In reading from the book, there's a peculiar definition of the phase, stating:  \begin{align}   K[a,b] &amp;= \sum_{\text{All paths from $a$ to $b$}} \phi [x(t)]\\   \phi [x(t)] &amp;= \text{const} \cdot e ^{\frac{i}{\hbar}S[a,b]}    \end{align}  Why is the phase defined this way? There is no reasoning in the book apart from the fact that this phase must be proportional to the action of the system for the said path. Can someone provide a more comprehensive reason than stated in the book?
In the book &quot;Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals&quot; Feynman &amp; Hibbs state that  the probability $P(b,a)$ to go from point $x_a$ at time $t_a$ to the point $x_b$ at the time $t_b$ is $P(b,a) = \|K(b,a)\|^2$ of an amplitude $K(b,a)$ to go from $a$ to $b$. This amplitude is the sum of contributions $\phi[x(t)]$ from each path. $$ K(b,a) = \sum_{\text{paths from $a$ to $b$}} \phi[x(t)]$$ The contributions of a path has a phase proportional to the action $S$: $$ \phi[x(t)] = \text{const}\ e^{(i/\hbar)S[x(t)]}$$  Why must the contribution of a path be $\sim e^{(i/\hbar)S[x(t)]}$? Can this be somehow derived or explained? Why can't the contribution of a path be something else e.g. $\sim \frac{S}{\hbar}$, $\sim \cos(S/\hbar)$, $\log(S/\hbar)$ or $e^{- (S[x(t)]/\hbar)^2}$ ? Edit: I have to admit that in the first version of this question, I didn't exclude the possibility to derive the contribution of a path directly from Schrödinger's equation. So answers along this line are valid although not so interesting. I think when Feynman developed his formalism his goal was to find a way to quantize systems, which cannot be treated by Schrödinger's equation, because they cannot be described in terms of a Hamiltonian (e.g. the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory). So I think a good answer would explain Feynman's Ansatz without referring to Schrödinger's equation, because I think Schrödinger's equation can only handle a specific subset of all the systems that can be treated by Feynman's more general principle.
Show/Hide hidden files without restarting finder? I came to understand that the following is the way to toggle the visibility of hidden files:  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES # replace YES with NO to hide hidden files killall -HUP Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app   Is there a way to show/hide hidden files without killing the Finder? Why are there non-visible objects in my final render? Have Blender on about 4 machines rendering animations. Just spotted on one of the machines its rendering something different from the actual scene that I have setup.    Top window shows a different set of layers objects to whats actually being rendered in the rendering window below.  In my scene contents, layers objects 1-5 are not visible, but these are the ones that look like they are being rendered.  The only thing I can assume is that perhaps it might be because I did not save the document before clicking render, but I would not have expected that behaviour (you dont need to save your word document before printing it).  Can anyone confirm why this is happening? I have created a 'control' using jQuery and used jQuery.extend to assist in making it as OO as possible.  During the initialisation of my control I wire up various click events like so  jQuery('#available input',              this.controlDiv).bind('click', this, this.availableCategoryClick);   Notice that I am pasing 'this' as the data argument in the bind method. I do this so that I can get at data attached to the control instance rather from the element that fires the click event.   This works perfectly, however i suspect there is a better way  Having used Prototype in the past, I remember a bind syntax that allowed you to control what the value of 'this' was in the event.  What is the jQuery way? Does $\int_{0}^{\infty}\frac{dx}{1+(x\sin5x)^2}$ converge? How can I tell hotels exist that aren't on the booking web sites? There are a ton of sites out there to help book hotel rooms and to aggregate all the different sites to book hotel rooms. These companies make enough money to buy ads on TV, so I won't name them here. I normally poke around 3 or 4 of these as part of planning any trip.  I am now starting some very long term planning for a 6 week South Pacific trip, which includes undertstanding what hotels costs on some very small islands. I have paper guidebooks and I've been looking online. But I come across anomalies. For example, a place which has only 9 hotels listed on the sites I use, and prices range from $1000/night down to $200/night, then when I read the reviews on that cheapest one people are saying "it's nothing special, there are 5 or 6 places just like it here for half the price". Well, not on this site there aren't!  My guess is that many of these places don't have web sites, or don't have online booking, and therefore aren't getting into the aggregators. For some islands I have found local tourism boards with lists of "pensions" and such, typically cheaper than what I can find on the aggregators.    