The most-used technical definition of a solid is a phase which can support a shear stress. This can depend on the frequency of the applied stress.
The individual grains of your material are solid, but the individual grains are not getting distorted in the way an element of liquid does when it is poured. Only the grains considered as a group participate in the flow.
What you describe is usually called "granular flow". Not solid, but very different from fluids.
They've had hits in the past, but the iPod was their first "breakout" hit in a *long* time. As in since the original Mac.
Speed-bumps and even radical case changes and the OS 9 --> OS X upgrade weren't changing the essential notion of "Macintosh" or increasing Apple's marketshare in the computer market.
Xserve and iMac and the lamp iMac and flat-panel iMac and dual-G5s were all just fresh new ways for Apple to keep selling into pretty much the same marketspace.
"highly successful company" in the sense of selling iMacs and G5s is not the same as "justifying huge P/E multiples on its stock price." The punishment Apple's stock has taken in the last few days is probably based on the iPod transitioning from "exploding" to simply "still growing."
It's hard to see something new and as market-smashing as iPod coming even from Apple. Even a dual-core G5 Powerbook by next week is not going to drive as many people into the Apple Store as iPod has.
Yes, that would be an interesting idea. However, people learn (and evolve) new languages much more quickly than they acquire new DNA.
You don't need to mix genetic material to find it necessary to learn and teach your children some other populations' language. Creoles are a clear sign that languages mix faster than DNA does.
Trade patterns and migration patterns change languages much more quickly than immigration and inter-breeding mix populations.
Actually, the chapter 1 story (and 2:1--4a) and chapter 2:4b--3.24 stories in Genesis are *different* stories, combined by a later "redactor." Chapter 1 is commonly called "P" for "Priestly" source, while Chapter 2 is commonly called "J" for "Yahweh".
Even in translation the styles are starkly different.
Just because they want to doesn't mean we should help them
So, let's see. Are you saying that when a terminally ill patient says "I don't want to eat or drink anymore" that we should stick a feeding tube in them, against their will, to avoid being an "accomplice."
Consider carefully the alternative, which is keeping the patient nourished until he succumbs to an ever-growing cancer, or some nasty secondary infection, perhaps in great pain, which has been artificially extended.
Have you been involved in the decision-making process regarding a terminally ill relative?
You know, one can google for this sort of thing, particularly at scholar.google.com. One interesting article I found quickly was here.
But anyway, a sketch,
The usual definition of a species is a population that cannot viably breed outside itself.
The quickest way to create such a reproductively isolated population is to select for behavioral or physical traits that prevent selection as mates. Many species have developed elaborate mating rituals, for instance, or are selective about the size of male with which they will mate.
By deliberately selecting for extremes of male dance behavior or male size, and breeding these populations, one can quickly generate populations divergent enough that they will not interbreed with one another. Because these traits are genetically determined, the distinction will be preserved.
Evolution by natural selection without ID makes many predictions which are testable. You test evolution by looking at current and fossil organisms and their relations to one another, by using structural analysis and DNA analysis on modern organisms, among other things.
You see all sorts of things like ancestors of whales which had legs, and modern-day whales which have hip bones without legs. You see that modern day humans have tails as embryos. You see that transitional forms between reptiles and mammals modified jaw bones to become ear bones. You see all sorts of crazy non-designs like panda bears eating bamboo like crazy, because their digestive system, which resembles other non-herbivorous bears, and does not efficiently process vegetable matter.
You can think of all sorts of great experiments in the lab with bacteria and fruit flies (to keep things on a human-accessible time scale) to measure the ability of organisms to respond to selective pressure and speciate. You can go into the field and see speciation in progress between genetically related populations which have been separated. You go into the field and verify that the co-evolution of bees and flowers corresponds to the testable ability of bees to see and respond to modified flower shapes.
On the other hand, intelligent design simply consists of "*I* don't see how this could possibly have happened, so there must have been some magic intelligent being that made it happen." It is disproved every time we see that natural systems are complicated jury-rigged Rube Goldberg schemes, rather than evidence of methodical design.
