insane_alien

could use an activated charcoal filter. that'll remove the smells. although shutting off the air conditioning for a bit would be simpler(and cheaper, you'd save on fuel)

here's hoping gordon left a big steamy turd in the ensuite for the tories.

lots of raw beef/mutton fat(depends on where you live) or did you mean soot?

okay but you are still wrong. as the gas expands to equalise it's concentration in the container, the partial pressure will reduce. the system pressure however will remain identical. first of all, they won't seperate that much. but seeing as they are separated, YOU DON'T HAVE A PERFECTLY MIXED SYSTEM WHERE DALTONS LAW APPLIES. YOU HAVE A (partially)SEGREGATED SYSTEM. how many times do i need to repeat myself here. mixed does not equal segregated, if you continue down this line i will be forced to assume you are being deliberately obtuse. irrelevant no, it doesn't, you just think it does. perform any reaction that involves a gas phase. do it with and without an inert gas component. this will prove partial pressures as these will determine the rate of reaction. i have done these both theoretically and practically, you can find many papers on them in journals.

its a popsci documentary. i can debunk EVERY SINGLE ONE of those. There is NO documentary shown on tv that can be described as an accurate reflection of the scientific principles they are attempting to describe. TV IS NOT A JOURNAL. why are you taking this like he came out and said 'ZOMG ELECTRICITY IS ACTUALLY MINIUNICORNS!' he isn't going against some well established scientific principle. he's saying 'i think aliens would be like this, here are my reasons' what about this do you find so outrageous?

bob, steam technology HAS progressed in the last century. its even progressed in the last 2 years. just because you have not been following the progress doesn't mean its not happening. heat exchangers have also underwent changes as well. but as skeptic says, any increase in efficiency now is not going to be a large change to the lay man, because hey, 99% to 99.5% efficiency is only a 0.5% improvement right? the areas for practical improvement are getting smaller and smaller. saying your going to start a revolution in steam power is probably going to set it back some as we are already pretty close to perfect thermodynamic efficiency. you cannot exceed perfect thermodynamic efficiency. ever. doesn't matter if you call it a revolution or not.

i like how it still appears wrong.

'heat lightning' is a bit of a misnomer. itsa perfectly normal thunderstorm and they do make noise. its just that the distance is so great that its out of ear shot. think of it like watching a fireworks display from 10 miles away, you'll be able to see it but the sound will not reach you. its also possible for the sounds of closer strikes(a couple of miles away though) to be muffled by heavy snow or a dust/sand storm.

you are still treating these things as segregated systems. MIXED SYSTEMS CANNOT BE TREATED AS SEGREGATED SYSTEMS. the nitrogen isn't going to flow, because it is already everywhere, the oxygen isn't going to flow because it is at the same partial pressure every where and so on. really, this has been well studied and proven. if you wish to ignore facts then go somewhere else and do it because this is not the appropriate place. seeing as you seem to be so intent on mis interpreting the soda bottle analogy, i'll give you another one. you have a vessel filled with oxygen at 10kPa and another vessel containing oxygen with a partial pressure of 10kPa and nitrogen at 90kPa. into these vessels you place a sample of lithium metal. which one will corrode the quickest? using the current method, the samples will corrode at the same rate. using yours the sample in the nitogen/oxygen mix will corrode quickest. as it happens, they corrode at the same rate. you can even try this yourself.

well, you'll have noticed that lightning will flicker. so it super heats the air several times very very quickly. when the air is heated, it expands(you could take this as splitting i suppose), when it is cooling it contracts. this causes pressure waves in the air which your ears pick up as sound. because of the extremely quick nature of the event, the expansion is super sonic which causes shock waves. shockwaves get distorted as the travel which is why a close strike sounds sharp and a farther away strike produces more of a rumble.

if you believe that a statement of opinion is the same as a published paper then you have things very very wrong indeed. he does make it very clear that it is SPECULATION. it really shouldn't be held up to the same standards as a hypothesis or theory especially as it contains opinion. it doesn't matter whether it has scientific merit or not because its not meant to be judged scientifically.

