Strange

So you prefer the opinion of a fiction writer to science. Ho hum. We need science to understand if and by how much the climate is changing in order to better plan flood defences. If these extreme events are going to become more common (and more more extreme) then what we do needs to be very different than if this year is just an unusually bad year. Personally, I would rely on climate scientists to establish that. Not tabloid newspapers. (At least you didn't quote from that disgusting rag, the Daily Mail who prefer to make up stories rather then report news.)

That is what they mean by "expanding at an increasing rate". As you can tell from the fact they go on to say "In formal terms, this means that the cosmic scale factor has a positive second derivative".

I don't know why you would expect any repulsion. An iron ball is attracted equally to a north and a south pole. (Edit, unless the changing fields are inducing currents in the ball giving it some magnetism ... But then I imagine it becomes very difficult to calculate what will happen.) But as all the magnets average out to zero overall, there will be no force. You will only get a small attractive force if the ball is close enough that it is closer to one of the N or S poles and the others don't quite cancel it out. An electric field. I know you don't want to be corrected, but it is a good way to learn. You seem to be mixing up electric charge and magnetism. I guess you mean a dipole moment? A slight excess of charge on one side than the other. Electrostatic, not magnetic. Unless they are moving, in which case there will be a magnetic field as well. No, for several reasons. Electric (and magnetic) fields can be screened, gravity can't. Gravity is not proportional to electric charge but to mass. Magnetism falls off with a cube law, not a square law. (And for the force due to a dipole moment as well, I think.) Even if there is a dipole moment at the atomic/molecular level that does not apply at the scale of the Earth. Everything is oriented differently and they all cacnel out. Even if the force did follow an inverse square law, the best it could do is model Newtonian gravity, not the real world.

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Hard work!

Indeed. But, as already noted, there is lots of other evidence. And, in general, we can identify the causes. As we can with the current warming. Strawman. No one says it is going to be. And it is. You can't just dismiss the data because you don't like it. The consensus is a result of the scientific data, not a substitute for it.

Gerard 't Hooft has a good website on this: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/ (You can't get away without math.)

Not necessarily. Gluons are massless.

You seem to be confusing "elite" with "prepared to make an effort to learn".

How has it changed? What tests could you do to see if it has changed? Ummm... Because that is what "change" means? Each particle can be in one of two states. So if there are 3 particles, then the possibilities are: 1. All in low energy state. 2. One particle in high energy state (it doesn't matter which because they are indistinguishable) 3. Two particles in high energy state (it doesn't matter ... ) 4. All three particles in high energy state (ditto) So, 3 particles = 4 states.

BTW. This website has a great selection of articles introducing the ideas behind quantum theory: http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/

I think the point was more about things being continuous, not made up of straight line segments (rather than circles, per se).

Swapping two identical cue balls doesn't change anything. The table is the same before and after. (If you think it isn't, you need to say how you think it is objectively [measurably] different.) It is only if you swap a green and a red ball that there will be a difference.

One (informal) way of understanding the zero point energy is through uncertainty. There is uncertainty in the energy of a particle, which you can think of as it having a distribution of energies around the expected value. Well if the expected value is zero, that distribution cannot go negative so there is small shift up from the expected zero value.

Are you thinking of Hawking radiation there? If so, you need to bear in mind that that analogy (even though Hawking came up with it) does not accurately reflect what happens...

And we can make images of orbitals (which match the theoretical images from my old physical chemistry books).

Can you quantify that? How much uncertainty is there, and how much would be acceptable? And regarding your posts where you quote improvements to the detail in the models, does that reassure you that the models are improving?

And ... ? Models are getting better as we learn more. So you should be getting increasingly confident in the science, if that was your main concern.

Great question. I assume the spin of the electron must be 'flipped' but I don't know...

Exactly. But it is important to realise that when they talk of accelerating expansion, they mean that the increase in rate of separation is greater than the relationship you describe; in other words the rate of scaling is increasing. I don't think so...

If there were clouds or galaxies of antimatter then there would be a point where they meet interstellar matter - this would cause distinctive radiation. There have been, and are, experiments to look for this, but so far the evidence isn't there. For example: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/14aug_ams/ But they have found all sorts of interesting things. For example: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/antimatter_binary.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/new-structure.html

Why do you think it is a bad thing that one source of inaccuracies in the models has been identified and taken into account? Isn't it good that the incorrect (too large, apparently) estimates are being corrected? I'm not sure what you mean by this rather cryptic comment. The title simply refers to the fact that it is only recently that sufficient data on the effects of aerosols have become available. I assume this is a combination of technology (more samples taken more accurately in more places, the use of satellites, etc) plus just having enough data to analyse meaningfully. It is not clear why you think this is a Bad Thing.

I would have thought that should be the other way round. AM came first because it is simple and intuitive. FM came later because it needed more advanced technology and mathematics. But analogies are only really useful if they have a close relationship to the underlying model being described. Trying to explain the big bang in terms of the difference between apples and bananas (which is about as good as your analogies are) just isn't very helpful. These images of complex numbers and rivers might make some sort of sense in your own head but it is almost impossible to see how they relate to physics and thus how they can be useful explanatory tools.

That was my interpretation too, but I assumed I had misunderstood it ...

I don't think a sample size of 2 is enough to draw statistically significant conclusions. Coincidence. There is some (inconclusive) evidence that even artificially-sweetened drinks can be bad - for both weight gain and diabetes risk. This might just be because people who consume a lot of sweet drinks also consume too many calories elsewhere.