on my main machine. The slow boot, the difficulty in things as simple as installing, driver incompatibility, etc made me turn around and never look back.
Now, I frequently use Solaris/OpenSUSE/Ubuntu in my lab, so I *do* know what I'm talking about. And there are some commands that are easier in terminal over cmd, but that's just a matter of preference. Hint -- look for the UNIX subsystem in Windows. Its built into some versions, downloadable on others, and you can use Cygwin if nothing else. If I need *nix operability, I use the Unix subsystem. I admit it -- I prefer SSH/FTP/LaTeX from the command line.
MS produces an OS that is stable for the most part (really, most of the issues stem from bad drivers), and like any computer system, if you take a bit of care in how you set it up it will serve you rather well. If you really do dislike it, ignore it, don't use it, and get on with your life. It is not really useful to despise MS and love Apple just because that's the "in" thing in the tech crowd (and, for the record, I despise Apple... their X.0 products are essentially public betas that work worse than most Windows betas, and they let form impact function too often). These are just companies, after all.
If nothing else, think of this: Microsoft deserves repsect for essentially supporting every device and every peice of hardware on the market, a feat which Apple doesn't even try to do and that Linux is spotty on. Whether or not all the drivers you get end up being WHQL signed or not, they do make the effort and there is an impressive list of device compliance.
Fair enough! I had been running Vista since Beta 1 and I saw the performance improvements through the betas, and ATI got their act together pretty quickly, so I certainly had long solved my problems by launch day. The only annoying thing that's still around is Winbond hasn't released 64-bit drivers for their card readers...
Bravo. I agree -- I run graphics intensive games on my two year old laptop and they perform just as well, if not better, on my 64-bit Vista install than on my XP install. I don't know what the basis of the "Vista Myth" is at all.
Hm, it must be body fat percentage. And when I was measured like that, I was very underweight (about 10-15 kg below the bottom of "normal")... but I must be thinking of body fat percentage. Whoops, my bad there.
A BMI of 30 is obscenely high, and will not affect just healthily athletic people. A standard male should have a BMI under ~15, and a woman under ~18-20 (don't take those numbers as canonical; but they're in the right ballpark). Last time I was measured, I had a BMI of ~11. A BMI of 30 is truly grossly obese.
Physical buttons are also *alyways there*... and in a consistent location. So if there is any frequently used functionality, having an actual button ultimately lets you blindly use some of these basic functions by virtue of consistent placement and the all-important tactile feedback.
As a point of fact, if you load an Office 2003 document and save it (just via ctrl+s) in Office 2007, you still have a 2003 document. You actually have to go to the Office Menu and select "Convert" to convert to 2007 OOXML, and even then you get a warning dialogue.
Fair enough --- but absolutely completely loopy physics at the beginning would need very large modifications to the Standard Model and to GR. The LHC will provide some nice support for this if it ends up detecting the Higgs particle (assuming its on the lower end of its mass limits).
However, if 'normal' physics pretty much holds at all, we have limits on how strange things could have been. We know the size of anisotropies in the CMB and that it was causally connected at some point, which is rather large support for inflationary models, and these models give us the right quantities of various elements, as well as teh right temperatures. The phase changes in matter is, in fact, predicted -- it, among other things, predicts a neutrino decoupling time. Our model is pretty solid up to about 10^-34 seconds or so; we lack confirmations from neutrinos, but that will take a bit. To date, all the mathematics agrees with what we observe, though. There is no reason to assume a crazy physics when standard (well, "standard"... at those temperatures nothing is!) physics will do.
Actually, no; we know this isn't the case because we can still observe the CMB, or Cosmic Microwave Background. When the universe was young it was very hot, and so normal matter was ionized and therefore opaque to EM radiation (ie, light). This cools off in a characteristic way until the temperature becomes cool enough that electrons re-bind to protons and the universe becomes (largely) transparent to light. Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe.