Evolution of modern species came about on a time scale very long compared to human lifetimes or human history, but left evidence *all around us* in fossils, and in the DNA and features of modern species. You may choose to ignore that evidence, or claim it is impossible to believe, but neither of those is a scientific approach to the issue.
reconcile the fresh, flexible organic structures in Mary Scheitzer's fossilised T Rex leg-bone with the 68 million year age assigned to it
No one except a creationist calls that tissue "fresh." There is no indication it is fresh. The scientists suspect that the material may have been altered in many ways over time, including a change in chemical composition, similar to processes that replace organic material in other fossils with minerals. Hell, chinese "thousand year eggs" stay flexible, but they are hardly unchanged. What the study reveals is the fact that fossil formation can "seal things in" much better than had previously been thought possible.
Unless you believe that yesterday's groceries can get trapped in 68 million year-old rock, in which case, you'll believe anything.
Anyway, if that tissue is fresh, you must believe that dinosaurs, etc., were recent inhabitants of the earth, but that all those honest-to-goodness old-looking fossils that are completely unfresh, distorted by fossilization, and remineralized (think petrified forest), are, despite all appearances and scientifically-supported dating methods, nonetheless young?
Doesn't seem to be much consistency in your "logic", there.
1) find specific, distinct neurons that cause the behavior they want 2) modify those neurons to respond to ATP
It's not clear at all that there are specific, distinct neurons that cause a consumer to buy an iPod, to pick a random example. Even if there are, it's not at all likely that the same neurons would cause the same response in others, so that the neuron is easy to find.
Flies work in the example because their nervous systems are considerably simpler than ours. The responses the scientists caused in this experiment are very low-level.
Furthermore, to modify the neurons, PharmaCompanyX would have to somehow pass clinical trials proving that their ATP/UV/PVP treatment was safe and effective for treating a disease, where the regulatory agencies are going to have to be convinced that "iPod avoidance" is medical disorder. And, doctors would have to completely abandon their ethical obligations to their patients, and insurance companies or patients would have to be convinced to pay for the medication.
Other than that, it might be conceivable. Hardly "definitely possible."
"Something is wrong with foo" is only the beginning of scientific inquiry when it leads to scientific inquiry. As in suggesting experiments. Exactly what experiments do advocates of intelligent design propose? None.
Followers of intelligent design, however, stop before they get anywhere in the direction of inquiry, because the "something is wrong" part is *all* they are interested in.
Simple denial is even more counterproductive than derision.
Yeah, but you forgot the part about genetically altering the customers so that specific neurons fire in the presence of ATP, then injecting them with ATP "caged" in molecules that require a UV pulse to unlock.
This is completely inapplicable for commercial influence, you clueless slashbot. It is a very clever *laboratory technique* for causing impulses in specific neurons of test animals without implanting electrodes.
Lots of apparently redundant projects get started because just "having the source" doesn't magically make software easy to change. Tweaking a product or patching a trivial incompatibility is much easier with the source, but major functionality is often still out of reach.
The main place one sees this is totally new apps that implement well-worn functionality, but use some new GUI toolkit. Few apps are factored well enough to be able to change the GUI enough to port an app from X MSWindows Mac OS, for example, even if they are open source. Sometimes it *is* easier to get something working from scratch than it is to understand someone else's code.
Software is hard. Contrary to popular/. belief, opening the source does not solve the eternal problems of software architecture. The feel-good aspect of open source, however, encourages any quarter-baked effort to get a project on SourceForge.
I'll admit that it was an express trip through an advanced solid-state physics class, assuming a familiarity with quantum mechanics, but I tried to at least keep one foot on the ground at all times.
The real moral of the story is that the poster's description of a photon in matter being absorbed for some time and re-emitted, if you express it in formal mathematics, is the first term in an expansion (analogous to a Taylor expansion in calculus I) describing a theory of "light in the presence of matter" by something like
leaving out the higher order terms in the expansion. But it really isn't a full solution until you take all the terms to all the powers, which can't really be computed. Instead, we manage to find tricky ways to find approximate sums or exact sums of simple parts of the terms, etc.
But the end result can't be separated out into "light" and "matter" any more: the interactions cause them to be inextricably mixed together, just like you can't really see the polynomials anymore when an infinite series sums up to give you something like a sine wave.
To be more specific, do you really consider "bird life" to be disconnected from "land life"? Funny how chickens look so similar to the other vertebrates. How do you distinguish bats from "bird life"? Do you really consider "land life" to be separate from "sea life"? What about whales and dolphins? Funny how whales have legs as part of their skeletal structure, and that fossil relatives of whales lived on land. And, in the other direction, it's amazing how similar the land vertebrates are to the fishes. Do ostriches count as "bird life" or "land life"?
