We previously saw a Fox News pie chart that had a couple extra slices (here). Now, fair and balanced math adds up to 120 percent of voters indicating that they view the science on global warming to be rigged.
This is an interesting Rasmussen poll when you add up the number and discover that you are in a parallel universe.
The question is: “In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?” According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely, 24 percent somewhat likely, 21 percent not very likely, and 5 percent not likely at all (15 percent weren’t sure).
This rather dubious poll is offered to show that people are dubious about the science and math of global warming experts.
For the full story, click here
Robert,
I liked the demolition game that you posted, check out this comic:
http://xkcd.com/690/
Here is a redo of the post with too many links.
Robert,
I’m going to try to explain this all to you point-by-point, but you have just tried to tell me that I don’t understand something (sound) while unquestionably proving that you don’t understand it yourself. Wikipedia is an entirely reasonable source for the basic science that I’ve been using (and I’ve been using it to support my understanding, not to form my understanding). I’m going to give you multiple other sources to demonstrate my point, but I wont do it again. If you want to impeach anything that I quote from WIkipedia then find your own source to debunk it.
[Me] “A sound with 100 Watts of power is a 140 dB sound (regardless of how it’s generated)”
[Robert] “Bullshit! Complete bullshit. For one, a sound does not have 100 watts of power. It may require X amount of power to generate a sound, at a particular frequency [Frequency has absolutely nothing to do with power.], that would reach a certain decibel level at a particular distance, but a sound is not said to have 100 watts of power.”
An audio source does work which transforms energy (electrical energy in the case of speakers) into sonic energy (pressure waves in the atmosphere). This quote is from ‘Physics: Its Foundations and Applications’:
“Thus the source does work on the water, supplying energy to it. The average rate at which the source continually supplies energy is the source power . The energy is not accumulated in the region near the source. Instead, the energy flows outward through the region because it is transported by the waves that the source produces. This means that the average energy per unit time crossing and closed curve surrounding the source must be equal to the average source power .”
This quote is about circular waves being generated in water, but it is equally applicable to spherical pressure waves being generated in the atmosphere. If you pump enough energy into a speaker for it to radiate 100W of power into the atmosphere, you will generate a sound that is 140 dB at the source. If you hear that sound 100m away and measure its decibel level, you can compute the volume at the source and hence the power going into generating the sound.
Me “[A speaker putting out 100 W of sonic energy will generate a 140 dB sound regardless of the size of the speaker or the frequency of the sound.]”
[Robert] “Bullshit! Support you argument with relevant citation of an accepted source. A decibel is a measure of sound pressure. “Sound power” is a measure of power, but that is not the same as a “sound power level”, which is measured in decibels.]
Sound power level is a measure of the amplitude of the pressure wave in the atmosphere, sound power is the energy per unit time needed to generate a pressure wave with a given sound power level at the source. If an acoustic wave
with a given power P is produced, the volume of the sound would be given by the equation:
L = 10 log {P/P(ref)} dB
Where P(ref) = 1 picoWatt = 0 dB. Below is a link to a chart comparing sound power level (measured in dB) to sound power (measured in Watts). It is identical to the chart in the ‘sound power’ entry in Wikipedia.
www(dot)ccohs(dot)ca/oshanswers/phys_agents/noise_basic.html#_1_8
(There is a bunch of good stuff about sound on this page, by the way – all of which is perfectly consistent with what I’ve said.)
[Me] “Power is measured in energy per unit time, in SI units that would be J/s. One Watt of power is one Joule per second.”
[Robert] “That statement is incomplete, and based on your history, likely to be intentionally deceptive. We’re talking physics here. Power is the rate at which energy is transferred or work is performed. P=Work/t [Yes, and work has units of energy.] To say that “Power is measured in energy per unit time” is INCORRECT. [As the quote below indicates, power is measured in Watts, a unit equivalent to Joules per second.] This is what you get when you rely on Wikipedia without having a working knowledge of the information. [I have a working knowledge of this topic and I know all of the physics I quoted from WIkipedia to be correct] Joules per second IS NOT a representation of work performed or energy transferred. [ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? ONE WATT OF POWER IS EQUAL TO ONE JOULE PER SECOND.] Out of context, it is meaningless. [I am using power in an appropriate context.] (delta)J/s is Power. [Power is work per unit time as shown in the quote below, for a variable source of work, total power would be given by integrating dP=dW/dt.] The end mathematical result is represented in J/s, but without the formula representing that the result is, in reality, the difference, it would be meaningless as a representation of power. [‘…the result is, in reality the difference…’? The difference of what?]”
Quoting P:IT&A:
“To be more specific, power measures the rate of doing work. If work is being done at a constant rate, the power P is, by definition, P=W/t, where W is the total amount of work done in the total time t. If work is being done at a varying rate, the power P expended at any instant is defined as P=dW/dt. The unit of power is the SI system is the Watt (W), named after James Watt (1736-1819), the inventor of the most important form of the steam engine. If work is being done at the rate of 1 Joule per second (J/s), the power is 1 W.”
[Robert] “It’s probably not a good idea to tell the guy who generates POWER for a living, what power is.”
It’s probably not a good idea to tell the person who builds mathematical models for a living how to correctly build mathematical models, but that hasn’t stopped you.
[Me] “Not once in this entire thread have a posted a number that I could not back up with a source or a calculation.”
[Robert] “OK. What is your source for 100W is 140db. Show me the math or provide a link to your source. If your source is a Wikipedia page without supporting citation; I’ll laugh.”
I’ve already posted one link to a chart identical to Wikipedia’s, here’s another:
www(dot)engineeringtoolbox(dot)com/sound-power-level-d_58.html
If you would like more, just google ‘sound power level’ – you should be able to find as many as you wish and they will all tell you that 100 W = 140 dB.
