exchemist

Yes I think it's the case that racism was certainly elevated to an ideological, moral, pseudoscientific footing in the c.19th. It helped to justify the competitive colonialism of the period. But before that time there seems little doubt people tended to have what we would now see as a racist outlook. After all, the slave trade was predicated on the notion that black Africans could be treated as subhuman. I also think the Four Horsemen of New Atheism indeed tried, for a while, a kind of evangelical promotion of atheism as a replacement for religion. I've even come across a film they produced, designed to inspire awe in the grandeur of nature and to ridicule traditional religion (silly cartoon animation of hell, with little devils with pitchforks). I think the idea was to appeal to that part of human nature that is satisfied by religious feeling, but it was hopelessly cack-handed and crude. This idea was never progressed, thank goodness. But your attempt to connect this to so-called "cancel culture" strikes me as unpersuasive. In universities there have always been controversies over what speakers to invite and protests over it. I remember this from Oxford in the 1970s. The irony is that this term, invented by the far-Right as a stick to beat the Left with, describes a practice that is now used as much by the Right as the Left, for example in the banning of various books from American school libraries. But this is not generally about religion (though some Right wing US school boards ban Romeo and Juliet because there is too much sexual language). I asked you earlier on this thread for examples of religious speakers being "cancelled" and got no response. I've never come across this and doubt it is really a thing.

True, if your school syllabus includes teaching religion, which is however excluded in some countries, e.g. the USA and France. You do not teach religion in science lessons, though. You teach it, if you teach it at all, in classes on religion. Creationism is not basic theology however. It is one of the beliefs of certain Protestant denominations - and possibly some versions of Islam, I think. Ciao, love and kisses.

That very much depends on the age of the children. In the 6th form, yes, in a class on religion or philosophy it can be instructive to expose the students to the issue, seeing as by then they will be alert to the philosophical distinction between religious and scientific ideas - and will most likely be aware of the politics lurking behind the issue. However it makes no sense whatever to confuse younger children with rival models, one of which is known to be false, and most certainly not in a science class. After all, we don't teach them the caloric theory of heat, the phlogiston theory of combustion, or the geocentric model of the solar system. (Such things might be taught in a history of science class, later on, to show how ideas have developed through time.)

Yes, your visualisation is good. If you draw lines radiating out from a point, the density of the lines will fall off with the square of the radial distance from the central point. This gives exactly Newton’s inverse square relation. It’s just the same as the way the intensity of illumination falls with distance from a point source of light. It’s a consequence of the surface of a sphere being proportional to the square of its radius. You have the same number of lines in total, passing through a bigger and bigger total surface area, as the radius of sphere increases. But for calculation, the algebra is a lot more useful than the visualisation.

No, QM tunnelling offers no such possibility, I'm afraid. For a start it is only significant at the scale at which the wavelike nature of matter become important - in practice, objects the size of an atom or a subatomic particle. And then, as I've been saying it's a statistical effect from the way a probability cloud is resolved into a measurement.

You’ve lost me. Why should there be a connection between QM tunnelling, which involves no motion, and a warp drive?

Not a field, just a wave function. The suggestion of time lapses is what I don't follow. To me, that makes no sense.

No, I don't think thinking about passage of time is helpful. No change takes place - apart from the detection event that determines where the QM entity is. The problem here, it seems to me, is that what is called "tunnelling" is a rather misleading metaphor. There is no motion from inside to outside. The wave function of a QM entity will extend a bit on the far side of a potential barrier, if the barrier is narrow enough and low enough. So a detection event - which resolves the "probability cloud" into a definite position, may occasionally find the entity outside instead of inside.

Must admit I don't follow this. My understanding of tunnelling is that the wave function of the state in question extends through the potential barrier and out the other side to a small extent. In other words, the barrier is not high enough and/or thick enough to damp it out to zero on the far side. That would seem to me to mean that a particle in such a state has a finite probability of being found on the far side when an interaction collapses the wave function. So there is no faster than light travel: in fact there is no "travel" at all. The particle is already on the far side of the barrier, for part of the time, if you like. It's just a matter of there being a low, but non zero, probability of detecting it there as a result of an interaction. Is my picture of this wrong, or is it perhaps the article that has got it wrong in the search for an eye-catching headline?

"single pain" appears to be a Freudian slip.😄

Not in my case. There was some sensation, which I would class as discomfort rather than pain, and in fact I was slightly unnerved by a smell of burning, but not too bad. And it may have saved my sight in that eye. Thinking back, I suppose there may have been a bit of an occasional ache, afterwards, for a day or two. In fact I needed two sessions, one at the St G clinic and another at Moorfields itself, as the first one didn’t quite reach far enough into the corner. I was able to go home on the Underground straight away after both sessions, once the dazzle had dispersed. Though they might not have wanted me to drive, I imagine.

