[chiralSPO]

Well, this is going off topic, but...

Money makes it easier for people to trade.

If person A has too many apples, and not enough bread, and person B has too much water, and not enough gasoline, and person C has too much gasoline and not enough apples, and person D has too much bread and not enough water... then without money they would all have to come together and do a big bartering operation involving all of them (very complicated and messy). But with money, each can sell what they have too much of at one point in spacetime, and buy what they need at another. Much more efficient!

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Far from it.Eg. There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about the health danger of excess sugar in our diet. There is a lot of evidence for this, but governments are slow to act, because they are subject to many pressures. How slow? Well in 1972 John Yudkin, a nutrition scientist, published “Pure, white and deadly” highlighting the role of sugar in obesity and heart disease. In a well orchestrated campaign the sugar industry fought to ridicule his findings and even reduce research grants into this area. Sugar is big business and governments listen. When I was small there was a high glucose drink given when you were sick and couldn’t eat, now it’s marketed as a fitness drink

Lucozade?  I remember it well.

I take your point about business also having a great deal of clout. On the other hand, if science back then did not have influence, why did business go to such lengths to rubbish the nutritionist's claims about sugar, I wonder?   

That being said, the example you quoted goes back to 1972.  I'm wondering if the balance of power has not shifted over the last 40 plus years.  The attitude to sugar now is hardening such that we are  being subjected to that foul tasting artifical sweetener which replaces sugar in soft drinks.  (As an aside, science has not, as far as I am aware, explored the psychological consequences of one's diet being so controlled e.g. no sugar, no fat, no salt etc, etc, especially as it is discouraging the very foods which people actually like and which give other foods a better taste.   I.e.  it could be that the harm done because of the detrimental psychological effects (assuming that there are detrimental efects) is greater than the supposed physical consequences.)

On the other hand, I remember the days when scientists at university did blue skies research  Now, of course, research is commercially driven.  Is this because business does indeed have the upper hand?  Or, alternatively, another possibility is that scientists, seeing how powerful business was (and is), aligned themselves a bit too enthusiastically with business in order to get some of that power.

 

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Living in the UK, you have access to a National Health Service (NHS), which is effectively free to people who are financially stressed. It has its flaws, but it works, funded out of taxes on those who are (currently) financially healthy.

"Financially stressed"?  That's one way of putting it, I suppose, but it does not describe what it is like to live in poverty.  I'm afraid it does not even come close.  People who have experienced real poverty would not, I think, use such a term.


As to the NHS being free, I think that is like saying the internet is free.  There are many costs, most of them hidden.

Your assertion that the NHS works is, in my experience, not the case at all.  Far from it, in fact.  I spent 2 months in hospital over last winter and boy did I have my eyes opened as to what really goes on.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I consider myself lucky that I survived the experience and that I am still here to tell the tale. 

As a taster, on at least three occasions I and another patient saved other patients from severe injuries which these elderly people with brittle bones would have sustained had they fallen off their chairs before we caught them. (Myself and the other patient could only get about using a zimmer and in my case crutches.)  There was a fourth occasion where a patient was saved from serious injury in this way, but this time by a visitor.

Another example: I was in hospital because of starvation and malnourishment ( I will not go into the reasons for my hitting rock bottom here).  Despite being on a fortified diet (i.e. extra minerals and vitamins, food enriched with extra butter/milk etc) one of the nurses, bearing a grudge, anonymously and surreptitiously put me on a minimum diet, the most basic available.  So, e.g. I was denied side salads with my main meal, denied any other "extras" and put on the smallest portions of food possible.  The portions were tiny.  And this to a patient suffering malnutrition and who had starved for 5 weeks (i.e. not eaten any food at all for 5 weeks).  In addition, before being transferred to this smaller cottage hospital, I was in the regional hospital where so fearful was I of being overlooked at mealtimes - being overlooked was a very real possibility - that I felt it necessary to hoard food.  So I ordered extra food e.g. apples, cheese and biscuits, at mealtimes and kept this supply hidden amongst my belongings.  That, I discovered, is the reality of the NHS.


So, the experience of hospital is another which confirms to me that the world is in decline.  In addition, in my experience hospitals are no different to other walks of life.  I think that scientists are no different from other people,  no more trustworthy than teachers, business people etc, etc.  So whether or not science is a force for good is not the question.  It is whether, given the nature of people in general, science should have the clout it does.             