If you check out this site:
www(dot)sengpielaudio(dot)com/calculator-spl.htm
and plug in 10 130 dB sounds you will find that this results in a total sound power of 140 dB (really you get 139.98 – must not be the most accurate calculation). Adding two sounds with equal decibel levels will result in an increase of about 3 dB (really 10 log 2) as shown at this site:
www(dot)ccohs(dot)ca/oshanswers/phys_agents/noise_basic.html#_1_13
If you scroll up a little you will find a table that tells you that a 10 dB increase means that the sound energy is increased by a factor of 10 (which is exactly what I said).
[Me] “If no distance is given, you may assume that I mean at the source (which is what you use to calculate its power). I included the Krakatoa thing (and other comparisons) because I believe that context like this comparison help to get a sense of scale in a discussion like this.”
[Robert] “How deep will you dig before you realize that you are getting deeper? [I’m wading in the kiddie pool right now, and I can swim in pretty deep waters in the field of mechanics without getting out of my depth.] Sound is not generally measured at the source. [Sound power is measured at the source and can be computed from the sound power level measured in dB at a known distance from the source.] Do you think someone was listening AT Krakatoa? [No, someone made an estimate. You need to estimate it at some distance because near the source the pressure waves are ‘clipped’ at zero pressure.] Does the audience at a rock concert put their ear to the speaker(s)? [I said the ‘rock concert’ comparison probably meant in the crowd It is clearly a very rough estimate anyway – are we talking about The Who or Cat Stevens?] A decibel level is measured at the point of observation. i.e. the decibel level in the car is not the same as the decibel level outside of the car. [Power is determined by the dB level at the source.] In addition, the watts used to drive a speaker, and the resulting decibel level is not a linear function. [The decibel scale (like the Richter scale) is a logarithmic scale – 10 times the power results in a increase of 10 dB.] At low wattage it takes major changes in wattage to produce small increases in sound. [At ANY wattage it takes 10 times that wattage to increase the sound by 10 dB.] Whereas, at higher levels it becomes nearly linear. [This is just totally wrong.] Sound physics “For instance, suppose we have two loudspeakers, the first playing a sound with power P1, and another playing a louder version of the same sound with power P2, but everything else (how far away, frequency) kept the same. [Actually, you generally want to add incoherent sounds – if you add identical sounds you get acoustical interference patterns.]” (I didn’t need to read a web page to know that distance and frequency made a difference -That’s called a “working knowledge”. [It’s a pretty poor ‘working knowledge’ if you don’t know that frequency doesn’t effect power level. And I didn’t need to read any of these web pages, I just linked them to support (and double check) my arguments, unlike your arguments which are unsupportable.])”
[Me] “I think that volume declines predictably with distance.”
[Robert] “Bravo! I don’t just think it, I know it. [The problem with you is that you ‘know’ a bunch of things a lot less well than you think you do.] Inversely, volume (decibel level) INCREASES as you get closed to the source. Hence, a decibel level presented that does not include distance from the source CANNOT be used to determine the energy USED by the source to generate it. [As I have repeatedly said, when you are talking about the power, you refer to the decibel level at the source.]”
[Me] “In order to make my post about speakers last night, I used the following facts and reasoning: the decibel scale of sonic energy is a logarithmic scale. This means that an increase of 10 dB corresponds to a sound with 10 times the power (your banks of 10 and 100 speakers made the calculations easy).”
[Robert] “Deceptive. Without knowing the source, you cannot determine the initial source power needed to generate the sound. [I have always maintained that you need to know the distance to the source.] i.e. A(watts) is to B(Watts) as X(decibels) is to Y(decibels). You cannot determine A,B, and Y by only knowing X. Not only that, in the “real world” we have a thing known as “power factor” or “efficiency”. [Which is why I was careful to talk about the amount of ‘sound energy’ i.e. the amount of acoustic energy output by the speaker – the electrical energy required to generate a particular sound would be sightly higher.] More amps, more energy is wasted as heat. [Yes, it becomes heat in the speaker. Whenever you talk about efficiency you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. The energy lost to inefficiency always becomes thermal energy.]”
[Robert] “I think this may be a good time to provide a better explaination of “efficiency”. In ALL of Slarti’s calculations, he considers energy transformation (which he incorrectly refers to as tansfer [sic – call it whatever you like, but energy is changed from one form to another whenever work is done.]) to be 100% efficient [No – any energy which is lost to inefficiency is converted to thermal energy – since that’s what I’m looking for, I don’t need to account for the heat resulting from inefficiency separately.]. The human body is only 20% efficient (some higher, some lower. It may be divided along partisan lines.:>) A nuclear power plant is only 30-40% efficient. A hydroelectric plant (one of the most efficient) is 80% efficient. As we can see, we as humans aren’t very efficient, and about 80% efficiency of energy transformation is about the best that we can achieve when we create a really good design. However, in Slarti’s experiment, because it doesn’t take place in the real world, he considers the energy transformation to be 100% efficient. [Nope, I just don’t lose thermal energy due to inefficiency.]
Robert quoted:
“The second law [or thermodynamics] then simply states that within each process of producing work, we are increasing the unavailable energy and the disorder in the universe. This means that even though the total energy in the universe is constant, we are decreasing the “quality” of the energy. We are decreasing the amount of available energy — the energy that we can use to produce work.”
Yes – the energy is degraded into thermal energy, the lowest ‘quality’ energy, at which point it can no longer be used to do work.