But how can I know? I don't want to assume that popular web sites represent reality, and choose only from places listed there. But I don't want to invest 10-20 hours of research per island only to discover the aggregators had everything. How can I know where the coverage is good and where it isn't, what kinds of hotels are more or less likely to be listed at expedia, trivago, booking, hotels, tripadvisor, and the like? (For example, I don't want to stay at a hostel, so I don't mind if they're not included in online sites.) Are there sites like wikitravel that list places without much of an internet presence?  I'm starting my research over a year before the trip, but wading through hotel pages is not the fun part of the planning so tell me how the smart people do it. Change Proxy Settings In Ubuntu I want to use the Ubuntu Software Center to install software, but I cannot download them.  How can I give my proxy settings in Ubuntu terminal (just like we use cmd in Windows to choose IE proxy settings)? How to prove that $p-1$ is squarefree infinitely often, where $p$ is prime?  I had thought of using Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions.  The number of squareful values of $p-1$ less than or equal to $n$ is bounded by $\sum_{q}{\pi_{q^2,1}(n)}$, each term $\pi_{q^2,1}(n) \approx \frac{\pi(n)}{q \cdot (q-1)}$, and $\sum_{q}{\frac{1}{q \cdot (q-1)}} \lt 1$.  But using for example , the possibility is open that the error in each approximation for $\pi_{q^2,1}(n)$ may continue to increase with $q$, and since the sum runs up to $\sqrt{n}$, this argument is invalid.  Is there a more refined version of Dirichlet's theorem that can be used to circumvent this issue?  Or an entirely different way to prove this statement? Union of subgroups is a subgroup if and only if one subgroup is a subset of the other Let $H$ and $K$ denote two subgroups of a group $G$.  Prove that the union $H \cup K$ is a subgroup of $G$ if and only if $H \subset K$ or $K \subset H$. The general consensus on a similar question,  is that "highly significant" is a valid, though non-specific, way to describe the strength of an association that has a p-value far below your pre-set significance threshold. However, what about describing p-values that are slightly above your threshold? I have seen some papers use terms like "somewhat significant", "nearly significant", "approaching significance", and so on. I find these terms to be a little wishy-washy, in some cases a borderline disingenuous way to pull a meaningful result out of a study with negative results. Are these terms acceptable to describe results that "just miss" your p-value cutoff? I want to use jQuery to parse RSS feeds. Can this be done with the base jQuery library out of the box or will I need to use a plugin? NullPointerException accessing views in onCreate() Why so many pins for the MOSFET's drain? How many Avatars have there been? A and B disjoint, A compact, and B closed implies there is positive distance between both sets Claim: Let $X$ be a metric space. If $A,B\in X$ are disjoint, if A is compact, and if B is closed, then $\exists \delta&gt;0: |\alpha-\beta|\geq\delta\;\;\;\forall\alpha\in A,\beta\in B$.  Proof. Assume the contrary. Let $\alpha_n\in A,\beta_n\in B$ be chosen such that $|\alpha_n-\beta_n|\rightarrow0$ as $n\rightarrow \infty$.  Since A is compact, there exists a convergent subsequence of $\alpha_n\;(n\in\mathbb{N})$, $\alpha_{n_m}\;(m\in\mathbb{N})$, which converges to $\alpha\in A$.  We have   $$|\alpha-\beta_{n_m}|\leq|\alpha-\alpha_{n_m}|+|\alpha_{n_m}-\beta_{n_m}|\rightarrow0 \;\;\;as\;\;m\rightarrow\infty.$$ Hence $\alpha$ is a limit point of B and since B is closed $\alpha\in B$, contradiction.  Is my proof correct? I feel as though I am missing something simple which would trivialize the proof. How to Backup and Restore Android OS without Rooting I want to find a way to restore my phone in case the process of rooting my phone or dual booting a custom rom breaks it. However, most of the ones I've looked at require the phone to be rooted before installing. I know I can create a nandroid backup through system settings, but I don't know how to recover that without rooting my device, or if there are better options. I'm not terribly concerned for any personal data on my phone (I can backup my pictures pretty easily), but I mostly just want to be able reinstall Android OS or reset to factory default in case my device breaks. Thanks! Edit: I am going to ask a new question (one different enough to justify not simply modifying this one) with the new info I learned from the possible duplicate. I ran into a problem today when I decided to use npm update -g in a nodejs app directory. This was a bad decision, because it caused me to run into a .   The solution is to reinstall nodejs and npm. Unfortunately when I go to install npm using sudo apt-get install npm it doesn't work.  