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I agree, this is likely a mistake. Most grand new discoveries fizzle when peers start falsifying (as in 'to test and prove false') them.

Having said that, a matter type can be imagined whose 'drag' on GPS sats would be so rare and trivial as to be mistaken for part of the drag that near-atmospheric objects feel. Neutrinos fit this example. All we need here are massive nonreactive slow cloudy fat (but I repeat myself) particles that do gravitationally interact but don't bump into each other, don't coalesce, etc. Weird weird weird.

The possibility of a cloud or ring or shell that increased gravity is also physically **possible**. That's just calculus. If memory serves, a ring would have asymmetries that would affect the orbital dynamics of anything traveling orthogonal to the ring, so that can be tested quickly (and it's absence in 60 insanely predictable years of orbital dynamics indicates it can be ruled out). Since the force inside a shell or uniform cloud would be zero ( http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/sphshell2.html#wtls ), we probably would have noticed this as a rather significant blip/bending of trajectories during space flight. Again, without reading TQA, I'm not seeing much hope.

This sounds way too much like ether and phlogiston.

But don't just say 'it can't be'; that's dogma. Instead, take five, and go to work defining how one would confirm or falsify this idea. I'd dig up old trajectory/force data from NASA. And FFS, TAKE A MOMENT to savor how fun scientific research would become again if it turns out to be true.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/cosmic.html

You've got that reversed: Cones are color sensitive and slower responding. Rods are monochromatic. Reference.

That all depends on how little "very little time" is. Crashing at 30MPH is apparently survivable, but note that the forces involved are greatly diminished by having extra space (and therefore time) to decelerate. That comes from having a helicopter body that deforms properly, so it absorbs kinetic energy rather than transferring it into the occupants.

Ideally, in a vertical crash the humans end up sitting right on the ground, with the whole fuselage under them deformed at a rate that keeps the peak acceleration they experience in survivable levels. No, it certainly wouldn't be fun, but it could mean the difference between death and just having survivable internal damage... and if the rest of the helicopter's deformation has been engineered with as much care, there (also ideally) would be no hazard from debris, fire, or other environmental effects, so the victims are relatively safe just lying there waiting for rescue... Perhaps a crushed spine, but no disconnected vital organs.

Interesting, that there was a larger equation,do you have a link for that?
Have to agree that the book is short not even a mention of the Lorentz contraction:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html

Good to know!

It’s “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” That’s the allusion I referenced; wasn’t trying to exclude mesons or any other quark combinations, including pentaquarks.

It’s “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” That’s the allusion I referenced; wasn’t trying to exclude mesons or any other quark combinations, including pentaquarks.

Actually, the mass of the vehicle doesn't really significantly impact the stopping distance on reasonably level grade.

See here.

Actually it does. There's a vastly different co-efficient of friction between the road and a semi vs. a car. Tyre compounds, center of mass and probably the most significant difference being how well the suspension keeps the tyres in contact with the road. The heavier the "unsprung mass" (all the components between the dampers/springs and the road) the more intertia and the less quickly the suspension will keep the tyres in contact. Trucks have very heavy suspension in comparison to a car, making them worse at stopping.

Actually, the mass of the vehicle doesn't really significantly impact the stopping distance on reasonably level grade.

See here.

Electric cars do suck unless you own your own home. Since unless you do, there's going to be nowhere to plug it in since you cant exactly retrofit your rental.

Not everybody would need to... Sorry, couldn't find one specifically for apartments.

For that matter, consider that some businesses installed chargers on their own. For an apartment, if you, or anybody else, manages to convince the landlord that good renters are going to start looking for the ability to charge in their assigned spot, that it's now a salable feature, they'll have the work done themselves.

I've been considering buying an electric motorcycle specifically because of all the heater plugs out there - I'd be able to charge up all over the place for free.

It's actually well known that muons do not orbit at the same distance at electrons (orbit in the quantum atomic orbital sense, of course, but since we're talking about hydrogen-like atoms, they can be described with the Bohr model). The calculations of energy levels do include the rest mass of the electron or muon as appropriate. The very reason to use muons in an experiment like this is their greater mass amplifies certain quantum electrodynamic interactions, allowing scientists to take experimental measurements of these interactions and plug them into QED calculations to determine basic physical properties (like the sizes of particles).

In this case, they used a phenomenon known as the Lamb shift. Essentially, two energy levels that should be identical have a slight difference due to a self-interaction effect. This difference can be measured by spectroscopy.

As they are both the same sort of particle (leptons), electrons and muons should behave identically in this experiment except for the 207 times greater rest mass of the muon, which is accounted for in the calculations. What this result suggests is either the Lamb shift of the electron and of the muon work the same and the experimental setup measures them differently somehow, or that they work differently and there is some sort of new interaction not being accounted for.

