Another example of cherry-picking what you reproduce here, in order to make yourself look good. You just can’t seem to resist.
After you cited an E&E paper to support the claim that sunspot cycle length is responsible for recent warming, I said:...
You accused me of not citing my sources, and asked me to provide a peer-reviewed paper supporting my statement, implying that none existed. I did so, per your request. In fact it took me only a very short time to do so, because it was one of many.
You were not satisfied, and pointed out a flaw in the paper. This (as it turned out later) was a legitimate criticism of the paper BUT you did not cite your own sources for that. Instead, I was forced to spend time finding it myself. Which did indeed make you guilty of EXACTLY the same thing you had originally accused me of doing.
But you didn’t put those first parts here. In fact, it appears to me that most everything on this page is somewhat out of context. And I suspect that’s intentional.
I do know about “fair use”. I found it rather laughable that today, on Slashdot, you pointed me to references about libel long after I wrote that I did not intend to sue you. And in fact I stated as much in clear, concise, English, and never, at any point, wrote that I did intend to sue you.
You know very well that I did not “threaten” (your word) to sue you, so why are you linking to libel laws in association with my name? What is the point of bringing it up again in that fashion, unless it is to give readers a false and misleading impression?
Once again, I question your methods and your ethics.
I linked to libel laws in response to your comment:
This high-schooler somehow thinks he/she can protect him/her self from libel and copyright by stating on the blog that “someone” said something, while still partially quoting said “someone”. And then even including a link to the original exchange. Haha. If I were this person, and possessed some intelligence, I would shut this site down. Sadly, it is looking more like he/she is going to end up in Litigation Land. [Jane Q. Public]
You've previously said: "Dictionaries do not accurately define words, they merely list popular usage. If you want technical accuracy, consult an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. "
That's why I'm referring to technical statements like these:
In 2005, 11 national science academies signed a joint statement saying "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities... The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
In 2007, 13 national science academies signed a joint statement referencing the earlier 2005 statement, and added: "Recent research strongly reinforces our previous conclusions. It is unequivocal that the climate is changing, and it is very likely that this is predominantly caused by the increasing human interference with the atmosphere. These changes will transform the environmental conditions on Earth unless counter-measures are taken. Our present energy course is not sustainable."
That's the definition of a climate change contrarian: someone who disagrees with the overwhelming scientific consensus that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.
Charming. As I said in my responses, I'll address your Sky Dragon misinformation when I get the time, but first I need to address some of your other misinformation to put it in context. Patience.
Wow, Mr. "khayman80". You sure do a wonderful job of distorting other people's statements and inflating your own ego here.
I remember our "discussions". As I recall, you were insufferably arrogant and pedantic, and rather consistently asserted I had stated things that actually I had not.
For example, you link to a statement above and write that I had threatened to sue you, when in fact I did not (as anybody who actually follows the link can see). What I *DID* write was that under different circumstances I would. Not the same thing. I made no "threat".
Your listing here of your own ego-stuffed accomplishments are just full of similar distortions. Which is exactly why I told you to get stuffed and told you that UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES I would sue you.
You are a pompous ass, and you distort other peoples' statements in order to try to make yourself look good. Then you use that as a self-advertisement to try to bolster your reputation as a "scientist". When in fact all it proves is... you are a pompous ass.
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
Haha. I have just been reading more of the post above by "khayman80". The funny thing is: if you actually follow the links he provides, you can easily see how grossly he distorts and cherry-picks my own statements in an attempt to make himself look good.
At least he had the integrity to actually link to them... apparently (and probably correctly) assuming that other people would take him at his word and not actually follow them.
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
(To others: please pardon the multiple posts, but this is something that needs to be stated.)
As other people can clearly see if they actually follow your links, our exchange included an accusation by you that my comments were "fraudulent". And that was not stated as an opinion but as a claim of "obvious" fact.
As I mentioned to you then: the fact that this is internet does not constitute safe haven from libel. Other people have been sued in the real world for less, and lost. And I would probably throw in some of your
Wow, Mr. "khayman80". You sure do a wonderful job of distorting other people's statements and inflating your own ego here.
I remember our "discussions". As I recall, you were insufferably arrogant and pedantic, and rather consistently asserted I had stated things that actually I had not.
For example, you link to a statement above and write that I had threatened to sue you, when in fact I did not (as anybody who actually follows the link can see). What I *DID* write was that under different circumstances I would. Not the same thing. I made no "threat".
