swansont

Let’s see the math

Indeed. The lack of rigor is frustrating to people who are used to it in scientific inquiry. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in legal circles, which is a lower standard than science has. “Objective” in science means measurements and recorded data. I don’t think the data are being dismissed. The conclusions are. Apply the same standard. We didn’t “dismiss” lightning - the phenomenon was observed. It was studied under somewhat controlled circumstances. Show me the scientific experiments that show UFO phenomena must be aliens.

The impact is from the recoil, which changes the KE, causing heating (or cooling under the right conditions) Now multiply by the scattering rate. The reason laser cooling works is that you can pretty easily scatter millions of photons/sec with the D2 transition. Even for scattering rates that are significantly smaller, it will have an effect when integrated over the course of ~10,000 sec Not quite. That’s the KE of a Na atom moving 2.5 cm/s If the atom were moving 250 m/s, you could stop it or double its speed with 10^5 scatters (if the atom were moving toward/away from the source. That doesn’t match up with your numbers.

! Moderator Note One incorrect answer is enough. No need to repeat it. (electricity is not an EM wave, and does not flow at c)

He’s talking about resonant scattering - i.e. absorption with an allowed transition - which is not the same thing. He’s right that that explanation doesn’t work, for reasons he gives, but that’s not the QM explanation being offered. So one can make the case that he’s debunking a strawman. Absorption by a virtual state doesn’t permit transfer of energy or momentum to the atom; the only possibility is for the photon to continue on along the same path. (Which, again, is not the case he discusses)

Where does he say that? (time stamp)? My problem with what I saw was already raised elsewhere - he states that the wave from the electron motion travels at a different speed, but that’s just a circular explanation. If the E field oscillations travel at c, then why would the other oscillations travel slower? He just states this with no explanation.

Yes. The speed change from a scatter is going to be a few cm/s. You’d need the scattering rate, too.

I’m not sure how much, but I see blue light scattered by the atmosphere, and that light originally came from the sun.

Yes. And photons get absorbed and emitted, by virtual states (so there is no energy or momentum imparted) and this takes time. So the photons travel at c, but the light takes longer to traverse the medium - it slows down. In the classical view, the permittivity of a medium is larger than the vacuum value; the EM field can’t oscillate as it does in free space - because it’s interacting with the electrons in its vicinity - so it slows down and has a shorter wavelength

Photon absorption is often a dipole interaction. There is a transition dipole moment, which gives rise to certain selection rules. If the photon changes direction, momentum has been imparted, and thus, kinetic energy. The amount of energy imparted is small, so the wavelength is only changed by a small amount - to first order it can be ignored.

You have to pay attention to detail in what is said. Light slows down in a medium. Photons do not. — talking about light and talking about photons are not exactly the same thing.

Primarily for military applications? My microwave oven disagrees. So does my wi-fi router. There’s nothing under discussion here that can’t be found in a textbook, news article, or as a reasonable extrapolation of other easily-accessible information. You can swallow various devices as medical diagnostics with wireless communication for data collection. So these are slightly larger than pea-sized https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/capsule-endoscopy/about/pac-20393366 “in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the SmartPill, an ingestible capsule that measures pressure, pH, temperature, and transit time as it passes through a person’s gastrointestinal tract.” https://www.inverse.com/science/ingestible-sensor-digestive-system

Defrosting organs? I’m not sure why you would need an internal transmitter, since microwaves can penetrate.

No kinetic energy loss, from mechanics. Energy can be transferred from one particle to another. But there is no energy loss. The atom is in the same energy state. Photon energy shifted to or from the atom’s kinetic energy. Why does that matter? The net result is translation. Radiation pressure is responsible for clearing out the gas near a star after fusion is initiated. For the tail on a comet. And you can have e.g. Rayleigh scattering, another elastic process.

! Moderator Note Someone reported the thread; it was closed so the mods could evaluate the report. No, it’s not a problem.

If a photon is re-emitted when the atom drops back to its original state, what is inelastic about the process?

Elastic scattering just means there’s no change in the energy level of the atom or molecule. If the photon is absorbed and re-emitted in a different direction, there is momentum transferred to the atom. It’s the basis of laser cooling. How much “coldness” is contained in an object at 0K?

No concrete evidence means just that - there is no concrete evidence, and you can’t draw the conclusion that it’s aliens. You seem to have admitted that there isn’t any conclusive evidence. Since not everyone is familiar with that, they might arrive at a different explanation. Nothing anthropocentric about the limitations of relativity, and the vast distances of interstellar space.

What does the pea have to contain? All the electronics and the energy source? Really small circuits are certainly possible. Commercially-available ones a little larger than your parameters can be found, and could be made smaller. One limiting factor would be if you have a power requirement

“real” being nonzero but still exceedingly small. How big of a balloon would be required to lift the payload to that height, and would you risk doing that knowing that it might or might not get close to any target of interest, and could be shot down well before that happened? I would imagine the risk is greater from a ground-based bomb in a van, that could be placed in sufficient proximity to a target. A balloon bomb is a threat from a movie writer.

In a word, yes. The same standard, at least, as any scientific endeavor. Possibly higher, since extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but certainly not a lower standard of evidence. Is there a scientific field where “something unusual” is sufficient to draw a definite conclusion? How do you determine the competence? The recent balloon adventures uncovered a story related to this “When the USS New York was sailing towards Iwo Jima in 1945, the crew spotted a silver sphere flying high overhead that seemed to follow the battleship for hours. Concerned that the shiny orb might be a Japanese balloon weapon, the captain ordered it shot down. After the guns failed to score a hit, a navigator realized that they were attacking Venus.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/03/japanese-balloon-bombs-world-war/ Flawed analogy. You and others keep doing the equivalent of insisting that bigfoot exists, and additionally, is anybody saying not to investigate?

Elastic scattering does this, too. There’s a net outward radiation pressure from any source.

$400k for a missile, but $200k for the training version, so cost without explosive payload somewhere in between. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder That’s cheap in comparison to US military budgets. The Air Force alone has bought more than 10,000 of them. Raytheon has hundreds-of-million-dollar contracts to supply them. https://www.airforce-technology.com/news/usaf-receives-10000th-aim-9x-sidewinder-missile/ This is peanuts, relatively speaking. And might tick off something on the training requirements for a pilot or two, so these might be in lieu of other missiles that would be fired.

Since a mole of an ideal gas at STP has a volume of 22.4 L, the lift is about 1g per liter under those conditions.

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