You don't believe Archaeopteryx is a transistional form between earlier dinosaurs and birds? You don't believe that lungfishes represent a transistional phase between aquatic fishes and more terrestrial amphibians?
You don't believe that the transition between jaw bones in reptiles to the ear bones in mammals is evidence of the "beginning of new structures" and "transitional forms"? Do you think the presence of gill slits and tails in human embryos is because human adults have "all parts complete"? Do you believe whales have "complete" legs? Or no legs? Certainly not "partial" legs, right? Are ostrich and penguin wings "complete"? Because they sure don't work for flight. Guess that's because penguins are "sea life." And ostriches are "land life."
Funny also how your "intelligent design" argument doesn't particularly emphasize the "intelligent" or the "design" aspect. Instead, it sounds like "simplistic history" in that it makes broad, sweeping, but arbitrary distinctions. "Land life", "sea life" you really think that these are precise scientific terms? Do you really think a detailed examination of the fossil record really falls neatly into the categories you mention? Or a classification of modern forms using DNA sequencing?
In fact, your historical analysis seems to have a deliberate resemblance to the account of Genesis than anything else. Hmmm. Why could that be?
So, you claim a Biblical text was actually written *by Moses himself* and you criticize others for not being scholarly enough in their Biblical analysis?
You should also consider that the violence that Europeans inflicted on each other, even those who remained there after the major emigrations, has something to do with the cautious tolerance that generally characterizes European politics today.
I think the tolerance seen in Europe today is as much or more a reaction against Fascism and its excesses as it is a result of shipping intolerant Puritans to America in the 17th century.
Einstein made enormous contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics: he was the second (or was it third?) person after Planck to publish a paper on quantum mechanics, understood, as did Poincare, that Planck had actually made a drastic assumption, where Planck had believed he was only using a mathematical technique, and extended the theory to explain the specific heat of solids at low temperatures (for which only *one* experimental result showed a need for a quantum correction!), the photoelectric effect, and predicted stimulated emission.
Now, he was apparently never convinced that the success of quantum mechanical models of the atom meant that the probabilistic parts of the theory extended all the way down to the microscopic reality.
My only slightly informed view on this question is that Einstein knew that all the successes of atomic spectra, etc., were actually describing experiments on large systems, obeying thermodynamic laws. I suspect Einstein felt that the laws of quantum mechanics were only expressing something like the "ensemble" view of a future microscopic physics yet to be deduced.
Bohr's view of atoms jumping around discontinously was far from proven by the spectral measurements alone. I suspect Einstein would have revised his view if he had seen the progress in the quantum mechanics of small systems (such as used in quantum computing), where you can see single atoms obeying quantum mechanical rules.
I think you are making an artificial distinction. The "quanta" you claim are un-altered are the mathematical representation of fields in *charge-free* space.
Inside a solid/liquid/gas != charge-free space.
Inside the fluid, your Hamiltonian is totally complicated with the electrons and nuclei all running around and interacting with one another; as a result, the eigenstates are incomprehensible.
For materials that are not strongly absorbing, you can see approximate eigenstates, which look very much like free photons, except their dispersion curve reflects a refractive index != 1.
That's about all you can say. Your picture of "photon propagates at c, is absorbed and re-emitted" is a cartoon of the first term of a perturbation series, not a microscopic view of what is really going on. There's a whole lot of averaging and other math that goes between that cartoon and the final result of a calculation.
Actually, E=mc^2 has very little to do with how or whether a nuclear bomb is workable or not.
It has *very* much to do with the details of neutron absorption and production in fission processes for various isotopes of U or Pu.
The energy production of a fission bomb can be very well calculated using the electrostatic repulsion between fission fragments; for fusion I think it is a bit trickier. In either case, the mass defect is merely a different way of stating the binding energy, without really clarifying the reaction processes, which are key to making a bomb actually blow up.
A fission bomb could clearly have been developed without any use of special relativity. It could not have been developed without experimental nuclear physics and nuclear engineering calculations.
Executive Summary: A dollar now (or yesterday) costs more than a dollar later.
More detailed explanation: postponing the expenditure of a dollar allows one to collect interest (or avoid paying interest, which is the same) on the dollar in the meantime.
The relevant interest rate is the "real" interest rate, meaning the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate.