[Robert] “In the real world, energy is transformed through a process known as work. [Yes…] Yes Work; that dirty little word that evades Slarti’s analysis of the collapse. [I certainly never claimed that work wasn’t done, in fact all of the thermal energy that I’m trying to quantify is the result of work being done.] Once you acknowledge “work” you can’t help but acknowledge “efficiency”. And the efficiency of a chaotic event would do well to reach 20% efficiency. [As I’ve said, since efficiency is the amount of energy that becomes heat instead of doing useful work rather than as a result of it, efficiency is not relevant to my argument, but out of curiosity, how would you define the ‘efficiency’ of a collapse?] A stationary chunk of concrete hit by a sledge hammer will disperse into many, many directions. [So will a watermelon. Your point?]”
[Robert] “You left off the qualifying statement “provided the work done is totally converted to heat energy” because all the work WAS NOT converted to heat energy. [The work being done converted kinetic energy into thermal energy.] Deformation does produce some heat energy, but the majority of that work resulted, not in heat energy, but in the metal now having a different shape. [If energy used to bend metal doesn’t end up as thermal energy in the metal, then what sort of energy does the work result in?]”
[Me] “I don’t feel that I have been dishonest.”
[Robert] “And shoplifters think they “work” to get the goods that they resell. When you left off the qualifying statement; that was being dishonest. [Since I have clearly stated all along that sonic, seismic, and thermal energy are produced by impacts and that thermal energy was the lion’s share (well over 90% in this case) If thermal energy were not the most significant resultant energy in an impact, why would it be the only form of energy resulting from an impact that the physics text mentions?] When you decided that you would consider the collapse of the WTC to be an event that took place in the universe, so that you could attempt to apply laws of physics to a system in which those laws do not apply; that was dishonest. [The law of conservation of energy applies to the GPE stored in the WTC, to say otherwise is ridiculous. Since that energy continues to exist, I can (and have) tracked it.]”
[Me] “I was trying to establish the fact that kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy by impact (which, I believe, you have just implicitly agreed to and Bob explicitly agreed to) and that the amount of energy transferred is calculable (which, according to Joule’s experiment, it is).”
[Robert] “Neither Bob, nor I, nor anyone else for that matter, has agreed with your premise (that virtually all of the remaining kinetic energy was transformed into thermal energy) [That doesn’t change the fact that it is correct. And no one else has offered realistic suggestion as to where the energy goes. If it isn’t where I say it is, then where do you think it is? And try to come up with something better than ‘ejected into the atmosphere’ (sonic energy) this time.]. You’ll notice that I used the word “transformed”, which is completely different than your word “transferred”. [As I’ve said, I don’t care what word you use – before the work is done there is one kind of energy and after the work is done there is another kind of energy. Call it what you want.] You, from the beginning, have FAILED to provide the method by which the kinetic energy became thermal energy.”
Friction. You (or Bob) mentioned friction from rubbing your hands together, but there are other types of friction. The important one here is internal friction – friction resulting from the deformation of a body. When concrete is pulverized or steel is bent or sheared, work is done to deform the body in question. This work converts kinetic energy into thermal energy.
Thanks Slarti.
Robert,
I will provide you with an answer to your question later tonight or tomorrow.
Have some fun.
http://www.physicsgames.net/game/Demolition_City.html
Slarti,
I should just leave you be, but I have on last question.
When the WTC impacted the earth, why did it stop? Please provide some detail in your answer.
Robert,
I cite Wikipedia because it agrees with what I already know about science. I made a long post debunking your comments about acoustic power, but it’s hung up in moderation because it has too many links.
[Robert] What about that 45 degree cut on the steel columns, and the remnants of molten metal?
Slarti’s response; [As I’ve said before, analyzing the forces in a complex event like this is nearly impossible, but seeing that this was the sort of event that bent I-beams into horseshoe shapes, I don’t think that forces capable of shearing steel columns at any angle are out of line – especially towards the end of the collapse.]
Slarti, You’re either intellectually dishonest, or completely out of touch with reality. You point to Wikipedia, and consider it to be accepted science because you accept it. I can’t compete with that logic.
I think this is a good time for me to bow out.
Bob posted:
“Robert: “However, in Slarti’s experiment, because it doesn’t take place in the real world, he considers the energy transformation to be 100% efficient.”
That’s the sophistry behind defining the system as ‘the universe’ since such a system by definition necessitates 100% efficiency.”
It necessitates energy being conserved. As I said in my post to Robert, the efficiency of the collapse (however you define it) doesn’t matter as energy lost to inefficiency is energy that is converted into thermal energy without doing useful work rather than by doing useful work.
[Me] “I don’t feel I have been anything less than honest (and up until now I’ve answered most questions).”
[Bob] “You haven’t answered any of my questions of late; e.g. your whale skewered upon two support structures of the towers is beginning smell rancid.’
I felt that it was more important to attack the misinformation that Robert was spewing about physics first. His bullshit smelled worse than the whale.
[Bob] “Epistemically speaking dear doctor, the only system you’re capable of analyzing is the one you’re capable of perceiving with empirical data.”
[Me] “Yes, and we have an enormous amount of empirical data about the universe – in fact, all of the empirical data in human knowledge is about the universe. We don’t have to know everything about a system in order to use science to understand it.”
[Bob] “Yes, and infinity divided by infinity is still undefined Slarti. Your credibility with me diminishes with every bullshit sophistic statement like the foregoing.”
And your credibility with me on science has stopped decreasing because there isn’t any left. I’m willing to take any system which includes the entire WTC collapse and in which I can use conservation of energy. The universe satisfies both of those conditions. If you just understood how to use basic laws of physics, I wouldn’t need to go to such extremes to prove that I’m using them correctly.
[Me] “If I’m making a model of traffic flow patters, I don’t need to know what people are listening to on the radio.”
