Recent content by adamq1

Why is the gravitational mass of an object directly coupled with the amount of stuff in it? Couldn't gravitational mass be coupled with something correlated with amount of stuff?

I just don't understand why dark matter is preferable to a coupling of gravity with a correlate of mass rather than directly with mass.

Fair enough. I'll go blunder around somewhere else :)

Hmmm... I'm not sure how to define that convincingly, or even what the options might be. It just seems intuitively plausible to me that for e.g. a sun would be in some sense more ordered than an equivalent amount of material in a more dispersed form. I suppose I'm really trying to find out what...

In the bullet cluster, a large quantity of matter in the form of gas has been removed from two galaxies as a result of them passing through each other. What I'm wondering is, how do we know that such gas constitutes a significant portion of the gravity a galaxy would exert? I know that gravity...

Yes, it's pretty astonishing! There was an article in one fo the UK newspapers last year about research that linked the efficiency and pace of the German industrial revolution with the fact that they had minimal intellectual property laws at that time. So ordinary people could afford books and...

...Stuff publicly available on on arxiv, pubmed etc. I quite often dig around in google scholar but i really don't stand a chance of interpreting how relevant any particular paper is to it's field. 'Summary' papers can be quite enlightening in that they outline where stuff might potentially...

well...why is it terrible? I think it helps to develop intuitive understanding, because you have to use what you already understand to figure out the problem you're looking at.

This is my habit when approaching a new topic; 1)Turn straight to the problems! Do not read through the text. 2)See how many you can do intuitively. 3)When you get stuck, go into the body of the text and extract any definitions relevant to the problem you're stuck on, and look at any worked...

I've done four OU modules in maths over two years while working full time, and for level 1&2 modules it's easily doable if you are organised. In the first year i did a level 1 and a level two module and i was comfortable with the pace, second year two level 2 modules was more of a challenge...

I hadn't come across the idea before and so maybe it's just me that's overhyping it. In my defence :smile:, i didn't say it was relevant to natural selection or would affect natural selection in any way. I just said it would be a mechanism of evolution that wasn't natural selection. I guess...

I've been reading on wikipedia and definitely getting myself confused. I found this http://www.epigenie.com/Epigenetics.html" that suggests epigenetics might be a bit over-hyped?

Thanks, i will see what i can find from your reference to Ted Steele. I found some info about the weismann barrier, but as far as i can make out it applies only to the interaction between DNA and RNA, and doesn't really exclude RNA 'carriers' like retroviruses. I think i might have put that...

I've read that somatic mutations don't affect gernline cells because gametes and so on are set aside very early in embryonic development. Is this distinction between soma and germline very well supported or is there still wiggle room? For eg, could there be a mechanism such that retroviruses...