Close, but the gravitational mass is still the same as the inertial mass in GR. The hammer and the feather still land at the same.

I'm afraid ocean looks like ocean from pretty much any angle...at least from lower you could make out details in the waves

... what the hell?

No and no.

FTFA

Windows 7 Starter Edition, unlike XP Starter Edition, will be for sale to users in both developing and developed nations.

Thing is the point of the LHC isn't really to find the Higgs boson (the God particle name really is oversensationalized). For most physicists the existence of the Higgs boson is a foregone conclusion. When they see the experimental proof it will be little more than a hmm, well looky there, what we knew all along is true.

The true purpose of the LHC is to uncover the unknown by probing energy ranges that have never been seen before. The LHC will payoff when they find a result that they have no idea how to explain which will push for new physics.

All of these things may or may not have a direct practical application. When they started building accelerators they had no clue that it would later be used for cancer treatments. Does that mean that just because practical benefit is not immediately obvious that pushing the boundaries of experimentation is a waste of money?

I think not.

Disclaimer: IAAP (in training, no Ph.D. yet) and have studied with a professor that is directly involved in the LHC.

I'm not sure if you are joking of if this is just plain /facepalm.

> Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.

That's an easy one: The particle accelerators developed for research in HEP have directly resulted in the accelerators used in hospitals for radiation therapy.

You may want to look up the inherent difficulties in transporting DC on a large scale.

Beamer?

This is mathematics goes far, far beyond just counting. I'll give you that originally math was invented to serve a real life purpose. The more important and surprising mathematical implications over physics have come from abstract mathematical work that was done without trying to explain anything around them. Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_theory#History Group theory has some extremely far reaching implications over physics in the fields of quantum mechanics, general relativity, particle physics, etc.

How does it have anything to do with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? That relation is a direct result of the properties of Fourier transforms. The randomness in quantum mechanics being described here is the inability to know to which of the eigenstates the wave function will collapse to after being measured beyond the probability of obtaining each state.

Mathematics is not, in general, refined to describe reality. Mathematics is refined by taking every logical rule to its farthest reaching implication. This goes far, far beyond anything that we currently see as based in our reality (though, as the current argument is about, it has the uncanny tendency to end up describing our physical reality extremely often). Physics however IS refined to describe our reality. It is precisely physics that ties the mathematical underpinnings to the reality that we observe.