[Bob] “Unless of course they’re being directed every ten minutes by various radio stations what roads to take. [Which doesn’t generally happen, so there would be no point in worrying about how to model it.] Nonetheless, your analogy is bullshit because your traffic flow patterns would be limited to those the task requires you to analyze; i.e. a closed defined set.”
Traffic flow patterns would be emergent behavior from a successful model. The model exhibiting the same behavior as its object is evidence which validates the model. The model could then be used to determine how to maximize traffic flow.
[Me] “I can make valid model of a traffic jam (a friend of mine in grad school did this), I just can’t tell you how many people will be listening to Rush.”
[Bob] “As I said before, your task defines the limits of your system for analysis. What elements you decide to include or exclude depends on your intent to make your observations relevant to the task at hand.”
Yes. The task that I have set my hand to is to determine (and quantify as much as possible) the amount of thermal energy in the rubble of the WTC (assuming no explosives) in order to show that there was enough thermal energy to account for observations and that explosives would not add significant thermal energy.
[Me] “In fact the whole point of conservation laws is because the details of most systems are too complex or unknowable”
[Bob] “Yes, and that’s why the steam locomotive was never invented or improved upon.”
If you can calculate all of the individual forces involved in the WTC collapse, be my guest. If you can identify the forces that were the result of explosives and show your work, you could convince me that I am wrong. But until you can do this, a calculation with energy is the best we can do. And doing a calculation with energy is the first thing you should try with just about any physics problem. Like developing the theory of thermodynamics so that you can explain how a steam engine works.
[Me] “Bob, you raise a valid concern about the fallacy of composition, but I am out of time tonight – I’ll attempt to convince you that I am justified in treating the multiple collisions that make up the ‘impact’ in aggregate (to the very rough accuracy of this calculation) in my next post.”
[Bob] “Sure you will.”
I wanted to wait until I’d established that the kinetic energy before a collision is equal to the total of kinetic (KE), thermal (TE), seismic (SE), and sonic energy (AE) after the collision, but if you’d rather I did it now, that’s fine. Assume that KE(before) = KE(after) + TE + SE + AE. The ‘impact’ of the rubble with the ground consists of a large number of individual collisions. Energy is conserved in each of these collisions, so we must account for all of the KE that is present immediately before impact. Given our assumption, every single collision in the ‘impact’ obeys the above equation, thus, by transitivity, the impact taken as a whole obeys the equation as well. qed
Taking the resultant forms of energy one-by-one:
KE(after) – This remains KE and will participate in further collisions. Since there is no KE present after the impact, this energy must ultimately take a different form. Therefore KE(after) = 0 for the impact as a whole.
SE – Collisions with the ground (or parts of the structure still connected to the ground) resulted in seismic energy being emitted. The seismic energy of the collapses of WTC1 and WTC2 were recorded as measuring 2.3 and 2.1 on the Richter scale – this means that roughly 12 GJ and 6 GJ went into seismic energy.
AE – Collisions resulted in acoustic energy being emitted. As it takes only 60 MJ of energy to power a 180 dB sound for 1 minute. Since the collapse lasted for much less than one minute and I doubt it was significantly louder than a rocket engine it seems reasonable to conclude that on the order of 0.03% of the KE was converted to AE.
TE – This means that we are left with over 180 GJ of thermal energy in the rubble and the ground below it as a result of the ‘impact’.
That’s all for now, I’ll answer some more of your recent posts later unless I think it’s more important to address any of your subsequent posts.
[Me] “Speaking of intellectually dishonesty, why did you quote: “Truly isolated physical systems do not exist in reality” without including: “(except perhaps for the universe as a whole), because, for example, there is always gravity between a system with mass and masses elsewhere. However, real systems may behave nearly as an isolated system for finite (possibly very long) times. The concept of an isolated system can serve as a useful model approximating many real-world situations. It is an acceptable idealization used in constructing mathematical models of certain natural phenomena;”
[Robert] “Slarti, a statement made on Wikipedia IS NOT a scientific fact. Wikipedia is generated by individuals. One is not required to have any credentials to publish on Wikipedia. You cannot even tell me who wrote the statement on Wikipedia, yet you rely on it as scientific fact to support your argument. And you call yourself a scientist?”
I haven’t quoted any scientific facts from Wikipedia that I wasn’t sure of already – Wikipedia is a handy source and, as I’ve said, reasonably accurate on this sort of stuff. If you feel that anything that I quote (or say) on physics is wrong, then it should be easy to find a source to rebut me, but you don’t seem to be posting links that contradict my interpretation of the physics. Why is that? And you never answered why you truncating a quote to avoid explicitly allowing my choice of isolated system (the universe) and sanctioning my use of an isolated system (computer modeling) is not dishonest, but me truncating part of a quote which refers to less than 10% of the energy involved is.
Me “yesterday’s earthquake in Haiti measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, meaning that about 130 petaJoules (10^15 Joules) of energy were released, the equivalent of 32 megatons of TNT, slightly more than the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco (6.9).”
[Robert] “Other than another attempt to sell your product, why add another relative? [To get a better idea of what the scale of the WTC collapse was.] Is your science failing? [No, this is actually a strength of my science – an understanding of how to compare things.] Do you just like saying “megatons of TNT”, [In fact I do.] or were you looking for a way to introduce “petajoules”? [I wasn’t looking for a way, it just happened, unlike how I’m dropping in ‘exaJoules’ (EJ, 10^18 J) right now. And, by the way, the ‘J’ in petaJoules should be capitalized.] The earthquake in Haiti is irrelevant to this discussion. [I is one more event that can be measured in terms of total energy (although, in this case, the devastation is much more than would be expected at this power (only about 20% more powerful than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake). It was a very efficient earthquake.)]”