The L2 point is even further away from the moon than the Earth is (on average around 4-5 times further) ..

L2 is closer to the Moon that the Earth is to the Moon. Lagrange Points of the Earth-Moon System

Forget whether there's a planet in the habitable zone or not. Alpha Centauri is relatively close (4.37 light years - 41.3 trillion km) - use the planets for resources to engineer the first extrasolar starbase that orbits in the center of the habitable zone.

High temperatures like that may be suitable for thermopiles to run mass drivers on the surface of these planets, especially if there's no atmosphere. By the time we have the technology to do this, it may be possible to synthesize water, carbon, and nitrogen from just hydrogen by using fusion. Hydrogen fuses to Helium and Helium is the fuel for the carbon cycle. Since hydrogen is abundant, locating heavier elements like iron, sodium, potassium, silicon, uranium, etc. will be more important than finding water.

1500K is cool when compared to the melting point of tungsten (3683K). Before this is discounted as impossible due to temperature, consider that Mercury has surface ice.

At the very least, we need to send a high-speed probe using nuclear propulsion. Uranium has an energy density about 1 million times larger than hydrogen. Even if only 0.1% of the energy gets translated to motion, that would make it possible to send a probe at 17,000 km/sec (5% of c). At that speed, it would take about 80 years before data from the system got here. Hopefully, there's a way to make it more efficient so it could go 25% of c. Then the mission length would be under 20 years.

Actually, simple hydraulics and electronics have natural analogies, in that similar equations can be used for both. Milliamp-hours is a unit of charge, 1 mAh == 3.6 coloumbs, or about the charge in 3.73e-05 moles worth of electrons, so yes, it would be accurate to say that mAh can be analogised to the volume of a tank of petrol, as charge would be the equivalent of fluid volume in hydraulics. However, voltage, being in units of energy per unit charge (a volt is 1 joule per coloumb), is more like fluid pressure in hydraulics (joules per cubic metre or pascals), or at how much pressure the fuel is being sent out the gas tank, so the article is completely wrong on that score. The "amount of fuel the device is drawing" is more like current, which is measured in amperes (coloumbs per second), which would be the equivalent of flow rate in hydraulics (cubic metres per second). Thus, if you had a battery rated at 1500 mAh used on a device that drew 100 mA of current from it on use, you'd be able to use it for about 15 hours before you needed to recharge the batteries. In a similar way, if you had a tank with a volume of 1500 cubic metres and were pumping liquid out at 100 cubic metres per hour, you'd need to refill it after 15 hours.

Brief info on tides: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/1225/

And, of course, there's the Inverse Square Law: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/isq.html

I think I'm still misunderstanding you. If the reference frame is Earth and you are not considering time dilation or the elapsed time from the POV of the space traveler then the total elapsed time would just depend on the average speed of the ship and the amount of time he spent "puttering around".

Or perhaps you want to consider time dilation. I've always like the Lorentz time dilation equation: T = To / sqrt(1 - (v^2/c^2)) where T is the elapsed time for a fixed reference frame observer on Earth, To is the elapsed time for the moving clock or person, and v is the constant or (roughly) average velocity of the ship (or the clock that is in motion wrt the fixed reference frame).

Assume that you have a ship that quickly accelerates to 0.93c (so that the acceleration time is negligible) with an average velocity of 0.9c. It would take a photon 40.6 years to make a round trip to Gliese 581. The ship is traveling 10% slower and will take 10% longer for a trip time of 44.66 years. That is how much time will have elapsed for clocks on Earth. That's T. So what is the elapsed time To for the traveler? You could use this time dilation calculator or just plug and chug.

So T = 44.66 years and v=0.9(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.43589. So 44.66 = To / 0.43589 or To = 44.66 * 0.43589 = 19.466 years or around 19 years and 6 months.

At a more realistic average speed for current abilities with a nuclear pulse propulsion system of .05c the trip would take 20 times longer than a photon or 812 years from earth clocks. So T = 812 years and v=(.05)(299,792,458 m/s). The radical becomes 0.99875. So 812 = To / 0.99875. To = 812(.99875) = 810.984 years. Just one year less time will have elapsed for the astronaut's ship in that case.

You're thinking about atomic nuclei, which are slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them.

But an individual nucleon (a proton or neutron) really does get a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.

I believe the binding of nuclei has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron nickel has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.

You're thinking about atomic nuclei, which are slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them.

But an individual nucleon (a proton or neutron) really does get a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.

I believe the binding of nuclei has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron nickel has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.

Actually, water does expand due to temperature... err, but only when it freezes.

Just food for thought...

We build things all the time in unstable parts of the world. It might even be easier in less developed countries - just grease a few palms and no civil liberties or freedom of movement to worry about. Someone you don't like gets too close to your expensive space launcher and you just disappear them.

