Posted on 12/06/2003 9:14:26 AM PST by John W
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:03:32 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- NASA is relying on Russian-made thrusters to steer the international space station following a new malfunction with the U.S. motion-control system, officials said Friday.
Flight controllers detected spikes in current and vibration in one of the station's three operating gyroscopes on November 8. Last week, when the gyroscopes were used again to shift the position of the orbiting outpost, all three worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Ah yes, now I recall why I don't even bother visiting these threads anymore...insults from the intellectually challenged thrown about at anyone secretly envied...especially physicists and engineers who take time out of their very busy days to answer you.
Emily Post update: A simple "thank you" would have sufficed.
No...but I like the notion!
Let's talk about semiconductors for a moment. Electrons in the solid each have their own energy level. Only a finite number of the electrons are allowed to share the same energy level because of the Pauli exclusion principle. So, starting at a certain ground state, each electron in the solid is assigned an energy. Once the ground state is full, no more electrons can have that low an energy. The next electron goes into the next higher energy state, and so on. This is called the valence band.
Once you get to a certain energy, you reach a band--a range of energies--where no electrons are permitted. This is called the bandgap.
Above the bandgap, there is another range of allowed energy levels. In these energy levels, the electrons are more or less free to travel throughout the solid. This is the conduction band. With enough energy (the bandgap energy), you can kick an electron from the valence band into the conduction band, which will create two charge carriers that flow as current. Two charge carriers? Yes: the electron in the conduction band, and the empty state (or "hole") that you left in the valence band when you removed the electron.
Now, here's the trick: you can think of the vacuum in the same way, except that there is no ground state for the valence band. The filled states--virtual particles--go all the way down. This bottomless valence band is known as the Dirac Sea.
There is a bandgap, too. For electrons, it's 1.022 MeV. That's the amount of energy it takes to create an electron-positron pair. What you're doing is kicking a virtual electron from the valence band (Dirac Sea) into the conduction band (a free electron). And the hole in the Dirac Sea? Why, that's the positron.
Each "flavor" of (fermionic) particle has its own Dirac Sea, with its own bandgap width.
And now I can give a partial answer to RWP and PH. Picture a quark tooling along until it passes through a proton. The proton is a cloud of real and virtual particles, as I said before. The faster the quark is going, the more energy it has with respect to the constituent particles of the proton. The more energy it has, the more particles in the Dirac Sea are available to be knocked into the conduction band (i.e., realized).
That's a partial answer, because the incoming quark can also "hit" gluons, and these, being massless have no "bandgap width", but nevertheless, the faster the incoming quark is going, the more gluons it "sees", too. (Not only that, but the whole band model doesn't apply to bosons such as gluons, because the Pauli Exclusion Principle only applies to fermions.) The geek answer is that virtual gluons are typically "off shell"...but I don't feel like writing another essay right now!
An economist as well as a physicist!
In Chapter Three of The Force, McTaggert adduces the work of Fritz-Albert Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg, Germany. Popp is well-known for his state-of-the-art research into cancer, among other things.
For present purposes, I just want to get down to the nitty-gritty of certain passages in this work. Please do read the book if you want all the preliminary details.
To be brief, suffice it to say that Popp eventually conjectured that the mechanism of cancer in biological systems proceeded from cancer’s ability to neutralize the “photo-repair mechanism” at the cellular level of the cancer-invaded organism. In other words, there are photons capable of work in the organic body, and cancer interferes with and finally overcomes their ability to effect necessary cellular repairs. Popp conducted many successful experiments tending to confirm this active photon-as-maintainer-of-living-systems hypothesis. But still, the results were not dispositive. Fast-forward to the relevant passages:
* * * * * *
A particularly gifted student [of Popp’s] talked him into trying an experiment. It is well known that when you apply a chemical called ethidium bromide to samples of DNA, the chemical squeezes itself into the middle of the base pairs of the double helix and causes it to unwind. The student suggested that, after applying the chemical, he and Popp try measuring the light coming off the sample. Pop discovered that the more he increased the concentration of the chemical, the more the DNA unwound, but also stronger the intensity of light. The less he put in, the lower the light emission. He also found that DNA was capable of sending out a large range of frequencies and that some frequencies seemed linked to certain functions. If DNA were storing the light, it would naturally emit more light once it was unwound.