These are all things that are measured in energy. When two quantities are measured in the same units they are, in a very well-defined sense, comparable. The total energy involved in the collapse of WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7 is likely well in excess of 20 TJ – a little less that the average thunderstorm puts out (36 TJ) and more than double the energy in the maximum fuel load for an Airbus A380 (10 TJ). Having some idea of what this amount of energy ‘means’ gives us a better feel for what sort of consequences throwing around this much energy has. When we’re closing in on half of the energy released by ‘Little Boy’, I don’t think that molten steel is very surprising. More comparisons can be seen at:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_E17_J#1012
[Me] “Because we had talked about it earlier, the Chicxulub impactor had about 4 or 500 zettaJoules (10^21 Joules) of KE, the equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT. If ALL of that energy were converted into a seismic event it would register 13.0 on the Richter scale.”
[Robert] “More irrelevant salesmanship.”
I enjoy facts like these. I share them in case anyone else enjoys them as well. That it seems to bug you and Bob is just an added bonus.
[Robert] “I am convinced that you don’t have the ability to comprehend the difference between something impacting the earth, and the release of energy from an earthquake. They are apples and oranges.”
Both of these are events which can be measured by their total energy. The whole point of units is to tell us what are apples and what are oranges. As I’ve pointed out above, if two quantities have the same units then they are comparable. If we can’t do this, then why do we measure anything?
[Robert] “Again you relied on Wikipedia that has no accepted citation. Some kid took some measurements and posted them on Wikipedia. Big deal! Your “kid” doesn’t specify frequency [Irrelevant.] or distance from the source. [Sound power is specified by the sound power level at the source.] More JUNK SCIENCE. [No, more science that I could find a dozen other sources for without difficulty – where are the sites you’ve linked to impeach my WIkipedia quotes?]”
As I’ve said, all of the physics that I quoted on Wikipedia were things that merely confirmed my understanding. I don’t need WIkipedia to teach me physics, but apparently you do. I was trying to help alleviate your ignorance.
[Me] “I just meant that most people don’t think of an electron when they think of ‘energy’. How many Joules of energy are generated in Cobalt-60 decay? Since the answer to this question is something like ‘the energy of 2 gammas and one electron mass plus its kinetic energy’, I think that this example is more likely to cause confusion than to alleviate it.”
[Robert] “Is scale really a problem for you? [No, I have a pretty good grasp of what scale means – what do you think the scale of an event which releases over 20 TJ of thermal energy is? And, in any case, this comment wasn’t about scale – it was about Cobalt-60 decay not being what most people have in mind when they talk about radiating energy.] Isn’t physics still physics? [Yes, the physics of impactors is the same as the physics of the WTC collapse or the physics of a whale hitting the earth. ] Are you that dependent on megatons and petrajoules[sic]? [No, I just think they are interesting.] Nevermind, I think you are. (for the purposes of salesmanship). [I’ve never said that the WTC collapse had the same energy as the Chicxulub impactor (if anything, I’ve carefully specified the difference), I’ve just said that the physics that governs both events are the same. It is often easier to understand the physics by considering the extreme cases.] There is no confusion here. [Well, I’m not confused, I’m not so sure about you.] At least, not for a physicist (BTW, I spent 4 years working as a Radiation Health Physicist. [And I’m sure you know a lot about what radiation does to the human body, but you don’t know as much as I do about what the human body does in response to radiation (I model cellular response to genetic damage), just like you don’t know as much about mechanics as I do.] Two of those as the shift supervisor. [And this is relevant how?])”
[Robert] “I performed an analysis (using YOUR numbers) based on the premise that a child used a slingshot to hit both buildings with rocks, which somehow caused WTC 1 and 2 to collapse in the same amount of time that we have accepted. Guess what? IT COULD HAPPEN. That’s what happens when you apply JUNK SCIENCE.”
[Me] “Reproduce your analysis and I will explain to you what you did wrong.”
The numbers are your numbers. [You have not described any specific scenario – we’re talking about science here, show your work.] The GPE was the same, and the time it took to collapse was the same. [And how are you assuming that the collapse was triggered?] Work backwards (as you did) and you end up with the same thing. [I am not working backwards – I trace all of the energy stored as GPE in the WTC before impact until after the collapse or it leaves the vicinity. I’m not following any energy backwards in time – that’s Bob’s fallacy.] You NEVER determined the amount of decreased structural support needed before the one (or two) floors would fail to support the building above it. [No, I haven’t determined this – however there is a strength at which a single floor would fail and after that happened the rest of the collapse was inevitable. Gravity is what does the work to bring down buildings in controlled demolition and it is what did the work to destroy all three buildings at the WTC. And all of that work resulted in heat, most of it in the rubble pile.] All you do is support that it happened. [Obviously at least a single floor failed (for whatever reason), my point is that once a single floor failed, nothing was going to stop any of these buildings from collapsing.]
[Robert] What about that 45 degree cut on the steel columns, and the remnants of molten metal? [As I’ve said before, analyzing the forces in a complex event like this is nearly impossible, but seeing that this was the sort of event that bent I-beams into horseshoe shapes, I don’t think that forces capable of shearing steel columns at any angle are out of line – especially towards the end of the collapse.] Your response from yesterday was unacceptable. It was like me asking what evidence you have that I hit your car, and you responding that it must be so, because I have a car. Tell us how the energy was focused just on those columns at a 45 degree angle. [I can tell you that there were 2-300 GJ of energy available by the end of the collapse and that this energy could power some very large forces – how much force is necessary to shear an I-beam?]
Slarti: “I don’t feel I have been anything less than honest (and up until now I’ve answered most questions).”
You haven’t answered any of my questions of late; e.g. your whale skewered upon two support structures of the towers is beginning smell rancid.