No, the magnetic field from a long conductor falls of linearly. If you don't believe me, do the math, do the experiment or here's a web page that gives the formula (note, no exponents): http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/magnetic/wirfor.html. The magnetic force from a plane does not decrease with distance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sheet#Magnetic_field_of_an_infinite_current_sheet

In an emergency, yes, you could quench the superconductors and lower the track. You'd want to build somewhere where weather isn't much of a problem though (another vote for the desert). There's no such thing as a conductor carrying current sans magnet. It is a magnet.

I have some good news for you: everyone is blind in the middle of their field of vision in a dark environment. The centre of the retina is extremely crowded with bright-light/colour vision cones, which is what gives us our excellent ability to see detail. There's just no room for rods left over, so we get a dark spot in our night vision instead.

A scrapyard at L1 wouldn't be stable. L4 and L5 are much better options for that and for permanent space stations.
see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/lagpt.html

L1 is really only useful as a transfer point to the moon.

As for naming the fist space tug - I vote they call it the Toybox.

Mass is a measurement of the amount of matter something contains, while Weight is the measurement of the pull of gravity on an object

http://www.nyu.edu/pages/mathmol/textbook/weightvmass.html

a fundamental measure of the amount of matter in the object.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mass.html

In scientific contexts, mass refers loosely to the amount of "matter" in an object

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_versus_weight

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electronic/and.html#c2

That's what I meant by "busbars for power distribution" :) You can of course use 48V coils to get lowest current at a safe voltage, but the dissipation will remain. And 48V small form factor relays aren't cheap. You could cheat and use optomos SSRs, but that's really aiming low ;)

It could be possible, perhaps, to have the "latching" part done a-la core memory: store charge in a "cell" made up of a capacitor storing enough charge to energize the coil momentarily -- long enough to latch a relay electrically (NO contact powering the coil). Let's see if it's feasible.

Say we use TYCO's TSC series relay. 6mA @ 24V for the coil, 5ms to operate so say we need it to stay, say, on for 20ms on capacitor charge alone. Final discharge voltage could be as low as 18V per the specs. We're discharging the cap through a 4kOhm resistor (24V/6mA). So a 30uF capacitor is plenty enough if we're starting from 24V, it'd be still around 20V after 20ms. I've used this handy tool. To keep refresh rates low, you could use a much larger capacitor.

So -- I'd say that a fairly small capacitor may be all that's needed to implement memory. You'd have row/column relays to connect the cap to the coil of the sense relay, and then that relay would latch itself electrically. They did have electrolytic caps with those specs back then (tens of of uF at 35V V.W.). The reads aren't even destructive -- the sense relay latches when the coil gets a kick from the stored charge, this energizes its coil from 24V using a N.O. contact that just closed. This also recharges the capacitor if there's no isolation diode between the capacitor and the coil. As soon as the row/column relays disconnect the capacitor is out of the circuit, fully re-charged.

If you had a full column of sense relays per each plane of memory, then refresh could be very fast as well. The circuitry for refresh (apart from refresh counter etc) is simple: one isolation relay per row, one sense relay per row, that's it. Nothing else is needed. The isolation relays close connecting the row outputs to sense relays, sense relays maintain the state of their capacitor and recharge it. If you wish, you could use the column of sense relays as the readout relays as well, then the isolation relays would be on the outside of the memory plane rather than on the inside -- they'd be connecting the memory to whatever bus it feeds.

You need one capacitor per bit, so 16 kbits worth of "RAM" would cost you approx. $500 for the capacitors (assuming you'd use through hole ESH476M035AE3AA from Kemet, those go for $0.03249 US each at 16k quantity from DigiKey). If you'd want it to be a 16 bit memory, then you have 16 planes of 1kbit each, organized 32x32 bits. Column select relays can be shared between planes, so you need 32 relays for that. Each plane needs 32 row sense relays for refresh and readout, and 32 row select relays for the output. So you need 32+32+2 relays per plane, or 16*66=1056 relays. That reduces your relay cost by a factor of 16, and reduces your power consumption even further since at most about half of these relays would be on at any given time -- you only select one row at a time for output. You'd also need some relays for the refresh counter. You could of course have 8 planes of 32x64 bits for an 8 bit memory, and then you'd need 576 relays (64 per plane for rows + 8 per plane for shared column selects).

The relays go for about $1.176 in 1000+, again from DigiKey. I'm sure you could optimize the relay count further, perhaps by using diode switches. You'd need to use some diodes anyway, for things like decoding row/column selects from the address bus and from the refresh counter, etc. If you'd hook up rows to the least significant address bits you could probably forgo a refresh counter and just assume that enough straight-line code gets executed that all rows will

The bigger problem is that Ni62 is the most tightly bound nucleus known, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucbin2.html#c1 or http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/ Fusion or fission of Ni62 require an input of energy; they clearly aren't measuring spontaneous release of energy in a fusion event...

