John Cuthber

"Unionism assumes that business will always do everything in its power to exploit labor/workers " As I understand it, US law required companies to maximise shareholder value. A simple way to do that is to exploit the workforce. "But in fact, democracy DOES make many rules to protect employees, if they are able to apply those to the entire country. There are laws about how and when you can fire someone, about minimum wage, about minimum travel compensation, about health and safety, maximum working hours, minimum holidays, etc, etc." And these laws sometimes get ignored. It often falls to the Unions to see that the law is enforced.

Osama bin Laden never existed. He was an invention of the CIA/ MiB. This was about to become public so they "killed" him. The "burial at sea" ensures there's no body to examine.

"Now I know this is a stretch, but work with me here (whispers) "I think it's rotates because of leftover momentum from our solar systems formation!"" That makes no sense. Momentum is a conserved property. Whatever momentum (including angular momentum) the solar system had when it formed, it still has. You can't use something that doesn't change a a source of energy. Please come up with a plausible source for the energy required to lift the earth's crust away from it's centre.

The OP specified non ionic. These might count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excimer

I don't know what we taste like but since I stood barefoot on a soldering iron I can attest that we smell like pork while we are cooking.

I think the paper Jimmy cites, which says "However, there is a fundamental flaw in Thomas Gold's theory of abiogenic petroleum formation. As previously pointed out, methane can only be converted to higher hydrocarbons at pressures >30 kbar corresponding to a depth of ~100 km below the Earth's surface. The proposed reaction of methane to produce higher hydrocarbons above this depth and, in particular, in the upper layers of the Earth's crust is therefore not consistent with the second law of thermodynamics . Furthermore, bacteria can not catalyze thermodynamically unfavourable reactions. Gold's deep gas theory in which hydrocarbons are supposedly formed from methane in the upper layers of the Earth's crust is therefore invalid." Pretty much nails the idea. The fact that the archetypal reaction 2 CH4 --> C2H6 +H2 occurs without a change in volume implies that the effect of pressure will be small. And the overall reaction n CH4 --- CnH2n+2 + n H2 will not be entropically favoured by high temperatures leads me to suspect that this reaction won't work any better at high temperatures. . Given the choice between thermodynamically measured heats of reaction and computed changes I tend to believe the former.

"Think about a figure skater in a tight spin and then slowly spreads her arms out while spinning. " I did, and I realised that, if she were as big and heavy as the earth, then spreading her arms out against the gravitational attraction of the rest of her body would require a lot of energy. Where do you imagine that energy comes from?

Gas phase electron diffraction can tell you the shapes and sizes of molecules, You can then look at the solid phase by X ray diffraction. The molecules are often pretty much the same in both cases.

I see that wedding fever has taken hold.

"Expansion Earth and Plate Tectonics really are not that much different! " Except that one means the earth keeps getting bigger, but the other doesn't. OK, for one of those to be plausible the extra "stuff" has to come from somewhere. Where is that stuff from? Without an answer to that question this "expanding earth" idea is dead and should be left to rot.

Unfortunately, CO is complicated. A simple approach is that the carbon ends up nearer where it wants to be and the oxygen is OK. The real answer involves back bonding and molecular orbitals. That's a bit complicated for this sort of thread.

"There is no doubt the Perfect Cosmological Principle MUST be correct." OK Michel, how come it goes dark at night?

The oxygen atoms each have 8 electrons. Two are "stuck" in an inner shell and don't participate in any chemistry. The 6 that are left are each 2 short of the 8 needed to form a closed shell- so they share and get 8 each (albeit that they only have a half- share of two of the 8). Does that help?

While it's perfectly possible that some hydrocarbons are not biological in origin, could someone who believes that most petroleum is geological please explain the presence of things like phytane and pristane in crude oil? Unless you can explain how these molecules ( which are clearly derived from things like chlorophyll) are present in oil then you haven't explained where the oil came from.