[jeffreyH]

If you hadn't eaten anything at all for 5 weeks then you should be dead. So now nobody should believe anything else you say because it is likely all untrue.

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

In an earlier post I claimed that science is captain of the world.  Some of you disagreed.  Some claimed politicians ruled the world, others that it was business.  No one agreed that is was science.

Upon reflection, I see that I was wrong.  Business is indeed captain of the world.

That is why science was obliged to move from blue skies research into research that is commercially driven.  From that perspective, it seems to me that it matters not whether the likes of global warming or any other theory is proven or not, because science is no longer independent i.e. it is in the pocket of business.  In fact, business is no doubt using science to rake in even more money.  Global warming, then, is in all likelihood a money making scheme for business and that is why it no doubt funds a great deal of research into global warming and why the acceptance of global warming and the fear of the supposed consequences of global warming have gained such momentum in the last decade or two.  This lack of independence of science raises questions about the accuracy of its findings.

As to politicians ruling the world, they too are in the pocket of business.  After all, I ask myself, what business would give a job to a retired, or practicing, politician on its board of directors if that politician made a habit of speaking out against business? 

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

[jeffreyH]

As for depending upon processed food full of sugar. Cook it from scatch. That way you have much more control over what you eat. People state inconvenience. Oh it's much more convenient to eat processed food. Is it?

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Re: Proving or disproving theories: how does science work?
« Reply #43 on: Today at 19:24:27 »
If you hadn't eaten anything at all for 5 weeks then you should be dead. So now nobody should believe anything else you say because it is likely all untrue.

It is absolutely true that I ate nothing for 5 weeks.  In fact, I had been on short rations (consuming whatever food was left in the house) for about 5 weeks before actually going completely without food, so I started starvation in an already weakened state.  However, suggesting that I should be dead after that length of time without food is simply an indication of how little you know about it.

In the first instance, Gandhi used starvation as a political gesture.  I’m not sure for how long he fasted, but I suspect he starved for even longer than 5 weeks – at least as long as it took for the violence he was protesting about to stop.  I believe that he allowed himself to drink water which was laced with lemon juice.  I’m not sure what difference lemon juice would have made to malnutrition, but perhaps at the very least drinking it with water would have disguised the foul taste one gets in one’s mouth as a result of malnutrition.  Having said that, the taste in my mouth got so bad that drinking tap water became such an unpleasant experience that I doubt lemon juice would have made much difference.  Actually, lemon juice might have made me produce more saliva, and swallowing foul tasting saliva just made me vomit even more.

Then there were the IRA prisoners in the 70s who went on hunger strike in NI prisons.  They became like walking skeletons.  Again, I do not know how long they regularly went without food, but long enough to become seriously ill, ill enough to put pressure on the UK government.  Based on my own experience, I would assume periods of starvation longer than 5 weeks, in the beginning at least.

You will no doubt also be familiar with pictures of survivors of concentration camps such as Auschwitz.  Their food intake was so bad as to make them severely malnourished, a state that they endured for years, not weeks.  They were skeletal by the end of it and extremely weak, but not dead.


One of the strange things about starving was that I did not actually feel hungry.  I got no hunger pangs at all.  What would have been the point?  There was no food and that was that.  Bowel movements ceased almost immediately, of course.  The first 2 weeks were not too bad.  However, I did start vomiting quite quickly.  As soon as I got out of bed, I vomited.  As soon as I sat up in bed, I vomited.  In the end I could not even drink water without vomiting.  Dehydration was becoming a serious problem.   

In the beginning week or two I would try and sit up during the day and watch a film or read or do a jigsaw puzzle.  These activities made me so nauseous that in the end I took to my bed, leaving it only to use the bathroom.  In bed, I could not even listen to the radio without feeling sick so I had to give that up too.  Lying in bed, day and night with nothing to do was very, very hard. 

Vomiting was not the only problem.   Sitting up to get out of bed made me pass out.  Vomiting made me pass out.  This symptom got worse as the starvation progressed.   Naturally I lost a lot of weight.  In the end I became so weak that walking all of a few yards to get to the living room to put on the gas fire became too much for me.

Another symptom which I only noticed when I got to hospital and which was due to malnutrition, was that my eyesight had deteriorated.  My eyes became “jumpy” so that I could not focus on any object.  The object was not out of focus, rather my eyes would not stop jumping about, would not fix on the object.  This symptom gradually disappeared as I began eating again, as did the vomiting and passing out.  In hospital I was weighed weekly.  It was only in the last week, the eighth week that I actually put on a little bit of weight.  Even though I was eating well (as long as the nurses were not trying to starve me, that is)  I lost weight every week until that last week.