These and other studies demonstrated to Popp that one of the most essential stores of light and sources of biophoton emissions was DNA. DNA must be like a master tuning fork in the body. It would strike a particular frequency and certain other molecules would follow. It was altogether possible, he realized, that he might have stumbled upon the missing link in current DNA theory that could account for perhaps the greatest miracle of all in human biology: the means by which a single cell turns into a fully-formed human being.
One of the greatest mysteries of biology is how we and every other living thing take geometric shape. Modern scientists mostly understand how we have blue eyes or grow to six foot one, and even how cells divide. What is far more elusive is the manner by which these cells know exactly where to place themselves in each stage of the building process, so that an arm becomes and arm rather than a leg, as well as the very mechanism which gets these cells to organize and assemble themselves together into something resembling a three-dimensional human form.
The usual scientific explanation has to do with the chemical interactions between molecules and DNA, the coiled double helix of genetic code that holds a blueprint [information!] of the body’s protein and amino acids. Each DNA helix or chromosome – and the identical twenty-six pairs exist in every one of the thousand million million cells in your body – contains a long chain of nucleotides, or bases, of four different components (shortened to ATCG) arranged in a unique order in every human body. The most favored idea is that there exists a genetic ‘program’ of genes operating collectively to determined shape, or, in the view of neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins [and don’t forget Steven Pinker here], that ruthless genes, like Chicago thugs, have powers to create form and that we are ‘survival machines’ – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
This theory promotes DNA as the Renaissance man of the human body – architect, master builder and central engine room – whose tool for all this amazing activity is a handful of the chemicals which make proteins. The modern scientific view is that DNA somehow manages to build the body and spearhead all its dynamic activities just by selectively turning off and on certain segments, or genes, whose nucleotides, or genetic instructions, select certain RNA molecules, which in turn select from a large alphabet of amino acids the genetic ‘words’ which create specific proteins. These proteins supposedly are able to build the body and to switch on and off all the chemical processes inside the cell which ultimately control the running of the body.
Undoubtedly proteins do play a major role in bodily function. Where the Darwinists fall short is explaining exactly how DNA knows when to orchestrate this and also how these chemicals, all blindly bumping into each other, can operate more or less simultaneously. Each cell undergoes, on average, some 100,000 chemical reactions per second – a process that repeats itself simultaneously across every cell in the body. At any given second, billions of chemical reactions of one sort or another occur. Timing must be exquisite, for if any one of the individual chemical processes in all the millions of cells of the body is off by a fraction, humans would blow themselves up in a matter of seconds. But what the rank and file among geneticists have not addressed is that if DNA is the control room, what is the feedback mechanism which enables it to synchronize the activities of individual genes and cells to carry out systems in unison? [emphasis added] What is the chemical or genetic process that tells certain cells to grow into a hand and not a foot? And which cell processes happen at which time?
If all these genes are working together, like some unimaginably big orchestra, who or what is the conductor? And if all these processes are due to simple chemical collision between molecules, how can it work anywhere near rapidly enough to account for the coherent behaviours that live beings exhibit every minute of their lives?
* * * * * * *
Whatever we might think of this, the PRC certainly takes it seriously.
It's hard to fake an atomic bomb.
161 - Well well well, speaking of envious, elitist, academic frauds, pretending. You should go back to making love to your non-existent man.
Delightful! More!
How many years of higher education do you have under your belt? How many graduate courses have you taken in the hard sciences? What kind of labs have you worked in...and pursuing what sort of research? Have you ever delivered a paper or even presented a poster session? Hmmm...I think I know the answers to all those questions.
As far as my "non-existent man"...the trouble, my dear, is that I have too many real ones to keep track of. BTW, I'm in a generous mood this Christmas season, how many vinyl repair kits do you need?
My childhood friends, neighbors, and girl friends fathers put those guys you are so envious of, on the moon, as we children watched out from our front doors or on the beach.
As did I...the difference between you and I however is that I am doing something with my life to realize those goals. What are you doing besides proving on FR that you are a "wannabe"?
Have you ever thought about trying out for the Dixie Chicks? You should fit right in.
Nah...I'm a bitch with a brain. They wouldn't want me.
Obviously you know less than nothing about me. As far as Chinese...believe me, it's on my "to do" list...unless of course the US gets off it's collective arse and goes back to the Moon.
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