Is it because Einstein described gravity not as a force but as a curvature of spacetime? Physicists usually say that it is hard to combine quantum mechanics with gravity. But I had doubt, is it because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that quantum particles can be at multiple places at once and therefore the gravity associated with the electron (quantum particles) can be at multiple places? Or as Hawking suggested in his book “A Brief History of Time” that when we work to do the math we end up coming up with numerous infinities which does not gets cancelled, but the more successful theory of quantum mechanics also has infinities under singularities but still we call it a successful one, so can’t those infinities get ignored (And what those infinities even mean as no one clearly tends out to show us the math behind it). I strongly suspect that there is an incomplete understanding of quantum mechanics in me as for sure the great physicists cannot be wrong if the is, then can you please explain. Thank you. We all have heard about the genius of Einstein about description of gravity not as a force but as a curvature of spacetime. We have encountered numerous situations in which Einstein’s general and special theory of relativity have provided us with results with extreme precision then why are we searching for a particle associated with gravity when we know that gravity cannot be expressed as a particle as it is the mere bending of spacetime? Your views ..
It is well known that quantum mechanics and (general) relativity do not fit well. I am wondering whether it is possible to make a list of contradictions or problems between them?  E.g. relativity theory uses a space-time continuum, while quantum theory uses discrete states.  I am not merely looking for a solution or rebuttal of such opposites, more for a survey of the field out of interest.
In-universe, a lightsaber is basically a controlled, fixed-length plasma stream that can be used as a sword. As such, the blade wouldn't have any mass (or infinitesimal mass if you want to get technical about E=mc2).  Anyone familiar with fencing or swordplay knows that the weight of the handle and blade, and thus the overall balance of the weapon, is critically important while fighting. A sword that is too blade-heavy is unwieldy; it is difficult to start, stop, and change the path of the blade as it's swung, which is vital to outmaneuvering your opponent in a duel. Conversely, a sword with too light a blade (equivalently, too heavy a hilt) is too easy to swing around. it's hard to "feel" where the blade is, and thus to make the minute changes needed to block a blow or land one. It can also be just as exhausting, in a different way, to wield such a sword; because most of the mass is behind your hand, it takes muscle power to point the blade forward instead of upward, while a balanced weapon would point directly forward from the user's hands. You also get no mechanical advantage while swinging it.  Obviously, out-of-universe the props were full "swords" that were then rotoscoped to paint the beam blade over the white wooden (later plastic) dowel that protruded from the saber. This gives the actual prop used by the actors a more realistic weight and balance, which can be seen in the duels (Darth Maul has to heave a bit to get that double-saber staff moving, and you can see the effort behind a full baseball swing of the sword by Luke or Vader in the original trilogy).  Was there any attempt in-universe to explain the weight and balance that an active lightsaber seemed to possess? How do I avoid the "S to Skip" message on boot? How to change the color of symbols (mobile, email, homepage, etc) in moderncv? Escape Key in the Chat At the end of ‘The Return of the King’, Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf and others boarded a boat and left Middle-earth for Valinor.  Is there any canon explanation why they couldn’t just take the ring there in the first place and leave Middle-earth altogether? Would Sauron have gone after them? Couldn’t the elves living there safeguard it?  I do realize that without Frodo taking the ring to Mount Doom there would be no story at all, but I wonder whether or not there is any canon explanation for this. Anyone knows what software tool is used to draw these circuit schematics I was reading online and found this site:   I was very curious how this professor drew all these circuit diagrams in his lecture notes (such as this one: ). They just look very very good.   And example is shown below:      To be more specific about what I mean, by "publication quality" I mean the following:   The software must output vector graphics, such as eps, or windows meta files. It would be good to have control over the style of the graphics, such the style of the components, line width, figure size, etc. It would be good to have a graphical user interface. I understand LaTeX is very powerful but it's just too painful to write a 100 line script to generate a circuit diagram.   So in short, I'm not really looking for a schematic capture program. I'm looking for a program that can generate pretty circuit schematic illustrations so that I can put them in papers and presentations.  (I am aware of other posts on this forum, such as this one: .  None of the software mentioned in that post seems to get you publication quality figures.) Python string prints as [u'String'] This will surely be an easy one but it is really bugging me.   I have a script that reads in a webpage and uses  to parse it. From the soup I extract all the links as my final goal is to print out the link.contents.  All of the text that I am parsing is ASCII. I know that Python treats strings as unicode, and I am sure this is very handy, just of no use in my wee script.   Every time I go to print out a variable that holds 'String' I get [u'String'] printed to the screen. Is there a simple way of getting this back into just ascii or should I write a regex to strip it? This is a problem from Rudin's Functional Analysis:  Show that there is a sequence of functions $\{ f_n \}$ in $X$ (the vector space of all complex functions) such that $f_n \to 0$ pointwise, but if any sequence $\{ \gamma_n \}$ tends to $\infty$, $\gamma_n f_n \not\to 0$.  The hint says to use the fact that the collections of all complex sequences converging to $0$ has the same cardinality as $[0,1]$. Honestly, this confused me more than it helped me.  