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swansont last won the day on February 16
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About swansont
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- Birthday May 12
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http://home.netcom.com/~swansont
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Upstate NY
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Interests
Geocaching, cartooning
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College Major/Degree
PhD Atomic Physics Oregon State University
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Favorite Area of Science
Physics
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Retired Physicist
Retained
- Evil Liar (or so I'm told)
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SuperNerd (12/13)
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He did his duty, then. Give him some credit for that. It puts him way ahead of some. If you warn people about an invasion and it doesn’t happen, you lose credibility while also causing panic and economic chaos, which Ukraine probably wanted to avoid*. Do it a few times and nobody pays attention anymore. It’s quite possible that if Zelenskyy had sounded an alarm, Putin would have delayed the invasion to undermine him. Zelenskyy didn’t believe an invasion was imminent. The US shared some intelligence, but the US didn’t have a lot of credibility owing to recent intelligence failures (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan) and they didn’t share all of it, because of Russian spies in Ukraine; it might reveal the sources of the information, and the US wasn’t willing to risk that until after the invasion happened. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-to-war/ *which happened anyway, because of the US warnings. So some in Ukraine were paying attention, even if you weren’t https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-warnings-russia-invade-frustrate-ukrainians-rcna16358
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A cyclone requires an energy input. It’s not something that just happens with a ”kick start”
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Mass and curvature (split from Question about matter and space-time)
swansont replied to Dejan1981's topic in Relativity
You’re claiming no curvature despite the energy not being zero. -
swansont started following Can centrally planned economy work , Window air conditioner, reversed. , Mass and curvature (split from Question about matter and space-time) and 4 others
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Cooling efficiency is not the same measurement. When you say that heating is (nearly) 100% efficient, that’s saying all of the energy is turned into heat. 100 J of electricity is turned into 100J of thermal. (temp goes up) Cooling efficiency is really the coefficient of performance; it’s about moving stuff with energy around. You can remove, say, 250J of heat from space with 100J of input, but you haven’t destroyed any energy - the rejected heat from the system is larger. 250J is removed from the space (temp goes down) but that and the 100J of electricity is deposited elsewhere (350J total) - wherever your thermal reservoir is. If you compare apples to apples, the COP of a heat pump is always bigger for heating than cooling, given the same input of heat and work https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
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Mass and curvature (split from Question about matter and space-time)
swansont replied to Dejan1981's topic in Relativity
A related experiment has been done. Antimatter is attracted, not repulsed, by gravity from normal matter. “antihydrogen atoms, released from magnetic confinement in the ALPHA-g apparatus, behave in a way consistent with gravitational attraction to the Earth. Repulsive ‘antigravity’ is ruled out in this case.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06527-1 You aren’t going to be able to measure gravitational effects between tiny amounts of matter and antimatter (i.e. particles or atoms) -
Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
swansont replied to Khanzhoren's topic in Biology
It’s a matter of rate, not prevention. k = Ae^(-Ea/RT) Low temperatures inhibit overcoming the activation energy Also if the molecule tended to dissociate owing to a high temperature, it wouldn’t be around very long. -
Mass and curvature (split from Question about matter and space-time)
swansont replied to Dejan1981's topic in Relativity
Yes, it does. The gravity (i.e. curvature) in some area depends on the mass nearby, but it doesn’t tell you the distribution of that mass. It could be a planet of some size, or a smaller planet with a higher density. Further, if that mass is rotating, that has an effect. -
Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
swansont replied to Khanzhoren's topic in Biology
Meaning you want to see it in real-time, which is also an unreasonable request. There are areas of science that have elements which rely on historical observation (e.g. astronomy, geology) rather than experiments in a lab. We know* abiogenesis happened. We know* the solar system formed, and each of the planets. *have evidence, combined with the best science we can apply So the fact that we can observe various processes that are elements of geology or star formation, that’s fine, but observing biological elements is not? (see e.g. the Urey-Miller experiment, which formed amino acids from simpler compounds) If a critical reaction has a low probability, you might need time to compensate for having a limited population of reactants. (p-p fusion in the sun, as an analogy, takes on average about a billion years. But that’s overcome by having many orders of magnitude more than Avogadros number of protons.) Since we only know that it happened but not the specific pathway, we don’t know what that potential bottleneck might be -
! Moderator Note No, that’s not how it works here. You post it here That’s not in accordance with mainstream physics. You can’t discuss a house-of-cards hypothesis. You need to establish the base before moving on. Photons and neutrinos are quite different items. And you have other dubious claims you have to address before moving on.
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Gap between life and non-life (split from What if god...)
swansont replied to Khanzhoren's topic in Biology
The direct evidence is that life exists, and previously it didn’t. Direct observation is a canard trotted out by people who aren’t familiar with science. Tip: don’t ever study modern physics if you expect this. You will be very disappointed. -
! Moderator Note Any discussion of consciousness requires a definition, because claiming a tree is conscious likely means that definition is so watered-down as to be almost meaningless. And posting videos without supporting information is not within the rules. If you can’t give us a summary there’s no confidence you’ll be able to engage in discussion of the subject.
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Given his penchant for ignoring the rules, he probably would have been
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That’s a noticeably different response. So it’s not that the government doesn’t “do stuff” because that’s what governments generally do. It’s about government ownership, i.e the economic side of communism or socialism. (and while “commies” don’t want to take the toothbrush, it’s not that person’s toothbrush. It’s community property, not personal property)
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! Moderator Note Quantum theory does not address this (not directly, at least) Please try and stay on-topic
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How can the means of production be owned by the state, without the government “doing stuff”?