John Cuthber

Lasers are used to carry a lot of information. I suspect this message was probably carried on a laser beam at least once between my computer and yours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Transmitters

In my very limited experience, steering a hovercraft is a pig. Sure, you can spin it round so you are facing the other way- but you tend to keep on traveling in the same direction you were originally- with the additional problem that you can't see where you are going.

I use a calendar.

"Where did you go?" Bed. "Why are you refusing to answer the other 2 questions!" Would you like to explain exactly what those two questions are? "And stop being rude and mean" You can't be bothered to write properly, and you expect me to give up my time to repeat answers that I have already given- even though I'm not getting paid for this or anything like that , then when I stop for a break, you say I'm rude. Would you like to think that over? And there are no "statements below" to read unless you mean "Everyone is conscious and equal, besides our different bodies, memory and decisions, we are all identical consciousnesses. If there is no god, we have to immediately find a way to make our consciousnesses in our brains stay going so we can live forever." and they don't seem very relevant.

The obstacle is that the laws of physics say it can't work. Essentially, the pressure is because of the weight of water above the sea bed. It could only do work if it moved downwards and it can't because the sea bed is in the way.

Thanks for illustrating how Honda did so well by accepting the laws of physics and seeing what those laws suggested (that higher RPM means a higher power output). I suggest you do the same. Stop pretending that you can ignore the conservation of momentum.

No it isn't. It's ambiguous and that's about the worst thing scientific writing can be. "You seriously don't know of any such test being performed as I just said!?" I explained why it would be pointless. "then we will never truely know" We pretty much do know- that's why it's pointless.

"But we have to have a test performed...if success we will get everything and become gods..." Let me know if you get funding. Also, will you please sort out your grammar. Stuff like "Also y haven't you answered the other 2 hey...just say nope other then your idea there no other way to levitate a atom with percision." is difficult to read. If you can't be bothered to write it properly, why should I bother to answer?

As I pointed out some time ago in this thread, it's my job to understand things like the interaction between light and atoms (and it has been for longer than you have been alive). Are you seriously asking if I only heard about the uncertainty principle from you? Here's a hint. You didn't use the phrase "uncertainty principle" until after I had used it. As for "Im talking about a test where a single or couple of xray or gammaray photons where shot at it mostly at one-side of the single atom, either with the atom floating in vacuum or at the corner of a larger mass." I can tell you what the outcome of that test is almost certainly going to be. A single photon misses the atom; nothing else happens. Now, do you think anyone ever went to the trouble of setting up that experiment? If you fire a lot of gamma ray photons at a lot of atoms then you get the compton experiment. The effects of firing photons at atoms in general is well documented. Practically every sort of combination of material and photon energy has been investigated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_photoelectron_spectroscopy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_photoelectron_spectroscopy Also, if you are going to write about English, spell it correctly.

You can certainly see why the liquor barons wouldn't like dope to be legal.

A good point about "our" drugs are ok but "their" drugs are bad. But in terms of cannabis the prohibition in mots of the West came about pretty much by accident. The egyptians had a cannabis problem and wanted to control it. To do that, they needed international cooperation. To "buy" that cooperation they asked the West to agree to ban cannabis in much the same way as the opiates. "Egypt, with support from China and United States, recommended that a prohibition on hashish be added to the Convention, and a sub-committee proposed the following text: The use of Indian hemp and the preparations derived therefrom may only be authorized for medical and scientific purposes. The raw resin (charas), however, which is extracted from the female tops of the cannabis sativa L, together with the various preparations (hashish, chira, esrar, diamba, etc.) of which it forms the basis, not being at present utilized for medical purposes and only being susceptible of utilisation for harmful purposes, in the same manner as other narcotics, may not be produced, sold, traded in, etc., under any circumstances whatsoever." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Opium_Convention Now that seems fair enough until you ask what this problem was. A researcher there had found that many of the people in the "lunatic asylums" in Egypt were habitual dope smokers adn came to the conclusion that the dope caused the mental health problems. He failed to take account of the fact that much of the population outside those institutions also smoked cannabis. As far as the UK China and the US were concerned, they had scarcely heard of cannabis- it didn't trouble them much. But the Egyptians refused to sign up to the opiates treaty unless the committee agreed to add cannabis to the list of banned drugs. So - for the sake of an easy life, the rest of the group added dope to the list. That's the basis of the banning of cannabis in the UK and US (and other places). Not on the basis of race or harm, but for political expediency based on a mistaken explanation of the mental health problems in Egypt. Now, I accept that it's possible that they were "right for the wrong reason" and that the stuff should be banned. But, if so, let's at least have the debate rather than carrying on a "tradition" based on an error and which is certainly a source of racial tension today.

You ask "John as I said at the top of that big paragraph did, you get the idea of the problem being the uncertainty principal from my other thread" and I had already said that the idea came from some German bloke but you asked the same question again. Did you think the answer might have changed somehow? You ask "does anybody have any references to anybody ever actually trying to shoot a xray or gamma ray photon at a atom" I suggest you look at Compton scattering. The first hit is the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_scattering which says "Compton scattering is an inelastic scattering of a photon by a free charged particle, usually an electron. It results in a decrease in energy (increase in wavelength) of the photon (which may be an X-ray or gamma ray photon), called the Compton effect." and "Compton scattering usually refers to the interaction involving only the electrons of an atom." and you say "That doesn't answer or help any of the left over questions above" If pointing you to a page that directly answers the question doesn't help, what are you hoping for?

