John Cuthber

One can't

You hope in vain.

PAWEL KOLASA, if you are right, how did we get to the moon?

" I come from the standpoint that resistance is not something I can store in a jar, then go pick up an empty component, open some little compartment, and pour resistance in. " Strawman. Nobody said that. You can't pour diameter into a car tyre- but it still has one. You have repeatedly failed to answer my questions and it seems that you are now refusing to do so. I'm sure others here will form their own opinions on "I do not think it is clear that you have refuted any of my statements either." They may well base those opinions on the web pages I have cited.

"We are treating resistance like it is a thing and not an electrical function. "the resistor has resistance" like the "the wheel has turn". Wheels turn, resistors resist. LOL!! " No. The resistor has a resistance like the wheel has a moment of inertia. What's the impedance of a 1µF capacitor (assumed to be ideal for the sake of simplicity) at 50Hz? Here's a hint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_impedance#Capacitor How much power does it dissipate? And, BTW, I didn't claim to have refuted your claim about the transformer (though I still doubt that you can do it) I refuted your claim that you had asked many questions. I thought that saying "So, for the record, that's another assertion (I've posed many questions) refuted." made that clear. Two is not "many"

You have made many assertions that were refuted and, as far as I can tell you asked just 2 questions (I got Chrome to look for question marks so if you forgot the "?" at the end of a question I will have missed it) The first was "There you see?" I thought that it was a rhetorical question but I will answer it if you like. Yes, I see that you do not think that resistance is an intrinsic quality of an object- such as a resistor- but that you think it is a mathematical abstraction calculated from the ratio of the voltage to the current. However as I pointed out, the definition of the word doesn't agree with your supposition. On that basis you are simply wrong. The second was "Yet, you are claiming that I wouldn't be able to sense an EM field produced by a transformer only a few hundred feet away at most? " Now the direct relevance of that is questionable but I think the answer is "it depends". If the transformer were in a nice empty pasture somewhere then I have little doubt that you could detect the em field from it. However if you were sat in a room with lots of other electrical equipment also generating 60Hz em fields I think it would be difficult ( or, at best, impractical) to assess the particular contribution to the net field made by that from the transformer. So, for the record, that's another assertion (I've posed many questions) refuted. On the other hand, you don't seem to have really answered any questions at all. Do you plan to?

That might be a reasonable enough comment, but I think he was probably referring to the story which is there. "Photo of Wade Michael Page, 40, a former Army specialist-turned-racist-rock musician believed to be the gunman in Sunday's massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that left 7 dead, including Page."

"Impedance creates heat. This is also a statement that can be agreed upon" Nope, not in a purely reactive circuit. Admittedly they aren't practically realisable, but that's not really the point. BTW, this "Whereas, you do not need the qualifier when saying, resistance creates heat. " is begging the question. It is only true if you assume that a resistor has no resistance when there's no applied voltage. If you make that assumption, you can't then use it to show that a resistor has no resistance when there's no applied voltage. And I'm still waiting for you to answer my question. While I'm at it this " All of this is prediction based on measurement of other variables, not the variable itself that we wish to measure." is troublesome too. If I measure the current and the voltage in a resistor then calculate the resistance from Ohm's law are you going to say that I'm measuring voltages and current not resistance which is the variable that we wish to measure?

I gave you a hint earlier about how to measure the resistance with no current flowing; it certainly isn't magic. Why not take a sentence that isn't clearly false? It's like saying "resistance creates breakfast cereal", and then trying to deduce something from that sentence.

Are you being deliberately unclear? Why has the word "illusion" suddenly popped up in this? Face facts. The Cavendish experiment shows that you are wrong. You can't just "fix" the units. If you think you can, then please do so because at the moment your ideas just don't work.

And it remains perfectly legal for me to purchase and own a lock knife for, for example, DIY. However, other than as a museum piece, I'd struggle to justify a flick knife. All of this is rather beside the point. We are not going to give the OP an answer to his question. Also, since he needs to ask it it is fair to assume that he doesn't know a lot about knives. In that case it would be gravely ill-advised for him (or his friend) to start a fight with someone who probably does.

Almond oil is made entirely of chemicals.

"You would not say that a long piece of wire is conducting unless it is part of a circuit. " No, I wouldn't. But I would say "copper is a conductor" and I would say "a copper wire is a conductor". For what it's worth I have a carefully calibrated bit of copper wire that has (as it sits on a bench down in the basement) a conductance of 1000 mohs. One describes the way in which the copper wire is acting at this moment (it is carrying or not carrying a current). The other describes a property of the copper wire; it has (whether you like it or not) a resistance of 0.001 ohms. I asked this before , and you haven't answered it. Why does a resistor suddenly not have a resistance when the voltage across it drops to zero? Also, I can, in principle, actually measure the resistance without an applied voltage /current, but I will let you work out how.

"In pure technical terms, nothing "has resistance". Things "offer resistance". " Says who? From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resistance "Also called ohmic resistance. a property of a conductor by virtue of which the passage of current is opposed, causing electric energy to be transformed into heat: equal to the voltage across the conductor divided by the current flowing in the conductor: usually measured in ohms." Since it's a property ,a resistor "has" (rather than "offers") it.

Lock knives are perfectly legal in the UK (within reason). Flick knives have been banned for decades. The law on self defence is complicated enough. How the law deals with a third party joining in would be even more so. The simple answer is that the jury would decide if the action was acceptable in the circumstances.