The nominal interest rate depends on the source of capital; many corporations can generate a return on internal capital which is higher than a risk-free return such as Treasury bills; in general, they should not invest in projects unless the investment will bring as high or higher return as other alternative projects. There is always the alternative to invest in Treasury bills, but if that is chosen, it calls into question why the capital is being used for all the other projects in the company, instead of being dissolved and handed back to shareholders.
A recent solar panel should earn you back what you paid for it in as little as a year, in good light.
There are an enormous number of assumptions you make in that estimate, which make it pretty useless.
In particular, you are probably assuming the output of the solar panel is either being 100% consumed on site or that it can be dumped onto the grid where your power company is forced to reimburse you for the energy at approximately the same price it charges you for the electricity you consume.
In an economic sense, the power company is probably subsidizing you heavily in doing so, because your supply has nothing to do with the power company's need for power. That is, he has to take your kilowatt-hour (at full price) even if he doesn't need or want it.
"The behavior of a fluid can be modeled without bringing in the notion of a quark."
On average, yes. Exactly? Probably not.
You are 100% absolutely wrong.
The subatomic structure of the fluid components is not needed for an "exact" solution of the fluid flow, for any practical meaning of "exact." Any quark effects are going to be overwhelmed by *many* orders of magnitude by the imprecision with which the experimental conditions can be specified.
The degrees of freedom represented by the quarks are completely frozen out at room temperature and normal fluidic energies. Meaning they do not participate unless the fluid you are talking about is something like a hot neutron star, and probably not even then. I'd wager that the only fluid in which quark dynamics mattered was the initial fireball of the big bang, up until the time nuclei condensed.
If quarks mattered in ordinary conditions, then we wouldn't need huge particle colliders to detect and study them; you would be able to study fluid mechanics instead.
Plenty of useful physics can be done without caring about quarks.
Slashdot Mirror
The most-used technical definition of a solid is a phase which can support a shear stress. This can depend on the frequency of the applied stress.
The individual grains of your material are solid, but the individual grains are not getting distorted in the way an element of liquid does when it is poured. Only the grains considered as a group participate in the flow.
What you describe is usually called "granular flow". Not solid, but very different from fluids.
They've had hits in the past, but the iPod was their first "breakout" hit in a *long* time. As in since the original Mac.
Speed-bumps and even radical case changes and the OS 9 --> OS X upgrade weren't changing the essential notion of "Macintosh" or increasing Apple's marketshare in the computer market.
Xserve and iMac and the lamp iMac and flat-panel iMac and dual-G5s were all just fresh new ways for Apple to keep selling into pretty much the same marketspace.
"highly successful company" in the sense of selling iMacs and G5s is not the same as "justifying huge P/E multiples on its stock price." The punishment Apple's stock has taken in the last few days is probably based on the iPod transitioning from "exploding" to simply "still growing."
It's hard to see something new and as market-smashing as iPod coming even from Apple. Even a dual-core G5 Powerbook by next week is not going to drive as many people into the Apple Store as iPod has.
Yes, that would be an interesting idea. However, people learn (and evolve) new languages much more quickly than they acquire new DNA.
You don't need to mix genetic material to find it necessary to learn and teach your children some other populations' language. Creoles are a clear sign that languages mix faster than DNA does.
Trade patterns and migration patterns change languages much more quickly than immigration and inter-breeding mix populations.
Actually, the chapter 1 story (and 2:1--4a) and chapter 2:4b--3.24 stories in Genesis are *different* stories, combined by a later "redactor." Chapter 1 is commonly called "P" for "Priestly" source, while Chapter 2 is commonly called "J" for "Yahweh".
Even in translation the styles are starkly different.
Well, your use of the word "kill" for "not stuff food into someone's stomach" is very interesting.
I guess I won't be putting you for my guardian on my living will.
Have fun when you are on your deathbed for a few extra painful months so someone else can feel morally superior.
just to clarify, you are using the French acronyms.
ARN == RNA (English)
ADN == DNA (English)
Just because they want to doesn't mean we should help them
So, let's see. Are you saying that when a terminally ill patient says "I don't want to eat or drink anymore" that we should stick a feeding tube in them, against their will, to avoid being an "accomplice."
Consider carefully the alternative, which is keeping the patient nourished until he succumbs to an ever-growing cancer, or some nasty secondary infection, perhaps in great pain, which has been artificially extended.
Have you been involved in the decision-making process regarding a terminally ill relative?
