468 karma · joined May 8, 2014
>unless you're an engineer
Not so last century, eh?
"Limitations on inherent tribal powers of self-government are few, but do include the same limitations applicable to states, e.g., neither tribes nor states have the power to make war, engage in foreign relations, or print and issue currency."
I'm not sure if this would prohibit raising an army per se, but what good is raising an army if you don't have the power to make war? Building bases is wholly out of the question, though, since that would involve engaging in foreign relations.
We should feel secure for our lives. Indeed it's one of the inalienable rights defined in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What many people now know as safe places, however, overreach their stated goal of providing security for minorities. They sacrifice liberty for life. You can put someone in jail for threatening your life, but you can't put someone in jail (or fire them or ruin their livelihood otherwise) for saying something you don't agree with. If you force someoen to empathize, they aren't truly empathizing, they are remaining quiet for fear of being called a bigot and getting their reputation ruined. They shouldn't have the right to make you fall behind at work because of harassment. Then again, no one should have the right to do that on anyone, no exceptions based on arbitrary classes/categories.
Depending on the site you read, it's either a violation of journalism ethics, or GamerGate blowing something out of proportion again. In lieu of a citation, you can google it if you really want.
"Why not faster? Why not slower?"
Certainly a lot of physicists are content with leaving it at "because it is." They're not searching for purpose, they're searching for explanation. The article doesn't just ask the question either, it explores a possible avenue for seeking the answer.
Experiments over the past few years seem to indicate that the speed of light can be derived by measuring electric and magnetic properties of the vacuum. This leads to the question: is it possible that the speed of light is the value it is because the vacuum restricts it to this value? This would mean the speed of light is not a fundamental constant, but an observable parameter of the vacuum.
The article is light on links, but here is a paper that I think the article was referring to, by Marcel Urban and colleagues at the University of Paris-Sud:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6165
From the paper:
"When a real photon propagates in vacuum, it interacts with and is temporarily captured by an ephemeral pair. As soon as the pair disappears, it releases the photon to its initial energy and momentum state. The photon continues to propagate with an infinite bare velocity. Then the photon interacts again with another ephemeral pair and so on. The delay on the photon propagation produced by these successive interactions implies a renormalisation of this bare velocity to a finite value.
This “leapfrog” propagation of photons, with instantaneous leaps between pairs, seems natural since the only length and time scales in vacuum come from fermion pair lifetimes and Compton lengths."
The paper claims that the speed of light might fluctuate as a consequence, and proposes possible experiments to test this.
"The propagation of a photon being a statistical process, we predict fluctuations of its time of flight of the order of 0.05fs/√m. This could be within the grasp of modern experimental techniques and we plan to assemble such an experiment."
This could answer the question, why is light so slow?