[Bob] “Epistemically speaking dear doctor, the only system you’re capable of analyzing is the one you’re capable of perceiving with empirical data.”
Slarti: “Yes, and we have an enormous amount of empirical data about the universe – in fact, all of the empirical data in human knowledge is about the universe. We don’t have to know everything about a system in order to use science to understand it.”
Yes, and infinity divided by infinity is still undefined Slarti. Your credibility with me diminishes with every bullshit sophistic statement like the foregoing.
Slarti: “If I’m making a model of traffic flow patters, I don’t need to know what people are listening to on the radio.”
Unless of course they’re being directed every ten minutes by various radio stations what roads to take. Nonetheless, your analogy is bullshit because your traffic flow patterns would be limited to those the task requires you to analyze; i.e. a closed defined set.
Slarti: “I can make valid model of a traffic jam (a friend of mine in grad school did this), I just can’t tell you how many people will be listening to Rush.”
As I said before, your task defines the limits of your system for analysis. What elements you decide to include or exclude depends on your intent to make your observations relevant to the task at hand.
Slarti: “In fact the whole point of conservation laws is because the details of most systems are too complex or unknowable”
Yes, and that’s why the steam locomotive was never invented or improved upon.
Slarti: Bob, you raise a valid concern about the fallacy of composition, but I am out of time tonight – I’ll attempt to convince you that I am justified in treating the multiple collisions that make up the ‘impact’ in aggregate (to the very rough accuracy of this calculation) in my next post.”
Sure you will.
Robert: “However, in Slarti’s experiment, because it doesn’t take place in the real world, he considers the energy transformation to be 100% efficient.”
That’s the sophistry behind defining the system as ‘the universe’ since such a system by definition necessitates 100% efficiency.
Sen. Kerry in reference to WTC 7; “They did it in a controlled fashion”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luyeg_EYM-A&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
BTW Senator, I don’t believe that you are that “unaware” of many of the details about 9/11.
This is a good video to debunk the claim that what we saw pouring out of the WTC was molten aluminum.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQdkyaO56OY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
I think this may be a good time to provide a better explaination of “efficiency”.
In ALL of Slarti’s calculations, he considers energy transformation (which he incorrectly refers to as tansfer) to be 100% efficient. The human body is only 20% efficient (some higher, some lower. It may be divided along partisan lines.:>)
A nuclear power plant is only 30-40% efficient.
A hydroelectric plant (one of the most efficient) is 80% efficient.
As we can see, we as humans aren’t very efficient, and about 80% efficiency of energy transformation is about the best that we can achieve when we create a really good design. However, in Slarti’s experiment, because it doesn’t take place in the real world, he considers the energy transformation to be 100% efficient.
“The second law [or thermodynamics] then simply states that within each process of producing work, we are increasing the unavailable energy and the disorder in the universe. This means that even though the total energy in the universe is constant, we are decreasing the “quality” of the energy. We are decreasing the amount of available energy — the energy that we can use to produce work.”
http://telstar.ote.cmu.edu/environ/m3/s3/03transformation.shtml
In the real world, energy is transformed through a process known as work. Yes Work; that dirty little word that evades Slarti’s analysis of the collapse. Once you acknowledge “work” you can’t help but acknowledge “efficiency”. And the efficiency of a chaotic event would do well to reach 20% efficiency. A stationary chunk of concrete hit by a sledge hammer will disperse into many, many directions.
Slarti,
What about that 45 degree cut on the steel columns, and the remnants of molten metal?
Your response from yesterday was unacceptable. It was like me asking what evidence you have that I hit your car, and you responding that it must be so, because I have a car.
Tell us how the energy was focused just on those columns at a 45 degree angle.
Slarti,
You left off the qualifying statement “provided the work done is totally converted to heat energy” because all the work WAS NOT converted to heat energy. Deformation does produce some heat energy, but the majority of that work resulted, not in heat energy, but in the metal now having a different shape.
“I don’t feel that I have been dishonest.”
And shoplifters think they “work” to get the goods that they resell. When you left off the qualifying statement; that was being dishonest. When you decided that you would consider the collapse of the WTC to be an event that took place in the universe, so that you could attempt to apply laws of physics to a system in which those laws do not apply; that was dishonest.
“I was trying to establish the fact that kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy by impact (which, I believe, you have just implicitly agreed to and Bob explicitly agreed to) and that the amount of energy transferred is calculable (which, according to Joule’s experiment, it is).”
Neither Bob, nor I, nor anyone else for that matter, has agreed with your premise (that virtually all of the remaining kinetic energy was transformed into thermal energy). You’ll notice that I used the word “transformed”, which is completely different than your word “transferred”. You, from the beginning, have FAILED to provide the method by which the kinetic energy became thermal energy.
“Speaking of intellectually dishonesty, why did you quote: “Truly isolated physical systems do not exist in reality” without including: “(except perhaps for the universe as a whole), because, for example, there is always gravity between a system with mass and masses elsewhere. However, real systems may behave nearly as an isolated system for finite (possibly very long) times. The concept of an isolated system can serve as a useful model approximating many real-world situations. It is an acceptable idealization used in constructing mathematical models of certain natural phenomena;”
Slarti, a statement made on Wikipedia IS NOT a scientific fact. Wikipedia is generated by individuals. One is not required to have any credentials to publish on Wikipedia. You cannot even tell me who wrote the statement on Wikipedia, yet you rely on it as scientific fact to support your argument. And you call yourself a scientist?
“A sound with 100 Watts of power is a 140 dB sound (regardless of how it’s generated)”
Bullshit! Complete bullshit. For one, a sound does not have 100 watts of power. It may require X amount of power to generate a sound, at a particular frequency, that would reach a certain decibel level at a particular distance, but a sound is not said to have 100 watts of power.