Your listing here of your own ego-stuffed accomplishments are just full of similar distortions. Which is exactly why I told you to get stuffed and told you that UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES I would sue you.
You are a pompous ass, and you distort other peoples' statements in order to try to make yourself look good. Then you use that as a self-advertisement to try to bolster your reputation as a "scientist". When in fact all it proves is... you are a pompous ass.
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
Haha. I have just been reading more of the post above by "khayman80". The funny thing is: if you actually follow the links he provides, you can easily see how grossly he distorts and cherry-picks my own statements in an attempt to make himself look good.
At least he had the integrity to actually link to them... apparently (and probably correctly) assuming that other people would take him at his word and not actually follow them.
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
(To others: please pardon the multiple posts, but this is something that needs to be stated.)
As other people can clearly see if they actually follow your links, our exchange included an accusation by you that my comments were "fraudulent". And that was not stated as an opinion but as a claim of "obvious" fact.
As I mentioned to you then: the fact that this is internet does not constitute safe haven from libel. Other people have been sued in the real world for less, and lost. And I would probably throw in some of your public mis-characterizations of my other comments, just to add some spice.
I did not threaten to sue you, but I did state that if the accusation had been against my real name rather than a pseudonym, then I would have. An
Wow, Mr. "khayman80". You sure do a wonderful job of distorting other people's statements and inflating your own ego here.
I remember our "discussions". As I recall, you were insufferably arrogant and pedantic, and rather consistently asserted I had stated things that actually I had not.
For example, you link to a statement above and write that I had threatened to sue you, when in fact I did not (as anybody who actually follows the link can see). What I *DID* write was that under different circumstances I would. Not the same thing. I made no "threat".
Your listing here of your own ego-stuffed accomplishments are just full of similar distortions. Which is exactly why I told you to get stuffed and told you that UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES I would sue you.
You are a pompous ass, and you distort other peoples' statements in order to try to make yourself look good. Then you use that as a self-advertisement to try to bolster your reputation as a "scientist". When in fact all it proves is... you are a pompous ass.
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
Haha. I have just been reading more of the post above by "khayman80". The funny thing is: if you actually follow the links he provides, you can easily see how grossly he distorts and cherry-picks my own statements in an attempt to make himself look good.
At least he had the integrity to actually link to them... apparently (and probably correctly) assuming that other people would take him at his word and not actually follow them.
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
(To others: please pardon the multiple posts, but this is something that needs to be stated.)
As other people can clearly see if they actually follow your links, our exchange included an accusation by you that my comments were "fraudulent". And that was not stated as an opinion but as a claim of "obvious" fact.
As I mentioned to you then: the fact that this is internet does not constitute safe haven from libel. Other people have been sued in the real world for less, and lost. And I would probably throw in some of your public mis-characterizations of my other comments, just to add some spice.
I did not threaten to sue you, but I did state that if the accusation had been against my real name rather than a p
Correction: Pauli exclusion explains why atoms with more than one electron don't collect all those electrons in the ground state. It's not really relevant to hydrogen, so I'm removing the first instance of the word "hydrogen" from my previous comment.
Probably not, but I also find charged mediators baffling. For instance, I couldn't stop thinking about baryon masses, and quickly went down a rabbit hole. Asymptotic freedom implies that a proton would lose ~98% of its mass if its quarks could all be in the exact same spot. That's a lot of energy; what keeps the quarks apart?
I clung to a familiar analogy: hydrogen atoms don't collapse because of Heisenberg uncertainty and Pauli exclusion. Quarks are fermions, but the down quark isn't subject to the exclusion principle because it can be distinguished from the up quarks. Undergraduates explore the structure of a hydrogen atom by solving the (comparatively simple) non-relativistic Schrodinger's equation for the two-body electromagnetic interaction. On the other hand, understanding the structure of a proton requires a full relativistic treatment which involves a three-body interaction including color charge, flavor, spin, and electric charge. Scary.
This was an excellent excuse to open David Griffith's Intro to Elementary Particles for the first time, and skip to page 180 to read about baryon wave functions. Conclusion: I really need to take a class on elementary particle physics!