There is a relationship between the force, the strain and the charge (or voltage) , but the maths isn't easy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity#Mathematical_description

Many years ago, when electric typewriters were new, someone pointed out (probably in an "end of article filler" in the reader's digest I think) that a secretary who changed from a mechanical to an electric typewriter would do less physical work and would- if they made no other changes to their lifestyle and diet- gain weight. If I remember rightly the gain was of the order of 10 pounds a year. The energy density of fats is pretty consistent. My bottle of cooking oil says it's 3400 KJ per 100 ml. That's about 3.7MJ/ 100g or 37Mj/Kg. About 170 MJ of energy is stored in the secretary's 10 Lbs of extra fat. For a typical working year of 200 days or so with 8 hrs a day that's 1,600 days or 138,000,000 seconds. That comes out at pretty close to 1 Watt for a mechanical typewriter (assuming my memory of something from 30 years ago is correct). So we need about 400 old secretaries (at 10% conversion) or about 100,000 new ones to power a light bulb. Overall, most of the typists would be working in the dark so they wouldn't be able to read what they were typing.

I guess it's a philosophical point. There's a 1000 ohm resistor on my bench at the moment. Does it have a resistance, even though it has no applied voltage? If I put 2 volts across it I get 2 mA of current. One volt gives me 1mA and half a volt gives 0.5mA. In each case I get a current of a thousandth of the voltage so the resistance is 1000 Ohms. Why would that suddenly stop being true at zero volts? I couldn't measure the resistance at zero volts, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. Perhaps more importantly, there's never exactly zero potential across a resistor for any finite interval of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise Anyway, back at the original question. Part of the "voltage" seen by the meter may be due to changes in the capacitance of the leads and leakage current from the DVM. A bit like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrophorus

"Love it Moon, wih the exception of beating up on Romney. He's my boy! " What exactly are you trying to say here? Claire is right: those religious nutters are wrong. Their supporters are wrong. Romney is one of their supporters. Yet Romney is not wrong- because he's Romney?

I'm a chemist with rather more than 20 years' experience. I learned chemistry doing experiments at home with a chemistry set. I still do chemistry at home. And, to top it all, cooking is practical chemistry. You need to be careful doing chemistry wherever you do it, but that doesn't preclude doing chemistry at home.

A couple of experiments show that my keyboard takes about 60g ie about 0.6N to press a key (but the force isn't constant throughout the key's travel) and that the distance is about 0.5 cm so Inigo's estimate is about the right ballpark but (at least for my keyboard, it's an overestimate of the energy and so an underestimate of the number of monkeys). With any plausible efficiency of energy recovery, hundreds of thousands of typists would be needed to power a lightbulb.

"Whether the actual mechanics of a currently used rocket would work in half atmospheric pressure I have no clue about - my guess would be no. " My guess is yes- because they do. Shortly after take-off the rocket does travel through air of half the normal density, and it works just fine. It's also interesting to consider why it would take slightly less energy. To a good approximation the viscosity of air is independent of the pressure. The reduced drag is due to the reduced "thickness" of the atmosphere. (the depth of the "ocean of air" so to speak.) But quite a bit of the acceleration to escape velocity takes place when the rocket has already left (most of) the atmosphere so the effect is much smaller than you might expect and depends on the velocity vs height profile. Of course there's the other way to halve the atmosphere's density: you can double it's temperature. That would raise the viscosity of the air and increase the thickness/ depth of the atmosphere so the rocket would travel further through more viscous air and both factors would increase the energy required. However the change in energy required would be small compared to the total energy.

There seems to be some confusion here. Whether or not the energy required to move something depends on the speed at which you move it is determined by what energy you are looking at. If I want to pick up a rock and put it on a table then I need to do two things. I need to provide the potential energy (Mgh) that the rock gains as a result of its position and also I need to lend some kinetic energy to the rock while it is in transit. The faster I move it the more kinetic energy I need to give it. that kinetic energy depends on the square of the velocity. But here's the important part. I can get that energy back when I bring the rock to a halt when it gets to the level of the table top Anyway, back to the original absurd assertion. pawelkolasa, When I push a heavy rock across a table with my finger I can see that my finger is bent. If it isn't the reaction force from the rock bending it, what is it? It can't be the force from my finger because that is a force towards the rock but my finger is bent back towards the wrist. The only thing that pushes my finger back is the reaction force. It's real: I can see its effect and I can feel it. Unless you can tell me what other force bends my finger you have to accept that it is the reaction force, physics has been right for the last 400 years or so and that you are mistaken. http://xkcd.com/675/

What happens in fact (rather than in your imagination) is that there is an attractive force between them which keeps the torsion wire twisted. I can calculate your mental age by taking the number of words in the last sentence I quoted and halving it. "Mental age = number of words /2 " is an equation; I can calculate with it. But the important thing to realise is that: It Is Wrong. Your equations are not plausible because of the failure of the units to tally up. Your assertions about gravity are false because they don't agree with observation. How wrong are you prepared to be?

"I don't need to prove anything, to show how rational my position is. " That's a lot more true than it first looks. "This is indeed maibe the strongest argument for theism." Indeed, and it's a very poor argument (not least because it's a strawman attack on an alternative).