You should do more research on nuclear plants. When you reduce power too much, reaction poisons build up. To increase power again safely, you just have to wait for the xenon to decay. As you might guess from the subject of the link, trying to ignore that is a bad idea.

You might be surprised to learn that we have quite a few 30 year old power plants here, and they're not going away any time soon. Of course, any plant can reduce it's yield as long as you don't mind spending money to produce waste heat. It's not necessarily a matter of capability, it's a matter of economic operation. It's cheaper if you don't have to make a base load plant act like a load following plant. If you're not too picky, a hammer and a rock are interchangeable.

As for France, they handle off-peak through a combination of exporting the surplus, throttling their hydro power, and throttling the reactors that are early enough in their fuel cycle to tolerate it.

I can agree that the categories may not be as sharply defined today as they once were, but they clearly still exist. Even you speak of base loads and peak loads, and using hydro storage to level peak off. Life would be simpler if all plants could just arbitrarily load follow and if efficiency didn't suffer for it, but clearly they can't. Nobody builds a hydro storage plant just for fun, they built it because they needed to level the apparent load to base plants. It was cheaper than the on-going losses of forcing a base load plant to behave like a load follower.

I remember reading about supernovae being so bright they could be observed during the day, brighter than Venus for instance.

From History of supernova observation

The supernova SN 1006 appeared in the southern constellation of Lupus during the year 1006 CE. This was the brightest recorded star ever to appear in the night sky, and its presence was noted in China, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Japan and Switzerland. It may also have been noted in France, Syria, and North America. Egyptian physician, astronomer and astrologer Ali ibn Ridwan gave the brightness of this star as one-quarter the brightness of the Moon. Modern astronomers have discovered the faint remnant of this explosion and determined that it was only 7,100 light-years from the Earth.[7]

It looks like this one will top out at magnitude 9 at best, making it appear like a dim star at night. How is that this supernova, if it's so close to us, appears so dim?

Can anyone clarify this? I thought type I/II supernova have roughly the same energetic magnitude...so if this one is only 21 million light years away, why isn't it brighter?

Edit: Nevermind, I figured it out. 21 million light-years vs. 7,100 light-years (the example above) is 5 orders of magnitude. It's faint because it's very very far away.

A Type 1 supernova reaches it's peak light output around 10-15 days of the initial explosion and then exponentially decays over a period of years. As the curve is exponential, a good chunk of the luminosity is lost within a couple of months and then the loss rate tapers off somewhat.

A type 2 supernova reaches its peak output in a few days decays, plateaus for a few months and then begins decaying again over a span of years.

The mechanism behind a type 1 is fairly well understood but the variation in modeled and observed luminosity is greater than 2%. A paper a few years back suggested that the variation might be evidence of dark matter but subsequent modeling has shown that the 2% variation can be accounted for by where the observer happens to be relative to the explosion as the explosions aren't symmetric.

The two are related in that thought experiments related to changing something by measuring it led to the development of the Uncertainty Principle. However, it can be reached from other angles, including deriving it mathematically. It exists independent of any actual measurement. Even if you imagine an omniscient god thinking about the particle, it's impossible to know both the momentum and position simultaneously.

Hyperphysics has an excellent summary showing where the uncertainty arises without any measurements taking place.

As for Wikipedia's part, if you look at the talk page, you'll see what happened. The editors there are making a conscious effort to make the subject approachable. So they focus on "real world" applications, such as measurements affecting the outcome, and gloss over the talk of wave packets and derivations that show the uncertainty exists even without measurements. I don't disagree with their approach. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a text book. But you have to be careful when turning to it for advanced information.

(For the record, I am not a physicist, but I did take multiple courses in quantum mechanics in college before turning to a far more lucrative career in engineering. I'm also close friends with a particle physicist who gives me crap about turning to the dark side to this day.)

My guess would be that light passes through the atmosphere, and (thanks to quantum physics) certain atoms and molecules absorb light at specific wavelengths. Carbon dioxide is absorbs infrared light ("The carbon dioxide strongly absorbs infrared and does not allow as much of it to escape into space." http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html). Since light is passing through miles of atmosphere (both light coming into the earth and light being reflected from the earth), it's also passing through lots and lots of air. Normally, the light just keeps going, but when infrared light hits carbon dioxide, specifically, it gets absorbed and turned into heat. This is why even a small increase in carbon dioxide has an effect: because the light is passing through lots and lots of atoms/molecules in the atmosphere. (To put it another way: if light is "harmlessly" passing through 1,000 atoms in the atmophere, then a small change of CO2 from 280 ppm to 380 ppm will increase the light's chances of hitting a carbon dioxide molecule from 28% to 38%.)