My social worker in hospital asked me if starving was painful.  It wasn’t.  It was unpleasant, decidedly unpleasant, but not painful.

Finally, I would say this: that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  Anyone who wants to find out if my claims are true could try a repeat “experiment” to see if their symptoms and the outcome are the same as mine!
 

[alancalverd]

I note that it does not mention "truth", rather it mentions "knowledge" .  So this has got me wondering about the difference between "truth" and "knowledge".  Although I am no philosopher, I would imagine that they would draw a distinction between the two terms.  Does science draw a distinction between these two terms i.e. truth and knowledge, do you know? 

As I  pointed out earlier, scientific knowledge is "the residue of scientific hypotheses that have not been disproved". You might also add "the reliable data in reference books" but this gets a bit fuzzy if it is extended to new experimental results in biology and psychology where the mechanism being investigated is very complex and not all the environmental parameters are known or controlled.

Back in the world of "hard" sciences we do occasionally use the concept of "true value" as a Platonic ideal. You can measure, say, temperature, and assign a range to  your reported value, say 300 ± 0.01K, depending on the quality of your instrumentation. The implication is that the "true" value lies between 299.99 and 300.01K. We can also use truth in its everyday meaning: it is true to say that I observed an apple to fall, but even though the observation has been repeated billions of times, the resulting laws of gravitation are only experimental discoveries and could turn out not to be true at very large or very small distances.

[alancalverd]

LBD's recollection of the effects of zero food intake are consistent with many such observations, particularly accounts from survivors of Nazi and Japanese military imprisonment and slave labor. Most people can survive up to 6 weeks with no food.

The "minimal diet" complaint may actually be the result of optimum treatment. Concentration camp survivors were initially put on a minimal diet with a high nutritional content but negligible bulk. Electrolytes, sugars, fats, proteins and vitamins are essential and quickly absorbed from aqueous suspension, but if diluted with indigestible vegetable fiber they will be excreted or vomited along with the bulk diluent, particularly if the patient has an underlying infection such as cholera or typhoid. AFAIK this is standard treatment for epidemic victims.

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

                                 
As for depending upon processed food full of sugar. Cook it from scatch. That way you have much more control over what you eat. People state inconvenience. Oh it's much more convenient to eat processed food. Is it?

In answer to your question, under certain circumstances, yes, I think it is much more convenient to eat processed food.   Again, I speak from experience here. 

For the last 10 years, being on an extremely tight budget i.e. I was poor, I survived without a cooker or a fridge (or a washing machine or vacuum cleaner etc, etc) because  I simply could not afford to run household appliances.  I could not afford to go shopping more than once a week. 

Fresh food was out of the question for three reasons.  Firstly, I had no means of keeping food fresh (except in winter, but even then keeping the likes of milk fresh was very difficult, and I could not afford to waste the food I had).  Secondly, fresh food tends to be rather more expensive than processed food.  And thirdly, I had no means of cooking fresh food because I did not have a cooker.  There is a gas fire in the living room and I arranged a line over that fire from which I could suspend cheap ready meals for heating.  As I did not put the fire on in summer, then at that time of year I ate ready meals cold.

Then there are other practical issues to consider.

 Poverty is extremely stressful, and it is exhausting.  One is living on a knife-edge all of the time.  E.g. you hear that strong winds are forecast for next day and you worry that if they take a tile off the roof then you cannot afford to have the damage repaired.  You see your furniture becoming older and more decrepit, and you worry because you know that you cannot afford either replacements or repairs.  The ancient tv you own starts to act up………one’s shoes are worn, tatty and let the water in……………etc, etc.  It is the relentless grind of worry that really takes it out of you.  If you had money then you could buy your way out of trouble but you simply cannot do that when you are poor. 

At this point one has to prioritise.  Even if one could cook from scratch, one is simply too exhausted with the daily grind of poverty to have the energy to do other than eat processed food.  One is also exhausted from eating poor quality food for years and years.  It really is a vicious circle.  So, yes, under these circumstances eating processed food is definitely more convenient.


And I can also say this: having lived in poverty for 10 years, then starved for 5 weeks, then had 2 months in hospital, I would not have missed ANY of those experiences for the world.   