no. what you said is that the force will be equal to the momentum therefore the force is equal to the momentum. not only wrong, but circular reasoning. you cannot assume the displacement to be negligble. negligble pretty much means zero. in order to stop something from any velocity to zero in zero distance then you need an infinite acceleration. to get an infinite acceleration you need an infinite force. as infinite forces clearly don't exist in this situation, the displacement of the scale is NON negligble and must be taken into consideration. Now, so the thread can progress, can we assume the scale displaces by 1cm? bugger you all, i'm going for it anyway. first off, we'll have to change all those nasty imperial units into SI because I refuse to use imperial. (i used wolfram alpha for the conversions if you want to check) so: mass = 4.536kg height = 3.962m using mgh this gives us an energy of 176.3J then using 1/2kx^2 for elastic energy to find k we get k=3.526*10^6 N/m so force equals k*x which gives us 35260N or in earth gravity 3594kg or if you want it in silly imperial units 7924 lb

why? if scientists never made nearly baseless(he has given some reasons for his thoughts) then progress would be a lot slower. speculation is the first step on the road to a new theory or discovery. science is full of wild speculations. 99.99% of them will turn out to be completely wrong but we still need them. only if he was submitting a research paper. his personal opinions are not subject to the rules of science.

the fire triangle is a over simplified thing. what it should read is: reducer, oxidiser, thermal energy the oxidiser is not necessarily oxygen, halogens tend to be good oxidisers and are often found in explosives because of this.

bob, you're going about testing daltons law all wrong by having a segregated system where daltons law SPECIFICALLY states it applies only in MIXED systems. lets say you have a canister with 1 bar of nitrogen gas in side it. to this canister you add carbon dioxide until the pressure is equal to 2 bar. if you remove all the nitrogen leaving only the carbon dioxide the pressure in the canister will be 1 bar. this means that both gases were producing 1 bar of pressure. you cannot say that both gasses were at 2 bar because they were acting on the same surface. if the impacts from nitrogen alone were able to exhert a pressure of 2 bar and the molecules of carbon dioxide alone were able to eexhert a pressure of 2 bar then since both types of molecule are hitting the container wall with the same frequency and force then the system pressure MUST be 4 bar. daltons law has been confirmed right down to molecular simulations of gases. to say it's wrong is actually crazy as the evidence is pretty irrefutable.

that and most migration appears to have been away from africa.

why? it's just his opinion. seriously, just because hawking says 'this is what i think' doesn't mean that this is the way it must be. forcing people to change their opinions because you don't like them isn't very fair.

again, steam power and research into steam power was still undergoing a boom phase. just because it wasn't being used in vehicles, doesn't mean it was't intensively researched and improved upon. infact, it is STILL being intensively researched and improved upon. at the turn of the century they managed about 70% of theoretical maximum efficiency which was damn good. now we're getting quite close to the maximum theoretical efficiency. looking at these numbers, IC engines are still slightly behind. the only reason IC engines appeared to have a massive increase in funding was because it went from zero.

see, it still doesn't make sense. all you have is a word salad with a hefty zenith component. it doesn't follow biology at all. its just gibberish. perhaps you should read up an the basics of metabolism.

what definition of zenith are you using? none of the ones in my dictionary seem to bear any relation to what you are saying. you really don't make a whole lot of sense.

you seem to be looking at energy as if it always stays the same type of energy. well, it doesn't. you can change one form of energy into another form of energy. This happens all the time. An electric motor changes electrical energy into kinetic energy. An electric generator does the reverse. Burning soemthing converts chemical potential energy into heat energy and so on.

glucose stores chemical potential energy. this energy can be converted to kinetic energy by the muscles but it could also be converted to electrical energy. the energy in glucose is not kinetic energy while it is in the molecule.

i give it 15 years before you guys just build a big dome over your country and seal yourselves off.

steam power didn't get its funding cut. justbecause it's no longer used for transport doesn't mean its not still extensively used. take your average powerstation. it RELIES on a steam cycle. whether it's coal, oil, gas, nuclear, even some solar. to say that progress stopped is just wrong.

the thing with supernovas is that they have quite a bit of mass. several times that of our sun if not more. nukes while powerful on our scale, are so incredibly non-massive. you'd get more of a signal dropping an ant near the detector.