But anyway, here's a null result which may be interesting. I wondered how much baryon masses depend on the electromagnetic repulsion of the two up(down) quarks in a proton(neutron). Qualitatively, it seems like up quarks should repel each other electromagnetically twice as much as down quarks, so protons should be bigger than neutrons. Bigger should mean more massive, because the strong interaction becomes stronger as the quarks are separated. Since protons are actually ~0.1% less massive than neutrons, it seems like electromagnetism doesn't play a significant role in determining baryon masses.
The analogy is useful, but note that ion-ion and dipole-dipole interactions are both mediated by massless, electrically-neutral photons. The strong force is mediated by massless, color-charged gluons, and the residual strong nuclear force is mediated by massive, color-neutral pions. Bigger difference.
Rewording slightly at Dumb Scientist to include: The residual strong force is mediated by massive pions, which are composed of gluons and a color-neutral quark-anti-quark pair. They mass ~135 MeV, which is less than 2/3's that of a proton's mass of 938 MeV, which seems like a clue that quark masses don't significantly affect the masses of hadrons like baryons (nucleons, etc.) and mesons (pions, etc.).
Meant to add: The gluons which mediate the strong force are actually massless. Their contribution to each nucleon's mass is E/c^2 through the energy of their interactions with each other and the quarks.
You're probably referring to the weak interaction (responsible for nuclear decay) which is short range because it's mediated by massive W and Z bosons. That's true, but it's a totally different fundamental force.
We usually regard two particles to be in a bound state if they remain "close" to each other, but that's only because we're used to forces that decay to zero at infinite range. Particles that are infinitely far from each other don't experience gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, so they're regarded as free particles. The strong force is completely different, because it gets weaker as quarks are brought together. Thus quarks are "more free" the closer they are to each other; this is called asymptotic freedom.
The force between nucleons is more intuitive because the gluons that mediate the strong force between the (not literal) red, blue or green color charges of quarks are confined inside each nucleon. Our intuition is based on electromagnetism which is mediated by electrically neutral photons, but gluons aren't color neutral, so they interact with each other in strange ways. The residual strong force is mediated by composite particles that leak from each nucleon called pions which are color neutral. As a result, the binding energies of atomic nuclei are easy to explain, but those of individual nucleons are counter-intuitive in many ways.
Please note that I'm not a particle physicist or an expert in quantum chromodynamics, so my interpretation and explanation should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Also, I noticed your conversation with dudpixel, and tried to explain that scientists aren't just assuming that nuclear decay rates are constant.
The Bible isn't the only thing that requires faith. There are more pieces that science doesn't know, than those it does know. Most origins science is not testable, which is why assumptions are made. The assumption that all radioactive decay rates have always been constant, is not testable. Many fields of science are based on that assumption. [dudpixel]
... how could you know what the decay rates of radioactive isotopes were 4 billion years ago? The fact is, no one knows, and so we just assume that because our measurements over the past couple hundred years show very little variation, it must have never varied. [dudpixel]
That's incorrect. Scientists don't just assume that nuclear decay rates have been constant over billions of years. Just to be clear, we can't be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates:
Supernovae produce many radioactive elements which slowly decay after the explosion. At first they shine brightly in a spectroscopically unique manner, but over the course of several weeks they fade to half their previous brightness. The amount of time it takes the brightness to fade is a direct measurement of the nuclear decay rate. The best example is supernova 1987A, which lies ~169,000 LY away. That means that when scientists looked at that light in 1987, they were measuring the nuclear decay rate as it was around 169,000 years ago. The results were experimentally indistinguishable from current decay rates, and have been confirmed by similar experiments on SN1991T, which is 60,000,000 light years away.
The Oklo natural nuclear reactor left evidence that can be used to determine the fine structure constant and neutron capture rates, both intimately entwined with quantum mechanics' predictions of nuclear decay rates. This experiment is more ambiguous and as a result the error bars are much larger than the SN1987A constraint, but it's also consistent with a constant nuclear decay rate. Since the Oklo reactor was active 1.8 billion years ago, the Oklo evidence only supports a change in the fine structure constant of one part in 10 million over that timespan.
The increase in nuclear decay rates necessary to increase the "apparent age" of rocks from thousands to billions of years is enormous. This decay rate would make all the mildly radioactive elements in the Earth decay faster, releasing enough heat to melt the crust. It would still be molten to this day unless God made a cosmically sized refrigerator to cool it down fast enough to fit into the creationist timeline.
Any change in nuclear decay rates would have to affect all types of nuclear decay identically, otherwise isotopes that decay by different mechanisms (alpha, beta, neutron emission, etc) would've decayed at different rates. If these rates changed differently, it would cause isochron dates of the same object but using different isotopes to disagree. To the best of my knowledge, that's never happened.
