swansont

You are correct. It carries no more weight than “some guy on the street told me”

If it’s small it’s not a threat. Missiles tend to not be large compared to a few-hundred-meters-wide target, and rubble piles do not have tightly-bound components, so not much momentum would be transferred to the rubble away from the impact area. Not to mention the difficulty in targeting, which gets harder as closing speed increases.

As Ken Fabian pointed out it’s the momentum imparted that matters. If you hit a rubble pile with a high KE projectile it might just blast through it; the part it hits would recoil but the remaining parts would continue on their path.

The solid earth acts like a fluid on the right time scale; the “illusion” would seem to stem from an unrealistic assumption that a solid is infinitely rigid. Nope.

That’s more of a what question than why, isn’t it? (and this is rhetorical)

! Moderator Note Irrelevant. If you don’t want to participate, you are free not to, but the OP doesn’t have to justify asking the question. The discussion isn’t about the merits of any of this.

It was and is a very public, reasonably easy-to-understand service for when people ask what impact an accelerator has on every-day lives. My weird-thing-at-TRIUMF story is that we tried to trap Francium, made at the isotope separator (TISOL; before ISAC came online) and the lab got a visit from a nuke watchdog who looked for fallout from bomb testing. Basically a set of huge filters to trap particulates, and then tested for radioactives. We were making tiny amounts of a range of unstable heavy isotopes as a byproduct, but they weren’t far away, so they noticed. Wrong signature for a bomb, but they wanted to be sure what we were doing. (the DRAGON instrument got its name from a colleague’s plot showing the unknown physics space the device would be able to investigate, labeled “Here Be Dragons” like an old map. Certain people liked the name, so they did a backronym)

Some scientists think about it, but most probably don’t, since it’s not necessary in order to do most science. We don’t know why masses attract, but we observe that they do, and can quantify the effect. Why they do so isn’t testable, at least at this time, and thus not science.

! Moderator Note Since you seem to be adamant about ignoring corrections to your flawed descriptions, this is closed. Do not bring the topic up again.

! Moderator Note Moved to philosophy, as these are questions of metaphysics

We had a couple of pretty good ones when I was a postdoc there.

There’s a treaty preventing nuclear weapons in space (the Outer Space Treaty), which would obviously be suspended in this scenario, but you probably aren’t going to be parking nukes in space in anticipation of hitting an asteroid that hasn’t already been identified as a very likely threat. Multiple parts of the plan would have to be in place beforehand.

And why did this happen? What about the NEO Surveyor mission, already in the works? Is there some deficiency in that? Do you have any facts or science to present, or is it just going to be a bunch of hand-waving?

Was this as part of the internship program? My recollection is that TRIUMF was quite supportive of this.

And yet you brought it up in your post. “Then extend distance in the future to further areas of solar system. Not exclusively in accretion disk orbit, but also sphere around the Sun, to detect also non-solar objects..” So I’m asking how we destroy the asteroid that your proposed system was set up to detect. They’ve detected asteroids, so they aren’t useless. They might not be 100% efficient, but you’ve not identified the flaws, or how how your proposal fixes anything. It’s your terminology. You’re supposed to tell us what you mean.

How would you do this? On an asteroid that’s a few hundred meters across? What if it’s not orbiting the sun? Why do you need a “cloud” of drones/satellites? Wouldn’t a few dedicated telescopes suffice?

So you found your answer. It’s the size tag. size=number This text is very small This text is big

Why does it matter? The strong interaction is already stronger than the electrostatic, dipole interactions are weaker, and induced dipole interactions weaker still. vdW forces only matter when you have a neutral particle, so there is no direct force of attraction, which isn’t the case here. It would be a tiny correction to the binding energy, assuming it’s not zero. And it would probably only be a (small) factor if you only had a small number of nucleons, because with more the effects would tend to cancel. Deuterium, Helium and perhaps Lithium and Beryllium. Once you have nucleons on both sides of your target, symmetry cancels all this out.

Your whole post screams, “citation needed!” (except the parts that are 50-70 years out of date. I mean, what’s the relevance?)

And AFAIK that information is no longer available in the forum editor, so it’s not a forum question. It’s a BBcode question, suitable for a search engine.

The dipole moment depends on the charges and their separation. The separation would be small, since the particles are. ~5 orders of magnitude smaller than in atomic systems. The charges are smaller, too, so you’d have a smaller moment because of that.

These are set in the editor; I think we lost the BBCode editing capability at least one update ago.

vdW forces are from induced dipoles where there are + and - charges, and you don’t have that here. But there’s a lot more to this; you’re obviously not getting the whole thing in a few sentences. Spin has an effect, for example. The dynamics of the interaction vary depending on whether you’re looking inside of a nucleon or between nucleons. This isn’t a deep dive into any of that.

Bumping this. Posts making such accusations with be deposited in the trash can

The fact that neutrons can be bound shows that they attract. You can make a neutron beam, but not sure how you’d get a coherent beam. A coherent beam might be more of a problem, since the neutrons would have basically the same speed, and thus have little KE in the beam’s frame. I suspect you’d form dineutrons which would very quickly decay to deuterium or a free proton snd neutron. Neutrons with different energies wouldn’t get trapped in each other’s potential well so easily.