swansont

And it's this gross misconception and ignorance of science that one has to fight in this situation. Theories don't "grow up" to be laws. Scientific laws are fairly simple mathematical relationships that have been observed to hold. Nothing more. Evolution will never be a law only because you can't jot down an equation that represents it, and not because of its validity (or possible lack thereof).

Unless you have a closed, defined system (such as mathematics), you can't prove a negative. You have to check every case individually.

Nothing in science is "unquestionably proven." Science is inductive. Evolution is as well-founded as gravity, yet few question whether you will fall down rather than up if you jump off a cliff. Yet all of physics, including gravity, is based on theory, and none of it is proven. Evolution has been confirmed to the point where it is perverse to withold provisional assent (to paraphrase SJ Gould). Like all theories, one would have to re-evaluate it if new evidence were to come to light. But the weight of evidence already present gives one a great deal of confidence that the theory is correct. Changes to the theory would most likely be fine-tuning (much like General Relativity as compared to Newton's gravity - Newton works fine for most cases. It's more accurate to say it's incomplete rather than wrong)

Coefficient of restitution. The collision, however, is almost certainly not elastic. Total momentum is zero, so whatever motion happens, it will be balanced. Any fragmentation will have equal (mass*velocity) in any given direction and its opposite.

Skinnier

You can't prove a negative. Nature is under no obligation to live down to your level of comprehension.

Hyperphysics Concepts is quite useful, as is Eric Weisstein's World of Physics

You mean like this?

I hope you don't have to find out how wrong you are, first-hand. You go to a foreign country, you have to play by their rules.

I thought maybe you were referring to this I did a bit of work at the Cornell NNF lab. Pretty neat stuff.

You're thinking of them as particles. But they have a wave nature, too. You're in a regime where "between" doesn't have a lot of meaning.

I don't need to. I know and work with people who have done BEC, and I do laser cooling (to "only" a few microK) on a regular basis. I suspect the journalist involved was misunderstanding and/or sensationalizing the phenomena. Imagine that...

I think you have that backwards. Hydrogen doesn't explode - it burns very fast. Burning hydrogen uses 3 moles of reactants to produce 1 mole of products, so the result is a 3:1 reduction in volume of gas. All expansion comes from the energy release, as opposed to products that go solid or liquid -> gas, that expand as a result.

The probabilty is given by the square of the wave function (i.e. you multiply by the complex conjugate). There are things that you can represent easier by using a complex wave function - the wave function itself has no physical meaning, so it doesn't have to be real. As Aeschylus said, it's a matter of convenience.

No. Absolute zero theoretically has all center-of-mass motion of atoms and molecules stopping. But, as you note, it is unattainable.

pentane seems to be a good candidate

That was "sweet," not "sweat." The scientist isn't a mechanical device, anyway. Anyway - sometimes things are red because the photons have a certain wavelength, but sometimes it's due to human perception. There are relatively few instances where light is monochromatic, or nearly so. And there are colors that aren't due to a particular wavelength - silver isn't a color of the spectrum; neither is brown. What one perceives as red depends on ambient lighting and surrounding color, and may vary from person to person. And, as a nit, electro-optics aren't technically mechanical means, so hooking up a spectrum analyzer doesn't work anyway.

That's within each sublevel, given by the magnetic quantum number. As Pulkit noted, there are magnetic 2l-1 sublevels. Within each sublevel there are the spin up and spin down orientations.

I don't think anyone's going to do your lab for you, but if you have questions, ask 'em. I've done all those things.

The KE is not caused by the state of the electron, and is not, in general, caused by photon emission. But some fraction of the atoms will be in excited states based on the temperature of the system.

Well, there's more to it than that, of course. Just making the units match doesn't mean an equation is valid; it's a necessary but insufficient condition.