The nicotine is extracted from tobacco plants. I don't have and specific data but it's difficult to see why the stuff should be more expensive than caffeine for example.

Google compton scattering.

Why not look at what the uncertainty principle actually says and then, rather than repeatedly asking us pointless questions, you can work out the answers for yourself. (and, yes, the question's pointless, because it has already been answered).

The question was already answered. It's impossible. That's what the uncertainty principle says. The best you can do is (roughly) the wavelength of visible light- about half a micron.

Well, three of those 5 replies are about the topic, so I guess that's progress. Re the first, you said "The drivers smoked marijuana and drove, so whatever else the weed contained it was part-and-parcel of the driving tests." The same is true of the people stopped by the police and found to have been smoking dope. They didn't just contain THC, they contained another psychoactive material- alcohol. Re "I never gave a view on alcohol or other drugs, whether related to driving or not." Actually, you did. You said that the other drugs present in the dope were not important.

Sorry, I can't parse this sentence with any certainty. "So you believe because scripture the christian use is reason for them to look at others with discriminant view?" Could you put some punctuation in it please?

Tim, I see you are trying the red herring approach again. Why bother? Surely you have realised by now that it doesn't work. Anyway, here's the latest balderdash you came up with "Once the methane has entered the water and dissolved how long do you think it will take for half of it to escape to the surface layers of the ocean and then into the atmosphere?" and the obvious reply is that if the water wasn't already virtually saturated with methane, the hydrates wouldn't form. So the gas can't dissolve- it bubbles out and the bubbles rise at a rate depending on their size- if they agglomerate as they rise they will get quicker. The bubbles will rise at (very roughly) the same rate as those from a scuba diver- I haven't measured it but it looks to about a metre per second, so from depths of a kilometre or so it would take about quarter of an hour. I could be a few orders of magnitude worth of wrong there and you still wouldn't have a valid point. So, seriously, why post that sort of dross?

The problem which you have been ignoring all along is that your ideas are not connected to the physical laws. It's not just a "matter of opinion", or "hoping to find a trick nobody else thought of". They have been mathematically proven; so, the same maths proves beyond any sensible debate that you are wrong. You may, or may not, choose to reply to this. It won't matter. You will still be wrong.

High voltage means the strip of wet towel gets hot. You can certainly char the paper that way. So you waste a lot more energy and risk starting a fire. What you actually need isn't a voltage stabiliser, but a current stabiliser. Still mainly wrong.

Delta, feel free to check my maths butI don't think a hand gun is quite the right analogy here. The mass of a billiard ball is roughly that of the bullet and the speed of the bullet is roughly the speed of sound. So the energy of the bullet is roughly enough to double the temperature of the ball. (to very rough approximations the speed of molecules is about the speed of sound at that temperature. They start off with energy due to being warm (not at absolute zero) and they get about as much energy again from the bullet). However, as mentioned, the photon energy is about 10,000 eV compared to the thermal energy of about 0.02 eV. So you are adding about a million times more energy than is initially present. I think that puts it into the range of trying to play billiards using nuclear weapons, rather than handguns. Advance, re. "Did you come up with the uncertainty principal or get it from my sentance lol?" Nope This guy did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg It might be better if you learned about it. It will save you a lot of time asking about things that are known to be impossible.

Interesting. You say it doesn't matter that there are other active materials in weed alongside the THC because they are in there anyway. Yet you don't take the same view with alcohol and dope which are almost always present together (according to phi's post and I'm sure it's true). It still doesn't affect the legality issue; at a pinch you could say that anyone driving under the influence of any substance (legal or otherwise) is driving without due care and attention since they could (simply by abstaining from the drug or from driving) pay more attention. The drunk in charge/ driving under the influence laws are a convenience but not strictly needed. Would the potential revenue from taxing cannabis enable the state to provide amenities for those who are adversely affected by the drug? Would it be better to treat those problems as medical rather than legal? Is the decision to keep the stuff illegal a political (Right vs Left) issue and does that cloud people's decision?

"So even if perfectly a single xray/gamma ray photon hit the atom and electron/s flew off, wouldn't the atom go moving in one direction in vacuum though?" Probably not. It would be much more likely to knock some electrons off the atom and the ionised atom and the electrons would fly off in different directions. It's like trying to steer an apple with a shotgun. Re the question in the other thread you say "Hi, I am 18 and although I know a lot about physics and stuff I am probably missing lots of knowledge and probably even simple things in physics. My idea from what I know follows physics and I think it could work maybe, I first realized it when I was 14 and still I have no proof it can't be made/work," Well, I have bad news, the proof it can't be made/work is the uncertainty principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Here's a picture of an animal (sadly extinct) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quagga_in_enclosure.jpg Sometimes it doesn't look like a zebra- for example from behind Sometimes it doesn't look like a horse - for example- from the front Because of these two properties we know that it's not a horse and not a zebra (actually, it's a quagga) Sometimes photons don't look like waves- for example in the photoelectric effect. Sometimes they don't look like particles- for example in diffraction experiments. Because of these two properties we know that it's not a wave and not a particle (actually, it's a photon). If you try to understand quaggas by pretending they are horses or zebras, you are not going to get very far. a quagga is not " a mixture of a horse and a zebra" If you try to understand photons by pretending they are waves or particles you are also not going to get very far. a photon is not " a mixture of a wave and a particle" A photon doesn't have a "dual nature" any more than a quagga does. It has one nature - it's a photon. .Any attempt to say "they are like a so and so" will be an analogy rather than the real thing. They are different from anything you know about.