swansont

A young bloke has started work on at a large ranch, and the boss sends him up the back paddocks to do some fencing work, come evening hasn't returned. The boss gets on the CB radio to check if he's all right. "I've got a problem, Boss. I'm stuck 'ere. I hit a pig!" "Ah well, these things happen sometimes," the boss says. "Just drag the carcass off the road so nobody else hits it in the dark." "But he's not dead, boss. He's gotten tangled up on the bull bar, and I've tried to untangle him, but he's kicking and squealing, and he's real big boss. I'm afraid he's gonna hurt me!" "Never mind," says the boss. "There's a .38 under the tarp in the back. Get that out and shoot him. Then drag the carcass off the road and come on home." "Okay, boss." Another half an hour goes by, but there's still not a peep from the young fella. The boss gets back on the CB. "What's the problem, son?" "Well, I did what you said boss, but I'm still stuck." "What's up? Did you drag the pig off the road like I said?" "Yeah boss, but his motorcycle is still jammed under the truck."

Yes. An alpha is a He-4 nucleus. So the final product will have 14 fewer protons and 14 fewer neutrons.

The internet is littered with people who think that relativity is wrong. They, almost universally, don't understand relativity. Time dilation experiments have been done. And are done, on a continual basis, with GPS satellites. Relativity has been confirmed many times over again. If you want to discard it, you have to come up with something that explains all that relativity does.

If you solve the QM "particle in a box" for the universe (solve it for length L and then let L get very big) you get an answer that looks like (n +1/2)hbar*w for each of the infinite number of modes. n is the occupation number, or number of photons in that mode, and w is the frequency. That means that even if there are no photons, there is an energy of hbar*w/2, and since there are an infinite number of terms, that sum is infinite. Physicists have long recognized that this infinity is meaningless and that the relevant energy quantity is the difference between two states. The perpetual motion proponents want to tap into that infinity, but it's not real. The force between parallel conducting plates is the Casimir force. When you solve the same equations for the plates, there aren't as many states - because of the boundary conditions, you can't have any modes with a half-wavelength longer than the separation of the plates. Those modes are absent, and the difference between the inside and outside energy exerts a force. (there are also interesting effects of suppression or enhancement of atomic de-excitation. You can keep an atom from decaying to the ground state in a properly prepared system, or you can make it decay faster than the free space equivalent) The problem is that though the force is real and does work, it requires work to assemble the system. It's not a perpetual motion source.

Any site that is trying to hype perpetual motion is probably not the best source of info on ZPE.

Note that magnetic forces do no work. You can't extract any energy from them directly. Good drawing or no, it won't work. Mother nature is a bit of a hard case when it comes to trying to violate the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics.

No, a catalyst lets you "sidestep" activation potentials. It doesn't let you ignore conservation of energy.

IIRC the National Guard was originally set up to be solely under the control of the state, but the laws were changed at some point that allowed federal control. So I think that circumstances dictate whether the President or the governor calls up the guard, and who has control. It's pretty clear that "state" means individual state when reading the constitution. The founding fathers were worried that the somebody in the federal government would take military control and try to rule, but would never be able to really do so because the state militias would vastly outnumber whatever standing army the feds could have. With single-shot, muzzle-loading rifles, the size of the army mattered a great deal. We've long since passed the point where that would be the deciding factor in an armed conflict.

Considering the multitude of experiments that are based on the formulae, I'd consider it experimentally proven, albeit indirectly. You can't stop a photon and try and measure a mass. But all of the scattering processes are consistent with a massless particle.

And I was just trying to demostrate why that's intellectually dishonest. You can do it with anything that's recognized as not being a miracle, if you work hard enough.

As far as I know, yes. It's simply a function of the molar concentration of the solute. So pure water freezes at the nominal temperature of 0 C, and everything else is a some point colder than that.

It doesn't - it tends to help it melt more quickly. When you dissolve something in water' date=' the freezing point decreases. So the liquid can absorb more energy from the solid that allows it to melt. Under conditions where the ambient temperature is a little below 0 C, you can still melt the ice. The freezing point decrease is related to the concentration of solute. Salt does a better job because it's ionic, and you get both Na and Cl contributing. More on freezing point depression

There is precession and nutation, but that's fairly small. The seasons arise because the tilt is present, so at one point one pole is pointed toward the sun and one hemisphere gets a lot more sunlight. But because angular momentum is conserved, six months later the axis is pointed in the same direction (wrt a fixed point in space) so the other pole is point toward the sun and the other hemisphere gets more sunlight.

No, water does not conduct heat better than metals. See here. Metals tend to feel cool to the touch (compared to other materials at ~room temperature) precisely because they conduct heat well. And a small tube probably isn't going to have convection. The roast is largely water already. Adding a water tube isn't going to change anything. Jenny- without a better description of the device I can't be sure what's going on. Do you have a link to a picture? An online ad, maybe?

Because of length contraction, how can "A' = A, M' = M and B' = B" hold true?

I doubt a meteor would have enough angular momentum to tilt us by 23 degrees, especially if it happened near one of the poles. The arctic is not a continent - it's just a bunch of ice. There are reasons to think that the earth's axis wasn't 0 degrees in recent times - there are seasonal deposits in lake beds (varves), and differences in oxygen isotopes (O16 vs O18) in ice (arctic or antarctic) that is seasonal, and there are hard to account for if you don't have seasons! Do have links for any of this?

By that I assume his problems were all behind him, if you take my meaning.

You don't want to assume that, and you obviously haven't been around any really big, industrial-sized capacitors, or heard any "war stories" from people who have. It's the people who assume that the big ones can be treated like the little ones that get into trouble. You don't take chances that the capacitor might be mislabelled or anything, follow proper safety protocol, and you don't get hurt.

More importantly' date=' for purposes of whether you melt the wire, etc. P = I[sup']2[/sup]R, so if you drop the current by 10, you drop the power by 100.

It's also shown in Maxwell's equations - the EM speed of propagation is invariant under coordinate transforms,which was a big clue for Einstein with relativity in trying to make the transformations work properly for other aspects of physics. That light was an EM wave was a fairly recent discovery at that time, and I think a lot of kinks were in the process of being worked out. Physics doesn't answer the fundamental question of "why" in the attempts to explain the behavior of nature - just the "how."