You know, one can google for this sort of thing, particularly at scholar.google.com.
One interesting article I found quickly was here.
But anyway, a sketch,
The usual definition of a species is a population that cannot viably breed outside itself.
The quickest way to create such a reproductively isolated population is to select for behavioral or physical traits that prevent selection as mates. Many species have developed elaborate mating rituals, for instance, or are selective about the size of male with which they will mate.
By deliberately selecting for extremes of male dance behavior or male size, and breeding these populations, one can quickly generate populations divergent enough that they will not interbreed with one another. Because these traits are genetically determined, the distinction will be preserved.
Evolution by natural selection without ID makes many predictions which are testable. You test evolution by looking at current and fossil organisms and their relations to one another, by using structural analysis and DNA analysis on modern organisms, among other things.
You see all sorts of things like ancestors of whales which had legs, and modern-day whales which have hip bones without legs. You see that modern day humans have tails as embryos. You see that transitional forms between reptiles and mammals modified jaw bones to become ear bones. You see all sorts of crazy non-designs like panda bears eating bamboo like crazy, because their digestive system, which resembles other non-herbivorous bears, and does not efficiently process vegetable matter.
You can think of all sorts of great experiments in the lab with bacteria and fruit flies (to keep things on a human-accessible time scale) to measure the ability of organisms to respond to selective pressure and speciate. You can go into the field and see speciation in progress between genetically related populations which have been separated. You go into the field and verify that the co-evolution of bees and flowers corresponds to the testable ability of bees to see and respond to modified flower shapes.
On the other hand, intelligent design simply consists of "*I* don't see how this could possibly have happened, so there must have been some magic intelligent being that made it happen." It is disproved every time we see that natural systems are complicated jury-rigged Rube Goldberg schemes, rather than evidence of methodical design.
Evolution of modern species came about on a time scale very long compared to human lifetimes or human history, but left evidence *all around us* in fossils, and in the DNA and features of modern species. You may choose to ignore that evidence, or claim it is impossible to believe, but neither of those is a scientific approach to the issue.
reconcile the fresh, flexible organic structures in Mary Scheitzer's fossilised T Rex leg-bone with the 68 million year age assigned to it
No one except a creationist calls that tissue "fresh." There is no indication it is fresh. The scientists suspect that the material may have been altered in many ways over time, including a change in chemical composition, similar to processes that replace organic material in other fossils with minerals. Hell, chinese "thousand year eggs" stay flexible, but they are hardly unchanged. What the study reveals is the fact that fossil formation can "seal things in" much better than had previously been thought possible.
Unless you believe that yesterday's groceries can get trapped in 68 million year-old rock, in which case, you'll believe anything.
Anyway, if that tissue is fresh, you must believe that dinosaurs, etc., were recent inhabitants of the earth, but that all those honest-to-goodness old-looking fossils that are completely unfresh, distorted by fossilization, and remineralized (think petrified forest), are, despite all appearances and scientifically-supported dating methods, nonetheless young?
Doesn't seem to be much consistency in your "logic", there.
Except they *also* have to
1) find specific, distinct neurons that cause the behavior they want
2) modify those neurons to respond to ATP
It's not clear at all that there are specific, distinct neurons that cause a consumer to buy an iPod, to pick a random example. Even if there are, it's not at all likely that the same neurons would cause the same response in others, so that the neuron is easy to find.
Flies work in the example because their nervous systems are considerably simpler than ours. The responses the scientists caused in this experiment are very low-level.
Furthermore, to modify the neurons, PharmaCompanyX would have to somehow pass clinical trials proving that their ATP/UV/PVP treatment was safe and effective for treating a disease, where the regulatory agencies are going to have to be convinced that "iPod avoidance" is medical disorder. And, doctors would have to completely abandon their ethical obligations to their patients, and insurance companies or patients would have to be convinced to pay for the medication.
Other than that, it might be conceivable. Hardly "definitely possible."
Fucking moron.
"Something is wrong with foo" is only the beginning of scientific inquiry when it leads to scientific inquiry. As in suggesting experiments. Exactly what experiments do advocates of intelligent design propose? None.
Followers of intelligent design, however, stop before they get anywhere in the direction of inquiry, because the "something is wrong" part is *all* they are interested in.
Simple denial is even more counterproductive than derision.
Yeah, but you forgot the part about genetically altering the customers so that specific neurons fire in the presence of ATP, then injecting them with ATP "caged" in molecules that require a UV pulse to unlock.