If nuclear decay rates have changed, then why do ice cores like the one taken at Vostok, Antarctica show agreement between annual layer counts and isochron age? A change in nuclear decay rates wouldn't affect the annual temperature fluctuations that form the basis of the annual layer counts, so the two different methods of dating the same (~400,000 year old) ice core should be different. They aren't.
The strong force between quarks in each nucleon isn't repulsive, it's just contrary to human intuition that's strongly influenced by gravity and electromagnetism. Electromagnetism can be repulsive, but it and gravity can both be approximated by inverse square laws that decay to zero at infinite range. The force between nucleons also decays rapidly with distance, but it's the residual of the true strong force between quarks, in the same way that van der Waals forces are residuals of the much stronger attraction between the atoms' protons and electrons.
The true strong force between quarks is more like a rubber band, which exerts a stronger force as you move them apart. This rubber band "breaks" when you put enough energy into separating them as it would take to create a new quark next to each one, and that's exactly what happens. They can't spontaneously fly apart without violating conservation of energy. Protons are stable (for at least the next ~10^30 years), and even though a free neutron decays into a proton within about 15 minutes, its quarks don't fly apart. Instead, one down quark beta decays into an up quark by emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino.
The force between nucleons decays rapidly with distance, but they're residuals of the true strong force between quarks, in the same way that van der Waals forces are residuals of the much stronger attraction between atomic nuclei and their electron shells.
The true strong force between quarks is more like a rubber band, which exerts a stronger force as you move them apart. This rubber band "breaks" when you put enough energy into separating them as it would take to create a new quark next to each one, and that's exactly what happens. They can't spontaneously fly apart without violating conservation of energy. Protons are stable (for at least the next ~10^30 years), and even though a free neutron decays into a proton within about 15 minutes, its quarks don't fly apart. Instead, one down quark beta decays into an up quark by emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino.
I recall you claiming that it works in the conspiracy theorists' favor:
The Towers were actually designed to withstand a direct hit by a 727... the largest common aircraft at the time of their design.
Why they didn't is a matter of speculation for government-contracted (of course!) engineers and conspiracy theorists.
One thing working in the conspiracy theorists' favor is the fact (discovered by reputable scientists with expertise in the subject and no conflict of interest, and independently verified) that the dust from the buildings contained bits of high-tech thermite. Not your everyday garage variety, either, but real high-tech stuff that is usually only available to government and military.
In fact, you've previously repeated many other 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories, at great length.
Pardon me. My mistake. I was confusing the fact that supersymmetry is an integral part of most versions of string hypotheses, with the idea that strings must exist for supersymmetry to exist. Mea culpa. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-07]
You've demonstrated true scientific spirit here by admitting a mistake. Kudos.
However, serious deja vu kicked in just 5 minutes later when you continued to imply that the astrophysicists who overwhelmingly consider dark matter more plausible than MOND are "confused".
Instead of apologizing, could you please stop spamming humanity with all of this multi-disciplinary misinformation? You may find that doing so reduces your need to apologize in the future.
Incidentally, I was asking for a citation supporting your claim that "string theory is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed." Your supersymmetry confusion seems completely irrelevant, but here's a comment posted 2 hours before yours:
That's wrong. Probably the two leading candidates for dark matter are axions and neutralinos, neither of which require string theory. (The latter requires supersymmetry, which is part of string theory, but there are plenty of supersymmetric field theories that aren't string theory.)[Someone]
Notice that he was saying even supersymmetry isn't really related to the existence of dark matter. Axions aren't related to supersymmetry. None of this affects your claim that "string theory is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed" because it's still wrong even if you replace string theory with supersymmetry. To me, this seems like the usual chaff intended to distract readers from noticing the increasingly vague nature of your statements.
Nonsense. It [dark matter] is a "questionable" theory because it is questionable whether it actually deserves the moniker "theory" at all. A theory must be testable. So far, no solid grounds for testing have been established. Yes, you have sensational articles saying it has "been found", but they invariably neglect to mention that certain other theories fit the observed phenomema approximately as well. In that vein, dark matter, dark energy, and string "theory" are ALL struggling to maintain a status of "theory", at all. Granted, there has been some evidence. But there has also been counter-evidence. And testability is still up in the air. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-07]
I've previously told you about some of the evidence for dark matter. Notice that none of those experiments referred to string theory or supersymmetry. In fact, Zwicky's 1933 discovery of dark matter predates string theoryandsupersymmetry.
