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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. But oil would likely have remained inexpensive, and there would have been little incentive to improve gas mileage. We would probably have more consumption than we do today, and more pollution as a result.
  2. swansont

    Nuclear Power

    "No pollution" ignores the construction of the plant, but it's certainly less pollution per kWh produced over the life of the plant than for fossil fuels. A problem in the US is education. People are afraid of nuclear power and radiation, but partly because they don't understand anything about the technical issues and can't objectively assess the risk.
  3. Your link admits that Setterfield's contention is wrong (a prediction is not borne out), and that the work of Humphreys did not yield anything. There are a number of experiments that show that the fine structure constant, which depends on c, could not have changed by more than a tiny amount.
  4. Do posts in speculations count toward your total? (edit: it seems to be so) I know that general discussion ones do not. If so, posting in this thread would not contribute toward "informative, knowledgeable, well-founded posts" even though it padded your post count total. I don't think post count is particularly meaningful.
  5. The iron core concentrates the field lines, so that the secondary sees a larger field, and thus a larger changing field, so Faraday's law tells you you get a larger voltage out the other side. If you take the core out the load is reduced, so I think you will just draw less current in the primary.
  6. Evolution does not have a direction, and you need to define "information" It's already been pointed out that "Darwinists" is an incorrectly applied (and some might say pejorative) term. I don't see where you've presented any evidence. Sure it can. Lamarckism was a naturalistic (would-be) theory, and it was shown to be wrong. However, you can't refute a theory that is correct, but it is falsifiable (i.e. you can test it in a way that it would fail if it were wrong). e.g. Darwin knew nothing of DNA when he came up with his theory. No mechanism for passing on of traits would have been a big blow.
  7. Nothing you've said here is objectively true, not the least of which is that molecules-to-anything is not part of evolution. If you've already assumed that Genesis is true, then the rest is circular reasoning. The Creationist interpretation breaks physical law. Evolution doesn't say God didn't do it, it just says that if he did, that we can see the mechanism. Lewontin is stating an opinion, and this is just an appeal to authority if you think it applies to anyone but Lewontin. There are reputable Creationists?
  8. That wasn't one of the categories. It was "creator" or "random chance."
  9. I find "no idea" to be preferable to an easy answer that is wrong.
  10. Furthermore, there are outcomes of chemistry and physics that are not random. If you e.g. mix together some chemicals, you get predictable outcomes.
  11. What about the option that the universe always existed?
  12. swansont

    mass

    The mass is never seen to increase in your own reference frame, since you can always view yourself as being at rest. A difficulty lies in trying to reconcile why your mass, measured by another, depends on their speed relative to yours. That's why, as Atheist comments, we use invariant mass and describe kinetic energy with a separate term (as we already know KE is frame-dependent)
  13. To imply that one cannot study past events scientifically is ludicrous. This concept would, by extension, mean that you would not convict any criminal of a crime for which there was not an eyewitness, because the crime happened in the past and nobody was there to see it. And besides, evolution has nothing to do with what happened at the beginning. It describes what happens to populations, i.e. already-living things. edit: changed wording to "to populations" in last sentence.
  14. I think we've seen why it won't be universally accepted. It all depends on what fraction of the population want ideology first, and will disregard explanations that do not conveniently fit within those ideologies.
  15. You need to look at a broader view of the situation. Getting fat as a chronic problem in the population is a relatively recent phenomenon. A hunter-gatherer 20,000+ years ago needed to store fat when extra calories were available, because the food supply was not as regular or plentiful. We are a product of evolutionary pressures on that population (under those conditions) very much more so than on our current situation.
  16. Really? That hasn't been my experience. The ones that post online often wouldn't recognize science if it bit them in the posterior. No, science does not rest upon a belief that "that's all there is." It simply operates under the recognition that it is limited to naturalistic phenomenon. That gets tested all the time, and it keeps working.
  17. You're always going to have some of the Lithium around as a gas, because it has a nonzero vapor pressure.
  18. You can have static electric and magnetic fields, though I wouldn't call them "flatlined photons." But they are DC, i.e. they are constant in time. EM radiation (photons) have them oscillating at some frequency. So if you wiggle an electron, it radiates photons (as I'm sure you already know, YT, because that's what happens in an antenna)
  19. What is the direction of the magnetization of the wire?
  20. Technically vapor is used to describe the gaseus form, so that isn't visible, either. The water has started to condense, so it's mist/fog/cloud of the small condensed droplets suspended in the air. This is yet another case where the science definition is at odds with the everyday definition, where a diffuse suspension might be called a vapor. A foggy definition, as it were.
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