The full error in the terminal is here:  Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that  some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies:  npm : Depends: nodejs but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-abbrev (&gt;= 1.0.4) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-ansi but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-archy but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-block-stream but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-fstream (&gt;= 0.1.22) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-fstream-ignore but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-github-url-from-git but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-glob (&gt;= 3.1.21) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-graceful-fs (&gt;= 2.0.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-inherits but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-ini (&gt;= 1.1.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-lockfile but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-lru-cache (&gt;= 2.3.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-minimatch (&gt;= 0.2.11) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-mkdirp (&gt;= 0.3.3) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-gyp (&gt;= 0.10.9) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-nopt (&gt;= 2.1.1) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-npmlog but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-once but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-osenv but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-read but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-read-package-json (&gt;= 1.1.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-request (&gt;= 2.25.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-retry but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-rimraf (&gt;= 2.2.2) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-semver (&gt;= 2.1.0) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-sha but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-slide but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-tar (&gt;= 0.1.18) but it is not going to be installed    Depends: node-which but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.   What can I do to get npm properly installed and running again?  Thanks. After swapping the positions of the hour and the minute hand, when will a clock still give a valid time? At 12 o'clock, the hour hand and minute hand of the clock can be swapped, and the clock still gives the same time, but at 6 o'clock, it can not be swapped. So in what cases when we swap the hour and the minute hand position does a clock still give a valid time? Why KL divergence is non-negative? Why is KL divergence non-negative?  From the perspective of information theory, I have such an intuitive understanding:  Say there are two ensembles $A$ and $B$ which are composed of the same set of elements labeled by $x$. $p(x)$ and $q(x)$ are different probability distributions over ensemble $A$ and $B$ respectively.   From the perspective of information theory, $\log_{2}(P(x))$ is the least amount of bits that required for recording an element $x$ for ensemble $A$. So that the expectation $$\sum_{x \in  ensemble}-p(x)\ln(p(x))$$ can be interpreted as at least how many bits that we need for recording an element in $A$ on average.   Since this formula puts a lower bound on the bits that we need on average, so that for a different ensemble $B$ which brings about a different probability distribution $q(x)$, the bound that it gives for each element $x$ will surely not bit that is given by $p(x)$, which means taking the expectation, $$\sum_{x\in ensemble}-p(x)\ln(q(x))$$ this average length will surely be greater than the former one, which leads to $$\sum_{x\in ensemble }p(x)\frac{\ln(p(x))}{\ln(q(x))} &gt; 0$$  I don't put $\ge$ here since $p(x)$ and $q(x)$ are different.  This is my intuitive understanding, is there a purely mathematical way of proving KL divergence is non-negative? The problem can be stated as:  Given $p(x)$ and $q(x)$ are both positive over real line, and $\int_{-\infty}^{+\infty}p(x)dx = 1$, $\int_{-\infty}^{+\infty}q(x)dx = 1$.  Prove $$\int_{-\infty}^{+\infty}p(x)\ln\frac{p(x)}{q(x)}$$ is non-negative.  How can this be proved? Or can this be proved without extra conditions? Display each sub-directory size in a list format using one line command in Bash? I want to get a list of the directories and their sizes in a list format like how you get when you do a ls -l.  The thing is that is there a one line command that can do this? I see others have long commands just to output this. That's just too long.  What command can do this or combination of commands that can be easily typed? du -h gives it, but it displays all of the sub-folders which is not what I want. just the current directories folders. Why do regex constructors need to be double escaped?