Strange

Another example of Brexit hypocrisy: during the debate on Welsh/Scottish devolution there was an amendment saying that there “must” be a second referendum when the details of the legislation were known. This was tabled by one Ian Duncan Smith, whose opinion now is that there would be blood on the streets if there was a second referendum on the detailed agreement.

The bit where you blame GDPR “You shouldn’t lock your door because it will encourage burglars to break the windows”

! Moderator Note This is not a place to advertise your web site The scientist concerned, Jacob Kegerreis, has written about their work here: https://theconversation.com/how-did-uranus-end-up-on-its-side-weve-been-finding-out-109894

I didn’t get till hear all of it, but what I heard was good. I will have to listen again to the whole thing.

Conventional current flows int he opposite direction to electrons, for silly historic reasons. How does it "charge ions"? What does "it charges ions" mean? Don't believe that's true. But, let's say you have a current in the ring. Choose a reasonable value (say 1A) and work out the force on it from the Earth's magnetic field. Now, from the mass of the ring, you can work out the acceleration it will experience. Is it more or less than the force of gravity?

He's talking crap as far as I can tell. I don't see how a privacy law suddenly gives hackers access to phone numbers.

It is random around that time. It is deterministic in that we know it will decay and (with various probabilities) what it will decay into. It will not turn into two unicorns, for example. It is very difficult to define what is meant by "random" and Bell's theory doesn't really tell us anything about that. It just tells us that there can't be factors that we don't know about which would explain the behaviour. If there is no way to predict when a specific muon will decay, and if the lifetimes are evenly distributed around a mean, then that is as good a definition of "random" as you are going to get.

You can't reverse time. But all muons are identical. If you put them identical conditions, they will decay at different random times distributed around 2 us. That is the closest you can get to your experiment.

Once you leave the realms of science, you can invent any result you want. That has nothing to do with the real world. I don't think it does. Quantum theory is deterministic, in the sense it is not random: we can say what the possible outcomes are from any interaction. But we can only predict the probabilities of any outcomes, not that a specific one will occur.

As far as we know, it is.

I assume the added(?) minerals are supposed to replicate spring water. People have been washing their hair in spring water for millions of years. So it sounds like a ridiculously expensive way of rinsing your head.

Well, the reason is that it is unstable and there are lower mass particles for it to decay into. But that isn't a cause. It is just a description of what is possible. There is no clockwork mechanism that makes it decay after 2 us. There is nothing that causes it to decay at the exact time it does. Baseless assertions are not science.

Eppur si muove.

You are misusing/misunderstanding Newton's third law. Consider a muon. It is a fundamental particle, with no internal structure or moving parts. Leave it alone, with no interactions with anything else (in other words, nothing that happens that could be a cause) and after a few microseconds it will decay. I know what you are going to say: "well in that case, it must have some structure that we don't know about". But that is not how science works. It doesn't invent things with no evidence just to satisfy our beliefs. It attempts to do the exact opposite: remove our beliefs and only look at the evidence. Scientifically, the muon is a fundamental particle.

No. See also: Bell's Theorem. And wrong. But don't worry. Even Einstein never accepted it. So anyone can be wrong.

It is an interesting question: why do so many ancient writing systems use letters for numbers? After all, the first inscriptions (before full writing systems developed) were generally basic accounts or stocktaking records: how many sheep or jars of oil were being delivered. So the most important part was the numbers. And the oldest writing system (Sumerian) had symbols for numbers as well as a positional system (and a symbol/placeholder for zero). So it seems odd that things went "backwards" from there. Presumably we can blame the Egyptians (because we got our nearly all writing systems from there) but that doesn't really explain anything.

Because they have an uneven distribution of charges across the molecule (or part of the molecule) - in other words a dipole. In some cases, I think the presence of the electric field can creates the dipole (by moving charges from one part of the molecule to another). Then the electric field causes the molecule to change its alignment, or in some case its rotation. (Photon, not proton.) The photons will go in all directions from the source. Some will go through the LCD layer. The LCD has a polarised filter one each side. Normally light passes though because both filters have the same alignment. Apply a voltage and the LCD twists the polarisation of the light (because the photons interact with the asymmetric charges in the molecules) so it no longer passes through the second filter.

I don't see the connection. (And no.) It would be up to you to show how that could happen. I'm not sure this is directly related to causality. But there are events that happen without cause, so that's not a problem.

There was a famous paper by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) that said: either there are hidden variables (your suggestion) OR particle attributes (such as position, velocity, energy, polarization, etc.) are not real and defined until they are observed. Bell's theorem shows that the presence of hidden variables would produce different results from the predicted by QM. And this has been confirmed by experiment. Therefore no hidden variables and therefore the values of these properties are not defined until we measure them. A fairly readable overview in this article: https://drchinese.com/David/Bell_Theorem_Easy_Math.htm

Tossing a coin is a probabilistic event, yet we know whether the result is heads or tails.

! Moderator Note Interesting question. I am going to move it to Engineering as it might get some more attention there...

By redefining the word "infinite" you have made your argument meaningless. A finite decimal is one that is blue. A non-finite decimal is one that smells like banana. When a blue number = a number that smells like banana then your argument ends in chaos. This is an example of the fallacy of begging the question. You start by (wrongly) assuming that 0.999... is a non-integer and then use that to "prove" that it cannot be equal to an integer. When it obviously is. You are basically saying 1 is a non-integer not a whole number and therefore 1 does not equal 1. That is a pretty dumb argument. So, on the one hand we have mathematical proofs. On the other hand we have "no, but it can't be; just look at it !!!1¡¡!!"

(Not really science news, but this is probably the most appropriate forum.) There is an episode of the series In Our Time about the life and work of Emmy Noether: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00025bw

If you want to play around with the properties of black holes, there is a useful calculator here: http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ You can put in one value (mass, radius, temperature, etc) and it will calculate all the others.

Or, roughly 1.9 times. I suppose this could be the basis for a discussion of the difference between accuracy and precision?