You also claimed that the reference showing that "string theory/supersymmetry is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed" was published "about 6 months ago"...
See also recent articles in Scientific American and other journals; dark matter, dark energy, and even string theory are coming under fire, because they are based on assumptions or "tweaks" to the observed data, in order to make the theories fit the observations. That is not science, it is mere specula
slashdot challenge: try to come up with a description of a fundemental force or property of the universe that is not self referencing
Noether's first theorem: If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time. Or, any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. Or, to every differentiable symmetry generated by local actions, there corresponds a conserved current.
In other words, the fact that performing indoor, controlled chemistry experiments at noon and midnight yields the same answer implies conservation of energy. The fact that both sides of the night sky are both so similar implies conservation of momentum.
String theory isn't testable using current technology, but it's largely unrelated to dark matter. On the other hand, we've already discussedsome of the actual evidence for dark matter. This new paper seems (to my non-cosmologist eyes) to be very rigorous. Among other checks, they extensively searched parameter space to exclude the possibility that standard NFW dark matter halos were being mistaken as a filament. The nearly head-on alignment of these two galaxies is fortunate, and the authors deserve credit for noting that it improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the gravitational lensing signal.
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.
Excellent comment. Just to take it further, active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which also includes a pressure contribution. That implies tension has negative gravitational and inertial mass because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short story called Hot Rock, which is set in the same universe as Riding the Crocodile.
Thank you riverat1, Gadget_Guy, Arlet, berbo, and tbannist for correctly repeating that a solid undergraduate statistics education helps one to determine how long a timespan has to be in order to separate the long term climate sea level signal from short term weather noise (using a realistic noise model) by producing a 95% (for instance) confidence interval that's entirely positive.
The reason ocean levels have fallen is most likely because Thailand, Pakistan, Australia and a few other places have all experienced massive record-setting floods. There's actually been enough flooding to show up as a small dip in the measure of ocean levels. [tbannist]
Yes, the sea level has gone down the past couple of years. The main reason for that is all of the major precipitation events that have been going on around the world. The puts the water on land that take several years to return to the ocean. The GRACE satellites have shown by measuring gravity an increase in the areas where the precipitation has occurred. [riverat1]
You're both right; the GRACE analysis was performed by Carmen Boening at JPL. She showed that most of the precipitation fell in Australia and Brazil. As Josh Willis explained, this is because of a very strong La Nina.
Slashdot Mirror
I linked to libel laws in response to your comment:
This high-schooler somehow thinks he/she can protect him/her self from libel and copyright by stating on the blog that “someone” said something, while still partially quoting said “someone”. And then even including a link to the original exchange. Haha. If I were this person, and possessed some intelligence, I would shut this site down. Sadly, it is looking more like he/she is going to end up in Litigation Land. [Jane Q. Public]
You've previously said: "Dictionaries do not accurately define words, they merely list popular usage. If you want technical accuracy, consult an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. "
That's why I'm referring to technical statements like these:
In 2005, 11 national science academies signed a joint statement saying "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities ... The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action."
In 2007, 13 national science academies signed a joint statement referencing the earlier 2005 statement, and added: "Recent research strongly reinforces our previous conclusions. It is unequivocal that the climate is changing, and it is very likely that this is predominantly caused by the increasing human interference with the atmosphere. These changes will transform the environmental conditions on Earth unless counter-measures are taken. Our present energy course is not sustainable."
That's the definition of a climate change contrarian: someone who disagrees with the overwhelming scientific consensus that most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.
Charming. As I said in my responses, I'll address your Sky Dragon misinformation when I get the time, but first I need to address some of your other misinformation to put it in context. Patience.
Oops, the previous comment used relative links that only work on Dumb Scientist. This version uses absolute links.
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
I'm not the first person you've accused of trying to put words into your mouth. Here's an example. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being distorted. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
I've copied an example below, so other people don't have to follow the links. Also, here's my "grossly cherry-picked" version of a conversation we had regarding dark matter. Compare that to the originals that are available by following the links. I think this wastes my readers' time, but they can judge for themselves whether your statements are being cherry-picked in an attempt to make myself look good. Anyone else who's bored by this can skip ahead LINK LATER to more science.
