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swansont

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Everything posted by swansont

  1. You can show the continents are moving trivially these days with some GPS monitoring. The part about the lava is that when it cools, any ferromagnetic material in it, like iron, will align itself with the earth's field. Some layers of the lava have the field oriented opposite to others. The dates of the field reversals are known to some accuracy via radiometric dating, so the positions of the layers show the sea floor spreading. for more, click here Wegener is the guy who though up plate tectonics, so doing a Google search on 'Wegener plate tectonics evidence' should get lots of info. I can't vouch for the quality of that info, though.
  2. swansont

    Am/pm

    12 AM or PM is ambiguous and incorrect. It's either 12 Noon or 12 Midnight. click here
  3. 12 is right. Look at the data and you can estimate what the half life is, even if you initially assume zero background. This will overestimate the half-life, and you should be able to convince anyone that waiting 60 days is many half-lives. e.g. if you wait 5 half-lives, you are down to about 3% of your original activity. If you wait 10 half-lives, it's about 0.1%. So the 12 cpm at two months is essentially all background.
  4. I think that's phase velocity you mean. The phase relation between individual waves can exceed c, because there's no information there. It's the group, or wave packet, that cannot exceed c. The popular phrase that "nothing can exceed c" is a simplification to the point that it's wrong.
  5. They didn't cause the particles to spin - they already had spin. What they did was measure one particle, and instantly knew, because the particles were entangled, what the spin orientation of the other particle had to be. This is because the spins had to add up to some value.
  6. Your plasma ball is giving off X-rays. Very "soft" ones (i.e. relatively low energy), to be sure, so I'm a little surprised that it sets off the Geiger counter, but I suppose it's possible.
  7. Not quite. C-14 decays to N-14. It's a beta decay, so a neutron changes into a proton, and emits an electron and antineutrino. For C-14 to decay to C-12, it would need to emit two neutrons. Neutron emission can happen for some nuclei, but that requires an large excess of neutrons, and doesn't happen in this case.
  8. In a medium (n>1) the wavelength becomes lambda/n. The frequency stays the same. Light travels at c/n through the medium.
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