There is no universally defined "now" in a relativistic universe. Observers travelling at different speeds will disagree on whether something happens at the same time or not (see the pole-barn paradox). For every two points A and B outside of each others light cones, there is a frame of reference which sees them as simultaneous (the path is space-like), and a frame of reference that sees A as happening before B, and a frame of reference that sees B as happening before A.

If A causes B outside it's own light cone (as it can with FTL communication), for one frame of reference, A has caused something that happened before A. Now we just need to make sure that that frame of reference is our frame of reference, which can be done by selecting the frames of reference of A and B.

dry air: 0.6 dB/m at 50 kHz, 1.8 dB/m at 100 kHz

No. Sound is not so linear as that. You cannot take a chart that says sound is attenuated by 1800dB at 1km and simply divide by 1000 to get the attenuation at 1m.

Remember inverse-square law: Check it out. (And more here.)

All that aside: The simplified rule of thumb for sound at audible frequencies, for a spherical waveform (such as that emitted by a phone), is that sound falls off at a rate of 6dB for each doubling of distance.

So, if you're making noise that measures 80dB@10cm, you get the following results at these increasing distances:

74dB@20cm
68dB@40cm
62dB@80cm

etc.

And we only care about frequencies in the audible range, despite the implication in TFS, or it will be completely unable to work with existing phones (which is the main point of the thing to begin with). To wit: Combine Nyquist theory with the shitty analog electronics and 48KHz (at best!) ADC/DAC in a phone, and the resultant system must be either audible to a sufficiently-close non-damaged human ear, or else be completely non-functional.

So, there's no point in even discussing how well the thing might behave at 50 or 100KHz, because that's never going to work with existing phones.

And the whole argument is moot, anyway: The transport layer for this sort of payment system, whether RFID or barcodes or acoustic signalling or Bluetooth or avian carrier, will be recordable by a sufficiently-motivated and clever person. It therefore must have strong security (whether cryptographic or otherwise), or it will fail and be exploited. And if it does have strong security, it doesn't matter if it's recordable or not, since any recovered data will be useless to the eavesdropping party.

I thought of the same objection as the OP, although I would have expressed it differently: the basis for the experiment is that massless neutrinos can't change type because they travel at the speed of light hence experience no proper time. But actually they only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. Granted the proper time between emission and detection would still be awfully awfully small, but do we know for sure how quickly oscillation occurs (in proper time)?

Photons only travel at less than the speed of light in a non-vacuum because of interactions; between interactions (between atoms, which is a vacuum) they still travel at the speed of light. It's the only speed a photon can travel at. It's not like the properties of light implied by masslessness and speed-of-light travel cease to be in a medium. :)

So I would strongly suspect that the QM-implied oscillations still require mass-full neutrinos, even taking into account mediums through which they travel. If there were such a medium that meaningfully slowed them.

I'm not sure that there's any problem with the neutrino needing to be emitted in the same direction; wouldn't wave mechanics take care of this, just like a photon traveling through glass? The odds of a photon interacting with a single atom and coming out in the same direction are minimal, but when you've got a whole bunch of atoms it just works out.

Obviously, as you point out, the plausibility of this objection depends on the rate of neutrino-atom interactions. So the question becomes: what is the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter over a 300km hop, and how does it compare to the fraction of changed neutrinos measured? You've said yourself they sent out an awful lot of neutrinos.

The photon-through-glass thing requires many, many interactions so the average is what we see when we treat the light as if they were rays bent by glass-air interfaces.

But neutrino interactions are exceedingly rare. I don't know the exact numbers; I'm sure there are decent values from both theory and measurement for the interaction cross-section based on energy, but here's some ball park numbers that should help put the scale in mind: Solar neutrinos pass through the earth at a rate of about 65 billion per second per cm^2, and large neutrino detector array might see on the order of a dozen interactions per day. This particular experiment, whose neutrinos are both lower in energy and quantity than solar neutrinos, saw 88 interactions they could attribute to their emitter in a year. 6 of these were of the electron neutrino type.

Here's a page which estimates the mean free path (average distance between interactions) as more than a light year through lead!

So, given the extremely low probability of interaction, you can't explain a result of 88 muon neutrinos, and 6 electron neutrinos, by saying the e neutrinos are the ones that interacted (at least) twice. You'd need to see many orders of magnitude more muon neutrinos before you'd expect to see even one electron neutrino if this was the case. And if this explanation depends on averaging the result of many interactions to get the changed neutrinos to travel in the same direction then the probability of seeing any of them would be ludicrously low.

