insane_alien

yes this is because the excited atoms can travel a distance without colliding with other atoms which will cause the excited atoms to discharge a photon. further reduce the pressure and the glow will be reduced.

the elctrons smash into atoms of gas that become excited due to the input of energy. excited in this case means one or more of the electrons in the atom has jumped up to a higher orbital. when the electron jumps back down to its usual orbital, a phoon of light is released. this is what you are seeing. at very low pressures, the electron beam rarely hits a molecule so you don't see it giving out any light.

i suspect it is my amatuer knowledge of quantum mechanics. i thought there were a limited number of excited states before the electron was ejected.

it would be better to wait till we get results from the LHC before any workis done so we can see what we need to aim for to further investigate phenomena. to come up with a design now would be shooting in the dark perhaps wasting billions at a time when nobody can afford to waste anything. it should also be made into an international effort rather than just the US.

gravitational sheer would be quite a problem. at the very least.even if you have a material strong enough to cope with it you still aren't going to be able to get humans through it.

and how do you intend on such extreme warping of spacetime?

ah right, i was just thinking of the jumps between shells sorry.

you have been refusing to provide evidence.

the current definition of a meter is how far a photon of light travels in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second in a vacuum. the thing about emission frequencies from an atom is completly rubbish. there is nothing stting that they will add up to a meter and since the nuclei have emission frequencies in the RF spectrum with several hundred meter wavelengths it is certainly wrong. and emmissions from the electron shell would add up to only a few millionths of a meter. perhaps a millimeter.

because if the gas was at normal pressure there would be too much gas in the way and it would stop being a beam. the electrons in the beam can be deflected if they hit molecules of gas. if too many of them are deflected either none will rech the target or the spot on the target will be very diffuse. lowering the pressure means that there are less molecules to collide with so everything works nicely. an analogy would be if you had some flour in your hand and you blew on it. due to the atmosphere it forms a billowy cloud that doesn't really go very far. but if you did in a vacuum (well, used a can of air rather than blew on it yourself due to the low pressure) the flour would probably go clear across the room.

proton, i'm pretty sure you've been told this already and i'm going to repeat it. when it is clear someone is struggling with a concept in physics, don't just recite off a list of phenomenon and/or the details of how they work, just keep it simple.

our minds are open, the theory we have found to be correct is a lot more wacky than yours and it works. it allows us to predict how atoms behave, yours does not. and electrons do not orbit atominc nuclei anything like planets in the solar system.

what i think is that you're talking utter bollocks and trying (and failing) to get us to drop years of study and evidence for some statement origionally intended for use on human behaviour. the universe is not human, do not try to personify it.

saying it over and over again doesn't make it true.

i said not the mgh one. U=-Gm1m2/r that one.

that is possible because energy is put into the system in the case of heatpumps(entropy is increased elsewhere in order for a local decrease in entropy)

the only thing we're still good for is our pattern finding ability and various wacky imaginative leaps. the actuall looking and seeing is handled far better than us. like the LHC, if we looked directly we'd be killed by the radiation and wouldn't see a damn thing except maybe some cherenkov radiation as the wave of particles impacts our eyes.

vision isn't an option at the quantum level so we chuck things at it in various situations which allows us to determine mass, charge, stability, spin etc etc everything important about the particle and how it behaves. something is there and that something is what we call an electron(or whatever). to say it is not an electron is to be using a non standard definition of 'electron' making you wrong. you see all the technology more advanced than couple of rocks and sticks, that's what science is good for. we seek to know how the universe works and to model it and use that model to predict what will happen. using newtonian mechanics we predicted when and where we'd need to fire rockets to reach the moon, using general relativity we predicted the frequency shift GPS would need to be as accurate as it is. and so on. everything from the bricks that make up your house(or the joints that hold the wood together) to the billions of nano-scale components in the microprocessor you are using right now to communicate with us comes from science. we also use the properties of particles you claim are just assumed to be there in all stages of that communication, we could not do this without knowing a great deal about their properties and behaviour. we found this information not by looking but by bouncing particles off each other and then seeing what that looked like. argue all you want, but it is evident that we are right by the very fact we are talking to each other over thousands of miles.

we don't look at them with photons is how. what we do is we bounce particles (such as electrons) off of them or use particle detectors(usually depends on the particle reacting with something). we can't see radiowaves either but we know they exist in the same way as we see their effects.

no, they are too small to be seen with visible light, the photons just pass by them and do not bounce off.

just find out your gravitational potential energy (not the mgh stuff) and there you go. that is the minimum energy needed to remove you from the earth.

yes, the uphil part returns it to its origional velocity but while it was in the dip it was moving faster than the ball on track A. track C signifies a ball that will not move very fast if at all until it gets the dip at the end. it could take hours for the ball to complete the track while A and B would likely finish in seconds.

there is no significant electromagnetic field to cause the tides though. we're quite good at detecting those you know, and there just isn't one there. it is gravity that cause the tides and it is a non-electromagnetic force. face it, your wrong. while you may be able to convince the occasional layman, convincing people who actually know a fair bit about this stuff requires a whole heap of evidence and you know, proof.

i said the strong force get stonger with distance not gravity. read my previous post more carefully. i disagree completely. gravity and the strongforce behave very very differently and have been observed to use different methods of action. i don't know what protons not decaying has to do with this, but i'll run with it. neutrons decay and they are held together by the stronf force, mesons decay and are also held together by the strong force, there are a bunch of other particles that decay which are held together by the strong force. blackholes also decay via hawking radiation, this will likely be observed in detail when the LHC comes online. gravity is actually pretty piss poor as forces go. very feeble indeed. the strong force is some 10^40 times stronger. it is also distance limited while gravity is not. also, you say the proton doesn't decay and yet in the same breath contradict yourself by saying it has a finite lifetime, if they did not decay then why would they have a finite life?

jsaldea, explain why the strong force does not follow an inverse square law with distance then? it actually gets stronger with distance rather than weaker and eventually there is a boundary to its extent from gluon selfinterference. this is not how gravity works on any scale. evidence or STFU. and stop posting your crap on my user page.