So is the entire Standard Model - at least so far we have failed to collect any data that are inconsistent with it.

QFT comes from the unification of quantum mechanics and special relativity and is one of the most precisely tested theories ever. However, to properly calculate the vacuum energy you have to understand Quantum Gravity i.e. unify quantum mechanics and general relativity which we have not yet managed. However, you can just ignore that and do the calculation in QFT anyway and get an answer....which is 100+ orders of magnitude wrong and confirms that undetsanding the quantum gravity part.is really important for this calculation.

Escape velocity is the velocity you need to escape the gravitational well without any additional energy being added. If you are in an orbit then you can alway add enough energy to escape (at least for classical systems). In the Earth-moon system the Earth is losing rotational energy to the moon which causes its orbit to raise.

Nature does not care what you think "common sense" says it should do. If it did we would not have quantum mechanics.

No, the event horizon is where the escape velocity is the speed of light. This is larger than the orbital velocity. because, any object with this velocity will escape the gravitational well unlike orbital velocity where it cannot escape since it is in a bound orbit.

It's not stealing, just money laundering.

That's not how publication fees work - you only pay if your paper is published.

It would be a daft idea if it functioned as you suggest but it clearly does not. It tricks the electronics controlling the motor into thinking that the motor is overheating. This means that the electronics monitoring the motor must be intact and functioning and since that is the electronics on which the EMP is focussed it seems unlikely it will damage anything else.

I suspect the way it works is to get the motor coils to act as an antenna which picks up the EMP. The increase in current through the motor is then interpreted as the motor slowing down because, if the motor were to slow down the back EMF would reduce causing the current through it to increase...but this is a guess since I could not find details on how it works. However, if this is right then it probably also works with electric cars too. I'm not sure how/why it would work with ICE though.

No, but he did say "gravity appears to be more than bent space" using gravitational waves as evidence of that when, in fact, gravitation waves are evidence that gravity is exactly a bend in space-time.

Sorry, but as someone whose job it is to take part in annual faculty reviews this is rubbish. There is no "simple metric" that is used because of the incredible complexity and diversity in science. Even in a single field like particle physics the number of publications is meaningless: if you are on a large collaboration like those at CERN on the LHC you get ~100 papers/year while some smaller collaborations may only publish 3-4 papers/year or even none during periods when the experiment is being built. Pure mathematicians may only publish once every ~2 years and there the quality of the paper matters a lot and you need expert input from mathematicians to fairly evaluate output.

More typically outputs are judged far more on quality than quantity. Producing 10 papers in some obscure, low-ranked journal is generally viewed as far less impressive than one paper in a top ranked journal but even then there are exceptions since some fields have very specialized journals just for that field which have a low ranking but are regarded as the top journal for the field that everyone trys to publish in. Evaluating faculty is an incredibly complex task as each case is individual. It's literally impossible to come up with any simple metric, instead you develop guiding principles and then do your very best to try and apply these fairly across an enormous variety of fields. It's never going to be perfect, but if you try to game the system with low-quality junk papers you are definitely going to get caught out, at least where I work.

It's exactly the opposite case. In the author pays model journals have a strong financial incentive to accept junk science because if they reject the paper they do not get paid and with online publishing there is no material cost if you increase the number of papers you publish. With reader pays the financial incentive is to only publish good science because otherwise readers will stop paying. In this case bad papers only get through because of a lack of proper reviewing.

Author pays is definitely better in terms of ensuring that everyone can access the latest research which is why it is ont the rise but in terms of ensuring only high quality research is accepted for publication it is a far worse model than reader pays. Indeed, the switch to author pays in pursuit of open access to research is almost certainly a major contributing factor to this problem.

There is a way perhaps to do both: provide the liability shield up to a certain size of company. This would limit the size of social media companies and effectively limit the scope for abuse be limiting the size of the audience. It would still allow for full freedom of expression albeit with the volume of the megaphone turned down so instead of reaching the entire globe you'd be limited to a special focus group or region.

Breaking up the social media giants like this and forcing the online communities to be smaller so that more people actually get to know each other might turn out to be a good thing for the internet and more like its early days with BBS. It's also proportionate: massive companies can afford to have people policing policies and with the massive audiences can cause massive damage, smaller operations cannot afford to police things but also have a far more limited audience and hence limited damage if things go awry.

Clearly not but that does not mean that the data is reliable. The problem they have is that if they are correct that 2023 is the hottest year in the past 2,000 years they examined then this means they have no data of how tree rings etc respond to such extreme temperatures.

In addition, things like Oxygen isotope concentrations take time to respond to changes in temperature since to change water has to evaporate, fall as snow and get converted into ice. This is more a measure of climate, not weather while annual variations are, at least partly, weather since single events like El Nino can impact it.

That's not to say that their claim is wrong - their projections might work out beyond where they have the data to confirm them - but typicaly when you make projections into areas where you lack data you acquire significant uncertainties and yet they are stating this result as an absolute certainty.

The Luddites were absolutely not at all on the right side of history. They were violent idiots who rejected technology and rightly deserve to be an very negative epithet. The children of the original Luddites are the people you are thinking of. They rejected their parent's Luddite philsophy, embraced the new industrial technology and successfully pressured the mill owners to use the enhanced profits the new technology gave them to improve working conditions. They were the founders of the union movement.

So, if you actually know your history you;ll find that, exactly as I suggested, embrace new technology and then using it to benefit society is exactly what works best. If the Luddites themselves had been more like their children then we could have had better working conditions a generation sooner. The only positive contribution the Luddites made to society was to have kids who were thankfully a lot smarter and open minded than they were.