This is completely inapplicable for commercial influence, you clueless slashbot. It is a very clever *laboratory technique* for causing impulses in specific neurons of test animals without implanting electrodes.
Get a clue.
Lots of apparently redundant projects get started because just "having the source" doesn't magically make software easy to change. Tweaking a product or patching a trivial incompatibility is much easier with the source, but major functionality is often still out of reach.
/. belief, opening the source does not solve the eternal problems of software architecture. The feel-good aspect of open source, however, encourages any quarter-baked effort to get a project on SourceForge.
The main place one sees this is totally new apps that implement well-worn functionality, but use some new GUI toolkit. Few apps are factored well enough to be able to change the GUI enough to port an app from X MSWindows Mac OS, for example, even if they are open source. Sometimes it *is* easier to get something working from scratch than it is to understand someone else's code.
Software is hard. Contrary to popular
Yeah, I agree with your main point. c != "speed of light", rather c = "speed of light *in a vacuum*"
:-)
So c doesn't change in the medium, but the speed of "propagation of electromagnetic waves" is reduced by the refractive index.
Just making sure everyone is being anal enough to be correct.
Thanks, I think.
I'll admit that it was an express trip through an advanced solid-state physics class, assuming a familiarity with quantum mechanics, but I tried to at least keep one foot on the ground at all times.
The real moral of the story is that the poster's description of a photon in matter being absorbed for some time and re-emitted, if you express it in formal mathematics, is the first term in an expansion (analogous to a Taylor expansion in calculus I) describing a theory of "light in the presence of matter" by something like
"light and matter together" = "light alone^1" + "matter alone^1" + "light alone * matter alone"^1
leaving out the higher order terms in the expansion. But it really isn't a full solution until you take all the terms to all the powers, which can't really be computed. Instead, we manage to find tricky ways to find approximate sums or exact sums of simple parts of the terms, etc.
But the end result can't be separated out into "light" and "matter" any more: the interactions cause them to be inextricably mixed together, just like you can't really see the polynomials anymore when an infinite series sums up to give you something like a sine wave.
All of your arguments are against strawmen.
To be more specific, do you really consider "bird life" to be disconnected from "land life"? Funny how chickens look so similar to the other vertebrates. How do you distinguish bats from "bird life"? Do you really consider "land life" to be separate from "sea life"? What about whales and dolphins? Funny how whales have legs as part of their skeletal structure, and that fossil relatives of whales lived on land. And, in the other direction, it's amazing how similar the land vertebrates are to the fishes. Do ostriches count as "bird life" or "land life"?
You don't believe Archaeopteryx is a transistional form between earlier dinosaurs and birds? You don't believe that lungfishes represent a transistional phase between aquatic fishes and more terrestrial amphibians?
You don't believe that the transition between jaw bones in reptiles to the ear bones in mammals is evidence of the "beginning of new structures" and "transitional forms"? Do you think the presence of gill slits and tails in human embryos is because human adults have "all parts complete"? Do you believe whales have "complete" legs? Or no legs? Certainly not "partial" legs, right? Are ostrich and penguin wings "complete"? Because they sure don't work for flight. Guess that's because penguins are "sea life." And ostriches are "land life."
Funny also how your "intelligent design" argument doesn't particularly emphasize the "intelligent" or the "design" aspect. Instead, it sounds like "simplistic history" in that it makes broad, sweeping, but arbitrary distinctions. "Land life", "sea life" you really think that these are precise scientific terms? Do you really think a detailed examination of the fossil record really falls neatly into the categories you mention? Or a classification of modern forms using DNA sequencing?
In fact, your historical analysis seems to have a deliberate resemblance to the account of Genesis than anything else. Hmmm. Why could that be?
So, you claim a Biblical text was actually written *by Moses himself* and you criticize others for not being scholarly enough in their Biblical analysis?
You should also consider that the violence that Europeans inflicted on each other, even those who remained there after the major emigrations, has something to do with the cautious tolerance that generally characterizes European politics today.
I think the tolerance seen in Europe today is as much or more a reaction against Fascism and its excesses as it is a result of shipping intolerant Puritans to America in the 17th century.