Slarti said “[A speaker putting out 100 W of sonic energy will generate a 140 dB sound regardless of the size of the speaker or the frequency of the sound.]”
Bullshit! Support you argument with relevant citation of an accepted source. A decibel is a measure of sound pressure. “Sound power” is a measure of power, but that is not the same as a “sound power level”, which is measured in decibels.
Slarti said “Power is measured in energy per unit time, in SI units that would be J/s. One Watt of power is one Joule per second.”
That statement is incomplete, and based on your history, likely to be intentionally deceptive. We’re talking physics here. Power is the rate at which energy is transferred or work is performed. P=Work/t
To say that “Power is measured in energy per unit time” is INCORRECT. This is what you get when you rely on Wikipedia without having a working knowledge of the information. Joules per second IS NOT a representation of work performed or energy transferred. Out of context, it is meaningless. (delta)J/s is Power. The end mathematical result is represented in J/s, but without the formula representing that the result is, in reality, the difference, it would be meaningless as a representation of power.
It’s probably not a good idea to tell the guy who generates POWER for a living, what power is.
Slarti said “Not once in this entire thread have a posted a number that I could not back up with a source or a calculation.”
OK. What is your source for 100W is 140db. Show me the math or provide a link to your source. If your source is a Wikipedia page without supporting citation; I’ll laugh.
Slarti said “If no distance is given, you may assume that I mean at the source (which is what you use to calculate its power). I included the Krakatoa thing (and other comparisons) because I believe that context like this comparison help to get a sense of scale in a discussion like this.”
How deep will you dig before you realize that you are getting deeper? Sound is not generally measured at the source. Do you think someone was listening AT Krakatoa? Does the audience at a rock concert put their ear to the speaker(s)? A decibel level is measured at the point of observation. i.e. the decibel level in the car is not the same as the decibel level outside of the car. In addition, the watts used to drive a speaker, and the resulting decibel level is not a linear function. At low wattage it takes major changes in wattage to produce small increases in sound. Whereas, at higher levels it becomes nearly linear.
Sound physics “For instance, suppose we have two loudspeakers, the first playing a sound with power P1, and another playing a louder version of the same sound with power P2, but everything else (how far away, frequency) kept the same.” (I didn’t need to read a web page to know that distance and frequency made a difference -That’s called a “working knowledge”.)
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/dB.html
Slarti said “I think that volume declines predictably with distance.”
Bravo! I don’t just think it, I know it. Inversely, volume (decibel level) INCREASES as you get closed to the source. Hence, a decibel level presented that does not include distance from the source CANNOT be used to determine the energy USED by the source to generate it.
Slarti said “yesterday’s earthquake in Haiti measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, meaning that about 130 petaJoules (10^15 Joules) of energy were released, the equivalent of 32 megatons of TNT, slightly more than the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco (6.9).”
Other than another attempt to sell your product, why add another relative? Is your science failing? Do you just like saying “megatons of TNT”, or were you looking for a way to introduce “petajoules”? The earthquake in Haiti is irrelevant to this discussion.
“Because we had talked about it earlier, the Chicxulub impactor had about 4 or 500 zetaJoules (10^21 Joules) of KE, the equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT. If ALL of that energy were converted into a seismic event it would register 13.0 on the Richter scale.”
More irrelevant salesmanship.
I am convinced that you don’t have the ability to comprehend the difference between something impacting the earth, and the release of energy from an earthquake. They are apples and oranges.
Slarti said “In order to make my post about speakers last night, I used the following facts and reasoning: the decibel scale of sonic energy is a logarithmic scale. This means that an increase of 10 dB corresponds to a sound with 10 times the power (your banks of 10 and 100 speakers made the calculations easy).”
Deceptive. Without knowing the source, you cannot determine the initial source power needed to generate the sound. i.e. A(watts) is to B(Watts) as X(decibels) is to Y(decibels). You cannot determine A,B, and Y by only knowing X. Not only that, in the “real world” we have a thing known as “power factor” or “efficiency”. More amps, more energy is wasted as heat.
Again you relied on Wikipedia that has no accepted citation. Some kid took some measurements and posted them on Wikipedia. Big deal! Your “kid” doesn’t specify frequency or distance from the source. More JUNK SCIENCE.
Slarti said; “I just meant that most people don’t think of an electron when they think of ‘energy’. How many Joules of energy are generated in Cobalt-60 decay? Since the answer to this question is something like ‘the energy of 2 gammas and one electron mass plus its kinetic energy’, I think that this example is more likely to cause confusion than to alleviate it.”
Is scale really a problem for you? Isn’t physics still physics? Are you that dependent on megatons and petrajoules? Nevermind, I think you are. (for the purposes of salesmanship). There is no confusion here. At least, not for a physicist (BTW, I spent 4 years working as a Radiation Health Physicist. Two of those as the shift supervisor.)
“[Robert] “I performed an analysis (using YOUR numbers) based on the premise that a child used a slingshot to hit both buildings with rocks, which somehow caused WTC 1 and 2 to collapse in the same amount of time that we have accepted. Guess what? IT COULD HAPPEN. That’s what happens when you apply JUNK SCIENCE.”
Slarti then said “Reproduce your analysis and I will explain to you what you did wrong.”
The numbers are your numbers. The GPE was the same, and the time it took to collapse was the same. Work backwards (as you did) and you end up with the same thing. You NEVER determined the amount of decreased structural support needed before the one (or two) floors would fail to support the building above it. All you do is support that it happened.