From either perspective, the important question is: have the theoreticians actually considered this idea? If they have, it is safe to assume that they have been able to eliminate it, or they wouldn't be making the claims they are. But it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to automatically assume that they have indeed considered every possibility, particularly the dumb sounding ones. (It's surprising how often dumb-sounding possibilities don't look so dumb once you've actually done the maths.)

This not being one of those cases. ;)

If you wish to either calculate or measure the impact of moderate to long speaker wire, here is a good place to start.

The inverse of the damping factor of an amplifier (measurable) is the output impedance.
http://www.transcendentsound.com/Transcendent/Amplifier_Output_Impedance.html

A good amp has a typical output impedance of under 0.01 ohms to maintain the waveform to the speaker even though the impedance of the speaker varies. The damping factor is important to control of the speaker cone motion.

Here is a copper wire table. The resistance given is for a single conductor. Due to the entire length of a speaker wire being in series, a 50 foot speaker wire for example contains 100 feet of wire resistance.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/wirega.html

Note that 12 gauge wire has resistance of 1.588 ohms/1000 feet. A 50 foot speaker wire would then contain 100 feet of conductor length for a resistance of 0.1588 ohms, or about 15 times the speaker damping factor.

On the other hand a 5 foot length of 18 awg wire is 0.06385 ohms.

The short cheap small gauge speaker wire outperforms the larger gauge longer wire. Short is best. Inductance is a function of length. Again short is best. Capacitance is a function of length, dielectric, conductor size, and spacing. Again short is best.

The resistance listed is for the conductor Resistance and does not factor dielectric losses, inductance or distributed capacitance. These factors are cumulative. Cutting the 50 foot 12 gauge wire down 5 feet now puts the wire on par with the amplifier impedance with a resistance of 0.01588 ohms. A comparison of the signal at both ends of the 100 foot speaker wire will provide measured differences in input verses output even when only resistance loss is accounted for. It is true most people won't even notice the difference in a blind test. As speaker wire runs become longer and smaller (cheaper) speaker wire such as 16 or 18 gauge, the difference becomes quite significant.

This shows the advantage of remote amps with a 200 ohm input resistive input impedance and a short speaker wire instead of a central amp and long speaker wires.

If all you play is modern top 100 compressed stuff destroyed by the loudness war, then yes the sound system improvements is wasted money. It's all rock and roll and a cheap set of speakers will do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
You can't get back the sound engineered out of a recording.

When you make wire claims, please provide measurable factors. This is Slashdot. news for Geeks. Science is spoken here sometimes.

Please read this link as to efficiency of nuke plants in terms of thermodynamics:
      "Current nuclear power plants operate below the temperatures and pressures that coal-fired plants do. This limits their thermodynamic efficiency to 30–32%. "
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_power_station

Also when I said boil water I am using Nuke industry terminology. You are the zealot I assume u are familiar with the terminology.
      http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/reactor.html

I looked at Time Cube and I immediately stopped reading it, I assume it is similar to the dangers of di-hydrogen monoxide.

"Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor."

1) Breeders have no inherent safety; read up about the Enrico Fermi I partial meltdown in Monroe, MI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents#1960s http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucacc.html 2) Pebble bed reactors are a nice idea, but the two actually made were leaky and contaminated the nearby area: The fuel temperature instabilities during operation with locally far too high temperatures, mentioned above in the criticism section, resulted in a heavy contamination of the whole vessel by Cs-137 and Sr-90. Some contamination was also found in soil/groundwater under the reactor, as the German government confirmed in January, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor#AVR The release of radioactive dust was caused by a human error during a blockage of pebbles in a pipe. Trying to restart the pebble movement by increased gas flow led to mobilization of dust, always present in PBRs and—due to an erroneously open valve—to an unfiltered dust release into the environment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor#Thorium_High_Temperature_Reactor Anyone made a pebble bed reactor yet which was economically feasible as a power generator? Answer: No. 3) ..breeder reactors have the added benefit of eating nuclear waste over and over until whatever is left might make you sneeze. Answer: No.

Prepare to be impressed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI (see the 1min mark) & http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/lhel.html#c3 ~Fus

It turns out nickel is most tightly bound. News to me.

Nuclei of atoms get a significant fraction of their apparent mass from the nuclear binding energy from the strong force.

It's true that an individual nucleon (such as a proton or neutron) gets a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.

But nuclei of atoms are actually slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them. I believe this effect has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.

As you pointed out, E=MC^2, so any energetic entity has a gravitational mass under relativity.

... and thus also has an inertial mass through the equivalence principle. My failure to explain why the container shouldn't exhibit an inertial mass of E/mc^2 doesn't invalidate the equivalence principle. If light didn't exhibit inertial mass in that sense, the container would be a magical fuel tank for a photonic rocket. Most of the constraints of relativistic travel are related to the need to accelerate the reaction mass in the fuel tank. If the photons can simply be stored in a mirrored container and accelerated for free until they're allowed to escape out the back of the rocket, that would represent an unbelievably efficient space drive. And I mean "unbelievably" quite literally here.