My main issue is through the method of showing existence: I am not sure if I should attempt to construct an explicit sequence $f_n$, or if I need to appeal to other nonconstructive means such as Zorn's Lemma, etc. I have been trying to construct clever choices of sequences for a good bit now, but it always seems like I will be able to find a sequence that diverges slowly enough to allow that $\gamma_n f_n \to 0$.   Thanks! Escaped line break tag in tooltip on election page Search with Auto-Complete (like Gmail / Intellisense) $\lim_{h\to 0}\int \frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}\,\mathrm{d}x = f(b)-f(a)$ How is $\dfrac1{(1-x)^5}=\sum_{n\geq0}{n+4\choose4}x^n$ Can someone please explain to me how is $$\dfrac1{(1-x)^5}=\sum_{n\geq0}{n+4\choose4}x^n$$  Thanks! How do Southern people discern Night's Watch deserters from truthful brothers sent south? Night's Watch deserters are sentenced to death, as we've seen in the very first episode of Game of Thrones. A man dressed all in black is apprehended by Stark men and brought before Lord Eddard Stark. Lord Stark sees him as a deserter and sentences him to die (and then executes that death penalty).  However, there are men of the Night's Watch south of the Wall, on a legitimate mission or on some kind of allowed leave. For instance, we have Benjen Stark visiting Winterfell when the king and his party is there. There is also Yoren, who travels around Westeros in search of new recruits.  I could imagine that the Warden of the North (and other lords in the northern part of Westeros) would have a good idea of who would be allowed further south and whose appearance would raise suspicion. But I reckon the southern lords don't have as many visits from the Night's Watch, so they might not know who would be allowed to be there and who wouldn't.  How would lords who are rather unfamiliar with the specific brothers of the Night's Watch discern deserters from brothers sent out for some reason?  That ends my question, but there is a spoiler from the season 5 finale that continues the question a bit more:      Sam is sent to Oldtown to become a Maester, so he can replace Maester Aemon at Castle Black.  But he is riding together with Gilly (a woman!) and her baby (a baby!), which might raise a lot of suspicion from people who don't know what he is sent out to do.  What prevents southern lords of sentencing Sam as a deserter from the Night's Watch? I want to ask about two sentences, and what would be the correct way to form a question:   It's very important that we eat healthy food, ...........?  Which would be the correct question tag: (isn't it) or (don't we)? It's a must that all applicants follow the rules of the competition, ..........?  Which would the correct question tag: (don't they) or (mustn't they)?   Please could you tell me the correct answers, and, more importantly, why those are correct? Why can't I import "pygtk" with Python 3.2 from PyDev? Exact Duplicate:        I was reading an article on MSDN where I found a mention to google-fu. It says, “To search for C++ delimeters and code snippets is going to take a little Google-fu on the reader's part.” what does google-fu mean? How to tell M2Eclipse to install jar file as a maven dependency Unwanted comma between author and year using citet command I've been using the biblatex package for a while, and since updating my TeX installation (post-el capitan upgrade) I have been experiencing the following.   If the following is typed:  Such and such has been said \citep[111]{citekey}.   The following text is displayed:  Such and such has been said (Author, 2016, p. 111).   And if the following is typed:  \citet[111]{citekey} has said such and such.   The following text is displayed:  Author, (2016, p. 111) has said such and such.   The citep command is working as I want it to, but I do not want a comma placed after the author's name when using the citet command. I would like it to display as follows:  Author (2016, p. 111) has said such and such.    If I use the \citeyearpar command, it is fine, but I would rather not have to type the author's name in manually.   Here is the command placed in the preamble:  \usepackage[backend=bibtex, style=authoryear-icomp, url=true, isbn=false, natbib=true, sortcites=true, block=space, pagetracker=false, loccittracker=constrict]{biblatex}   Here is an example of an entry in my bib file (made using BibDesk):  @article{poldrack2006, Author = {Poldrack, Russell}, Journal = {Trends in Cognitive Sciences}, Number = {2}, Pages = {59--63}, Title = {{Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?}}, Volume = {10}, Year = {2006}}   I have also tried changing the entry to the following:  @article{poldrack2006, Author = {Russell Poldrack}, Journal = {Trends in Cognitive Sciences}, Number = {2}, Pages = {59--63}, Title = {{Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?}}, Volume = {10}, Year = {2006}}   The bibliography entry appears as follows, and is fine:  Poldrack, Russell (2006). “Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data?” In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10.2, pp. 59–63.  Thank you for any help that can be offered. Fastest way to remove non-numeric characters from a VARCHAR in SQL Server I'm writing an import utility that is using phone numbers as a unique key within the import.  I need to check that the phone number does not already exist in my DB. The problem is that   phone numbers in the DB could have things like dashes and parenthesis and possibly other things. I wrote a function to remove these things, the problem is that it is slow and with thousands of records in my DB and thousands of records to import at once, this process can be unacceptably slow. I've already made the phone number column an index.  I tried using the script from this post:   But that didn't speed it up any.  Is there a faster way to remove non-numeric characters? Something that can perform well when 10,000 to 100,000 records have to be compared.  Whatever is done needs to perform fast.  Update Given what people responded with, I think I'm going to have to clean the fields before I run the import utility.   To answer the question of what I'm writing the import utility in, it is a C# app. I'm comparing BIGINT to BIGINT now, with no need to alter DB data and I'm still taking a performance hit with a very small set of data (about 2000 records).   Could comparing BIGINT to BIGINT be slowing things down?  I've optimized the code side of my app as much as I can (removed regexes, removed unneccessary DB calls). Although I can't isolate SQL as the source of the problem anymore, I still feel like it is. "within 1 to 2 weeks" vs "in 1 or 2 weeks"