This whole island universe thing (ironically what people first thought of galaxies) amounts to an excercise in seeing when expansion beats out light. Recessional speeds due to expansion can exceed someone's idea of "light speed" because space expands and essentially drags the coordinate system with it. The article basically says that the closest bodies will be outside our light cone in ~3e12 years, and the expanding coordinate system will red-shift it to nothingness to boot. Its nice to have it quantified, but its something that we've known for a long time.
Hm, apparently the comments can't parse .
I suggest you try the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. Aside from letting you delete the two spawns of Satan (otherwise known as Quicktime and Realplayer), you can download streaming files -- including the *.qtl file. Or watch it streaming, for that matter.
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That's a BS degree?! I feel cheated. My UC Berkeley Astrophysics/Physics degree will be a BA o_0
Its easy. Because they're WRONG. Maybe when people stop saying "What about THIS alternate theory!?!" and start taking physics and astronomy classes, making relativistic corrections in experiments and in your data, knowing where teh data came from, and it matching perfectly with everything else, they can talk.
String theory is very mathematical and I have my personal issues with a number of aspects of it -- but these issues stem from the excessively nonlinear requirements on earlier calculations to derive current models. But its a damn sight better than nothing at all -- and even if some of the spin-offs are *almost* religions in their untestability, at least they're looking for a way to test themselves.
By the way: gravity does travel at the speed of light. Its why orbits follow images -- you *never* see something "where it really is", you always see its light-position. Enter Brehmßtralung radiation (a purely relativistic effect). It also does bend space-time; its why there's gravitational lensing. It also does radiate gravity waves: we have detectors set up for them and pulsar orbits can be observed to decay with that energy radiating. We also have detected dark matter where there is no visible matter. Same gravitational lensing I'm sure you believe doesn't exist.
This idiocy-fixing brought to you by basic university-level astrophysics.
The concept of a "God" is antiquated -- its a concept that shuffles off responsibility for your actions to an invisible companion, and and robs you of intellectual vigor as you place thorny questions on his/her/its proverbial shoulders.
... religion is pretty much repugnant in all of its scriptures, beliefs, and positions, actually.
How is the Judeo-Christian God any more reasonable than the Flying Spaggheti Monster? Or the Invisible Pink Unicorn?
Or, for that matter, Q, the Lords of Kobol (yes, a modified Olympian pantheon), or any other "fictional" god?
To paraphrase a quote, realize that each and every believer out there is an atheist. They believe only in their God and in no others. When they can honestly tell themselves why they don't believe in Kronos and Rhea, Ra, Thor, or any of the other gods, and only their own -- then they'll understand why I don't believe in their god.
Religion is a completely untenable intellectual position, untestable, and relies on blind faith of the masses to give it acceptence by ignorant popular vote.
Of course, this is aside from the gross physical violation of these immortal, omniscient being, the fact they just foster a creation event onto something else that is uncreated. And the immense hubris of the religious who believe that they are so incredibly special to merit the attention of said being.
As a matter of fact
That said, religious people can be great people, and some of my closest friends are religious (though weakly so at best). But it is certainly not something that should be encouraged or respected in political candidates.
I have not found a single thing that a *nix machine can do that Windows cannot. Just like Linux requires a familiarity with the terminal, Windows requires familiarity with cmd prompt/powershell and where the administrative tools are. There was a single time I tried to use Linux on my main machine. The slow boot, the difficulty in things as simple as installing, driver incompatibility, etc made me turn around and never look back. Now, I frequently use Solaris/OpenSUSE/Ubuntu in my lab, so I *do* know what I'm talking about. And there are some commands that are easier in terminal over cmd, but that's just a matter of preference. Hint -- look for the UNIX subsystem in Windows. Its built into some versions, downloadable on others, and you can use Cygwin if nothing else. If I need *nix operability, I use the Unix subsystem. I admit it -- I prefer SSH/FTP/LaTeX from the command line.
