swansont

You can add to your KE if you do it right. The symmetry of losing as much energy as you gained is true for a stationary planet, but if you approach in the direction of the orbit, you can gain extra energy (the planet keeps moving away, so you spend more time/travel a longer distance accelerating toward it). The trick is that it is asymmetrical in our frame, so the energy lost is smaller than the energy gained. Here is amore complete explanation.

Consider that you need to give whatever chunk of material you want to eject the required escape velocity without frying it. "Unlikely" is an understatement.

How would you get a tidal lock with no tides? Tides are a consequence of there being elasticity in the surface of the planet/moon. As long as a force is exerted, there is a tide.

The object will tend to speed up as it approaches the earth. But unless it loses energy along the way, it won't be captured.

But to any extent this happens, it does so radially WRT the sun, and thus it doesn't exert a torque.

Technically potential energy is shared between the objects in the system, but when the masses are so different we usually "assign" the energy to the smaller. But yes, all objects affected by gravity have some amount of gravitational potential energy.

The earth rotates because it has angular momentum, and that's a conserved quantity in the absence of an external torque. We are transferring some angular momentum (and energy) to the moon through tides, so I imagine the same is happening with the sun at a smaller scale. (The moon is currently receding at ~ 4 cm/year). It doesn't take any energy to rotate - the energy is already there. It would take energy (and a torque) to increase the rotation, and energy would have to go somewhere if the rotation rate decreased.

Gravitational force is infinite in range, but decreases in strength as 1/r2

The formula you want is F=dP/dt, which i the source of the well-known F=ma, or force is mass X acceleration. But that assumes constant mass (so dP/dt =m(dv/dt), or ma), and isn't useful in this case. Rearrange it and you get F= v (dm/dt), where dm/dt is the rate at which mass is ejected and v is the speed, which is assumed constant.

Travel in 3D leads to collisions, which will tend to eliminate the particles in these orbits, over time.

Water is a polar molecule, so there are attractive forces between them. On surfaces they will be asymmetrical (along the surface and inward, but not outward) If the drops are small enough, the force is sufficient to make them stick to things, and also accounts for why drops tends to be small. Detergent tends to destroy surface tension - you can float a razor blade or paper clip on water and then sink it with a drop of liquid dtergent. Also works with water strider bugs (or so I'm told

Short wavelength photons pass through the atmosphere more readily, and are then absorbed be the earth. The earth radiates - this is blackbody radiation, since it has a temperature, and the molecules are vibrating - which is at a much longer wavelengths. The longer wavelength light doesn't pass through clouds readily. Your characterization of IR=heat is incorrect. All EM radiation transfers energy. Hot objects tend to radiate strongly in the IR. But IR is not heat.

Actually it was Mrs. Scroedinger's cat.

You'll. Have. To. Do. More. Than. Make. The. Claim.

Uh, no. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig's disease) Body breaks down, mind still works.

There's a whole bunch of links on the Ketterle page.

More simply (perhaps): the PE at infinity is zero. If the force is attractive, you have to add energy to separate the particles, so they have negative PE. You could have extracted this energy as the particles came together. One of the implications of this convention is that negative mechanical energy (KE + PE) implies a bound system.

Entropy is a macroscopic property/concept, so the notion that perpetual motion of the first kind can't work doesn't apply on the atomic scale.

Here is a link from Wieman and Cornell at U. Colorado. Here is Ketterle's page (MIT) (Those three are the Nobel Prize winners for BEC)

What General? Pres. and Mrs. Kennedy were in the back seat, and Gov. and Mrs. Connoly were in the seat in front of them.

Thanks, and mea culpa. Populations evolve, not individuals.

But we observe it whenever we look. Same as with gravity - we don't need to measure it everywhere to have confidence that it is present. We've long passed the point where we understand that large masses exert gravitational forces, and that living beings with DNA will evolve. I don't advocate teaching that evolution is unquestionable. But neither is it conjecture. The amount of evidence that supports evolution is staggering. It is irresponsible to teach that it's just a guess (and made up by those Godless scientists who want to topple the church, as is often implied)

Evolution occurs, as you say. Thus it is a fact. The fact of evolution (it occurs) and the theory (the explanation of why it occurs) are two different things. It would be incorrect to say that evolution in the past is a fact - that has to be inferred from the evidence. Theories don't "grow up" to be laws. A law is merely a fairly simple mathematical relationship that has been observed to be valid under some set of conditions. The law of gravity (F=GmM/r2) is, if fact, "wrong" in the sense that it is less complete in explaining behavior than the general theory of relativity. It's not the "law of relativity," because you can't write it out as a simple equation. Hooke's law is only valid under certain conditions (no deformation of the spring). Ohm's law has exceptions. Having something named a theory or law doesn't have the implication that one might infer from the lay terminology. Science terminology tends to have very specific definitions. To a scientist, speed and velocity are not interchangeable as they are in common use. There is no such thing as e.g. deceleration or de-evolution, if you are rigorous about the scientific definitions. So when people who have little training in science start arguing these points, there is going to be confusion if you don't understand the definitions. But "theory" is often interpreted as "guess" and it just isn't so.

Evolution is both fact and theory. The phrase "only a theory," in science terms, is an oxymoron, since theory is the pinnacle (vice hypothesis or conjecture) and requires a large amount of supporting evidence.

Except that creation isn't a scientific theory.