I think the Higgs Field is better described as the "source of inertia", as opposed to the source of mass

Photons don't interact with the Higgs, and photons certainly have zero rest mass. Most of the introductory material I've read seems to use that terminology, but again I'm not a particle physicist.

Since photons do not interact with it at all, that's why I was saying that you could argue that photons do not have inertia (on top of the fact that you cannot apply a force to them to change their velocity).

Velocity is a vector, so gravitational lensing and reflection are both examples of changing the velocity of light. Refraction is an example of changing the direction and the speed of light. In all these cases, equal and opposite reactions occur but are simply too small to observe. The sun is gravitationally attracted to a beam of light that it deflects, a solar sail experiences a force, and the material interface that refracts the light really does experience a force as it deflects and slows down each photon.

Nuclei of atoms get a significant fraction of their apparent mass from the nuclear binding energy from the strong force.

It's true that an individual nucleon (such as a proton or neutron) gets a significant fraction of its mass not from its constituent quarks but from the strong force. For example, a proton's mass is 938 MeV but its two up quarks and single down quark only sum to (at most) 12.4 MeV.

But nuclei of atoms are actually slightly less massive than the individual neutrons and protons that comprise them. I believe this effect has a different sign than the binding of quarks into individual nucleons because quarks can't ever be physically separated. It's also much smaller; iron has the most tightly bound nucleus, and its binding energy is only 8.8 MeV per nucleon. Though vastly larger than chemical energies, this is still less than one percent of its mass.

As you pointed out, E=MC^2, so any energetic entity has a gravitational mass under relativity.

... and thus also has an inertial mass through the equivalence principle. My failure to explain why the container shouldn't exhibit an inertial mass of E/mc^2 doesn't invalidate the equivalence principle. If light didn't exhibit inertial mass in that sense, the container would be a magical fuel tank for a photonic rocket. Most of the constraints of relativistic travel are related to the need to accelerate the reaction mass in the fuel tank. If the photons can simply be stored in a mirrored container and accelerated for free until they're allowed to escape out the back of the rocket, that would represent an unbelievably efficient space drive. And I mean "unbelievably" quite literally here.

I think the Higgs Field is better described as the "source of inertia", as opposed to the source of mass

Photons don't interact with the Higgs, and photons certainly have zero rest mass. Most of the introductory material I've read seems to use that terminology, but again I'm not a particle physicist.

Since photons do not interact with it at all, that's why I was saying that you could argue that photons do not have inertia (on top of the fact that you cannot apply a force to them to change their velocity).

Velocity is a vector, so gravitational lensing and reflection are both examples of changing the velocity of light. Refraction is an example of changing the direction and the speed of light. In all these cases, equal and opposite reactions occur but are simply too small to observe. The sun is gravitationally attracted to a beam of light that it deflects, a solar sail experiences a force, and the material interface that refracts the light really does experience a force as it deflects and slows down each photon.

Nickel is on the wrong side of the curve of binding energy: energy is released from elements heavier than iron by fission, not fusion.

Snake.
Oil.

Bzzt no thanks for playing. I suggest you take your theory out to your local casino or stock market but make sure you bet a lot of money.

You're either a terrible troll or completely misinformed.

As everyone else has told you, you're completely wrong. There are 46,656 potential combinations for 6 rolls of a 6-sided die. Some of them overlap (e.g. 1/6/6/6/6/6, 6/1/6/6/6/6, 6/6/1/6/6/6, etc.) Of these 46,656, only ONE is 6/6/6/6/6/6. Thus there is a 1/46656 chance of this occurring... it's just as likely as any other combination in this sequence, but most of the other combinations result in the same results thus have a fairly normal probability distribution.

It's one thing to spread science FUD, but really? MATH FUD? This is pretty basic stuff, please don't run around trying to teach people bad math. Here are some pretty graphics explaining dice roll probability distributions to help you out.

That paper is about the moon, it's a 3 body system, the moon, earth, and sun. In a system, where one body is tide locked to it's primary gravitational influence but there are other significant gravitational influences, you can have tides, including core tides. However, in a system in which a body is tide locked to it's primary and has no additional significant gravitational forces (it's not gravitationally bound to, and doesn't have any relatively massive bodies gravitationally bound to it), there are no significant tidal forces.

The moon is tidally locked to earth, it's primary gravitational influence. However, the earth-moon system is gravitationally bound to the Sun, and the Sun's gravity has a significant secondary gravitational influence on the moon, therefore, the earth and moon do experience tidal forces due to the Sun. If there is any liquid in the moon, it will flow due to those tidal forces. However, a tide locked planet with no moon in a system with only a single star is not likely to have any other significant gravitational influences. In fact, about the only possible source for another significant gravitational influence would be another massive planet in orbit around the star. How massive it would need to be depends upon the relative masses and distances of the bodies. For instance, Jupiter does not exert a significant tidal effect on Earth because it's too far away.

