CPL.Luke

also they are doing substatial work on carbon sequestration, where they bury the CO2 underneath the site, thus bringing the CO2 emissions down to near zero Bascule unfortunatly this is mass so nuclear is considered dangerous, I've been trying to do some work on getting the local masspirg to support nuclear initiatives. sisyphus the reasoning behind the all coal 20% renewables was that with clean coal off the table, then it being mass the state would be forced to switch to coal for its primary source of power, as oil, and gas would be uneconomical, and nuclear politically unsavory. Whereas the natural course of things would have seen increased use of wind (it now is as economical as coal) and an increased use of clean coal technologies, and possibly a continued role for natural gas as the state wouldn't be faced with rising energy costs due to a forced adoption of cleaner technologies.

recently the Massachusettes state legislature passed a bill that will provide a mandate for the state to produce 20% of its energy through clean and renewable energy. My problem with the bill is that it prevents the state from investing in or developing clean coal technologies, and because of this it is likely that the bill will produce dirtier air on a watt for watt basis. currently Massachusettes produces its energy with a heavy slant on natural gas. now most of these power plants are going to have to be rebuilt soon as power plants are built with a 30-50 operational lifetime in mind and a large portion of these facilities are coming due. Now this is Mass so keep in mind that the state is extremely liberal, in 2020 assuming that the state has fulfilled their mandate 20% of the power will be coming from renewables while the remaining energy will have to come from coal due to the fact the state will most certainly not build any more nuclear plants and the existing ones will have been shut-down. oil and natural gas will boath be seen as increasingly untenable options due to the rapidly rising cost of both of these things. I did the math out a while ago on a scenario where a state uses eastern coal standards and produces 80% of its power from coal and 20% from renewables and found that this actually makes the emissions from the state worse than what they presently are in mass. this is just a recent example of enviromentalism trumping smart economics and good legislature.

I don't know what "convenience" your talking about when it comes to giving up horses. also your thing about congressman seems to be a bit misinformed http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/pensions.asp back to the electric cars, looking at the average number of miles driven everyday and arguing that a car that fulfills those needs is sufficient is at best a bit misleading, at worst its a strawman. Most americans require lengthy car trips easily exceeding several hundred miles. Further any policy that mandates such things would cause tremendous economic harm as various attractions and factories etc. are shut-down as people are no longer capable of reaching them. also its not a question of the technologies capacity but rather a question of its cost and charging times. For instance I could build a truck that could drive a thousand miles on a single charge if I took a semi-truck put an electric engine in it and filled it with batteries. but it would take several days to charge and if I were running a trucking company a quick calculation would show that the downtime of such a machine would hurt me alot more than running on gas would. similarly I could use lithium-ion batteries to power a car that could beat a ferrari and would run for a 100 miles on a charge. But it would cost so much that only a couple of people would be able to afford it. see the tesla and yet both of these scenarios bring me back to the problem of charging, which has yet to be solved, as "keep it charging for longer" is not a solution. not to mention that your choice of solar-panels in order to do the charging is the least credible option, as solar panels cost the most out of any commercially viable electric solution (at around 11-23 cents /kwh compared to 4 cents per kwh for coal). not to mention that as the sun varies from day to day it could also afect your ability to get to and from work.

phi for all have you heard of the chevy volt? the fact is battery technology isn't there yet, the volt was supposed to save the company by being the first plug-in hybrid, 40 miles per charge and then it would have a gas generator in it to keep it going. The main problem with it has been the batteries. The car was originally supposed to be a mass-market thing with a price tag between 20 and 30 thousand, more than capable of competing with the prius. with every statement the projected cost of the car went up, first to 30 then to 35, and now between 45 and 50 thousand. the projected cost of the car's developments are now at around 5 billion. GM put all of their available resources behind it and they have failed the best compression they could get on the timeline. The Volt would have been 5 years in development for a release date in 2010. the problems with electric cars are little understood by the general public, as it is not just a problem of batteries, it is a problem of charging. A gas pump delivers 5000 kilowatt-hours/sec to your car, whereas an electric outlet can only deliver .0006 kilowatt-hours/sec in other words assuming equal efficiency of charging (a questionable assumption) if it takes 3 minutes to fill up your tank which normally has a range of 300 miles, it would take days to charge up a car to the full 300 mile range (I seem to be getting a ridiculous answer when I try to calculate the time it would take to charge a car). People don't understand how wonderful oil is, and how hard it will be to replace it. There is a question chem-eng professors ask their students at the the start of a class. "what can fill a teacup and can lift a 1 tonne block a thousand feet in the air" answer: oil

russia did develop some of these back in the day presumably as a second strike weapon, they built about 100 of them. Last I heard around 40 were unaccounted for. their were alot of articles on it back in 2002-2003 when this all came to light, and osama was claiming he had a few (obviously he didn't, or realized the us response would be to nuke everything sacred in the holy land)

haven't heard anything about IIT however CMU is a very good school, however pittsburgh really is the pitts.

it went into enough depth that there wasnt anything important that I felt I missed, however it would be necessary to do more problems in it in order to better appreciate it.

my GR course spent the first two months covering math, and then we spent the latter two months studying the schwarschild solution and the basics of cosmology. honestly I don't feel as if I have that good of grounding in it, for that I think I'll have to wait another few years for a grad course, but it covered enough math and such so that we could appreciate what the equations meant and how to work with them in general. for things like QM and such there is a better sense of understanding when you finish it. although this varies person to person, for instance while I feel I have a very good understanding f the qm I was taught (griffiths, and now merzbacher) my current EM course feels more like there isn't much understanding, although I'm sure there are others who feel the opposite.