In terms of starvation, I am probably in a unique position, in the UK at least, to know what starvation really means, what it is really like.  Having experienced poverty, I know what that is like too.  Therefore when someone like a politician or even a scientist e.g. a psychologist, talks about poverty, I can tell instantly if they know what they are talking about.  I can tell instantly if they speak from real experience or not (some psychologists play at being poor for a year, write books about it and then (mis-)advise governments or think tanks about poverty).    These experiences also let me explain to inexperienced people, why, for example, it is not always easier to eat fresh food, and why it is often more “convenient” to eat processed food.

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

it is true to say that I observed an apple to fall, but even though the observation has been repeated billions of times, the resulting laws of gravitation are only experimental discoveries and could turn out not to be true at very large or very small distances.

That's interesting.  I think that I am correct in saying that rules which apply here on earth e.g. gravity, are assumed (right word?) to be true not just in this galaxy but are thought to hold for the entire universe.  Could you put me right on that?

[alancalverd]

Tiled roof, furniture, television....way beyond the dreams of half the world's population, or even (thanks to the Luftwaffe) those of my childhood in London!  But as you imply, having a waterproof house and a pot to piss in doesn't guarantee an easy life, or indeed even a sustainable existence, in a cash-based society: "consumer durables" can quickly become a burden rather than an asset. Civilisation, especially urban civilisation, is all about specialisation and collaboration, and cash is the lubricant that makes all the parts work together smoothly, as Thomas Cook has just discovered.   

[alancalverd]

That's interesting.  I think that I am correct in saying that rules which apply here on earth e.g. gravity, are assumed (right word?) to be true not just in this galaxy but are thought to hold for the entire universe.  Could you put me right on that?

I've used it before, but here's an illustrative tale. Three blokes on a train in Patagonia, look out of the window and see a black cow and a white cow.

Politician: "The vast majority of Patagonian cows are black"

Statistician: "On a random but not sufficient sample, one could hypothesise that half the cows in Patagonia are black"

Physicist: "I can see two bovine quadrupeds. At least one side of one of them is black."

At present we have no reason to think that Newtonian gravity and Einsteinian relativity are not universal. However some observed behaviors require further explanation in terms of phenomena or entities not yet observed. See, for instance, "dark energy" and "dark matter". And although there is evidence consistent with a Big Bang, the laws describing that singularity are unclear.

You might care to think about my idea of "negaticles" - fundamental particles with charge, spin, etc., but with negative mass. They would have the property of repelling ordinary matter but aggregating to each other. We would be able to observe the repulsion as an expansion of the observable universe, but could we observe any other effect of their presence?

[Harryobr]

If science ruled the world nobody would have heard of Putin, Trump or  Johnson

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

LBD's recollection of the effects of zero food intake are consistent with many such observations, particularly accounts from survivors of Nazi and Japanese military imprisonment and slave labor. Most people can survive up to 6 weeks with no food.

I appreciate the above.  Thank you.

Having used discussion forums on and off for many years now, I know that one of the first things forum users will do when another member makes assertions such as I have done is to check up on these on e.g. the internet.  Of course, as you know, finding that my assertions are consistent with observations from third parties does not prove that I was telling the truth.  I could easily have found out about the symptoms of starvation myself and concocted any old story about them.  (However, and I repeat: I was telling the truth.)

In earlier posts I have made much of personal experience.  I went so far as to say that I would not have missed out on my recent experiences for the world (i.e. poverty, starvation, hospital).  Any experience is valuable, good or bad.   Importantly, having extensive personal experience means that I generally do not have to check up on people to assess whether or not they are telling the truth.  The more extensive one’s personal experience, then the better one becomes at recognizing authenticity i.e. recognizing if someone is lying, (even though that person may not even be aware that they are telling lies.)  The following is an example:

In 1988 I spent 6 weeks backpacking in China.  The following year I watched tv news programmes reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests.  Reporters observed how the police used cattle prods against the protesters.  The use of cattle prods was, the reporters declared, an abuse of human rights.  Of course, most of those reporters just swept into China at the start of the trouble, stayed there for a few days until the excitement was over, then flew home again.  In other words, they knew nothing about China. ( It is also apparent to me that even those reporters who have lived for a while in the country from which they are reporting, are nonetheless living in what amounts to a hermetically sealed bubble. )

When I was in China I too saw police wielding cattle prods.   And I was glad to see them.  That is because I recognised that cattle prods were not instruments of torture.  Instead, they were used to save lives. 