Also flashes in your vision. But I would see a real ophthalmologist if you can, not just an optician. I originally saw the optometrist at the local optician, who diagnosed PVD but missed the flapping edge of the retina - it was over in one corner. I was initially reassured by her and left it for a few days but was not entirely happy, as the flashes and floaters continued, and booked myself to see a consultant ophthalmologist (I did it privately, reckoning it would be £250 well spent). I'm glad I did as he told me to go and present myself at the Moorfield's eye unit at St George's within 24-48hrs, for urgent laser treatment. I think if I were you I might go to the eye unit at your hospital. You'd need to take a book of course as you might be waiting several hours to be seen, but you would get seen by a proper eye doctor.

Have you been to the ophthalmologist about it? If not I suggest doing so without delay. New floaters can indicate posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). While common enough, these can result in retinal detachment in 10% of cases. I had a PVD last year and needed laser surgery to weld the flapping edge of my left retina back in place. This was regarded as very urgent by the doctors.

The enlightened man certainly turns away from meaningless ballocks dressed up as profundity.

What conference was this and what was the charge?

It is not, I say again, not a bulb fault. I know this because putting in a new one has no effect on the issue.

Hmm, but it does the identical thing if I change the bulb. So it's not a bulb fault.

Yes. From a purely energetic viewpoint one could imagine that a fall of 2kg of water through 0.5m would be enough to lift 0.5kg of water through 2m. But the problem seems to me to be that the "suction" , i.e. pressure drop, generated in their setup is determined by the head of water in the container, which, being less than the head needed to draw the water up from the well, cannot possibly achieve that. I think they would need to put all the water in their container into a tall pipe, taller than the depth of the well, and let the suction from that, as it empties from the bottom, draw water up. Anyway the whole exercise is pointless as it relies on refilling a container with water to keep the thing going, as they have no running water source to sustain any of these ideas. So just typical YouTube crap.

Thanks all, some good suggestions for me to follow up. On a couple of points, yes the system used to have halogen bulbs, but the ones in the supermarket these days are LED, as a result of the drive to cut energy consumption, which I bought without imagining they might cause a problem. I have been replacing the halogen ones one by one as they fail. I will now need to check how many of the old halogen ones remain and which ones are LED. I am dubious about the idea of corrosion causing a poor contact, due to the metronomic regularity of the flashing, at approx 1 to 1.5 sec intervals. It is not the random flashing or flickering one would expect from a faulty connection. It is some electronic phenomenon. As one other bulb, always the same one, sometimes also goes out or flashes during these flashing episodes I suspect there may be 2 wired in parallel to a transformer. Unless it just happens that these two are the only LED ones. Annoyingly, all the wiring and the transformers are hidden up in the false ceiling, which has no inspection panel! I may have to cut a hole in the ceiling to get at them. I may see if I can still source more halogen bulbs online, and try reverting to those to see if that fixes it. But I suspect that sooner or later these will become unavailable, so that is not a long term solution.

There is no dimmer in the kitchen. Could the transformer behave like a dimmer for some reason? I had naïvely assumed it would just be coils wound on a magnetic core, as of old, but from the behaviour I suspect there is some kind of solid state step-down gizmo which plays up under some circumstances.

Don't think it's that as the flashing is too regular. Looks more like the sort of thing a solid state device might do under conditions it doesn't like. But certainly it's curious that it eventually seems to settle down. I wonder if I can still get halogen bulbs somewhere and see if that fixes it.

I have 6 spotlights in the ceiling of my kitchen and one of them has started flashing a short while after they are switched on. The flashing is at a rate of once every second or so, and after a while it stops and stays on continuously, though sometimes one of the others then flashes or even cuts off. I’ve tried changing the bulb but that makes no difference. Must be something to do with the transformer I think. Web search suggests it could be replacement of halogen bulbs by LED, causing too little current to be drawn for the transformer to work properly. Does this seem plausible, why should that happen, and what can I do about it?

Well I don't think Einstein believed in a personal god, so this would presumably not arise in his conception of it. But a conventional Christian might see the order in nature (I mean the "laws", not the products of their operation) as something set up - and even maintained? - by a creator god of the type described by the Abrahamic religions One Catholic priest I've spoken to (an educated man and not a creationist) seemed to see it that way. After all, the laws of nature "just are", according to science - there is no reason why they are as they are (conservation laws excepted, I suppose).

This is very unclear indeed. The voiceover talks of Bernoulli, suggesting the principle is the suction from a partial vacuum created by a flow of water through a venturi. This is how the laboratory water aspirator, commonly used in suction filtration, works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_ejector But that does not seem to be what is going on the YouTube video linked by @Externet, nor does this video of yours show any venturi, or indeed any source of the constant flow of water needed to sustain a water aspirator. The maths is not shown. There is just one little formula flashed up for a couple of seconds, with no explanation. The design of the system is not shown either, so far as I can see. It's all hidden inside the barrel. One gets the impression this bunch in the video have no idea what they are doing, and indeed, mirabile dictu, it doesn't work! This is all crap, by the look of it.

No, just thinking of the Genesis creation accounts and thinking of Einstein’s suggestion that the laws of nature may be, in effect, god.