I'd be careful with the hydrogen as it it tends to make a vary forceful reaction which most people would consider an explosion. especially if its mixed with the oxygen to begin with. If you have any sort of containment equipment, or if your school would allow a thermite reaction to be done outdoors it would be very safe as well (assuming your not doing it near anything flamable (a baseball field or an empty parking lot ought to do it)

the standing wave shouldn't change much inside of the axis, as most microwaves are rectangular, any stray waves should be canceled out relatively quickly with respect to the standing wave. the experiment is very safe, however I don't know where your students are at, but by all means the experiment is far less dangerous than a number of chem demonstrations i was a party to in high school. (The thermite was a good one)

why bother with the chocolate? in order to have a standingwave in the microwave you need to have a half integer number of wavelengths along the axis that the waves are traveling on, as the frequency is 2.45ghz and the wavelength is c/f the number of waves will be (n/2) and the length can only be (n/2)c/f=L 2Lf/n=c find n the best way to find n would be to put a light bulb on the rotating tray of the microwave and look at where it dims/turns off. warning: you may want to have a beacer full of water in the center to absorb some of the energy, otherwise the metal in the bulb is likely to burn/become a plasma and cause the bulb to explode. Although the the beacer does not guarantee the bulb will not do this.

if they reciieved any form of request from the government for records they will be able to get out of it, on entrapment. this would be a case similar to a cop telling you to get into your car and drive off when your drunk and then pulling you over the next instant. this is why cops don't sit outside bars waiting for a drunk to get in the car, the would have been legally obligated to stop the person before they got in the car.

fiberoptics? I'd imagine that depending on the necessity of accracy in the frequency's gravitational redshifts could gunk up the works over extreme distances. gravitomagnetism? there aren't any real applications yet however thats a general relativistic effect that can be created in a lab, its only a matter of time. the best one's would be for geology where gravitometers measure the changes in gravity from point to point and find out whats in the ground (like oil).

diet is really key things like fish, broclli and asparragus give you the vitamins you need to work properly

you could express power in those terms, however the basic definition of power is the rate at which work is done, hence the SI unit of power is joule/sec or watt. now consider that a joule is a coulomb volt so you could easily replace the volt in your equation with joule/coulomb now an ohm is a volt-sec/coulomb or a joule-sec/coulomb^2 so essentially your equation says that a watt is a joule/sec just like we would expect. If you weren't looking for the units than I apologize and your algebra is correct v^2/R=p

I gotan email back from my professor So the problem is unresolved

your question is an interesting one and I forwarded it to my GR prof, however if we aren't looking at an evaporating black hole than we can still use classical GR to predict what happens on the inside of the schwarschild radius for instance the fact that nothing could leave once inside it (the time and radial co-ordinate switch) but there are flaws, I personally don't know exactly where these flaws become critically important (does anyone?).

in my very limited experience the quality of the lab course depends on the creativity of whoever is put in charge of the labs. For instance back in high school the physics department (there actually was a physics department) the physics professors got very creative and while the labs were simple, they did a lot to make you think about how you would measure things and what you would need to do it etc. at my cc the labs weren't worth doing, and at my university there are some decent (although very long) labs, the professor who ran them was heavily invested in making the labs interesting and worthwhile to the students. personally, being a theory person the fewer labs I touch the happier I am.

that was my point that the only reason why we say that its one way over the other is because it relates back to what we know about classical mechanics, and again our concepts of energy make it so that a photon is much more logical than a darkon, but you could concievably do it the other way and get the same results from experiments (albeit much more complicated)

my point exactly you know why one is true over the other, it fits with everything else we know, however there is no experiment that can be done to guarantee that one way works over the other.

insane alien can you name an experiment where you could differentiate between low pressure drawing things in and high pressure pushing things out? I can't really imagine any such experiment, however it makes a much more consistent explanation for the pressure to exert a force out, as it meshes with classical mechanics.

as I haven't done any work on black holes where we had to take into account hawking radiation I honestly can't answer those questions (although someone may have found the answer already) it seems that you don't really understand what an event horizon is, its a border in space time which you will never see events occurring beyond. for instanc if I look at the space of an accelerated observer, and an inertial observer, and compare them then I will see that there are some events that the stationary observer doesn't see and will never see. feven if he lived an infinite amount of time. now if you look at a black hole the stationary observer will watch the object fall very close to the black hole, but never into it. but the observer who falls into the black hole will see himself cross the schwarschild radius (the radius of the EH) (and there are a number of ways he can deduce that he's crossed this point) and then fall into the center of the black hole. Now we are dealing with special observers here as they are actually capable of falling into a black hole (any actual observer would be destroyed), and while the observer who fell in would not be able to ever send a message out to the ones on the outside, the others could fall in after them and find out the results of the experiment. it is interesting that its possible for us on the outside of the black hole to never know what the results of the experiments were, but I think a lack of a result in this case would be evidence for the correctness of our description.

one thing that most people don't realize is that the expansion is caused by a cosmological constant, and more importantly this cosmological constant is actually matter. its a very strange type of matter that doesn't change in density as you change the size of its container, we know it either exists or general relativity is wrong, as otherwise the age of the universe doesn't come out right.

your actually very close to what relativity says, I say this because kinetic energy is the time component of the four-momentum in relativity. However it is not true that all things are composed of matter and energy, really everything is composed of matter with something that we call energy mathematically attached to the matter. energy doesn't really exist on its own, you can say that something has energy, however you'll never find something which you can say is "energy" also how could you explain the equivalence between rest mass and energy through your idea?

that doesn't matter you could easily say that the "space timeenergy" high pressure zones push things towards the low pressure zone. the real problem is what is this "space-time energy"