Recent content by Nugatory

The thread will remain closed.

You are just cheating yourself out of essential background understanding (which is the really fun part) if you've skipped chapters 1-3. (Edited to add: I said above that I had learned relativity from that book - actually the first edition, which I still prefer. By far the hardest part was...

There’s no “if” here, dark matter is defined to be the stuff we haven’t seen yet that is interacting with the mass we have seen. It differs from ordinary matter only in that we haven’t seen it yet; in particular it has mass and behaves gravitationally just like any other matter. Please please...

Yes, seriously in some philosophies of ethics and less seriously in new-age pseudo-philosophy. However this thinking has proven unhelpful in empirical science - there's no getting around the "but what difference does it make?" question.

No. Your speculative idea neither explains some previously observed but unexplained phenomenon nor suggests some experiment/observation that might demonstrate an otherwise unexplainable result. Thus, as far as empirical science is concerned, there is nothing to explore here.

Very sorry to hear this - he contributed much over the years and will be missed.

Do remember that collapse is not part of the theory of quantum mechanics as described by the math (which is the only real description of the theory). Collapse is an interpretation, a way that we can think about what the math is telling us if we find it helpful. But we don't have to think in...

Your hypothetical “electrop”differs from the positron (the electron’s anti-particle, and not hypothetical) only in that it doesn’t interact with electrons? They would form bound pairs with electrons (like positronium, but stable), these pairs would be neutral, and now we don’t have charge...

We aren't. We are analyzing the forces acting on a given infinitesimal volume somewhere along the rod, and these are all external to that volume. You might find it easier to understand if you consider two weights connected by an idealized massless string, rotaing with the weights orbiting the...

Any time you run into a paradox, your first thought should be that you have taken a wrong turn on the way there. You have started from "Imagine the universe has an edge, and outside that edge there is true nothing" and arrived at a contradiction. That is a fairly strong hint that your starting...

Many legal documents do that. At the beginning of most of my insurance policies there is a section of definitions, stuff like “PERMITTED DRIVER means ….” and throughout the document the term is capitalized to indicate that that is exactly what is intended.

If this is intended as a "random thought" - and yes, it does qualify as such - what's going on here is that the word "variable" means something different to mathematicians and computer programmers. That's not a problem with either the mathematicians or the software people, it's an example of...

@Green dwarf did we not go through all of this with you ten years ago? https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/where-is-the-matter-in-a-black-hole.836527/

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There's not much point in proposing a greek letter for us in describing multiverses when the multiverse notion is an idle speculation that is no part of any serious physical theory and cannot even in principle have any observational consequences. This threaad is closed, and anyone coming across...