Take a Chinese ticket counter at a railway station.  There is a long queue of Chinese waiting to buy a ticket.  As the Chinese get to within 2 yards of the counter window, all hell breaks loose.  The Chinese punch and bite and scratch and kick and fight each other to get to that window.  They climb over each other’s shoulders to get to the window.  There were times when it was literally more than my life’s worth to even attempt to buy a ticket under those conditions.  However, as soon as a policeman appeared with one of those cattle prods, the biting, punching, kicking Chinese instantly desisted their life-threatening hostilities and stood quietly to attention in an orderly line.  So no, Mr or Mrs Reporter, the use of cattle prods was not abusive, it was life saving.  (This behavior by the Chinese was typical.  You similarly risked your life travelling on the Beijing underground.  Waiting at a Lanzhou bus stop early one morning along with only 2 other passengers, both Chinese, I witnessed both of them get into a violent scrum as they simultaneously tried to squeeze through the door of the bus.  The bus, by the way, was completely empty.)             

On the radio not so long ago I heard someone extol the virtues of the internet.  He declared proudly that he had no need to leave his living room to see the world because google brought the world to him on his computer.  The idea that one can see the world without leaving one’s living room, or even through reading books, is, of course, abject nonsense.  Experiencing the world is called Living.  And it enriches life enormously.

I have done a fair bit of travelling worldwide.  Sometimes when I am, say, watching a film which is set, not in a country or place to which I have been, but somewhere similar e.g central Asia, I can sometimes get a real sense of recognition, of familiarity.  I can smell the place, taste it, sense the atmosphere, recognize the types of people, all as if I was actually there.  That makes watching films a hugely more enriching experience.  It is that sort of experience which enriches life enormously.  So I feel sorry for that fellow who thinks he doesn’t need to leave his living room to see the world.  Did he but know it he is living in a prison, and moreover, a prison of sensory deprivation.

So, experience enriches life.  It also enables one to detect authenticity or the lack of authenticity.  In fact, it allows one to be completley independent of other people.

PS: another reason why I would not have missed out on poverty was that ittaught me to be more resourceful and better at solving problems.  For example, I made myself a slow cooker heated by boiling water. It didn't work very well, but perhaps if I made certain modifications.....  Anyway, those of you familiar with tv programmes like The Great Egg race (Prof Heinz Wolf) or Scrapheap Challenge will know the sort of resourcefulness and problem solving abilities I mean.

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

If science ruled the world nobody would have heard of Putin, Trump or  Johnson

Someone else made a similar comment.  As I said in an earlier post, I realise that I was wrong.  It is business that rules the world.  Putin, Trump and Johnson are merely in the pockets of business. 

[littlebrowndragon (OP)]

Tiled roof, furniture, television....way beyond the dreams of half the world's population, or even (thanks to the Luftwaffe) those of my childhood in London!

The above is not the point.  The point is that people such as politicians, aided by their advisers, make policies based on pure fantasy i.e. they do not have the slightest idea of the conditions people are really living under and therefore what effect those policies are going to have on them.  (Or perhaps politicians DO realise the effect these policies will have, on poor folks especially, and implement them out of cruelty.  Nothing like kicking a dog when it’s down, eh?)  Also, the point also is that many people claim that in the UK there is no real poverty and that no one is starving.  These people are living in a fantasy land and ought not to be able to make these claims without being challenged.  I have never yet heard such a claim being challenged.  This merely perpetuates the lies. 

When I was in hospital, the social services had to get me some money.  I was, inevitably, put in touch with the Department of Work and Pensions to enquire about claiming Universal Credit.  In the end, I was offered £300 per month.  That amount was less than what I was living on before I was reduced to starvation and went into hospital.  In addition, in my weakened condition I was still expected to go out and look for work. Of course, on that amount of money, I would never fully recover my health.  My future at that point looked dire.   It was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.  In addition, any emergency advance the DWP gave me would be treated as a loan.  On £300 per month, I would be expected to repay a loan as well as feed, clothe, heat myself plus more, lots more.  Actually, I can remember at first how awful I felt.  But then I got angry.  Really angry.  I got VERY angry.  I felt intensly resentful because all the government thinks people like me are worth is £300 per month.  That is inhuman.  All the more so because politicians like Johnson are paid a small fortune (and have a secure future doing lecture tours at tens of thousands of £s a shot, or working one day a week on the board of some company, with enough left over to pay for a daily help and a PA) all for having a whale of a time travelling abroad to meet their buddies, for spending all day talking and generally playing around and wrecking people’s lives.  This while other people like me are only worth starvation wages.  Anger is acknowledged by the government as being a serious problem now in the UK.  When people are treated like dirt, no wonder they get angry.

