swansont

What do you think Chapt 10 is saying? The quote from Feynman is particularly apt: The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.'

Cavendish did an experiment to test gravity using nonmagnetic materials. Gravity was still there. I have magnetic shields in my lab, which reduce the ambient field by a factor of 100,000 or more (tough to measure at that point). Gravity is not reduced. Gravity is not a magnetic interaction. This notion has been falsified already.

Copying this over to a new thread in Chemistry so as not to further derail a discussion on the safety of vaccinations, but to underscore that the amount matters. —————— Another danger: salad dressing Here's the MSDS for Acetic acid (i.e. what you find in vinegar) http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/a0326.htm Any more examples of everyday items that are deemed dangerous in large amounts?

O M G http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s3338.htm

O M G http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s3338.htm

So you are claiming that I (and others here) never questioned the validity of AGW claims. False, I say. And I disagree with your conclusion — a skeptic is one who questions. If your definition was right, as a skeptic, you cannot accept gravity, or that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that your clock is correct. Have you ever decided the evidence was sufficient for you to rely on those events? That's not really true in the US. We haven't passed any significant legislation to limit AGW, and the previous administration certainly was not in lock-step with the scientific consensus. Sure. Show me the plethora of papers by statistics experts debunking the AGW work. As I said, you chose a poor example. Phrenologists weren't pursuing science. But look at examples that are better. Who exposed Piltdown man as a fraud? I was the paleontologists studying evolution. Who took down the cold fusion claims of Pons & Fleischman? Other physicists. Not outsiders. The paradigm of an outsider needing to do the debunking only works if the whole group of climatologists are perpetrating a fraud or are grossly incompetent.

Your use of the terms belie this claim. You say that this is a non-skeptical crowd. Yet a skeptic is someone who will not accept claims without evidence, which implies that this crowd has accepted global warming without evidence. I think it's clear that those who wish to discuss it here have actually looked at the issue in some depth. Hence my confusion about your use of the term. The acceptance of global warming conclusions does not appear to be a blind one, ergo labeling posters here as non-skeptical is merely an attempt to poison the well. (and we frown upon the use of logical fallacies) And yet you continue to avoid clarifying which consensus you refer to when you use the word. That's equivocation. (another logical fallacy) Yes they are. They are trying to turn a scientific consensus into a political one, because — as we agree — they are different things. It's quite clear that politics can use poor or fabricated science as a justification for action or inaction. But as phrenology was discredited scientifically, rather than popularly, then it's a poor example for you to have brought up. There are many such medical examples that are popular and yet have no support from science. I don't see how this advances your position, though, since it merely supports the notion that popular support can exist for concepts that have no scientific support. Plimer's book is Heaven and Earth. You've made this error several times. Phrenology was debunked by people versed in the skills needed to debunk it. Which would include people studying neuroscience of the time — hardly an example of disproving from without. It's not like it was dismantled by a bunch of podiatrists. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Ironic you'd point out selective sampling when it's what you propose to do. Is there any legitimate scientific reason to break the graph up into two sections? Is there a mechanism that would explain the behavior if one were to do this, i.e. warming for the first part, and then flatter for the second?

1. I don't think "skeptic" means what you think it means. 2. You have yet to distinguish between political consensus and scientific consensus. They are two very different things. Why is phrenology now a discredited practice? Is it because of scientific consensus, or political consensus?

One thing that's going on is that you're getting the physics wrong, again. The fission yield curve has two lobes — you don't tend to get two Pd-166 nuclei from it. You get a nucleus with about 95 nucleons and another with about 140. Yes, you can get more neutrons if you hit the nucleus with a high-energy neutron, but these are thermal reactors, so there are materials around to slow neutrons down. And you don't typically get 20 MeV neutrons — on average, they have an order of magnitude less energy than that. The neutron yield includes delayed neutrons, not that this changes the total much. They account for less than one percent of the neutrons. Where do you come up with 5? No, can't happen. Much of the energy has to go into the fission products; they are charged particles repelling each other. A ~40e and ~50e nucleus sitting 10^-14m apart have a few hundred MeV of electrostatic potential energy. That gives you the scale of the problem. There just isn't a lot of energy left to go into spitting out neutrons. You're wrong here, too, but for a different reason. 100% of the energy released in fission is radiation. But almost all of it is captured in the reactor. Simple thermodynamics tells us that we can't get a MW of released radiation for every MW of electricity; the process used has an efficiency of around a third. For every MW of electricity there MUST be ~2 MW of waste heat produced, and ALL of that had to come from the radiation of the reaction. So your accounting is short. No only is there nothing left to be emitted, you owe me 1000 MW. (Even if the efficiency was 50% you'd have nothing left over) You're just making up numbers here. Pure fiction. As the above nonsense is the basis for your conclusions, it is not worth addressing.

