swansont

This also explains the relatively large hyperfine splitting of the S state. That’s the solution to the Schrödinger equation. This has to be multiplied by the volume element, which depends on r and is zero at r=0, to get the physically meaningful quantity.

It isn’t. You might have only been looking at the wave function itself. The probability multiplies this by r^2, making it go to zero at the origin. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/hydr.html

Yes, it’s a mathematical consequence, because the equation that describes the probability is math. Quantum mechanics can be hard to conceptualize, as some ideas are at odds with classical, everyday notions. Such as the electron having some particle behaviors and some wave behaviors, and the way probability shows up in the way things work. The hydrogen radial wave function drops off as e^-r/a (and probability is the square of that) so while there is a probability of finding the electron far from the nucleus it is vanishingly small.

A whistle-blower is one who reports wrongdoing to their chain of command or a designated point of contact outside the chain. There’s nothing traitorous about reporting suspected criminal behavior to the authorities.

Which would have been fine in a thread on alternative power, but not in science news, which need to focus on the linked article

Wut They shoved all the downside/problems to the latter part of the article. How does the reactor shut down? Can the decay heat keep the salt molten? How are they making electricity? As I recall, a huge problem in these reactors is primary-secondary leaks. How are they dealing with that? (it won’t be as bad as with liquid sodium, but I imagine it’s still an issue)

This is related to whistleblowing…how?

There's evidence that supports one. Not so much for the other. There's evidence that supports one of these. Not so much for the other.

! Moderator Note Unfortunately this violates our site's rules (2.7) about linking to sites and documents, and relying on document attachments.

Right, because it's not like something like this has ever happened! <wink, wink>

Just to clarify, because this is a little unclear: fission is not the source of heat after shutdown. It's called "decay heat" and comes from the decay of the fission products. As I stated earlier, the thermal energy you have to deal with in fusion would be the couple of grams of fuel at whatever the plasma temperature is.

The link provided by the OP suggests it is, or at least can be. Variants of the theorem include multiple and even infinitely many typists, and the target text varies between an entire library and a single sentence. ... For n = 1 million, Xn is roughly 0.9999, but for n = 10 billion Xn is roughly 0.53 and for n = 100 billion it is roughly 0.0017. As n approaches infinity, the probability Xn approaches zero; that is, by making n large enough, Xn can be made as small as is desired,[2][a] and the chance of typing banana approaches 100%. The same argument shows why at least one of infinitely many monkeys will produce a text as quickly as it would be produced by a perfectly accurate human typist copying it from the original.

The context of the OP's argument is often "evolution can't happen because randomness" and then showing the big numbers as the conclusion. This ignores the point that chemistry isn't random (as we've brought up a few times), and is falsified by the Miller-Urey experiment (and yes, while it's true that the conditions of that experiment are likely not those of early earth, it demolishes the notion that such probability calculations are relevant, because you would calculate a low probability of those amino acids being formed, and you would predict the formation of molecules that don't form.) One part of the rebuttal to the OP is that only the creationists are asserting that all aspects of evolution are random, and you should never cite a creationist as a credible source of information about evolution.

Yes, but there are only a few grams of fuel in it at any given time, limiting the thermal energy, and it cools as it expands. https://www.iter.org/sci/FusionFuels

Who paid for the development? Who were the customers? edit: It wasn’t the US doing this. from 1920 to 1935, the US produced no more than 35 tanks (p. 75) https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R1860.pdf

And to my point above, nobody was going to develop the tank on their own.

Devices ≠ technology IOW, we didn’t need those airplanes anymore, but we still used planes Competition might drive some progress, but business has to deem the research worthwhile. There needs to be a profit involved. They are happy to use research done by the government - basically free to them - after the fact. Or have the government pay them (direct or subsidy, partially or fully funded) to do it.

No, there isn’t. As I described above, anyone who might be branded a traitor is leaking information, not whistle-blowing.

We have a thread for introductions

They only obey these statistics if they are identical, so yes, they are exactly the same

! Moderator Note Split from https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/124059-correction-hijack-sharia-in-the-us/ Owing to multi-part posts, this split may be omitting some discussion

"Getting ahead in life" seems to be an artificial distinction. Did you mean inert, rather than innate? The 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy will increase, so it's not going to help in this distinction. There might be some traction in the rate at which entropy increases for something of equal mass, in general (i.e. there will be exceptions) e.g. living matter tends to consume food and excrete waste, and in doing so there are chemical reactions. To any extent that inanimate matter does this (or an analogue of this), it probably tends to do so more slowly. That might be something to look into.

Not quite https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ You can locally decrease entropy if you increase it somewhere else. Overall it increases, and work has to be done to decrease it. This is not a controversial issue. Evolution is natural. A salt crystal forming from a solution decreases the entropy of the salt. Last I checked, salt is not alive. Similarly, forming ice decreases entropy of the water. If you take H2 and O2 and add a spark, you will get mostly H20. You will not get a random assortment of H and O atoms strung together. The outcomes of chemistry are not random. You are using a watered-down description of entropy and trying to apply it well outside of its scope.

Infinite monkey theorem. (I should have said if you have an infinite number...) It's another related gambit to what I said earlier. Infinity is big, but we'll use a million, and a million is pretty big, right? Well, no. A million is small in this context. It's a bait-and-switch, going from the infinite monkey theorem (the wikipedia link addresses n going to infinity) to the million monkey theorem as if they were basically interchangeable.

But you have an infinite number of them, so it actually takes almost no time at all. The issue here is someone is trying to baffle/intimidate their audience with large numbers, while also ignoring the incredibly large numbers involved in chemistry. Avogadro's number, for example, is 6.02 x 10^23. That's just one gram of hydrogen atoms. 100 grams of something of atomic number 100. The mass of the earth, meanwhile, is 6 x 10^24 kg 283 trillion trillion is 2.83 x 10^20. In the scheme of things it's a small number. *Nobody with decent understanding.