Ophiolite

I thick so. From the wiki article, quoting Bertrand Russell "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision". Well, I'm just no too sure about that. I can't make my mind up.

Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.

If I was researching in a field that has been evolving for well over a century and had contributed to that evolution I might wish to emphasise the novelty of my contribution. If I was the personality type that enjoyed, even required, battling authority I might wish to challenge the validity of the current consensus view. If I had a philosophical bent and was a fan of Khun I might wish to think I was in the midst of a paradigm shift. If I was a pedant who thought what we called things was more important than what they actually were, I might try to artificially classify recent advances in the field with a new name. If we were a group of individuals with these viewpoints and predilictions, providing mutual support and encouragement, pretty soon we might find disciples willing to promote these concepts on science forums with posts that had titles such as Evolution is not Darwinian. But that's all hypothetical, far-fetched and unlikely to happen.

You've overlooked the cost of the damages when your navigation system fails very badly indeed.

My understanding, which I am happy to have corrected, is a fundamental assumption, validated by many, diverse observations, is that the same physical laws apply throughout the universe. Your reference to the principle of locality does not contradict that. We could expand your quote to read "In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly, according to the universal laws of physics, only by its immediate surrounds." So either you are misunderstanding what is going on, or you are using local physics laws in a singular way, or I'm thicker than I thought I was.

It appears to me to be botryoidal hematite that has been subject to some erosion. I imagine it was found in a river bed. See this wikipedia article.

As occurs at present the volatiles would be concentrated in the end stage products. Expect to see a lot more hydrothermal veins.

A few other random thoughts: 1. Investigation of earthquake hazards relating to siting nuclear power stations. 2. Support of civil engineers in constructing hydro-electric schemes. This could involve studies of catchment area volumetrics, or tunneling challenges, etc. 3. Again with civil engineers in locations for tidal energy barriers. Or you could abandon energy completely and go into mining/prospecting

QA - No. QB - No. Photons can never be at rest.

You can express the distance travelled, s, for each car. Now equate the two expressions and solve as required for the unknowns.

Or look at some of the posts on the forum for true savagery.

Yes, broadly. Temperatures in the disc were high. This was a consequence both of kinetic energy from infalling particles being converted to heat and radiation from the protosun. An earlier understanding of the formation process saw the differences between the terrestrial planets and the gas and ice giants as being due to this. Planetologists refer to snow line, beyond which temperatures were low enought to allow ices to condense. The dust that formed at this time gradually coagulated into larger particles then into kilometres sized bodies and then onto planetesimals. There were dozens of Mars sized objects flying around. Anything over about 100km in diameter was big enough to remelt itself and differentiate into mantle and core. Does that help? It's way more complex than this, but that captures the highlights.

Opinions and assertions are different beasts, as you well know. Your opinion is the only one I noticed on this thread that was offered as an assertion.

Could you ask your mother where she thinks this extra weight is coming from? And, if I may be indelicate, is it possible your mother is a little on the heavy side and seeks to avoid personal responsibility for this situation.

Would you take the time please to give an example of a local physics law.

You may support the idea as much as you wish, but until you do so with considerable evidence you are merely expressing an opinion. You have every right to have that opinion, but the only valid sceintific position at this time is "We don't know."

Contend all you like, until you provide evidence your contentions will be ignored. It is almost a century since it was argued that the solar wind was dominated either by protons or electrons. you will need some powerful data to turn the clock back.

The distance to go before it converts to mist will be contingent upon the character of the fluid as well as the physical parameters of the experimental set up.

This turns out to be incorrect as far as the rocky asteroids are concerned. The temperature of the accretion disk that formed duirng the formation of the proto-sun. These formed the chondrites and achondrite meteors many of which coalesced to form chondritic asteroids. (Caveat: there is some recent research that suggests that at least one chondritic parent body did manage to partially differentiate. This is based upon the ratios of certain siderophile and lithophile elements when compared with the solar norm.)

I think you may be oversensitive. As has been pointed out by several posters, myself included, and most recently by arete, you do not understand what fitness means in an evolutionary context. Now ignorance is not an offence, it is a normal human condition. When someone corrects a small portion of my ignorance I welcome their intervention. I don't object to it. No one, that I could see, was attacking you, they were correcting your misunderstanding. Of course, you are free to continue to insist that your misunderstanding actually represents the truth, however that would be counterproductive for yourself. You are free to continue with your impression that evolutionary debaters are petty. If insisiting upon consistent, concise, commonly held definitions is petty, then I'll vote for pettiness at every opportunity.

I tend to associate the name with any Oscar Wilde play, or any upper middle class setting from the Edwardian era. (I'm Scottish and more than old enought to know better.)

Yes, but it did so by a mechanism distinct from that envisaged by the Modern Synthesis. It would be much clearer, less ambiguous, if we were to say that life emerged from non-life, or that life arose from non-life. Using the same word for two disitnct processes is unscientific. One of the difficulties here is that humans have a tendency to classify things. We make sense of the universe by organising our observations and the phenomena they relate to. But classification is ultimately artificial. Nature operates independently of any classifications we seek to impose. The distinction between life and non-life is one of these artificial distinctions. True, there are some things that are certainly not alive and others that certainly are. But there are also grey areas and in the past, as life was emerging, these grey areas were likely larger and even more ill-defined. In such circumstances your statement, the non-genetic became biological probably ceases to have meaning. More likely the accretion chemistry gave way to pre-biotic chemistry that led on to biochemistry from which genetic chemistry emerged. It is a spectrum of changes, not a digital LIFE/NON-LIFE.

NIF, your understanding of fitness is flawed. (More accurately, it is wrong.) Fitness is not about strength, or health, which your post #5 implies it is, but about suitability for its environment. Change the environment and you change what is suitable, what is fit. You argue that it is the biggest lion which gets to procreate. Do you have citations to back that up? Are you sure it isn't the one with the shaggiest mane, or the higher proportion of fast twitch muscles, or the more aggressive perosnality? You have made an assertion based on an assumption. I'd like to see the data that supports that assumption.

Where in that lengthy piece do you address the fact that sexual reproduction is not, as you claimed, the dominant form of reproduction? Or,alternatively, where do you provide data to demonstrate that my contention is wrong?

Really? Have you let the bacteria know?