I should have been more clear: those other orbits may intersect, but a linear orbit must intersect. Unless your gravitational partner is a torus, you get (at most) one half of a period of "orbit" before smackdown time.

Parabola and hyperbola don't have you crashing into the gravitational partner.

The cause is the electrons, and whether they are paired or unpaired. Additionally, for the few ferromagnetic materials, whether the material can physically realign in response to a field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism

One might argue that the straight line really isn't an orbit, either. More of a poor lifestyle choice.

Like they'd stick to any other molecule — electromagnetically. Molecules can attract extra electrons; some do this better than others.

If you ionized the air, you have liberated electrons. They become attached to the oil drops. And apparently he did do it this way http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/millikanoildrop.html http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/millikan.html

I agree. The HUP basically says that no matter how good your camera, the boys will always be indistinct. if you zoom in, they are localized (you know they are in the frame), and they will be blurry because they can't have a well-defined momentum.

You could vary the type/strength of magnet, or effects of different metals (same shape & size) placed in between the magnet and the battery (or maybe under the battery) to see if that varies the strength of the field sampled by the wires.

This is a continuation of a topic that was locked. That's a no-no. original thread was locked because there was no evidence presented of an electromagnetic relation to gravity. None here, either.

And it collapsed the wave function in the thread.

Plane wave. It's a plane wave, as in the wavefront is a plane. You're missing an "i" in the exponential, which turns it into a complex sinusoidal function

"Same test conditions" isn't enough information. The black towel will heat up faster even with mostly IR around (if it's truly black in the IR) if the surroundings are warm, and it will cool faster if the surroundings are cool. This will probably affect the drying rate.

Ah, the irony. If something is not getting across, it isn't 100% clear. And that's one of the issues. The poster doesn't get to decide if the explanation is 100% clear. That can only be determined by the comprehension of audience. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged In the context of the thread, though, I think this isn't so important — it's not the use within technical papers that's at issue. The literature is chock full of nomenclature that scientists understand and lay people don't. What's important to me (and to others who discuss this point) is the effect on people who aren't up to the level of deciphering those papers. Which include most of the people that show up here to ask questions about relativity. For example, they say that a photon has mass because of E=mc^2, and then start into some of the other equations, and come to erroneous conclusions. And then they get frustrated because they have to keep track of a term that has more than one meaning, and they don't know enough to be able to decipher the context. They get confused. And that's what we're trying to avoid.

I know you'd strongly argue your point. The problem being, you wouldn't be arguing about the same point that others are arguing about. That's why there's no value in it. I have no doubt that whatever definition I gave, that you would be able to find a different definition given by someone else. That isn't the point. And here you've confirmed it. I'm not here to argue the usefulness of relativistic mass. It becomes an even larger waste of time when you argue points that others aren't arguing. —— If someone uses "mass" to mean rest mass, and someone else uses it to mean relativistic mass, it will cause confusion, since they are not interchangeable. That statement makes no claim about the usefulness of the concept or how widespread it is.

That's OK if you don't have any other optics around. I've used dry ice and liquid nitrogen to show lasers in those cases (in my lab, a sparkler would only induce the question of where to hide the body of the perpetrator). But I think the important criterion in the OP is to not have any net flow from the source of the smoke; a sparkler is hot, so there will be convection.

There's no value in answering it. You seem to be arguing a different point than everyone else in this thread.