MigL

Zero point energy is directly related to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and as such, it is a global property of our universe. It is also directly related to the expansion of the universe, and the reason it cannot be infinite ( some original ideas ) or even the current calculated 120 orders of magnitude greater than the values derived from observations of 'flatness' and expansion rates of our universe. See here for history and details regarding vacuum energy Zero-point energy - Wikipedia As it is a global property of the vacuum, and gives the vacuum a 'mass/energy' allowing it to 'gravitate', any decrease in vacuum energy allows expansion to increase. This is the mechanism for the inflationary period of the universe, while it was still in a global causal contact. See here for inflation history and modelling Cosmic inflation - Wikipedia As the universe is no longer in causal contact, 'tapping into' vacuum energy has the effect of decreasing local vacuum energy, possibly causing localized inflation. Think of the prospect of using zero point energy to power your car, and creating a new universe in your driveway. It would be a long walk to get to your front door 😄 .

Yes it is. The only other person I know of, who tosses around IQ comparisons as if they mean something, is Donald Trump. Draw whatever conclusions you wish from that ...

A lot of scientists do some things that are detestable. @exchemist has already mentioned some, but R Feynman liked dating female undergrads, F Haber and W Heisenberg were staunch NAZI supporters, and @swansont has been accused of being an authoritarian moderator ( 😄😄 ). Accomplishments and character have little to do with each other. I can even admire B Mussolini for making the trains run on time, and A Hitler for rebuilding the German economy, while detesting the methods used to accomplish such things.

That's putting it nicely 🙂 . Sometimes it can be termed 'delusion' 😄 . ( Delusion - a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, as a symptom of serious mental illness. )

The energy of empty space is actually very small; there just happens to be a HUGE amount of empty space. Unfortunately, that energy is unavailable, either for use, or in calculations ( 120 orders of magnitude discrepancy ). The 'empty' space of a Black Hole, however, is not the same 'empty' space. That space is defined by its Schwarzschild radius, and the resultant Event Horizon. Classically, the Event horizon conserves mass/energy, charge and angular momentum; there are various ways to extract energy from a massive, charged, spinning system. Semi-classically ( with some Thermodynamics and QM ) that space has a temperature, and depending on size, can radiate considerable amounts of radiative energy ( Romulan ships in the Star Trek universe employ a miniature BH as a power source as opposed to the matter/anti-matter process used by the Federation )

I don't see how we 'shape' our part of the universe, or 'create' the future. We interact with the only part of the universe that the speed of light/information allows us to. If that is what you are saying, then ... yeah; but it's no big revelation, it is a fundamental principle.

I am arguing that the levelling and unification of interactions make it unlikely that an electron can be modelled as a BH. Not that it makes it possible. Which is still a classical solution. You are the one who brought up the observation that the classical picture is insufficient, and Quantum gravity may modify the situation. Why can't I do the same ?

Exactly ... Quantum Gravity. The exact same new Physics KJW proposes that might allow for electrons to be quantum ( not classical ) Black Holes. It's expected ) though not certain ) that as Planck scale is approached, gravity becomes comparable in strength to the other forces and can no longer be ignored. There is a further expectation that all the fundamental forces are unified at that scale. Most theories, including Sting Theory and LQG, favor the unification of all fundamental interactions.

I have used the two-part lids. They usually come with Mason jars, used for 'canning' home-made preserves such as jams, peach slices in syrup, cherries in alcohol, even pickeled vegetables or tomato/pasta sauce ( I used to help my mom when I was young ). They are similar in operation to the other 'tabbed' lids, and both have a rubber friction ring where the lid contacts the glass. The usual procedure is to fill with hot preserves and cap tightly with the threaded ring, on the now soft rubber sealing surface of the lid. As the contents ( and the rubber seal ) cool, the head space will now be at a lower pressure than atmospheric and the seal will re-harden to provide a not-easily slipping seal. The seal is almost always good enough that the threaded ring part of the two-part lid can be removed without loss of seal for years, and the ring re-used for next year's canning ( for the frugal among us ); however the lid part cannot be re-used, but they are available separately without the threaded ring. I keep my jam/marmalade in the refrigerator once opened, and putting them back in the fridge to cool again after use, makes them very hard to open the next time. A little bit of differential pressure makes for a good seal. FYI Airplane doors are not 'locked'; it is their design ( 'plug' ), and a couple of pounds of DP, that keeps them from opening, although there have been one or two occasions where a 'crazed' passenger has managed to open a door and depressurize the plane ( probably at lower altitudes ).

I don't believe in singularities; much, much less so the idea of naked singularities. Are you sure ? The Coulomb interaction would provide a large potential barrier, but at high enough energies/small separations gravitational potential would be strong enough to mitigate, or possibly cancel, the Coulomb interaction. But we seem to be in the area of opinions, not verifiable facts. The only description we have of Black Holes is classical; even Hawking's ( and Bekenstein ) radiating model only incorporates a few aspects of a quantum model, so when you say "not a classical Black Hole' how are we to interpret that ? I agree, maybe Quantum Gravity may eventually provide answers/clarifications, but all we have now are currently accepted models, and they seem clear ( to me 😀 ) that elementary particles cannot be modelled by our current understanding of Black Holes

Come on ! We are on the second page of discussion on opening jars ? Some of the members here can probably calculate the trajectory for a moon landing. I didn't think jar lids would be such a problem; most housewives can manage 😄 . ( I can imagine the problems you guys have doing laundry )