No, I wouldn't bother. I'm confident that my diet contains plenty already and I know that an excess of it (like everything else) can be toxic.

Before we start expanding the universe, let's nail the issue of Olber for a static one. The reply to Airbrush's comment is simple. Q. what would be between all those bright points? A Other stars So the "gaps" would be bright too. Olber was not an idiot.

The effect of buoyancy of air is real. It's easy enough to measure on a laboratory balance. Typically the correction for air density is about 0.1% Often, it's not worth troubling with but if you are really trying to get precise results you need to correct for it (and allow for the variation of air density with humidity and barometric pressure) or weigh things in a vacuum chamber.

"A theoretical infinite Universe in space and in time would produce an infinite observable universe as well." And, unless there's something odd about our bit of the universe, then all bits of it would have permanent light because of the light from the infinite number of stars (which would have had an infinite time to reach everywhere). So, we know we don't live in a universe that's infinite in time and space. That answers the original question. BBT has nothing to do with it- it's just one possible way in which the universe might be finite, but there are other possibilities. It's just a theory- it may be proven wrong but, even if it is, then the fact that it goes dark at night will still prove that in some way, the universe is finite. The bit about an observable universe is a red herring. If the universe were infinitely old then light would have reached us from all of it and it would all be observable. In talking about an observable universe that is different from the universe per se, then you are tacitly accepting that the universe hasn't been here forever. That means you are assuming it's finite, then using that to prove that it's finite. That's more than a little tautological.

"I see, so electrons have different levels of free-play that doesn't involve level-change. " There are changes in levels, but there are lots of levels very close together so there seems to be an arbitrary choice of energy they can gain or lose If you put two atoms next to eachother they disturb the energy levels of eachother. If you start with a simple case where each atom has one (accessible) energy level then the pair of atoms will collectively have a pair of "molecular" orbitals" One will be slightly higher energy than the original, and the other will be slightly lower. If you add a 3rd atom got get another orbital with some slightly different energy level. Carry this on until you have zillions of atoms, like a bit of metal, and there is a huge spread of possible energy levels permitted. Typically, for a metal, not all of these energy levels are full. So you can move electrons from one level to another. Since there are lots of energies that could start from and lots of energies they could end up with, there are lots of possible differences. That means lots of different photon energies could be absorbed. There's another factor which makes metals shiny and therefore not generally good black bodies, but that's another issue. It means that, while it's true that "the closest behavior to a blackbody are metals" it's also true that metals are also about the worst approximations to black bodies you can get. Silver isn't normally thought of as black (unless you are a B+W photographer)

Why?

There's no doubt that men are usually bigger and stronger. There may be some debate about the men being generally more aggressive, but I think that would be widely accepted too. Given those circumstances I think it's entirely expected that women are more likely to be the victims. I'm not, of course, saying it's right, I'm just saying it's no surprise.

"Creation 6000 years ago, was not when the universe physically appeared in reality, but when it conceptually became reality, for the human mind." Interesting speculation. But what did the humans who were around more than 6000 years ago think? Did they think that they hadn't been created? (I realise that any answer to that would be total guesswork; that's the point I'm making)

OK, Oops I got the worms muddled.I meant "If space isn't finite, in time or extent, how come it goes dark at night? " However the finite size of the observable universe only occurs because it hasn't been around for ever, so it only happens if the universe is finite in time. The interstellar gas clouds don't matter to Olber's paradox. If the universe has always been here, how come those clouds haven't yet heated up until they too are glowing? Olber was right.

I suspect that breathing air at 200C would be sufficiently bad for you that any containments would be irrelevant.

"While "puck" isn't a swear word "screwed" definitely is," Well, screw your courage to the sticking place, and do something about it. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/312475.html I'm very amused by the idea that anyone who comes here to read science will be unaware of the rude words they will occasionally meet. They will be in real trouble if they ever read Chaucer's "Canterbury tales"