A radio psychologist/journalist, as a money making experiment, spent a year living in poverty.  Of course, she didn’t move out of her centrally heated, large terraced house to live in a hovel.  She did not replace all her good quality furniture with dirty, broken 2nd hand furniture. (I now know why people donate goods to 2nd hand/charity shops.  It is because the goods e.g. tvs, dvd players, are faulty.  One such item I bought had a remote which drained its batteries in 24 hours.)  She did not repaper the walls of her house in paper she didn’t like but would have to put up with due to lack of money.  Similarly carpets etc.  No replacing good carpets with bare, ugly alternatives.   I suspect, especially as she had children, that she still ran a washing machine, a cooker and a fridge etc.  Of course she did not replace her family’s good quality clothing with cheap, mis-fitting alternatives.  Her waterproof shoes would have been of good enough quality to last the duration of the experiment without springing a leak.  It is possible she may have decided to do away with the tv and the computers etc.  I suspect she would not have allowed the experiment to damage her children’s health by making them eat the cheapest processed food she could find - cold.  She would still have had the security of her bank savings, even if she decided not to dip into them. Her husband remained in employment, even if she did not use his money i.e. she had security.  I’m not sure if she had a mortgage and how she paid for that.  Also, and this is the most important aspect, she KNEW that this experiment would only last for one year.  She also KNEW that her book based on these experiences would get published.  She also KNEW the experiment would bring in other work, possibly advising politicians or think tanks.  Before experiencing poverty myself, I might have been taken in by this woman’s nonsense.  But because of my personal experience, I didn’t have to check up on other people’s experiences of poverty to assess her claims.  I KNOW that she didn’t have a clue about what poverty is really like. 


PS : One final point.  When in Cold War Bulgaria, I was an overnight guest of a peasant couple.  They were pretty poor.  For example, the toilet was a hole in the dirt in a shed in the yard.  Despite being so poor, they did own a television.  You see, merely existing is not enough.  One needs something else, something to lift the spirits, something to give one hope.  So poor people will often go without certain things for the sake of having a tv. 

(As to myself, I did without some things too e.g. a pair of waterproof shoes, rather than go without a tv or radio.  In fact, it’s probably better not to bother replacing one’s cheap, leaking shoes too quickly.  One can only afford other just as cheap, poor quality replacements which will either fall apart or spring a leak within a week or two anyway.  Better to keep an intact, if leaking, pair of shoes than replace them with even poorer quality ones.) 

And by the way, I only used my dodgy 2nd hand tv to watch dvds.  I couldn’t afford a tv licence. 

[evan_au]

You might care to think about my idea of "negaticles" - fundamental particles with charge, spin, etc., but with negative mass. They would have the property of repelling ordinary matter but aggregating to each other.

There was a hypothesis that perhaps antimatter might repel normal matter.
- This might explain the almost total absence of antimatter in the part of the universe we can see
- There has been a long-term project at the LHC to measure the gravitational acceleration of anti-protons, and now anti-hydrogen
- But it is an extremely difficult experiment to conduct
- Most physicists guess that antimatter and "normal matter" will attract each other normally - but you don't really know until you conduct the experiment!

As for negative mass, that would be interpreted in Newton's gravity equation as a repulsive force.
- However, according to Einstein's relativity, any real particle with real energy will have a real mass (due to E=mc² etc)
- The concept of "negative energy" is hard to grasp.
-  Most equations which produce energy have a squared term in them, which always produce a non-negative energy
- In fact, E=mc²  is part of a larger equation which has squares & 4th powers, so Energy should still always be positive.
E² = (pc)² + (m₀c²)² 
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93momentum_relation

[alancalverd]

E² = (pc)² + (m₀c²)² 

Better still! If a² = b², then a =  +b or -b

You read it here first, folks!

[Bored chemist]

Tiled roof, furniture, television....way beyond the dreams of half the world's population, or even (thanks to the Luftwaffe) those of my childhood in London!

