swansont

There are “patrons of science” that fund museums and researchers. I recall funding of his paleontology digs being discussed in Johanson’s book “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis). The “return” they get is a successful dig and maybe a part of a museum named after them. Others fund digs to get a share of the proceeds when the fossils are sold, like those who fund hunts for sunken treasure. In the US the NSF funds research, but the amount for paleontology is a very small slice of their budget

I don’t see why not. It only needs to be wide enough to fit the card, and long enough to accommodate a row of the holes, and read the rows sequentially

Yes; this is how laser cooling works. You have to adjust the laser’s or atom’s frequency if you want the interaction to continue as the atom slows down (by “chirping” the laser frequency for the former, or by exploiting the zeeman shift with an external magnetic field for the latter) Otherwise the change in speed eventually shifts the atom out of resonance.

Not really. Twenty million spent on lobbying is a pittance for a company doing >20 billion in sales. Buying congress is relatively cheap. Pfizer, for example, spent almost $2.8 billion on advertising in 2022, but "only" $12.6 million on lobbying https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-much-does-pfizer-spend-on-advertising/# https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2022&id=D000000138

Do you have any evidence that spacetime is a substance that could rupture? Can you show the math that led to these negative time dilation values?

All science is provisional. But until there’s an experimentally-verified model, this is just appealing to magic.

When I see drug ads I sometimes try and assess how prevalent the condition is and how much marketing there is for the drug. It speaks to the profit margin and also the fact that you're often treating but not curing an affliction, so if it's chronic any new customer is going to be paying for repeated treatments for some period of time. It also explains how they have these coupon programs to lower out-of-pocket costs. If you're going to be buying ~30 pills a month for the next ten years, they can eat the co-pay and still make a big profit.

Any ones that don't require new physics?

Yes, as I mentioned; Doppler broadening and collisional broadening are two of the prominent ones. Energy is conserved, and if you have a polyatomic molecule or your gas has collisions, there's a ready reservoir for both energy and momentum conservation. I don't know if anyone has looked at a single neutral atom absorbing and emitting photons in an isolated situation, trying to see if e.g. a red-detuned photon was absorbed and resulted in a red-detuned emission, because how would you do that?

! Moderator Note One thread per topic, please

Surely you mean absorption here. Photons can’t be at rest, and so can’t be adsorbed. Transition energies themselves do not have an arbitrarily small precision. They have a natural linewidth, which can be broadened by various mechanisms. The D2 transition in Rb-87, for example, has a ~6MHz linewidth, owing to the ~25 ns lifetime of the excited state. The transition probability decreases exponentially as you move off resonance. There is no mismatch in energy, as such. The atom absorbs all of the photon energy.

The above seems explicit to me. From your view, what issue isn’t being addressed? Momentum is conserved in interactions. The notion in QM that light slows down in a medium but takes a straight path is because the virtual excitations take time but don’t result in a real absorption because momentum has to be conserved - there’s nothing there to recoil. Only the straight path is permitted.

exchemist didn’t say it was. They said the average perturbation was zero. I thought Genady addressed this.

Vacuum fluctuations are not an example of variations about zero energy, though. The energy of the vacuum - zero-point energy - is not zero.

I didn’t see it here, I saw it in pieces discussing this.

What’s an example of a fluctuation about zero?

The linewidth of a de-excitation transition is related to the lifetime, owing to the uncertainty relation. The nominal value of the transition might be e.g. 1 eV, but the value of any particular photon might be slightly higher or lower than 1 eV. Not a negative amount, since the linewidth is on the order of MHz to GHz, but a negative contribution because the energy is smaller than the average

If you invoke magic (or any other unphysical phenomenon) then you can make up any rules you want.

Things that sounds like “that’s simply not done because we’ve never done it” i.e. a very conservative, non-empirical response. Consistent with the description John Cleese gives in “A Fish Called Wanda” Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing Not “don’t do that, it tastes awful” which would be empirical though subjective. Or “do it if it’s to your liking” No, it’s “that’s not the proper way to do it, personal enjoyment be damned”

What is the connection to conservation of momentum? The issue is tunneling. The contribution can average to zero; the value being slightly larger or smaller than the average.

It’s not supposed to be a visually faithful depiction, so that the picture doesn’t reveal the answer. You’re supposed to use math skills rather than measurement.

I fund it interesting that the pushback I’ve seen on this is that it goes against tradition rather than evaluating whether or not it makes for better tea.

If they are in the box when opened, they were placed there before.

! Moderator Note Yeah, no idea why. Moved, since this seems like a Schrödinger’s cat question. No, that’s not consistent with what we know. The contents of the box is likely a classical situation, not a quantum superposition, so the contents would be determined when the items were placed in the box.

“The chemist who told us to put salt in our tea explains why she did it” “While it might seem outlandish, the idea of adding a pinch of salt to tea in order to reduce the bitterness is rooted in science. Sodium ion is a key element of salt, and it interacts with the chemical mechanism that produces the perception of a bitter taste.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414348-the-chemist-who-told-us-to-put-salt-in-our-tea-explains-why-she-did-it/