@ChrisWhite well defining what constitutes right and wrong is where religion came in. And religion has been a uniformly positive force in human affairs hasn't it?
@0celo7 I'm just trying to understand... is Trump's position on immigration more important to you that e.g. his ability to interact with foreign leaders?
I'm not going to give you a manifesto of why I'm voting for Trump.
user54412
7:02 PM
I didn't want to debate which economic argument was factually correct. Just that ultimately the criterion for illegality might be better off closer to "could I personally imprison someone for this?" rather than "do these actions decrease GDP?"
@JohnRennie Can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. I don't think it's obvious that religion is net positive or negative, and I think it's very difficult to even talk about a world without religion.
JR did say "uniform" -- though to be fair how many decades were spent in the early years of calculus because convergence and uniform convergence were conflated
@DanielSank It's quite simple, really. Since we don't stone people for adultery, we don't take moral lessons from the bible. There is some higher rule book that says we don't stone people for adultery.
@ChrisWhite I also feel like that. I think it's important to know because it makes it clear that consequentialism is not some sort of automatic default.
@0celo7 Oh of course I would. What I think is't the point, and a Christian can argue all day that some parts aren't to be taken as models of behavior. That's like saying FPS games are meant to teach us to murder our friends.
@0celo7 I don't get it. First you criticise the bible because it allows you to stone women. Then when I point out it doesn't you criticise the bible because people don't do what it says.
If you seriously don't think the Bible forms an enormous component of Christian people's daily moral standards, then I don't think we have much to discuss.
@JohnRennie It's a standard argument, he's just expressing it badly: Since most Christians do not follow all moral commandments of the Bible, they must have some way to choose which ones. The instance (whatever you think it is) that determines which ones is the "higher code" he's talking about.
@JohnRennie : because we use that local speed of light to define the second and the metre, and then we use them to measure the local speed of light. It's a tautology. See arxiv.org/abs/0705.4507 :
"The unit of time is defined by an oscillating system or the frequency of an atomic transition, and the unit of space is defined in terms of the distance travelled by light in the unit of time. We therefore have a situation akin to saying that the speed of light is “one light-year per year”, i.e. its constancy has become a tautology or a definition".
@JohnRennie : yes, I do disagree with your distinction between coordinate and local velocity of light because Einstein said the speed of light varies. See the gif below. It features two gedanken light clocks at different elevations. The lower clock runs slower. Not because time is slower, but because light is slower. Those two light pulses are not travelling at the same speed.
@0celo7 Let me put it like this... explaining this joke explicitly would require typing words and phrases which, to me as a US citizen, I have been conditioned not to type.
For example, let us consider that I write a manuscript which is to be submitted to one of the prestigious journals such as PRL, PRB, etc. In this manuscript, is it OK to cite from some journals which are generally considered as not-so-prestigious journals? If I cite more papers from low impact fa...
@ACuriousMind I have a bunch of QFT questions with no answers. Is it because of lack of interest, or because there's a really simple answer I'm missing?
I have heard that in QFT, the vacuum has zero four-momentum:
$$P^\mu |\Omega \rangle = 0.$$
However, I also know that the vacuum has vacuum energy, i.e.
$$ \langle \Omega | H | \Omega \rangle = E_0 \neq 0.$$
In textbooks, we patch up the latter equation by subtracting an infinite constant, and ar...
@Slereah I wouldn't really say the "vacuum has energy". The "vacuum energy" is really just the renormalization parameter input you have to give because the 0-point function is divergent due to vacuum bubbles
This term I'm taking a (graduate) course which is crucial for my degree. The teacher's plan for the course is quite ambitious and all along he's been following the structure of a given text, but he doesn't follow it completely and quite often omits (what I consider) key results from it, e.g. resu...
@0celo7 From the question it is evident that the user is able to read and understand the book on their own, and does so independently of the lecture. Why would they want the lecturer to waste their time with things they can look up on their own?
More flippantly:
@PatriciaShanahan I would listen to their request. But, you say this student does understand the material in the book? Then what is the problem? Is it just that they want to learn less than I am teaching? — Colin McLarty9 hours ago
> he doesn't follow it completely and quite often omits (what I consider) key results from it, e.g. results which motivate or deepen the understanding of definitions or other results.
Doesn't sound like a bad book, and why would you want him to follow a bad book more closely?
@0celo7 Again, why would you want to follow the book instead of learning what the lecturer teaches? The point of taking a course is learning things, not learning what is in a book
@0celo7 That'd be terribly sweet of them, but the other people are adults too who can read a book on their own :P Basically, I think this question is something a high school student would ask, not a graduate student.
@0celo7 lol. Well, it's not immoral, but it is ridiculous, and not how it should work if there isn't some deep insight in those words (and there isn't, in this case)
@ACuriousMind yeah by topological I meant "no metric"
@ACuriousMind we shall continue this later...
@ACuriousMind it would be pretty cool if her mom turned out to be a lawyer physicist and was willing to talk about volume forms on Lorentzian manifolds