For more information on tidal influences, see Tidal Influences

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote for my law school's paper about online security w/ some suggestions about passwords. (I doubt there's any interest in the whole article but here's the link if you are for some reason: http://law.gsu.edu/thedocket/node/519 )
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1) Stop using the same password for everything. At a minimum come up with a base password and then append (or prepend) it with something unique for each application. If your base password is "fido" then for Twitter you could use "fidotwit" or "twitfido."

2) Don't use "Fido" as your password. One of the most common passwords is the name of the user's pet (Paris Hilton's Sidekick was hacked because the cracker knew her dog's name was Tinkerbell). Teenage guys often use the type of car they drive. Parents often use the names of their children. Law geeks often use the name of their favorite Justice.

3) Change your passwords occasionally. Just because you haven't noticed anything amiss doesn't mean that your emails aren't being accessed. If you have a base password of "fido" (which you won't because you're faithfully adhering to #2, you might change it to "fidomarch2010."

4) Avoid dictionary words (even non-English words). One fairly simple technique is to come up with a phrase that has some meaning to you and then use the first letter of each word. "I love taking Fido to the park when it's sunny" becomes "iltfttpwis" which could be used as your base password. Applications that allow you to use upper-case and lower-case characters as well as numbers and symbols exponentially increase the complexity of your password. "I love taking Fido 2 the park when it's sunny!" then becomes "IltF2tpwis!" and you have a fairly robust base password; when combined with a variation for each site and occasional changes you should have a decent password system.

Not exactly.

magnetic fields basics

short answer about deflecting both electrons and protons in a magnetic field

Magnetic deflection is used quite regularly on very small things (electron beams in a CRT for instance, or protons in the massive Van Allen radiation belts around Earth). Anything with a charge, though, is a magnet. Any conductor can have a current and therefore an electric field induced in it by a magnet. If you have a strong enough magnet positioned just right and time the movements just right, you can induce a current into a metal and then repel the metal rather than attract it.

There are then the diamagnetic solids, of which lead is one. In a diamagnetic object, the induced magnetic fields actually repel the object from the magnet rather than attract it. All materials are to some extent diamagnetic, but most are also to some extent ferromagnetic or paramagnetic, and are classified by their net overall effect. The velocity of a bullet fired from a pistol or rifle would be much higher than you could readily produce via diamagnetism, since diamagnetism is a pretty weak force. Given a powerful enough magnet, though, you could theoretically repel lead, copper, or a few other materials in their solid state. Good luck overcoming chemical explosives for velocity, though.

Not exactly.

magnetic fields basics

short answer about deflecting both electrons and protons in a magnetic field

Magnetic deflection is used quite regularly on very small things (electron beams in a CRT for instance, or protons in the massive Van Allen radiation belts around Earth). Anything with a charge, though, is a magnet. Any conductor can have a current and therefore an electric field induced in it by a magnet. If you have a strong enough magnet positioned just right and time the movements just right, you can induce a current into a metal and then repel the metal rather than attract it.

There are then the diamagnetic solids, of which lead is one. In a diamagnetic object, the induced magnetic fields actually repel the object from the magnet rather than attract it. All materials are to some extent diamagnetic, but most are also to some extent ferromagnetic or paramagnetic, and are classified by their net overall effect. The velocity of a bullet fired from a pistol or rifle would be much higher than you could readily produce via diamagnetism, since diamagnetism is a pretty weak force. Given a powerful enough magnet, though, you could theoretically repel lead, copper, or a few other materials in their solid state. Good luck overcoming chemical explosives for velocity, though.

Dark matter- God of the gaps. Can't explain something? Dark matter! That magical substance that is everywhere it wants to be, any way you need it to be!

Can't explain the missing mass of Beta decay? Introduce new particle! Can't explain how electrons are confined to the nucleus? Introduce new particle! Can't explain the inertial mass of particles? Introduce new particle!

So yeah, introducing new particles to explain discrepancies in observations is something totally unheard of and not something a real scientist would do...

So, each USB iteration offers the smallest possible increments in speed?

In some cases, the "smallest possible" increment is more than a doubling. Check this or this out for example.

Not that it justifies the use of the term out of context of course.

EUV is 13.5nm, X-rays are generally thought of 10nm and smaller. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/ems3.html

It is close and this region is sometimes referred to as "soft" X-rays but there is nothing incorrect about the "UV" moniker. It also helps to distinguish EUV from actual X-ray lithography, a largely abandoned approach which used wave lengths on the order of 1nm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_lithography