This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Idler: Wasn't it actually Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart who coined this term in their science segments of The Science of Discworld?
- Reg Shoe: They have actually said that the phrase, along with a few other turns of phrase and so on, where Terry's, who was involved in the sections too.
- I believe the phrase comes from Figments of Reality, an earlier book they worked on together before writing the Science of Discworld series with Pterry. (See also, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A685055.)
- I believe the phrase comes from Figments of Reality, an earlier book they worked on together before writing the Science of Discworld series with Pterry. (See also, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A685055.)
In primary school, prime numbers are commonly described as "divisible only by one and by themselves". This leads people to think that the number 1 is prime, since obviously it is divisible by both 1 and by itself...
- Up until Pre-Calc, they'll tell you you cannot divide by zero. - (I'd be interested in an elaboration here - I don't study math or physics, but I've had a few classes in the university dealing with math and I'm still told not to divide by zero? Unless you're referring to l'hospital's rule (or something similar).
...what atoms that pop in and out of existence?
Gattsuru: I don't want to try discussing this in the main page, because it'll go on forever and my explanation is itself a lie to children, but the simple definition law of conservation of mass and energy is a vast oversimplification of how things work. Over sufficiently long time scales or distances (ie, anything humans can reliably observe) it is accurate. On the sufficiently small scale, you run into issues that require a much deeper description. One of those issues is called virtual particles, typically subatomic charge particle/anti-particle pairs that wink in and out of existence over ridiculously small amounts of time and seldom detectably interact with longer lived particles. We can detect them through things like the Casimir effect or vacuum polarization, and they're a pretty big part of the Hawking radiation theory. The universe 'gets away' with them because overly sufficiently long periods of time the net entropy of the system remains constant or increases.
Mike Rosoft: Removed
- E=mc^2 is more related to SR units as opposed to SI units if I am correct. SR being the system of units that relativity uses. It's a whole other ball game.