The above is not the point.  The point is that people such as politicians, aided by their advisers, make policies based on pure fantasy i.e. they do not have the slightest idea of the conditions people are really living under and therefore what effect those policies are going to have on them.  (Or perhaps politicians DO realise the effect these policies will have, on poor folks especially, and implement them out of cruelty.  Nothing like kicking a dog when it’s down, eh?)  Also, the point also is that many people claim that in the UK there is no real poverty and that no one is starving.  These people are living in a fantasy land and ought not to be able to make these claims without being challenged.  I have never yet heard such a claim being challenged.  This merely perpetuates the lies. 

When I was in hospital, the social services had to get me some money.  I was, inevitably, put in touch with the Department of Work and Pensions to enquire about claiming Universal Credit.  In the end, I was offered £300 per month.  That amount was less than what I was living on before I was reduced to starvation and went into hospital.  In addition, in my weakened condition I was still expected to go out and look for work. Of course, on that amount of money, I would never fully recover my health.  My future at that point looked dire.   It was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.  In addition, any emergency advance the DWP gave me would be treated as a loan.  On £300 per month, I would be expected to repay a loan as well as feed, clothe, heat myself plus more, lots more.  Actually, I can remember at first how awful I felt.  But then I got angry.  Really angry.  I got VERY angry.  I felt intensly resentful because all the government thinks people like me are worth is £300 per month.  That is inhuman.  All the more so because politicians like Johnson are paid a small fortune (and have a secure future doing lecture tours at tens of thousands of £s a shot, or working one day a week on the board of some company, with enough left over to pay for a daily help and a PA) all for having a whale of a time travelling abroad to meet their buddies, for spending all day talking and generally playing around and wrecking people’s lives.  This while other people like me are only worth starvation wages.  Anger is acknowledged by the government as being a serious problem now in the UK.  When people are treated like dirt, no wonder they get angry.

A radio psychologist/journalist, as a money making experiment, spent a year living in poverty.  Of course, she didn’t move out of her centrally heated, large terraced house to live in a hovel.  She did not replace all her good quality furniture with dirty, broken 2nd hand furniture. (I now know why people donate goods to 2nd hand/charity shops.  It is because the goods e.g. tvs, dvd players, are faulty.  One such item I bought had a remote which drained its batteries in 24 hours.)  She did not repaper the walls of her house in paper she didn’t like but would have to put up with due to lack of money.  Similarly carpets etc.  No replacing good carpets with bare, ugly alternatives.   I suspect, especially as she had children, that she still ran a washing machine, a cooker and a fridge etc.  Of course she did not replace her family’s good quality clothing with cheap, mis-fitting alternatives.  Her waterproof shoes would have been of good enough quality to last the duration of the experiment without springing a leak.  It is possible she may have decided to do away with the tv and the computers etc.  I suspect she would not have allowed the experiment to damage her children’s health by making them eat the cheapest processed food she could find - cold.  She would still have had the security of her bank savings, even if she decided not to dip into them. Her husband remained in employment, even if she did not use his money i.e. she had security.  I’m not sure if she had a mortgage and how she paid for that.  Also, and this is the most important aspect, she KNEW that this experiment would only last for one year.  She also KNEW that her book based on these experiences would get published.  She also KNEW the experiment would bring in other work, possibly advising politicians or think tanks.  Before experiencing poverty myself, I might have been taken in by this woman’s nonsense.  But because of my personal experience, I didn’t have to check up on other people’s experiences of poverty to assess her claims.  I KNOW that she didn’t have a clue about what poverty is really like. 


PS : One final point.  When in Cold War Bulgaria, I was an overnight guest of a peasant couple.  They were pretty poor.  For example, the toilet was a hole in the dirt in a shed in the yard.  Despite being so poor, they did own a television.  You see, merely existing is not enough.  One needs something else, something to lift the spirits, something to give one hope.  So poor people will often go without certain things for the sake of having a tv. 

(As to myself, I did without some things too e.g. a pair of waterproof shoes, rather than go without a tv or radio.  In fact, it’s probably better not to bother replacing one’s cheap, leaking shoes too quickly.  One can only afford other just as cheap, poor quality replacements which will either fall apart or spring a leak within a week or two anyway.  Better to keep an intact, if leaking, pair of shoes than replace them with even poorer quality ones.) 

And by the way, I only used my dodgy 2nd hand tv to watch dvds.  I couldn’t afford a tv licence. 

OK, so now we know why people shouldn't vote Tory.

That has very little to do with how science works.