swansont

I don’t think you can speak for all atheists beyond the commonality of lacking belief in a supreme being.

Characterizing this as a “hoax” is much too forgiving to Kirk. Terhune has been doing this kind of satire for years. Charlie’s just mad that he can’t recognize that form of humor.

As far as SFN goes, for as long as we’ve expected good-faith discussion and outlawed thread hijacking. If you want to change the parameters you open a new thread.

Two snippets from social media, about what many pundits and pollsters are doing wrong by downplaying Dobbs. They haven’t acknowledged/adjusted for how skewed their predictions have been since that decision came down. (paraphrasing) - Imagine a dozen or so states just outright banned guns. Do you think that wouldn’t continually be at the center of discussion? - Women are furious

Did you not understand what is meant by pure democracy, which has already been defined? edit: xpost with iNow

If you have a constitution you don’t have the pure democracy anymore (except for the trivial case of it guaranteeing a pure democracy)

In a very narrow way; you could cause a nuclear excitation, and the excited state could possibly have a shorter half-life (probably only for an isomeric state), which happens in K-38. (~8 min vs ~1 sec, IIRC) You might also cause a nucleon to be ejected, and end up with a shorter half-life, but that’s also unlikely. Hand-wavy assertions, though, are not a substitute for actual physics

Interesting that you mention gravitational potential energy below but ignore it here. The requirement from the uncertainty principle is a return to zero energy (or ground state energy), not nothingness. So if the positive energy of the fluctuation is balanced by the negative gravitational potential energy, there is no violation. What if expansion of space is not limited by c? (which it isn’t)

Probably not by any on the right —- “In 2012 and 2016, early votes were about 36% of all votes. … Fourteen states have already accounted for half of their 2020 vote count with their 2024 early vote tally.” (article date 31 Oct) https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/2024-early-vote-data-map-rcna177666 As they note, 2020 was an outlier for early/absentee voting owing to the pandemic

CNN says Georgia early voting is down, but Georgia’s website tells a different story https://sos.ga.gov/news/georgia-voters-break-4-million-votes-during-early-voting-period “To date, 4,004,588 voters have cast ballots either by voting early or absentee by mail. …. During Early Voting in 2018, there were 1,890,364 voters who cast ballots. 2,697,822 cast ballots in 2020, and 2,289,933 cast ballots in 2022.” That’s not down 4.9% edit: early voting in 2020 was probably increased by the pandemic. Fewer people seem to be motivated by that these days. And, as I said, some states have changed their rules since 2020 (the GOP doesn’t like early voting) so a proper comparison isn’t possible with such a lazy snapshot

And some in the GOP are either livid that women would have the temerity to do this or in denial that they would. Their efforts to restrict their rights and threats of doing more (e.g. repeal the 19th amendment) make it clear they don’t think women should have agency. How dare they think for themselves! That’s not what these graphs say. Percentages are not numbers. From what I’ve read, numbers are up compared to earlier elections, and some early voters were election-day voters last time. Also, early-vote rules changed in some states. By only looking at a little bit of the data this is indistinguishable from cherry-picked propaganda. You should also link to your source, not just name it. Do better.

There’s a story out about how the phone response rate for polling is now about 1% https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/01/polls-accurate-nobody-answers-phones/ There’s the suggestion that people answering is skewed toward older people. More polls are going with nonrandom methods.

Who is “they”?

The issue is whether the electric field is vertical when the charges have rotated. It doesn’t look like it would be.

Why? What requires that it be “nothing”? How was this chosen? What if R were much larger?

The assertion that the electron would have 3ħ/2 of angular momentum already restricts this scenario to there not being a photon after the interaction. Unless you are asserting there can be a photon with no angular momentum. If you have linearly polarized light with the electric field in the vertical direction, it’s alway vertical. It doesn’t point in any other direction. Even with randomly polarized light, the field is perpendicular to the direction of propagation. With your configuration and twisting, that won’t be the case.

It’s a tad more complicated, because an electron in an atom can have orbital angular momentum, and the spin is added to that but can be in the opposite direction. So an excited state electron can absorb a photon in the S orbital and still have h-bar/2 of angular momentum (the P1/2 state)

What is polarization in terms of this twisting? How is this twisting possible for linearly polarized light? The fields do not change orientation. Why don’t these charge pairs cancel? What are these particles? Charge is a property, not a substance. How do we get these massless particles to have a charge? How do they respond to a static electric field? Off-resonant light is not absorbed by an atom, rather than being partly absorbed. e.g., if there is a transition at 1 eV and you shine a 1.5 eV source at the atom, you do not get photons absorbed and 0.5 eV photons emitted.

The issue is the distance. Another solar system means light years of distance, which means years of delay in communication and several decades of travel time for cargo. You decide to mine something (“floof”) on planet X and send it to earth, but you run the risk that floof will still be worth it in 100 years — that a huge deposit won’t be discovered on earth or a planet/asteroid in our solar system, driving the price down. Exporting a finished product to X assumes it’s not cheaper to just build a facility on X to make it, and that it won’t be obsolete in 100 years. Is there any 100 year-old product you’d buy today?

Except that it isn’t. A free electron never absorbs a photon.

As the speculations guidelines say, we want a model of some sort. Some way that the idea makes specific predictions and makes it testable.

The coordinate mass is just a proxy for total energy (rest mass energy and kinetic energy), so it’s redundant. The mass that shows up in most of the equations is the rest mass. Coordinate mass has nothing to do with center of mass calculations. “coordinate” and “proper” are used to refer to issues involving frames of reference

Interstellar commerce might be an interesting topic to investigate, but any assumption that it would be a simple extrapolation from what we know and have is naive.

The neutron doesn’t decay because it has a different entropy. Protons can decay, after all (beta plus). Just not free protons.

Not directly, but relativity is based on it and it’s also found in electrodynamics so there’s a whole lot of physics that wouldn’t work without it.