Recent content by MaWM

Well.. The first semester I was back in school, I couldn't even remember integration. I was pretty scared. But it all comes back pretty fast, and now I've recovered what I've known and greatly added to it. It will happen to you. Don't let it scare you away.

Man, I'd pay that money just for the hair washing. Talk about relaxing.

Think we we are talking about the same things. Wave function collapse cannot be predicted with current theories, and thus the particular value of a measurement doesn't have a cause in Copenhagen QM. Again, it doesn't violate causality, causality simply doesn't apply. Anyway.. ignoring QM...

A bit. Yeah. I know.. what I mean is that some aspects do not have the qualities of causality as we typically understand them. Mind you, this doesn't mean that it *violates* causality, merelty that causality doesn't apply to certain aspects at all.

Correct. But it's more than that. A Hermitian operater is a self adjoint operator on a complex inner product space with a particular inner product. So, even if the field is complex, if the inner product is is the typical one, the operater would be merely selfadjoint. For a matrix, the...

Correct. It doesn't mean its retreivable, but it is out there

Hey there. By "information", Hawking does not mean "knowledge". What he means is that, since one object's behavior is a sum of the forces which acted on it, the universe contains a record of all things that happened within it through the motions and postions of particles in the present. So in...

If we accept our own survival as a "good" thing, then things which maximize our survival are good. Humans are, by nature, a social species; cooperation increases our mutual chances for survival. In order to cooperate most effectively, a stable society should exist. Thus, there are certain...

There are things that are difficult because they are difficult to understand, and there are things that are difficult because they require a lot of work. That problem you posed is conceptually simple and doesn't even require that much work. A genius is judged by his capacity for...

or the formation of other star clusters

The fact that the events themselves happened in the past is irrelevant. You can still make predictions and test them by finding fossils, studying the earth, etc. The theory allows you to predict the results of expirements regarding where fossils are found, what ages they are, etc. Even though...

Actually.. its a lot more complicated. You need to know how quickly each of the infinities is diverging in order to compare them.

Well, just like no one single piece of evidence "proves" evolution, it would be difficult to find a single piece of evidence that disproves it. That's pretty standard for science.

Sure. There are lots of ways to falsify evolution. Another example: Sometimes, as a random mutation, creatures display features of their evolutionary anscestors (humans born with tails, whales and snakes with legs, etc). Now, by evolution, the only features that can be exhibited by such atavisms...

That *IS* evolution. What yooure telling me sounds akin to "There is no such thing as an airpalne. They are just cars with wings that can fly."