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Comment Re:And what about dark matter? (Score 1) 109

Right, so my original motive for the first post in this thread, was to challenge the smugness of the guy who said his physics teacher described cosmology as being like biology before Darwin. My point was, physics has problems too. One of those problems being the supposedly sacrosanct law of conservation of energy.

Comment Re:36% less pain (Score 1) 274

If gender can have heretofore unknown effects, why can't it have an effect on subjective measurements? You seem to be assuming gender has no effect on measuring the mice's grimaces, but isn't the point of the experiment that the gender of the experimenters had an unrealized effect?

Note also that there may be some effect of being stared at in play. From http://ejp.wyrdwise.com/EJP%20...:

"However in a post hoc analysis one of the
conscious report variables approached significance for the
interaction between staring and distraction in the predicted
direction. The effect size of the staring effect in this condition was
d = 0.57. We conclude that the starer’s mental strategy during the
non-staring periods may be important."

Comment Re:And what about dark matter? (Score 1) 109

It's converted into potential energy, which then becomes kinetic energy again as it falls. But when is the potential energy lost from photons stretching as they travel long distances through space converted back into kinetic energy? Is there any evidence for that, as there is for a ball thrown up, then stopping, then coming back down?

Comment Re:And what about dark matter? (Score 1) 109

What happens when you get macroscopic objects displaying quantum effects, as in the experiments of Andrew Cleland and Aaron O'Connell?

Or Yves Couder et al., who reproduce the two-slit experiment on a macroscopic scale - but it seems to require an ether if that's what's happening on the quantum level, which goes against physics dogma?

Comment Re:And what about dark matter? (Score 1) 109

Where is the energy removed to?

In the edx Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe MOOC, a student asked a question:

First:At the 2nd lesson you said that the energy of photons and particles, at the young universe, is the same (equipartition) and higher of the today energy. But the first law of thermodynamic says that the energy is constant in a closed system. We have any violation of the law?

To which Professor Paul Francis replied:

First question - it turns out that energy is not necessarily conserved in General Relativity on very large scales. So it is possible that the energy just goes away! Some people believe that there is a sort of potential energy built into space-time, and so as space expands, this potential energy increases, compensating for the loss of energy of the photons etc. They sometimes go on to say that this (negative) potential energy is exactly equal and opposite to the energy of everything in the universe, so the whole universe has a net energy of zero (and is hence the ultimate free lunch).

Comment Re:Written by a Woman? (Score 1) 274

Govt isn't funded by taxes, in the same way that banks aren't funded by deposits. Banks' loans (created out of nothing) are their assets. So the Fed expands its balance sheet by creating an asset, which funds the government, and keeps the asset on its books forever. Zero-cost govt funding. Taxes aren't necessary, a relic of a feudal era.

Comment Re:If you're just beaming it down to earth anyways (Score 1) 230

But relying on the private sector to research innovative alternative energy sources (as the original post I was replying to in this thread implied) is futile. Did the private sector build Hoover Dam? When oil dropped to $10/barrel during the 1990s, the private sector abandoned alternative energy research. That was precisely the time when government should have invested in it (but Reagan's influence in defunding the DOE's alternative energy projects prevailed, a continuation of his attitude of symbolically ripping out the solar panels on the White House that Carter had installed). What the private sector considers uneconomic may be good for the General Welfare, and then government should fund it, by borrowing from the Fed at zero cost for example.

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