swansont

It's bad headline writing to couch this as right vs wrong. AFAIK it was a conjecture, not a conclusion. Did Darwin even know about hydrothermal vents? (Plus the idea they had a role in abiogenesis is old. It's bad to present this as a new idea. Here's an article from 1988. It's against the idea, but it shows it was being discussed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11536607)

And recreated in a lab setting. https://www.livescience.com/7035-mysterious-ball-lightning-created-lab.html But I don't see how ball lightning is an example of "hand waving away evidence". It seems to me that it's the opposite of that. A phenomenon was observed, but solid confirmation of it was lacking. What evidence was hand-waved away? This is called "conventional wisdom" and has been a bane of science for a long time. What conclusive evidence is there that UFOs are aliens? Conclusive meaning you can positively eliminate all other (scientifically reasonable) explanations? Couple with that, what plausibility argument exists that is not based on conjecture and wishful thinking that a piloted or autonomous craft could get here from interstellar distances? Why, with the explosion of the number of people carrying a camera with them at all time, haven't we seen better pictures? (and is there data showing the number of observations has scaled with the number of potential picture-takers?) This brings to mind the question of why, as our detection methods get better, do we not find "aliens" more easily? The aliens are far from home, and it seem unlikely that they are doing R&D and deploying new technology "in the field" and there would not be time for new craft to get here with more advanced technology. They are presumably stuck with whatever they had when they left home.

A lot of variables here. If these are pure tones, there are locations where the amplitude and phase difference will result in having them destructively interfere, so a microphone at that point will record (basically) nothing. (microphones having a spatial extent means that the amplitude will be small but not zero)

Not my point. “...that we theorize may contain trillions of comets and other icy bodies." We don’t know what’s there. It’s conjecture.

There are a number of examples of this. many point out issues of simultaneity being relative. Trains and flashes of light as the train and platform observers are adjacent, for example. In general, in these examples one tries to simplify the scenario, so that only one behavior is being investigated and tested. Every added caveat is an opportunity to misunderstand what's going on.

This video, with the following description (emphasis added): "Far beyond even Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is a vast and mostly empty region of space that we theorize may contain trillions of comets and other icy bodies."

Let's not. Let's say you hand-waved your explanation without much in the way of science or analysis (which is consistent with the topic under discussion: lots of hand-waving, and not much in the way of actual scientific analysis) So they can travel in interstellar space without having developed "pointing" technology?

Have you come up with better arguments? Because if memory serves your rationale was seriously lacking when this came up not long ago.

I don’t see any science. No rule. But since that’s not what I objected to, it’s moot. Do you? One might ask why you won’t share it here. This misses the mark bout four different ways, but it’s just not worth it. Don’t bring this topic up again.

There can be regions where fields are excluded.

! Moderator Note Dancing around the issue breaks one. Advertising (sending people to another site) breaks another. That bit has been deleted. Oh well.

How would that work? How would you employ these folks with the specific knowledge necessary for each paper and keep them occupied as an employee? Otherwise it's the same thing as we have now, only the journals would pay the referees, so as to keep them to a schedule. Driving up the cost of the publications. I think you overestimate the ease with which one might identify certain work that ends up having significance. What's missing the pool of talent from where you might draw this panel. I'm pretty sure papers have already been rejected that were ultimately the basis of Nobel prizes. edit: Ratcliffe won the Medicine prize this year. The paper he wrote was rejected by Nature. The Higgs boson paper was rejected by Physical Review Letters. https://www.news18.com/news/world/27-year-old-letter-reveals-scientist-peter-ratcliffes-nobel-prize-winning-study-was-rejected-by-journal-2344475.html

One of the things I learned when I was teaching is that there is no explanation or approach that is so wonderful that it will reach 100% of the audience. It's still a subjective experience. Saying an explanation is better isn't correct — it may mean that it's better for you, but you can't necessarily say that it will be better for someone else.

The potential problem with this attitude is that you might be left with so few reviewers that they can't handle the load and will refuse to review additional articles. That doesn't improve the system. If a journal doesn't have a deadline and a way to quickly re-assign the review duties, then they have failed, too.

Spacetime is a geometry. Objects are not. "Do objects actually have infinite spatial extent" is kind of a loaded (and vague) question - it depends on what you mean.

The alternatives cost additional money, unlike student labor, which is essentially free of additional obligation. I've helped move optical tables and other equipment. It did not seem to be an unusual request. Same thing now, in a government lab. We move equipment (locally) all the time. Contracting it out is a tedious process, and we usually want it done now, rather than after three weeks of paperwork. And there's a lot of stuff we wouldn't want to trust to outside people (such as the four atomic fountain clocks we moved from our lab to another building) since they would be nowhere near as paranoid about damaging something.

! Moderator Note Questions about expansion have been split. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/120440-expansion-split-from-empty-space-inside-galaxies-must-be-different-than-empty-space-outside-of-them/

And that’s correct. It’s not uniform if it doesn’t look much longer that it is wide (i.e infinite becomes a bad assumption), which happens near the ends.

This is purportedly a science discussion, and you need to bring the receipts. Either a theoretical basis for a claim, or experimental evidence that supports it. So far we've seen neither one.

Single loop, or a solenoid?

I'm pretty sure some sort of system was in place before I became a resident expert (which was prior to becoming a mod) edit: there was one taken down for improvement in 2004, so there has been time where no system was in place. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/3391-what-happened-to-the-reputation-system/

Yes, precisely. The electron spin flips, but that's it. No atomic motion. There is no other interaction available to the ground-state atom until you get to 10.2 eV.

If by "high school stuff" you mean that it does not include calculus, then you might have an element of truth in your statement. If you integrate the effects of a single loop over an infinite length, you get a uniform field. But you might not realize that if you can only apply high school thinking to the problem. The practical reason I don't believe you is that I have used coil systems in atomic clocks. The C-field coil (basically a long solenoid) and the anti-helmholtz coils (coil pair with anti-aligned current) used for atom trapping behave as expected. That is, the C-field is uniform as long as you are away from the ends of the coil. If it wasn't, the clock performance would be compromised, as atoms would not experience the same field, and would thus have a different bias from the Zeeman shift that depended on their radial location. But this isn't a problem.

Changes in their angular momentum can be measured, but in QM this is not physical spinning. In e.g. hydrogen, you could flip the hyperfine state, which is the 1420 MHz transition. The only way to give the electron orbital angular momentum would be to have it jump from the 1S to the 2P level, which requires a 10.2 eV photon or from a collision (which is not something you see very much in a thermal system). But that doesn't involve any physical spinning of the atom. That notion is inconsistent with QM.

That’s the equation, but it’s not the solution, which would give you x(t)