Einstein made enormous contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics: he was the second (or was it third?) person after Planck to publish a paper on quantum mechanics, understood, as did Poincare, that Planck had actually made a drastic assumption, where Planck had believed he was only using a mathematical technique, and extended the theory to explain the specific heat of solids at low temperatures (for which only *one* experimental result showed a need for a quantum correction!), the photoelectric effect, and predicted stimulated emission.
Now, he was apparently never convinced that the success of quantum mechanical models of the atom meant that the probabilistic parts of the theory extended all the way down to the microscopic reality.
My only slightly informed view on this question is that Einstein knew that all the successes of atomic spectra, etc., were actually describing experiments on large systems, obeying thermodynamic laws. I suspect Einstein felt that the laws of quantum mechanics were only expressing something like the "ensemble" view of a future microscopic physics yet to be deduced.
Bohr's view of atoms jumping around discontinously was far from proven by the spectral measurements alone. I suspect Einstein would have revised his view if he had seen the progress in the quantum mechanics of small systems (such as used in quantum computing), where you can see single atoms obeying quantum mechanical rules.
I think you are making an artificial distinction. The "quanta" you claim are un-altered are the mathematical representation of fields in *charge-free* space.
Inside a solid/liquid/gas != charge-free space.
Inside the fluid, your Hamiltonian is totally complicated with the electrons and nuclei all running around and interacting with one another; as a result, the eigenstates are incomprehensible.
For materials that are not strongly absorbing, you can see approximate eigenstates, which look very much like free photons, except their dispersion curve reflects a refractive index != 1.
That's about all you can say. Your picture of "photon propagates at c, is absorbed and re-emitted" is a cartoon of the first term of a perturbation series, not a microscopic view of what is really going on. There's a whole lot of averaging and other math that goes between that cartoon and the final result of a calculation.
Actually, E=mc^2 has very little to do with how or whether a nuclear bomb is workable or not.
It has *very* much to do with the details of neutron absorption and production in fission processes for various isotopes of U or Pu.
The energy production of a fission bomb can be very well calculated using the electrostatic repulsion between fission fragments; for fusion I think it is a bit trickier. In either case, the mass defect is merely a different way of stating the binding energy, without really clarifying the reaction processes, which are key to making a bomb actually blow up.
A fission bomb could clearly have been developed without any use of special relativity. It could not have been developed without experimental nuclear physics and nuclear engineering calculations.
Do you not understand the "time value of money"?
Executive Summary: A dollar now (or yesterday) costs more than a dollar later.
More detailed explanation: postponing the expenditure of a dollar allows one to collect interest (or avoid paying interest, which is the same) on the dollar in the meantime.
The relevant interest rate is the "real" interest rate, meaning the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate.
The nominal interest rate depends on the source of capital; many corporations can generate a return on internal capital which is higher than a risk-free return such as Treasury bills; in general, they should not invest in projects unless the investment will bring as high or higher return as other alternative projects. There is always the alternative to invest in Treasury bills, but if that is chosen, it calls into question why the capital is being used for all the other projects in the company, instead of being dissolved and handed back to shareholders.
A recent solar panel should earn you back what you paid for it in as little as a year, in good light.
There are an enormous number of assumptions you make in that estimate, which make it pretty useless.
In particular, you are probably assuming the output of the solar panel is either being 100% consumed on site or that it can be dumped onto the grid where your power company is forced to reimburse you for the energy at approximately the same price it charges you for the electricity you consume.
In an economic sense, the power company is probably subsidizing you heavily in doing so, because your supply has nothing to do with the power company's need for power. That is, he has to take your kilowatt-hour (at full price) even if he doesn't need or want it.
"The behavior of a fluid can be modeled without bringing in the notion of a quark."
On average, yes. Exactly? Probably not.
You are 100% absolutely wrong.
The subatomic structure of the fluid components is not needed for an "exact" solution of the fluid flow, for any practical meaning of "exact." Any quark effects are going to be overwhelmed by *many* orders of magnitude by the imprecision with which the experimental conditions can be specified.
The degrees of freedom represented by the quarks are completely frozen out at room temperature and normal fluidic energies. Meaning they do not participate unless the fluid you are talking about is something like a hot neutron star, and probably not even then. I'd wager that the only fluid in which quark dynamics mattered was the initial fireball of the big bang, up until the time nuclei condensed.
If quarks mattered in ordinary conditions, then we wouldn't need huge particle colliders to detect and study them; you would be able to study fluid mechanics instead.
Plenty of useful physics can be done without caring about quarks.