***
Correction: Pauli exclusion explains why atoms with more than one electron don't collect all those electrons in the ground state. It's not really relevant to hydrogen, so I'm removing the first instance of the word "hydrogen" from my previous comment.
Probably not, but I also find charged mediators baffling. For instance, I couldn't stop thinking about baryon masses, and quickly went down a rabbit hole. Asymptotic freedom implies that a proton would lose ~98% of its mass if its quarks could all be in the exact same spot. That's a lot of energy; what keeps the quarks apart?
I clung to a familiar analogy: hydrogen atoms don't collapse because of Heisenberg uncertainty and Pauli exclusion. Quarks are fermions, but the down quark isn't subject to the exclusion principle because it can be distinguished from the up quarks. Undergraduates explore the structure of a hydrogen atom by solving the (comparatively simple) non-relativistic Schrodinger's equation for the two-body electromagnetic interaction. On the other hand, understanding the structure of a proton requires a full relativistic treatment which involves a three-body interaction including color charge, flavor, spin, and electric charge. Scary.
This was an excellent excuse to open David Griffith's Intro to Elementary Particles for the first time, and skip to page 180 to read about baryon wave functions. Conclusion: I really need to take a class on elementary particle physics!
But anyway, here's a null result which may be interesting. I wondered how much baryon masses depend on the electromagnetic repulsion of the two up(down) quarks in a proton(neutron). Qualitatively, it seems like up quarks should repel each other electromagnetically twice as much as down quarks, so protons should be bigger than neutrons. Bigger should mean more massive, because the strong interaction becomes stronger as the quarks are separated. Since protons are actually ~0.1% less massive than neutrons, it seems like electromagnetism doesn't play a significant role in determining baryon masses.
The analogy is useful, but note that ion-ion and dipole-dipole interactions are both mediated by massless, electrically-neutral photons. The strong force is mediated by massless, color-charged gluons, and the residual strong nuclear force is mediated by massive, color-neutral pions. Bigger difference.
Rewording slightly at Dumb Scientist to include: The residual strong force is mediated by massive pions, which are composed of gluons and a color-neutral quark-anti-quark pair. They mass ~135 MeV, which is less than 2/3's that of a proton's mass of 938 MeV, which seems like a clue that quark masses don't significantly affect the masses of hadrons like baryons (nucleons, etc.) and mesons (pions, etc.).
Meant to add: The gluons which mediate the strong force are actually massless. Their contribution to each nucleon's mass is E/c^2 through the energy of their interactions with each other and the quarks.
You're probably referring to the weak interaction (responsible for nuclear decay) which is short range because it's mediated by massive W and Z bosons. That's true, but it's a totally different fundamental force.
We usually regard two particles to be in a bound state if they remain "close" to each other, but that's only because we're used to forces that decay to zero at infinite range. Particles that are infinitely far from each other don't experience gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, so they're regarded as free particles. The strong force is completely different, because it gets weaker as quarks are brought together. Thus quarks are "more free" the closer they are to each other; this is called asymptotic freedom.
The force between nucleons is more intuitive because the gluons that mediate the strong force between the (not literal) red, blue or green color charges of quarks are confined inside each nucleon. Our intuition is based on electromagnetism which is mediated by electrically neutral photons, but gluons aren't color neutral, so they interact with each other in strange ways. The residual strong force is mediated by composite particles that leak from each nucleon called pions which are color neutral. As a result, the binding energies of atomic nuclei are easy to explain, but those of individual nucleons are counter-intuitive in many ways.
Please note that I'm not a particle physicist or an expert in quantum chromodynamics, so my interpretation and explanation should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Also, I noticed your conversation with dudpixel, and tried to explain that scientists aren't just assuming that nuclear decay rates are constant.
That's incorrect. Scientists don't just assume that nuclear decay rates have been constant over billions of years. Just to be clear, we can't be sure that nuclear decay rates are exactly constant. But experiments have placed constraints on the size of any variation in decay rates:
Oops! I think this is a more complete answer.
The strong force between quarks in each nucleon isn't repulsive, it's just contrary to human intuition that's strongly influenced by gravity and electromagnetism. Electromagnetism can be repulsive, but it and gravity can both be approximated by inverse square laws that decay to zero at infinite range. The force between nucleons also decays rapidly with distance, but it's the residual of the true strong force between quarks, in the same way that van der Waals forces are residuals of the much stronger attraction between the atoms' protons and electrons.
