swansont

tsolkas suspended for one week for continued trolling; violations of rule 2.8: posting essentially duplicate messages without engaging in discussion of the original topic.

tsolkas has been suspended for repeated violations of rule 2.8: posting without engaging in discussion of the original topic

Zephir again suspended for multiple rules violations, 2.3.5b and 2.5. Two weeks

Zephir again suspended for thread hijacking in violation of rule 2.5.

This will be a listing of users that have been banned or suspended for rules violations (other than spambots that have been immediately deleted) Automatic suspensions for exceeding the 25-point limit of infractions are three days. (edit: points system no longer in use) Other suspensions and bans are from explicit moderator action. "Sabbatical" refers to a user-requested suspension/ban (update 4/24/09) ———————————————————— Zephir has been suspended for 1 week for repeated highjacking via off-topic posts of alternative theories in the physics section (including violations of rule 2.5, use of scientific threads to advertise a personal theory)

Infinite thermal capacity is impossible.

That's a classical calculation. That's the point of several discussions on the matter — classical descriptions of the electron fail. You have to use QED.

That doesn't jibe with what I was able to read on Google books. The book continually points out that the electron is a point, and you only get indications of size when it's interacting, and that these are clearly quantum effects.

4000-5000 per second. Average person has ~140 g of potassium, of which ~16.5 mg will be K-40. I get 4400 for that number. http://fas.harvard.edu/~scdiroff/lds/QuantumRelativity/RadioactiveHumanBody/RadioactiveHumanBody.html http://www.rerowland.com/K40.html The second link confirms my calculations that an average banana is radioactive at ~12 dps. Back when I was trapping K-37, I came up with the "banana equivalent" for the amount of atoms trapped. Sometimes it was a frustratingly small number (with a half-life of 1.226 sec, one banana of K-40 is equivalent is ~21 atoms of K-37)

Note: recent discussion on science philosophy and the supposed failings of the standard model have been moved http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=30673

I'll need some clarification and supporting evidence for this one. ~3000 from C-14, and at least that many from K-40, I think.

Elas, I moved you last post to the thread you linked to; discussion of your work beongs there, not here.

Blue is a primary color, and more manly. Seriously, though, I think it's more from narrowing the choices to red-green-blue, rather than ROYGBIV.

Gyros are already used in this fashion to keep things pointed in a desired direction, e.g. in satellites.

What part of "composite" is giving you trouble here? composite: made up of distinct parts As opposed to elementary particles, which are not made up of distinct parts. Nobody is advancing the hypothesis that fractional hall states are elementary particles (except, perhaps, you). Every time you have presented a paper title or abstract, it has been in terms of composite states. When someone says particle, they do not automatically mean elementary particle; an atom is referred to as a particle, but it is also a composite.

You do not need a force to keep spinning things pointed in the same direction, just as you do not need a force to keep things moving. An object moving in a straight line will continue to do so until acted upon by an external force, and when that happens, its momentum will change. But if it has a large momentum, a small force will not cause much deviation (whether that is in speed or direction). A spinning top is the same, but in a rotational sense: it has angular momentum, and the only thing that can cause a change in that angular momentum is a torque. But with a given torque that the earth can exert, a fast-spinning object will not deviate as much (in speed, or in this case direction, which is along the spin axis)

You have gotten substantial feedback, from physicists no less, much of which you have brushed aside. My evaluation of your material as speculative is based on the fact that, um, it is! What you have is based on conjecture; you have not proposed how to test this conjecture and have no data that supports you at the exclusion of established theories. Further, you have made predictions that are contrary to actual experimental results (e.g. that the classical electron radius is the actual size of an electron, and that a neutron is comprised of 5 particles) And it certainly doesn't help your complaint about being moved to speculations that one of your most prominently displayed bits of evidence you felt supported your conjecture was based on misunderstanding the fractional quantum hall effect discovery to be elementary particles rather than quantum fluid composite states, and that this gaffe has apparently not changed your thesis one bit.

The guts of two new fountain clocks, under vacuum.

We have the original system out so we could play with it. The later incarnations are much more compact, as we had decided on a design. It's modular and fiber-coupled now; we have tried three different laser sources, and none of the optics had to be reworked — just plug in a different fiber. I'll post some more pics when I get back to the office.

old laser layout http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/clockdev/lasertable.jpg newer laser layout (the laser itself is in another part of the rack) http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/clockdev/Rboptics1.html

Either grade inflation, or the fact that many post-bac programs have similar standards. I went to a state school for my PhD, and a "C" was a failing grade. BFD.

Not so much the physics that's attacked on a regular basis. Gravity can be both, you know. Warped space is from a classical theory, gravitons are from a quantum approach. Epicycles were ad-hoc, and you discard them for that reason. Occam and his shaving utensils. If you see any current physics that is ad-hoc, then we'll give you a pass on the initial accuracy of the replacement. Alternatative science can be (and often is) brought up in the speculations area. Most of the time it's not even close as to whether it should be in a science section (i.e something that comes close to passing as a theory) or in speculations.

But that would be a correlation with education, not intelligence. They aren't the same thing. It was a small-sample study. There's a reasonable chance it was meaningless/wrong; the kind of test is a zero-sum game, and Pangloss has already alluded to this. But the Slate article is wanting: "participants had one-tenth of a second to look at the letter and another four-tenths of a second to hit the button. One letter, one-tenth of a second. This is "information"?" That's scientific criticism? No, it's not. It's science-bashing rhetorical crap. The whole article is full of it. Saletan is making a huge extrapolation of a relatively simple test, and adding a lot of his own interpretation to the science, from what I can tell. And I have to ask: where does the conclusion come from about the motivation for the study? The scientists saw a claim made by "political scientists and psychologists" and devised a simpler test to investigate and see if there was any weight to the claims. Is it so unreasonable to hypothesize that there might be some difference in function between people who have different world views? He doth protest too much, methinks.

There's not a unique mapping, though. Like some physics calculations (especially in thermo), answers can be path dependent — it's not just a matter of where you end up, it matters how you got there. I think units is also "path dependent" and you're focusing on the endpoint and ignoring the path, as it were. The endpoint does not contain the information about how you got there.

As I said before, there's more to the story than units. Using the example of energy and torque, it's possible to exert a torque and transfer varying amounts of energy — it all depends on how much of a rotation is involved, and angles are unitless. Dimensional analysis can tell you if an answer is wrong (the units don't work out) but can't guarantee that the answer is right.