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One cannot simply assume that accelerating such a mass will automatically lead to collapse; this is actually a very complicated problem, and would have to be treated mathematically to see what would happen. Even accelerating a fully-formed black hole leads to some non-trivial results (see here for example), and a system just about to undergo collapse is far less trivial still (remember we would need to work with interior metrics here). My intuition is that nothing would happen actually, but I might well be wrong.

Some thoughts,frequently speculative, in no special order, on the thread OP and some of the points made by other members: The OP contains the inherent assumption that IQ has a strong correlation with "success" of the individual and of society. I think it is generally understood that "success" is much more complex than that. Thus Nelson Mandela was undoutedly of above average intelligence, but it was his grit, determination and compassion that enabled his achievements. That raises the question, why would a decline in IQ (unless it were off a precipice) be of much concern? I would be more troubled by a fall in commitment and caring. I suspect that declining average IQ is unlikely to have a major impact on the value of the outliers. There should still be Newtons and Einsteins and lesser luminaries to do the heavy mental lifting for society. Most of us are drones compared with the 'top level thinkers'. The development of AI is likely to eliminate a large scale need for those with above above average IQs but that fall short of genius level. The increasing reliance on AI over the next century may be the real challenge we face in relation to societal intelligence. I keep getting flashes of the Eloi and Morlock of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, in which the decadent and now dumb elite are preyed upon by the subterranean worker Morlocks. (The novel was, at its heart, about the nature of society and its possible trajectory. The SF element was a device to enable that exploration.) I have long thought the main value of the IQ test was to determine how people would do on an IQ test. I benefited from a University education funded by the government, fees paid and sufficient money to live on, so that aspect (for undergraduates) of Moreno's proposals resonates positively with me. However, that was at a time when university education was, in the UK, for 5% of the population, not closer to 45%. I hope that this expansion of student population has not been achieved at the expense of standards, but I remain nervous on that point. Of all the points raised in the thread so far the drop in attention span is the one I find most concerning. Intelligence is only of value when it is employed effectively. That takes time and practice and application. In other words, it requires one's attention be focused on a problem until it is solved. On an upbeat note, perhaps we are developing aspects of intelligence that are appropriate to the environment we are now living in and that are not well discerned by the current tests.

We frequently get amateur chemists posting here thinking they have found a way to make themselves some sodium, which they see as incredibly exciting because it reacts with water. Most of these methods involve electrolysis. Let me explain, once and for all why this idea is wrong and foolish: 1) The reduction potential of sodium is very negative. This means that it likes to be Na+ and doesn't like to be Na at all. However, water has a much smaller reduction potential, and will easily be reduced to give hydrogen gas and hydroxide ions. The difference between the reduction potentials is so enormous that you will NEVER make sodium by reducing a sodium salt in water. You do however have a chance of making some chlorine at the other end if you decide to use sodium chloride. If you do this, you'll be making a very toxic gas which will burn your lungs in nasty ways. Be careful! A side-point to aqueous electrolysis should be bloody obvious to people but it isn't. That is, that if you DID somehow miraculously manage to reduce sodium onto your cathode (perhaps you're Jesus), then it would immediately react with the water to make sodium hydroxide again, spitting and flames inclusive. 2) There is another method for making sodium and at least this one is actually possible. It is the electrolysis of molten sodium chloride. The trouble here is that while this is fairly easy to do on an industrial scale in specially built vessels, it's very difficult to do on a smaller scale, not to mention extremely dangerous. Molten sodium chloride is not pleasant, and it's very difficult to get to those kinds of temperatures. Sodium hydroxide was another suggestion I read on the forums, and while it certainly has a lower melting point, we're talking about a strong base here... do you REALLY want a molten puddle of fuming, spitting sodium hydroxide in front of you? REALLY? No. You don't. 3) Just because you can write and balance an equation it doesn't mean it will happen. The reasons behind what reactions will "go" and what reactions won't are quite detailed and beyond the scope of this thread. However, in general, things which are considered unstable (like sodium) are difficult to make (they require less stable things in the first place, or giant amounts of energy). So, NO, you can't make sodium by doing a simple displacement reaction or a precipitation reaction. So all-in-all the net result of the above is NO! You CAN'T make sodium! The above also applies to the other alkali metals

Hi everyone ! In shops, one remaining Covid contamination path is money. An answer is to allege that money doesn't host the virus, I read that. Or we can try to tackle the problem. UV light is known to destroy virusses, including Sars-Cov2. UV LED are available for near-ultraviolet Hg wavelengths, compact, reliable, efficient. This could irradiate the money between the cashier's and the customer's hands, in both directions. The rest is mechanical design, still imprecise. The apparatus must stop the UV from exiting but irradiate both sides of banknotes and coins. Both users could introduce the money at the top, say between a pair motorised soft rolls, and grasp it at the bottom, after an other pair of rolls. UV between the pairs of rolls would be blocked by the rolls. Nice for banknotes, but the coins would fall at once. It also needs a soft material that survives UV. This shape has the smallest footprint. Or a platter would tun slowly. The customer has a sector to introduce and extract money, the cashier has an other sector, and the two sectors in between irradiate the money under a cover. Silica and variants make the platter transparent to UV. Maybe banknotes and coins should have different paths. Possibly the soft rolls for banknotes and the platter for coins. The apparatus must be easy to open, and opening must halt the UV emission. Fluorescent surroundings would reveal any UV leak. Marc Schaefer, aka Enthalpy

Perhaps a just a minor aspect but how the heck are life forms in hydrovents separate from all other lifeforms on Earth?