MS produces an OS that is stable for the most part (really, most of the issues stem from bad drivers), and like any computer system, if you take a bit of care in how you set it up it will serve you rather well. If you really do dislike it, ignore it, don't use it, and get on with your life. It is not really useful to despise MS and love Apple just because that's the "in" thing in the tech crowd (and, for the record, I despise Apple ... their X.0 products are essentially public betas that work worse than most Windows betas, and they let form impact function too often). These are just companies, after all.
If nothing else, think of this: Microsoft deserves repsect for essentially supporting every device and every peice of hardware on the market, a feat which Apple doesn't even try to do and that Linux is spotty on. Whether or not all the drivers you get end up being WHQL signed or not, they do make the effort and there is an impressive list of device compliance.
Fair enough! I had been running Vista since Beta 1 and I saw the performance improvements through the betas, and ATI got their act together pretty quickly, so I certainly had long solved my problems by launch day. The only annoying thing that's still around is Winbond hasn't released 64-bit drivers for their card readers...
Bravo. I agree -- I run graphics intensive games on my two year old laptop and they perform just as well, if not better, on my 64-bit Vista install than on my XP install. I don't know what the basis of the "Vista Myth" is at all.
Hm, it must be body fat percentage. And when I was measured like that, I was very underweight (about 10-15 kg below the bottom of "normal") ... but I must be thinking of body fat percentage. Whoops, my bad there.
A BMI of 30 is obscenely high, and will not affect just healthily athletic people. A standard male should have a BMI under ~15, and a woman under ~18-20 (don't take those numbers as canonical; but they're in the right ballpark). Last time I was measured, I had a BMI of ~11. A BMI of 30 is truly grossly obese.
Physical buttons are also *alyways there* ... and in a consistent location. So if there is any frequently used functionality, having an actual button ultimately lets you blindly use some of these basic functions by virtue of consistent placement and the all-important tactile feedback.
As a point of fact, if you load an Office 2003 document and save it (just via ctrl+s) in Office 2007, you still have a 2003 document. You actually have to go to the Office Menu and select "Convert" to convert to 2007 OOXML, and even then you get a warning dialogue.
Fair enough --- but absolutely completely loopy physics at the beginning would need very large modifications to the Standard Model and to GR. The LHC will provide some nice support for this if it ends up detecting the Higgs particle (assuming its on the lower end of its mass limits). ... at those temperatures nothing is!) physics will do.
However, if 'normal' physics pretty much holds at all, we have limits on how strange things could have been. We know the size of anisotropies in the CMB and that it was causally connected at some point, which is rather large support for inflationary models, and these models give us the right quantities of various elements, as well as teh right temperatures. The phase changes in matter is, in fact, predicted -- it, among other things, predicts a neutrino decoupling time. Our model is pretty solid up to about 10^-34 seconds or so; we lack confirmations from neutrinos, but that will take a bit. To date, all the mathematics agrees with what we observe, though. There is no reason to assume a crazy physics when standard (well, "standard"
Actually, no; we know this isn't the case because we can still observe the CMB, or Cosmic Microwave Background. When the universe was young it was very hot, and so normal matter was ionized and therefore opaque to EM radiation (ie, light). This cools off in a characteristic way until the temperature becomes cool enough that electrons re-bind to protons and the universe becomes (largely) transparent to light. Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe. This whole island universe thing (ironically what people first thought of galaxies) amounts to an excercise in seeing when expansion beats out light. Recessional speeds due to expansion can exceed someone's idea of "light speed" because space expands and essentially drags the coordinate system with it. The article basically says that the closest bodies will be outside our light cone in ~3e12 years, and the expanding coordinate system will red-shift it to nothingness to boot. Its nice to have it quantified, but its something that we've known for a long time. Hm, apparently the comments can't parse .
I suggest you try the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. Aside from letting you delete the two spawns of Satan (otherwise known as Quicktime and Realplayer), you can download streaming files -- including the *.qtl file. Or watch it streaming, for that matter.
Running IE7 on WinVista build 5744, and I don't get any phishing error messages...
Running IE7 on WinVista build 5744, and I don't get any phishing error messages...