The true strong force between quarks is more like a rubber band, which exerts a stronger force as you move them apart. This rubber band "breaks" when you put enough energy into separating them as it would take to create a new quark next to each one, and that's exactly what happens. They can't spontaneously fly apart without violating conservation of energy. Protons are stable (for at least the next ~10^30 years), and even though a free neutron decays into a proton within about 15 minutes, its quarks don't fly apart. Instead, one down quark beta decays into an up quark by emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino.
The force between nucleons decays rapidly with distance, but they're residuals of the true strong force between quarks, in the same way that van der Waals forces are residuals of the much stronger attraction between atomic nuclei and their electron shells.
The true strong force between quarks is more like a rubber band, which exerts a stronger force as you move them apart. This rubber band "breaks" when you put enough energy into separating them as it would take to create a new quark next to each one, and that's exactly what happens. They can't spontaneously fly apart without violating conservation of energy. Protons are stable (for at least the next ~10^30 years), and even though a free neutron decays into a proton within about 15 minutes, its quarks don't fly apart. Instead, one down quark beta decays into an up quark by emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino.
I recall you claiming that it works in the conspiracy theorists' favor:
In fact, you've previously repeated many other 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories, at great length.
You've demonstrated true scientific spirit here by admitting a mistake. Kudos.
However, serious deja vu kicked in just 5 minutes later when you continued to imply that the astrophysicists who overwhelmingly consider dark matter more plausible than MOND are "confused".
Instead of apologizing, could you please stop spamming humanity with all of this multi-disciplinary misinformation? You may find that doing so reduces your need to apologize in the future.
Incidentally, I was asking for a citation supporting your claim that "string theory is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed." Your supersymmetry confusion seems completely irrelevant, but here's a comment posted 2 hours before yours:
That's wrong. Probably the two leading candidates for dark matter are axions and neutralinos, neither of which require string theory. (The latter requires supersymmetry, which is part of string theory, but there are plenty of supersymmetric field theories that aren't string theory.) [Someone]
Notice that he was saying even supersymmetry isn't really related to the existence of dark matter. Axions aren't related to supersymmetry. None of this affects your claim that "string theory is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed" because it's still wrong even if you replace string theory with supersymmetry. To me, this seems like the usual chaff intended to distract readers from noticing the increasingly vague nature of your statements.
I've previously told you about some of the evidence for dark matter. Notice that none of those experiments referred to string theory or supersymmetry. In fact, Zwicky's 1933 discovery of dark matter predates string theory and supersymmetry.
You also claimed that the reference showing that "string theory/supersymmetry is one of the pillars upon which dark matter theory is formed" was published "about 6 months ago"...
See also recent articles in Scientific American and other journals; dark matter, dark energy, and even string theory are coming under fire, because they are based on assumptions or "tweaks" to the observed data, in order to make the theories fit the observations. That is not science, it is mere specula
Noether's first theorem: If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time. Or, any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. Or, to every differentiable symmetry generated by local actions, there corresponds a conserved current.
In other words, the fact that performing indoor, controlled chemistry experiments at noon and midnight yields the same answer implies conservation of energy. The fact that both sides of the night sky are both so similar implies conservation of momentum.
Citation?
String theory isn't testable using current technology, but it's largely unrelated to dark matter. On the other hand, we've already discussed some of the actual evidence for dark matter. This new paper seems (to my non-cosmologist eyes) to be very rigorous. Among other checks, they extensively searched parameter space to exclude the possibility that standard NFW dark matter halos were being mistaken as a filament. The nearly head-on alignment of these two galaxies is fortunate, and the authors deserve credit for noting that it improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the gravitational lensing signal.
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.
Excellent comment. Just to take it further, active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which also includes a pressure contribution. That implies tension has negative gravitational and inertial mass because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short story called Hot Rock, which is set in the same universe as Riding the Crocodile.
Thank you riverat1, Gadget_Guy, Arlet, berbo, and tbannist for correctly repeating that a solid undergraduate statistics education helps one to determine how long a timespan has to be in order to separate the long term climate sea level signal from short term weather noise (using a realistic noise model) by producing a 95% (for instance) confidence interval that's entirely positive.
You're both right; the GRACE analysis was performed by Carmen Boening at JPL. She showed that most of the precipitation fell in Australia and Brazil. As Josh Willis explained, this is because of a very strong La Nina.