In binary numeral system, to clear the least, or the most significant bits, there can be used bitwise AND operator e.g. in C/C++: a = x & ~( 1 << y - 1 ); and to get reminder there can be used yet another bitwise AND operator e.g. b = x & ( 1 << y - 1 ); In the normal circumstances you (or CPU) would have to do modulo e.g.: a = ( x / y ) * y; and e.g. b = x - a * y; Multiplication and division by arbitrary integer are slower than bitwise operators.

Exactly. If you have a 32 bit address space, for example, then the total number of bytes you can address is 232. If you use, say, 5 bits for the address within a page (the offset) and the remaining 27 bits for the page address, then you will have 227 pages each of 25 bytes.

Multiplication or division by 2^x can be replaced by bitwise left shift or bitwise right shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwise_operation They are extremely fast, in comparison to regular multiplication or division by arbitrary integer (not to mention floating point).

While energy will contribute to the geometry of space-time, just as mass does, it does not curve in any way. You can in fact, argue that even space-time doesn't 'curve', but geometric curvature in the mathematical model ( GR ) effectively reproduce observational evidence. After all, space-time is merely a mathematical concept, a co-ordinate system geometry, if you will. Unless you are confusing energy with light, and the fact that light follows null geodesics ( curved by gravity ).

This is a reaaalllllyyyy long shot, but...I am planning to take six months out next year to attempt a thru-hike of the Continental Divide Trail in the US (~3100 miles - no small feat!), subject to me being able to raise the necessary funds for the gear I need, and getting a visa. Just wondering if by odd coincidence there is anyone on here who has done this trail, either the whole thing, or a section of it?

No prob. I did think of WW2 initially but thought Spanish Flu around WW1 was more appropriate.

Would not surprise me, to be honest. Getting students to concentrate for a certain stretch of time is like shoveling water. There was a paper perhaps 10 years back that found lower cognitive scores, including IQ in kids who used internet excessively. Now thanks to cell phones it is pretty much a constant distraction. But of course that is circumstantial. Perhaps there are more studies out looking at that.

Yeah, but I can't keep up with 'modern' usage. It changes way too quick . Apparently I'm out of bed, showered, shaved and dressed, but I'm not 'woke' yet.

It may not be intended that way but "alarmists" usually means people making exaggerated or false claims of impending doom. Being alarmed because multiple (independent) studies all show we face a real problem of unprecedented scale is not the same as being "alarmist". That aside, the impacts of current warming are expected to harm people now living in ways that look ongoing and irreversible; our responsibilities to "the planet" or it's remnant natural ecosystems may be unclear and not universally accepted but our responsibility to people generally is. I am one who think we do have that broader responsibility - and that issues like climate stability and unsustainable land use practices are inextricably linked to enduring human prosperity and security. It doesn't matter what the CO2 levels and global temperatures were millions of years ago or how much life (but not humans) thrived under those conditions - the life and lives of humans now living would be ruined by a return of similar conditions.

Also the ideas make no sense to me. Easing the access to higher education is fine, but paying the equivalent of a salary does not amke sense to me (outside of graduate studies where folks actually work full-time). What is the benefit of studying in Uni for as long as possible? How does it benefit the student, the Uni and the society at large? This seems to stem from a weird obsession of a metric that has a narrow range of utility. Also, before wild speculations are made, it is helpful to read some articles on the topic. One those studies, published in PNAS ( Bratsberg was author forgot year but title was something about reversal of the Flynn effect) indicate that variations happen within family, indicating environmental factors are responsible (i.e. not the rather populist assumption of dumb folks having too many kids) . It also highlights that one should not wildly extrapolate and speculate based on incomplete data.

What does being well educated or having children have to do with IQ? Are we to assume from your posts that you have very many children? (But yes, there is a strong correlation between increasing education, especially of women, and falling birth rates. That is a good thing.) Nothing else in this rather incoherent post appears to be on topic either. Citation still needed. As you are unwilling or unable to hold a coherent conversation and engage in a discussion, maybe this thread should be closed as well.

+1 for the out of date part. It's also social 'norms' that are buried in the tests. The IQ test was introduced well over a century ago now, and today's social norms are quite different from those of 1904.

Citation needed. Maybe it is just compensation for the Flynn effect. I would guess the lack of a good definition of IQ and the corresponding arbitrariness of the tests accounts for a large part of it. Maybe modern communication technology and social media means that cultural change is happening faster and the tests can no longer be fudged quickly enough to compensate.

Do you think bringing everybody home from other countries exacerbated the spread? Wouldn't it be better for control if each country was responsible for all citizens in their place at the time an emergency is declared? Or is that an ethical minefield?

More or less yes ! A system can only develop if an electron and proton was to manifest simultaneously at any given point of a void . This is the only possible way some thing can form to have stability in a void . Then rather than self annihilating , a stable volume is formed and expands . a/R^n=0/t b/R^n=0/t delta 0 = a+b/t = 1/t 1/t = a^3+b^3+kE/t kE=(a^3+b^3)(hf)/t E=(a^3+b^3)+kE/(R^n/t) That is the physics ! I've added math and for support I add the Cavendish torsion ball experiment F(G)=<E , different mass balls . I also added earlier fire always points up towards less energy space , the stratosphere is cold hence the force is shown F=<E . Additionally the earth magnetic field is curved towards the poles , F=<E . the curve is what makes the density . To add : We can use internal energy of a system u and u/R^n=V/t Electrons are stable within an enphalpic system that is a^3+b^3=V , a singularity .