swansont

No, it's very real http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/278 An isomer (long-lived excited state) of Fe-65 was discovered because its mass is greater than that of the ground state, by an amount that is E/c^2. So the atom, absorbing a photon of that energy, increases in mass.

Ashish, you've asked me to weigh in here, but Klaynos is giving you reasonable answers. If you think that there are only particles, you need to explain things like single-particle interference. If you shoot single electrons, photons or atoms through a double slit, they will generate an interference pattern, which is a wave phenomenon, as Klaynos has already noted. One should realize that physics attempts to describe how nature behaves, not what these phenomena are. We use "particle" and "wave" because they are convenient to use, stemming from macroscopic behavior. And things like electrons have behaviors of both, which are convenient to use in the description of their behavior. But there's a big difference between "acts like a particle" and "is a particle" and to say the latter means you step outside of science, IMO, and into metaphysics. There's no way to test "what it really is." Only "how it behaves." You may be able to come up with a model in which everything is a particle. If you can get that to work, i.e. it's consistent with what we already have, explaining observations and predicting others, great. But to be useful (i.e. a better model), it will need to be simpler than what we already have. ————— "New Physics" post moved to speculations http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35525

Mass is a form of energy. If an object absorbs energy, its mass will increase. Standard physics separates the kinetic term, in order to be able to transform between reference frames. E2=m2c4 + p2c2 m here is the rest mass

It's not really the air, it's the water and steel. The steel has pushed the water out of the way, and it's the water pushing back that keeps the ship afloat. The air is at one atmosphere of pressure. It's there, but not really doing anything. All of the strength to withstand the forces is in the steel. The ship floats because the water displaced weighs more than the steel+whatever is inside the ship (were it to be completely submerged), so it exerts a greater force than the weight. Contrast this with a balloon inflated underwater. Then it's the air restricting the collapse, but the air would have to be above atmospheric pressure.

And, to clarify this, it means the theory doesn't hold at r=0. No need to test a theory where one doesn't claim it to be valid. I'll ask again, do you have any untestable implications of quantum physics in mind?

The formula assumes the energy is absorbed, which is not necessarily the case for a gas that is mostly transparent to the radiation. It's also included in the blackbody "correction factor" CaptainPanic mentioned; it's called the emissivity. (However, one would not include both it and the effect of reflection, since the latter is included in the former) Basically, yes. You could have temperature differences because of different emissivities, but if they are at the same temperature, something with a higher heat capacity has more energy that it can transfer for each degree it drops in temperature. The bottom line is the ability to burn is not just a function of the temperature, as in the oven example I gave previously.

What untestable implications do you have in mind?

I was under the impression it started falling apart before he and Obama arrived. Like people started reading the fine print and realized it was a pig in a poke. No oversight. No restrictions on CEO pay and bonuses. Little things like that.

We generally can't establish the connection between taxes paid in and government services. "Let the government pay for it!" (or substitute "insurance companies," or whatever) Cognitive dissonance is our birthright.

Not that different from moving ones; you get them all the time in resonant cavities, e.g. some types of lasers

You have a thread on this topic already http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35426 Please don't hijack other discussions

So? Should anyone take a non-responsive ad hominem seriously? Does the fact that Krugman wrote it mean that Paulson didn't testify before congress, didn't say what was quoted, and that section 8 of the proposed bailout didn't completely abandon oversight? I don't know who Krugman is and I don't care — I followed a link. I don't care if Bozo the Clown posted it after channelling Ramtha, though. It was factual information, and that's what is relevant. Attacking the source rather than the information is a very basic logical fallacy, the worst of political discussion, and you should know better. I don't understand what you're calling bullshit on.

Rubber is another material that tends to contract upon heating. Long molecules, stretched when cold, but bent when heated.

I'll have to read the article; I wonder if the net flow of energy is still outward and this is a localized effect.

I find the democrats' apparent willingness to bend over and essentially write another blank check of almost unlimited power to this administration appalling. Paulson does a complete about-face on oversight, and people think he's trustworthy? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/good-ideas-and-lies/ Haven't we seen enough knee-jerk legislation in the past several years to be a little more wary of these quick solutions? How well has this worked out? It's scary (to me) when Newt Gingrich becomes the voice of reason.

Yeah, I saw this earlier. The article is remarkable short on useful information. Typically these are alpha decayers, so by activating them you have them beta decay with a much shorter half-life, and that gets them into a different decay chain. Isotopes with a million-year (+) half-life are going to be low-level waste, because the specific activity is small, so this isn't a huge priority. Along the same lines, isotopes with really short half-lives decay quickly, so they aren't a problem either — the activity quickly drops to levels that aren't much of a problem. The real issue is the isotope with the 1,000-10,000 year half-life that's already beta decaying. The activity level will be high, and it won't decay away very quickly. You probably don't do this in a reactor because you want those neutrons to induce fission (these would be a poison) and you want to absorb only one neutron; in a reactor you may absorb several.

The shortcoming of this definition is that QM effects can creep up into macroscopic objects; the cutoff between QM and classical is not distinct. QM is the treatment of the behavior entities as waves. I think Severian once pointed out that "wave mechanics" would be a more apt description.

How are the rules rewritten? How does y = ux + wy get changed to x = vyu * uw - y?

You can model antiparticles as particles moving backward in time. At that level there is usually time-reversal symmetry, so the reaction looks just fine whether the clock is running forward or backward. There are some rare reactions that violate this; they all involve weak interactions.

Not every season — over a long time. The earth precesses, but having the moon limits the excursion.

Depending on who you think gamblers are, I'd say you have this backwards (this an argument of semantics, not statistics). Gamblers fall prey to this precisely because they believe in luck rather than understanding statistics. They think that the dice have memory, so if they've come up 7 ten times in a row, that somehow the next roll the odds will be less than 1/6. Casinos love people like this. Professional poker players are not gamblers, per se, because they understand the odds and bet accordingly, so that in the long run, they are betting on a proposition that is better than 50-50. Blackjack can be treated this way as well, if you can count the cards. ————— Luck, or the perception of it, also tends to bring the "remembering the hits and forgetting the misses" fallacy into play.

I think you are mixing two effects here, or at least not sufficiently differentiating them. Pluto (or any massive body) can be treated as a point to the extent that it's homogeneous, regardless of distance from the surface. It's the effect of the inhomogeneities that either can or cannot be ignored, depending on the distance. IOW, it can be treated as homogeneous because it's so far away. It can be treated as a point if it is homogeneous. Two separate things.

I don't see how that's possible. The higher-order rules have to converge to the lower-order rules. You can't change the outcome of my experiment by writing down an equation after-the-fact unless you are willing to toss a few observed concepts, like causality. At a very basic level, chemistry and biology are emergent theories of physics. Physics itself, with e.g. different classical vs quantum-mechanical descriptions, is emergent. Stochastic systems (e.g. thermodynamics) — are they emergent?

That involves an acceleration, and you can always tell who accelerated. It's easier, work-wise, to accelerate an individual than a large vehicle (like a car or train) containing an individual, but we often do that anyway. In inertial frames, with no memory of what was accelerated, there is no difference.

I think you need to investigate this further. A 50m water level difference is not the same as a 50m deep lake. That depends on the configuration of the dam. Here, the dam would be unable to generate electricity far earlier than it drains. There are ecological reasons why you might not want to drain a lake anyway. But then you have to also worry about where to put the extra water, because that's also on top (literally) of the normal water. This is going to be inconvenient for any people living near the lake.