At this scale I tend to trust Quantum Mechanics and Thermodynamics more than I'd trust GR. A Black Hole is a perfect black body, and must have a characteristic temperature. In your analogy, the problem is not that an electron cannot orbit the nucleus ( it certainly may ); the problem is that it cannot be a classical particle. Similarly in the problem being discussed, it is not that Black Holes do not have a temperature ( and may radiate depending on that temperature ), but rather that they cannot be Black Holes. ( what would you get when you scatter a BH electron off another ?? )

Due to the finite speed of light/information, and the universe's finite age, our specific Cosmological Horizon limits what can affect us and what we can observe from the center of our horizon. It is currently defined by a radius of about 46 Billion Light Years, but it grows with time. There are also horizons in time. The past one being defined by the CMB, or surface of last scattering, beyond which light can't observed ( butneutrino and even gravitational waves may eventually provide previous horizons ). And the future one defined by the Event Horizon, which events will never be able to affect us, even in the future.

As Markus has pointed out, a Black Hole's temperature is inversely proportional to its size. A small sized Black Hole the size ( mass ) of the Earth would have a temperature of 0.02 degrees K. An extremely tiny BH with the mass of a person would have a temperature of 1021 degrees K. The upper bound for the size of an electron is 10-18 m so its temperature, if it was a BH, would be in the order of 1030 degrees K. And the relationship for luminosity due to emitted radiation is given by L = AoT4 Where A=4*Pi*r2 and o is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. I'm sure we would have noticed such extreme effects by now ....

This is not Philosophical. It is the very idea that allows us to do science, and it is called the Cosmological Principle. "The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists." Astronomer William Keel from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle IOW, this means that the universe looks the same from everyone's perspective, has no special center or edge, and that the laws of physics are the same everywhere and at all times.

Those always go missing just when you need them. When you don't need them, you're tripping over the three extra sets you bought because the originals were missing when you needed them. Or, maybe you guys are feeble, and I'm forgetful of where I put things.

All you feeble old men should head down to a nearby dollar store. They sell a V-shaped contraption that screws onto the bottom of your kitchen cabinets ( out of sight ), and when you need to open a jar lid, you push the jar lid into the V, which has a friction surface, and turn the jar. Easy-peasy. Incidentally ... your fingers are weaker than your thumb, so always turn in a direction that tends to 'tighten' your fingers. ( think of a pipe wrench )

Moon landing deniers, and all other conspiracy theorists, can come up with so many ( un )plausible explanations while there is only one truth that uninformed people are unlikely to receive on their social media feeds.

My 1st year Uni, in '77, when you had to go physically sign up for courses, I saw the team slogan and signed up for rugby. The slogan was "you gotta have leather balls to play Rugby". Yes, it was fun while it lasted; then it turned to a broken collar bone.

I would think 'hygiene' might be better termed exposure. Exposure to biological pollutants during the crucial formative period of a child's auto-immune system might reduce the allergic response later in life. There is, after all, a condition called Pica, which affects expectant mothers as a craving to eat dirt. It is attributed to iron deficiency, but it may be partially attributed to instinctive behavior as a way for the mother to 'expose' the fetus to biological pollutants. I myself, am allergic to ragweed/goldenrod, having lived almost my first decade in Italy, where these weeds are not common. The allergy came on suddenly in my late twenties ( thought I had a cold for the months of September and October ), but gradually went away by my 50s; so there is hope String Junky. I am also allergic to Alpha blockers ( eye drops ) which manifests as red bumpy irritation under my eye-lids and blurry ( more so than usual ) vision. No other allergies.

It is not so much 'things coming our way', rather the fact that our solar system is travelling around the galaxy. "The Sun moves in a roughly circular path around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a journey that takes about 225 million years. This primary orbital motion is accompanied by a perpendicular "bobbing" motion as the Solar System oscillates up and down through the galactic plane, with a period of approximately 63 million years. The speed of this motion is roughly 230 kilometers per second (about 828,000 km/hr.)" So it is entirely possible that we are overtaking interstellar objects moving slower than we are, being overtaken by faster moving objects, and intercepting objects as we weave 'up and down' the galactic plane. Relativity makes it appear we are being 'visited', where we may, in fact, be doing the 'visiting'.

And when California decides to have a referendum on re-drawing their electoral maps, to mitigate the effects of the Trump backed re-drawing in Texas, California gets slapped with a lawsuit by the personal lawyer hacks he has appointed to lead the Justice Department. You can't even make up this level of hypocrisy.

Let it go @studiot . After all, even D Trump says that no one knows what magnets are ... Trump, 79, Claims Nobody Knows What a Magnet Is surely you don't doubt anything D Trump says !

The Democrats approved it. It is not a vote for the general public. We had a 'polarized' freedom with both sides represented. Now we have FOX and right wing media, while every one else is afraid to get sued. Sure. Everyone was free to study and say as they wished. Now, if you don't agree with D Trump's views you get your funding cut. Never very easy because of Republican shenanigans. Has gotten seriously corrupted wit D Trum's efforts to rig the midterms by re-drawing electoral maps. Democracy isn't perfect, but it was immensly better before D Trump got involved. Yes, this is a science forum, and all of us can tell that it isn't getting any better, as you seem to believe.

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