swansont

No, actually, it wouldn't. First of all, energy is conserved. The minimum energy required to take apart the nucleus is exactly the same as you get when you assemble it. From that standpoint it would take no extra energy at all. The minimum energy to take apart the nucleus is given by the binding energy. This being science (you should try it sometime) we can calculate the binding energy of U-238. It's about 1.8 GeV. (The difference between the mass of the constituent particles and the mass of the U-238, multiplied by c^2). Since some of the hydrogen would have to be deuterium and tritium, owing to all the extra neutrons, it would take even less energy than this to break the Uranium up into hydrogen. That means you're off by at least 44 orders of magnitude . (there are 6.24 x 10^9 GeV/Joule) That's not typically considered "approximately correct"

Baloney. What you've done is shown that if you build a really crappy detector, you can get results that don't have good agreement with the theory. Because the detector is crappy. I can do a similar thing by leaving the lens cap on a telescope. But that doesn't disprove astronomical observations.

If we're talking about science, visceral knowledge can go pound sand. We want empirical knowledge. Not making sweeping generalizations (which you actually did, twice, in the passage under discussion) would seem to be at odds with making absolute statements.

Wanted to update this with the note that installed solar PV in the US has passed 20 GW (up from ~1 GW in 2008), and about an equal amount to that is expected to be installed by the end of 2016. 40 GW would be around a 4000% increase since just before the economic collapse and the stimulus, which kick-started solar. Such failure. http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/us-solar-market-prepares-for-biggest-quarter-in-history

The temperature drops because the wavelength increases, in proportion to the expansion of the universe. Wien's law connects the wavelength with a temperature. http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/cmb.htm http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/CMB.html

A 1 kg ball moving with a speed of 1 m/s has half a Joule of translational KE. But it doesn't have a temperature based on that rolling. kT for that energy is about 10^22 K. Temperature assumes an ensemble of particles that have reached a steady state and exhibit a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of speeds. The description of colliders assumes that you had such an ensemble, because in the early universe you did. You would need to assume you had billions of 1 kg balls, elastically colliding , with an average speed of 1 m/s to assign a temperature to that.

Nope. There are arguments on this very discussion board that refute your naive contention.

No, not really. Temperature tells you something about energy - average vibrational KE - but the reverse isn't true.

It's not obvious to me.

Even if that were true (you might note it's one hypothesis among many in that link), I don't see how it supports your claim that "criminals are poor because they have a problem with working for a living"

Hot is a property or condition. Heat is energy being transferred owing to a temperature difference.

If one argues that these things are not real, how is that an argument that they are the sum total of reality? That makes no sense.

Tonight on Criminal Minds

Dentistry dates back more than 200 years. Our self-inflicted tooth problems are relatively recent on an evolutionary scale. i.e. problems caused by our diet since we settled down in the last ~10,000 years. What fraction of dental problems does that represent?

So you and/or people you know gathered it? How do you know it is ancient?

How would you find the area of a circular strip of finite size?

If science is not tied directly to reality, then how can the things represented by the terms defined by science be considered real?

I don't understand why low rates indicates gamma. If the discriminator is set to 1/3 of the alpha energy, then it will filter out anything below ~1.8 MeV. But that might not hold for particles that aren't alphas. I don't know the details of that detector, but since alphas deposit their energy in such a small volume, there's a possibility the detector would be less sensitive to electrons and gammas.

You could, in principle, turn U-238 into hydrogen and back.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had. If most justices think there was no error in applying or interpreting precedent by the lower court, why would they take on a case?

Questions that come to mind are whether the detector can resolve the energy of the particles, and if it's sensitive to electrons. I suspect that some fairly high energy electrons get kicked out of the foil when an alpha comes tearing through. Having looked at relevant section of the FQXI paper, it seems perhaps not. "Both SCA LL settings were at 1/3 of the characteristic a pulse-height " That means it should be insensitive to a 60 keV gamma, too. He did a two-hour control test, but the coincidences in the main experiment the coincidences were at less than one per day (~10^-5/sec; did he really do this experiment for two months or so?), so that's not conclusive. The control was in a different geometry — 90 degrees vs back-to-back. He doesn't label his graphs well, so I don't really know what figures 7 and 8 are showing.

Asking for additional detail is not an attack. Since an interaction with the gold is being claimed, that does not preclude the possibility of gammas originating there. You should know that, rather than having an attitude.

There's not enough information presented to critique this. It is? Where would the gammas be coming from? How is he doing the detection? There may be schemes that are not sensitive to gammas. It's tough to give thoughts when you present no details.

Right - that's what I was thinking of for the two-photon source. Many other single-photon sources are just low-intensity via filters. The timing of the production of the photon doesn't come into play.

Regardless, it still exists as a real, physical object. But it's then providing shade, which is not a real, physical object.