exchemist

Bullshit. Don't try to play the Dance of the Seven Veils. You were asked a straight question. You owe the questioner a straight answer.

Not sure I’m persuaded of that. A yuge part of Trump’s success, surely, has been his cult of personality, hasn’t it? They can’t just transfer that to De Sanity Clause or some other loathsome specimen.

On the contrary, once you have determined the real explanation for the fireball, there is nothing left in the incident we are discussing, apart from an uncorroborated report from some panicky people. Nothing. It’s just like someone seeing the Blessed Virgin on a piece of toast.

Oh dear. You really have no idea what you are doing in the kitchen, have you? Potatoes take 25-30 mins to cook. If you don't have time for that, cook rice or pasta instead. I usually steam large potatoes, to avoid the risk of them disintegrating. Small ones are safe to boil. But one point I agree with you: they are best cooked in their skins. The skins add flavour, and nutrition, supposedly. I always leave the skins in when I make mashed potatoes.

Which is not a signature for the presence of life.

Agreed. But then we are discussing how baptism evolved.

But then baptism is a sort of purification ritual too, symbolically washing away Original Sin, if I remember correctly.

Don't be ridiculous, it doesn't at all. A building block is not evidence of a building. A brick is a brick, not a house. Phosphates are just one ingredient, of many, that would be needed to support terrestrial style biochemistry.

So what? All that says is phosphorus is needed for terrestrial biochemistry. If you actually read the paper, and take in what it says, it is quite clear about the mineral processes that lead to orthophosphate, i.e. the anions of the inorganic acid phosphoric acid, being present in the water. The finding is interesting in that people had thought one of the difficulties in life getting going elsewhere might be the relative lack of phosphorus compounds. In the case of Enceladus there seems not to be this deficiency. That's all.

OK so the water is alkaline, due to dissolved bicarbonate and carbonate and this favours leaching into solution of orthophosphate - which they think they have detected. (The element is phosphorus by the way. Phosphorous is an adjective like phosphoric, e.g. phosphorous acid is H₃PO₃, whereas phosphoric acid is H₃PO₄.) The presence of phosphate is explained as due to wholly inorganic mineral processes, i.e. there is no suggestion its presence is any kind of signature for life on Enceladus.

I must admit I don't see the difference. Surely the reason why the images for different wavelengths are different sizes is because refractive index is a function of wavelength, i.e., because of dispersion and thus refraction through different angles, just as it is for a prism? The light is spread out into a spectrum by this process, i.e. the colours are separated, in both processes, surely?

There are no recordings of any "UAP" , only of the fireball which was widely reported and has a completely conventional explanation.

That's putting it mildly. It is plain that the object did NOT land anywhere that has been found - and most likely did not reach the surface at all. Given this fireball was reported by 21 different individuals, spread across 4 states of the USA, it clearly must have been a very high altitude phenomenon and travelling very fast. This is not AT ALL consistent with something "landing" in someone's back yard - and then mysteriously taking off again. Aha, I thought as much. So you are trying to drag in other - unrelated - reports, over a period of years, as evidence that this incident must have involved an alien landing, even though the evidence from the incident itself is pisspoor? I'm afraid it doesn't work like that. We are discussing this one incident, to see what merit the claims have. The evaluation stands or falls on the quality of evidence from the incident itself.

The limit is due to the amount of static charge that can accumulate on the ball at the top of the generator before discharge occurs. There is no capacitor present. Once discharged the belt has to run for a number of seconds before a second discharge is possible. It's diving back into my ancient A-Level physics but, as I recall, you can calculate the charge present on a conducting sphere to generate a given electric field strength. And you know when the breakdown field strength of air is exceeded, because that's when it discharges, to whatever object is brought a certain distance away from it. Thinking more about it, though, you may have a point in that the above is arguing the charge is low, rather than the current i.e. the rate of charge flow, during the instant of discharge. If it all discharges in a microsecond, ten the instantaneous current could be high, I suppose.

From what I have seen, there is no "cascade of events". The fireball, we can safely say, is a perfectly normal phenomenon. So forget that. It's only function in this tale has been to make some people panic and start imagining things. There are no "credible documented accounts of encounters with beings of unknown origin" anywhere in this episode, so far as I can see, nor have any "military" people been involved, just a few cops who saw nothing themselves either. There is no "entire story" to fabricate, just a small group of people who got in a panic and called the cops. Where are you getting all this extra stuff from about documented sources and military people?

Surely the operation of something like a Van de Graaf generator would explain why this isn't entirely a myth? High voltage, but very little charge, so you get a shock but little current and no danger.

Nothing “crashed”, that’s obvious from the widespread fireball sightings I linked earlier, but which you have opted to ignore. So all we’re left with is the uncorroborated testimony of these panicky people. The video footage shows nothing. It’s a total non-story.

Quite. Seeing what you want to see. But for me the fireball reports (21 of them) from across 4 states is pretty decisive. I searched "1st May meteor Las Vegas" and got that link straight away. Funny that people predisposed to attribute these reports to aliens don't take the elementary precaution of running a few simple checks before committing themselves to their preferred version of events.

That's fairly obviously a meteor, or re-entry of some space debris: https://ams.imo.net/members/imo_view/event/2023/2408 Note that sightings were reported across four US states. So it clearly wasn't a local phenomenon, like a spacecraft landing in the vicinity of the town. And the "alien" picture could be anything at all. Move along ladies and gents, nothing to see here.

Not at all. I'm choosing to focus on the observations because you've had a good run with @Mordred on the derivation of the theory and I can't do that as well as he can, as I'm only a chemist. But in the end, in science, observations are what count. How the theory was derived may be interesting intellectually, but the test of a theory is whether it predicts observations correctly. You seem not to have engaged at all with the examples on time dilation and mass-energy equivalence I gave you earlier. Why is that?

I can't follow you here. Invariance of the speed of light has been observed, time dilation has been observed (I gave you an example) and mass/energy equivalence has been observed (I gave you an example). If you want to argue that the observed invariance of the speed of light is some kind of artifact of the measuring process (is that what you are claiming?), you still have to deal with these other observations, which are predicted by SR.

The independence of the speed of light from motion of source and receiver is an observed fact. It is idle to pretend otherwise. All of SR follows from that observed fact. And all observations predicted by SR are found to be correct in practice. Whether Einstein's logic was sound or not doesn't really matter. Nature behaves, so far as we can tell, as if SR is correct. If you want to argue about the logic that's fine. But do not pretend the observations are wrong.

I believe baptism originated in a Jewish purification ritual involving immersion in water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_washing_in_Judaism#Full-body_immersion It seems likely that this is what John the Baptist may have been inspired by.

Well the observational facts are that the predictions of SR are correct, so you have a big problem there. I gave you some examples earlier in the thread. And it all derives from the observational fact that the observed peed of light is found not to depend on relative motion between source and receiver, or between observers. It contradicts classical physics, sure, but it seems to be the case. Just as in quantum theory the behaviour of atomic scale entities does not confirm to classical physics either. One of the big insights of c.20th physics was that nature does not have to conform, at all scales and in all circumstances, to what looks to us like common sense. But I'll observe your discussion with @Mordred with interest.

That's perhaps a useful clarification on your part. Do I take it, then, that you accept that in practice SR accurately accords with observations? If so then your issue, presumably, is with Einstein's reasoning when he set out the theory, rather than arguing that SR does not work. Do I have that right?