swansont

Constant c falls out of Maxwell's equations. Special relativity follows from constant c. Do the math. There is no ether. Yes, it's strange. Get over it already.

You have to enjoy it. Or have the discipline to see it through in case you don't.

Not in a million years. Well, 60 or so million.

It's the Spring of 1957 and Bobby goes to pick up his date. He's a pretty hip guy with his own car. When he goes to the front door, the girl's father answers and invites him in. "Carrie's not ready yet, so why don't you have a seat?" he asks. "That's cool," says Bobby. Carrie's father asks Bobby what they're planning to do. Bobby replies politely that they will probably just go to the soda shop or a movie. Carrie's father responds, "Why don't you two go out and screw? I hear all the kids are doing it." Naturally, this comes as a quite a surprise to Bobby, so he asks Carrie's Dad to repeat it. "Yeah," says Carrie's father, "Carrie really likes to screw, she'll screw all night if we let her!" Well, this just made Bobby's eyes light up, and immediately revised his plans for the evening. A few minutes later, Carrie comes downstairs in her little poodle skirt and announces that she's ready to go. Almost breathless with anticipation, Bobby escorts his date out the front door. About 20 minutes later, a thoroughly disheveled Carrie rushes back into the house, slams the door behind her, and screams at her father: 'Dammit, Daddy! "The Twist!!" It's called "The Twist!!!"'

To the creationist, every new fossil just means there are two new gaps to fill. "Reptile -> bird" filled by archie just demands that you come up with a new transitional. But you're letting them set the rules if the argument becomes "you can't show it wasn't created" and you haven't defined what a transitional fossil is - chances are they will say it's a "half-formed" specimen - something that couldn't possibly have existed. Something with half a lung, or half a wing. A self-fulfilling prediction: if the creatre couldn't possibly exist, transitions are impossible. (BTW- The whale lineage is a much better example to use as an example. More steps present.) Science is inductive. Let the creationist make some predictions, and see how well that turns out. Why is there a pattern to the strata in which we find the fossils? Chances are you'll get "geological sorting" (which would be an even worse violation of the second law of thermodynamics than evolution could possibly be, which it isn't) It's a strawman argument to say that the platypus isn't transitional, because it's an extant species - there's no "after" to which it could transition. The bottom line is that creationists aren't playing by the rules of science and logical debate. The arguments are based on a misunderstanding of how science works (proof vs. evidence) and are chock full of logical fallacies. Point those fallacies out, and make them do some science.

There's also Astrometry, which is the measurement of the positions of stars (and everything else) and is important for navigation.

Look here

IIRC They've also done this in room-temperature vapor using electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) to make the linewidth really narrow, so there's a really big dispersion right near the resonance.

Note that he's not quoting Wheeler, just a calculation Wheeler did. If you solve the "particle-in-a-box" for the Universe, you get an infinite number of EM radiation modes, each frequency w with an energy of (n+ 1/2)hbar*w, where n is the occupation number. Since there are an infinite number of modes, even if n is zero, the equation show infinite energy. But that just an artifact of the model - that energy isn't available to us.

I wasn't asking you defend it, I was asking for a direct link to results of a test I had described, without having to wade through the marketing and publicity garbage. Methinks you doth protest too much. Quantum snake oil will do whatever you want it to. Tropical flavors? Not a problem.

It's called anomolous dispersion. It's not precluded by relativity. In essence you are just reshaping the pulse in a novel way. The idea that "nothing can exceed the speed of light" is a watered-down version of a concept of SR, diluted to the point that it's wrong.

Antimatter

Yes. Photons of sufficient energy make particle/antiparticle pairs. electron/positron pairs take minimum 1.02 MeV (the rest mass energy), and the process can be seen in bubble chambers and similar detectors.

"hydrogen-like" implies it has a single electron and you could use the generic form of the Bohr model energy equation to calculate the energy of the electron states.

No, photons are created and annihilated, they aren't "stored" in other particles. And since they possess energy whatever emitted them will see a mass change. Also you can create mass from the photons under the appropriate conditions.

"simple QM" is an oxymoron

c=h=1 for a lot of folks I know...

This is just based on what I remember from the group up the hall from me in school, but in superconductors, the magnetic field lines are trapped by the material (flux pinning sites). Above a certain current density (critical current), the flux lines start moving and exert forces on the electrons that destroy the superconductivity. The value depends on the superconductor. More on the critical current more stuff The cartoon I drew using the jargon I learned from that group.

Photons have momentum of p=E/c. Whan an atom absorbs a photon, it gets a momentum "kick." When it releases a photon, there is another "kick." But the directions don't have to coincide, so there can be a force on the atom. Even though E/c is small, atoms aren't very massive and an atom can absorb and emit millions of times a second. The 1997 Nobel prize in Physics was awarded for laser cooling, which uses the radiation pressure concept. (Chu, Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji)

There is a point where superconductors fail, as well. You cannot put an unlimited current through them.

here:

Wouldn't the "ridiculously" cancel out, then? c2 is almost 1 GeV, and electron transitions are of order 1 eV, so the mass change is (very) roughly a part in 109

(volume turned down by me) Gammas are photons from nuclear interactions. They are waves if you look at wave properties, they are particles if you look at particle properties. Gammas can create electron-positron pairs if of sufficient energy; they can cause the photoelectric effect and undergo Compton scattering. Since we were talking about a quantum of energy produced in an interaction, there is really nothing terribly wrong with saying "gamma particle," quasi-redundant though that might be. Certainly nothing so egregious as to elicit your response.