swansont

It is. Conservation of angular momentum.

Is the issue the time it takes (i.e. the light is very old), or the fact that the recessional speed exceeds c?

What data do you have to support that this is the case? If acceleration depended on the mass difference, rather than the mass product, how would this affect, say, the planetary orbits and the motion of our moon? The moon experiment wasn't designed to support or disprove this particular conjecture, so your critique of it is without merit. You have proceeded under the apparent assumption that Newton's gravitational law didn't have a massive (as it were) amount of evidence to support it already.

Probably nothing. But if they did do that, I'd expect they'll want the pool boy to start the car every morning, because there will be a lot of pissed-off shareholders. (This is assuming they actually drive themselves anywhere) This is the US government, though. They'll find a way to screw it up. (The republicans through greed and the democrats through incompetence, with some corruption thrown in on both sides)

The insolation is dependent on the latitude and thus so does the grid parity point. If your panel doesn't track the sun's angle above the horizon you'll take a significant hit on how much power you can generate, and thus the break-even point. —— I think my main objection to panels on a car is that you put something somewhat delicate in harm's way, and it's not worth the risk/reward. A few m^2 and perhaps 5 kWh/m^2/day, for 10 kWh. 20% efficient panels gives you 2 kWh, which is enough to drive about 5 miles. But what happens when you get into a fender-bender? Are the panels as resilient as the structural material of the car, or do the panels shatter? Are they even up to the repeated shock of slamming the doors shut on a daily basis? Is that worth the extra money?

And there are quantities on the atomic scale that are not quantized. The post I responded to stated that QM applied at the atomic scale and below, and that's not really accurate. IMO it's more accurate to say it's the scale when you may have to start treating things as waves rather than as classical particles.

How is this relevant to the question?

Anything with quantum physics and consciousness mentioned simultaneously probably belongs in P&S

The system has to have a lower energy after undergoing decay for the reaction to be possible. Not all atoms can do this.

Cannot personally profit, right now. True. But the original plan handed the keys, pink slip and paid-up no-fault insurance over to the administration, who would be free to pick and choose who got what in the bailout, so there would be opportunity to funnel more money toward favored institutions. (Who would all happen to have open seats on the board of directors next year.) Congress as a whole has low approval ratings. But I think it's viewed by the various constituents as "Our guy/gal is good, but the rest of them losers should be voted out"

By "It" are you referring to millions of years of erosion, cutting through layers of sedimentation and other deposits that are millions of years older? i.e what the scientific evidence indicates?

I think the "killer asteroid" is supposed to hit (or not) in 2063. But the odds are still slim — you can't get a good read on it yet, and the uncertainty is a path much larger than the size of the earth It's hard enough to predict technology and science a decade into the future. How would the aliens know when Europeans would emerge from the dark ages, or that China and the Middle East would change their direction involving science and discovery? The atmosphere for scientific inquiry is dependent on the political/religious attitudes. There's just no way to know that the industrial revolution would happen, much less that relativity and quantum physics would be figured out. Even if postulating aliens were plausible, this scenario isn't plausible. Unless they figured that if we hadn't advanced to that level of sophistication we weren't worth saving.

What definition of "obvious" are you using here? Yes, I did. There is no legitimate reason to use a large font for an entire post. It, along with ALLCAPS is considered rude — tantamount to shouting. I asked for context, because your question was too open-ended without it. I feared you might tread into some nonsense. Silly me. Ok, given that context, the answer is no. Parts of a theory that are not testable are not scientific. That's why, for example, people are working on ways to get around singularities that pop up in theories. The theory fails to hold under those conditions. However, the "random assembly" hypothesis is testable. You could test it on a smaller scale and see if it holds. No, that wasn't what I was saying. Perhaps that's part of your confusion. You haven't really defined what you mean by a proposition (I'll be very disappointed if any equivocation appears later on) but either the proposition has to be testable or it has to depend on another one that's testable. If it's independent then it can be tossed from the theory, so there's no reason to include it if it isn't somehow testable. I'm still not seeing where you have discussed untestable predictions of quantum theory, as you stated in your first post. You can either do that and continue discussion, or not and the thread will be locked. Trolling is a behavior that grows tiresome.

I think he pegged it, though there were a whole lot of dems that helped repeal Glass-Steagall. There's plenty of blame to go around, I'd have some respect for anyone who had the brass ones to admit their complicity. Pelosi didn't (in the clip I saw), and Bush sure didn't in his remarks last week.

Agreed.

That's not the reality. When particles collide they can create particles by converting their kinetic energy into mass energy. The e.g. shower of mesons you get when colliding protons are not particles that were inside the protons.

Yes, he can. That's one way you can tell you're in an accelerating frame of reference, and can be seen in the Sagnac effect (a rotating frame) The velocity four-vector is the invariant quantity, so the numbers get combined in quadrature, but the idea is basically right. If someone observes you to be moving through space, your motion through time is also affected to make your velocity vector through spacetime remain at c.

They slowed the speed of light propagation, not the individual photons If they the same color, no. The Casimir effect is hypothesized to allow you to exceed c http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scharnhorst_effect

Right. Alphas are exceedingly tightly bound, which is why they are the particle of choice to be released for nuclei that are too big, but stable vs beta decay.

Nuclei have energy levels and shells for neutrons and protons, similar to those of electrons, so you can reach a state where a proton or neutron has a higher energy than an empty state of the other particle. The particle will change identity if the nucleus can release energy in doing so, which is what happens in beta decay. Physical, chemical and biological reactions are also affected by isotopes; heavier particle move slower, on average, at a given temperature, and tend to react or diffuse more slowly. For example, there are seasonal variations in the concentration of O-18 and deuterium in water found in ice layers. Heavier isotopes evaporate more slowly and condense more quickly, so the isotopic ratios will differ depending on the conditions. http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/icecore/review.php

No, that's all there is.

Basically yes, but you have to realize that there are two different nuclear forces — strong and weak. The strong force does act on both neutrons and protons, and nuclei with too many nucleons tends to alpha decay. But an excess of protons or neutrons leads to beta decay, which is mediated by the weak force. Light atoms can be unstable with beta decay, as I mentioned before. Be-8 is also unstable, splitting into two alphas.

What is a synthetic state?

Seems to me all the answers were just a couple of seconds of ad-lib to bridge the way back to their talking points. I was disappointed that Obama seems reticent to take the gloves off. In an early exchange McCain talked about earmarks and fired a salvo at Obama. If McCain's so opposed, why did he choose a running mate who loves them? Obama didn't bring that up at all. And McCain's lame joke about bear DNA would have been a time to attack him on the importance of science and technology. I tuned out after McCain's second reference to himself as not winning "Miss Congeniality." It just seemed like theater by that point.