Robert said:
“You quoted the Wikipedia entry for “The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat”. […] But you left off the last part of that paragraph. Why? Why did you put a period (you put the period in the quote) instead of quoting the last part of the sentence that said “provided the work done is totally converted to heat energy.”? That’s dishonest! You left off the qualifying statement in order to sell your bag of bullshit. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Considering that I have accounted for the other significant forms of energy in the impact (sonic and seismic) all along, I don’t feel that I have been dishonest. I was trying to establish the fact that kinetic energy is converted to thermal energy by impact (which, I believe, you have just implicitly agreed to and Bob explicitly agreed to) and that the amount of energy transferred is calculable (which, according to Joule’s experiment, it is). That being established we can now talk about HOW MUCH kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy (about 90-95% of it by my calculation).
Speaking of intellectually dishonesty, why did you quote: “Truly isolated physical systems do not exist in reality” without including:
“(except perhaps for the universe as a whole), because, for example, there is always gravity between a system with mass and masses elsewhere. However, real systems may behave nearly as an isolated system for finite (possibly very long) times. The concept of an isolated system can serve as a useful model approximating many real-world situations. It is an acceptable idealization used in constructing mathematical models of certain natural phenomena;”
Which not only explicitly sanctions my usage (constructing a mathematical model), but validates my assertion that the universe can be treated as an isolated system. I added the period when I was double-checking my post and you are correct that I should not have, sorry (it’s especially bad given my fondness for ellipses…).
[Me] “Your line of 10 speakers requires 10 W and generates a sound of 130 dB and your bank of 100 speakers requires 100 W and generates a 140 dB sound (as loud as a rock concert).”
[Robert] “It would require 100 Watts to power 100 speakers, and it would sound as loud as a rock concert? [A sound with 100 Watts of power is a 140 dB sound (regardless of how it’s generated), ‘loud as a rock concert’ is the equivalent of 140 dB in Wikipedia, I include it for some idea of scale, but it doesn’t affect the numbers. I would assume this means ‘as loud as being in the crowd at a rock concert, not ‘the total speaker power at a rock concert’ (Which I would imagine to be in the kilowatts).] Somebody should tell the sound people that run these rock concerts. How far from the speakers was the sound measurement taking place? [As I said above, I don’t know for the ‘rock concert’ comparison – which is clearly very rough, but the power is a function of the volume at the source.] Does it take the same amount of energy to drive a 20″ woofer as it does a 2″ tweeter? [A speaker putting out 100 W of sonic energy will generate a 140 dB sound regardless of the size of the speaker or the frequency of the sound.] Is that 100 watts per millisecond? or nanosecond? [Just 100 Watts. Power is measured in energy per unit time, in SI units that would be J/s. One Watt of power is one Joule per second.] All you did is put numbers in a statement. You didn’t support your numbers with math. [Not once in this entire thread have a posted a number that I could not back up with a source or a calculation. Where I have made mistakes or revised inaccurate numbers, I have noted it. When you have disputed numbers that I have been using I have either accepted your values (like 400 GJ GPE) or explained why I don’t consider them valid (like 14 GJ to rip loose a floor).] You provided us with off the wall babble. Provide links to your source. [Since my writing style is already very dry and most of the statements I make are the result of multiple sources (I’ve got 4 Wikipedia pages open right now) as well as calculations I have, in general, omitted sources unless I’m making a direct quote. If you would like me to be more rigorous, I will (and, of course I will provide sources for anything you ask for). In my ‘speaker’ post, I used the ‘decibel’ page (to verify that my understanding of the topic was correct) and the ‘sound power’ page (for the equivalences of decibel level to power). Later in this post, I will explain my logic/calculation for the ‘speaker’ post – I can do this for any (but unfortunately not ALL) of my posts.]”
[Me] “Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what the decibel level of the WTC collapse was, but it requires one megawatt of power to produce a 180dB sound. This is the sound of a rocket engine or the sound of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption as heard from 100 miles away. Given that 1 million joules per second produces this volume of sound, the sonic energy produced by the collapse is negligible in this calculation.”
[Robert] “Notice that you gave a distance for the measurement of Krakatoa (100 miles), but did not for the rocket engine.”
If no distance is given, you may assume that I mean at the source (which is what you use to calculate its power). I included the Krakatoa thing (and other comparisons) because I believe that context like this comparison help to get a sense of scale in a discussion like this.
[Robert] ” Do you think the sound level is the same at the source as it is at a distance of one mile? 10 miles? 100 miles?”
I think that volume declines predictably with distance.
[Me] “Seismic energy works exactly the same way, except in the case of the seismic energy we do have accurate measurements (2.1 and 2.3 on the Richter scale for the WTC1 and WTC2 collapses – I’m not sure which is which).”
[Robert] “As I told you before. The collapse of the WTC(s) CANNOT be directly related to the energy of an earthquake. The buildings hit the surface of the earth. An earthquake is an event in which the earths crust moves or crumbles. You’re not comparing apples to apples.”
The Richter scale measures seismic energy. It takes a fixed amount of power to generate a given reading – the distance between the source and the measurement is figured into the reading (The collapses measured a 2.1 and a 2.3 on the Richter scale, not a ‘2.1 from 1 km away’). The consistency of the ground determines how much energy gets transformed into seismic energy, how much gets transformed to sonic energy, and how much is transformed into thermal energy (other forms of energy generated – like electromagnetic energy – are not significant in this event), but it is the total amount transferred into seismic energy which determines the reading. For example (and to give an idea of scale), yesterday’s earthquake in Haiti measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, meaning that about 130 petaJoules (10^15 Joules) of energy were released, the equivalent of 32 megatons of TNT, slightly more than the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco (6.9). The conversions from the Richter scale to Joules and tons of TNT can be found on the ‘Richter magnitude scale’ entry in Wikipedia along with the formula to compute the relative energy of two readings. The whole point of the Richter and decibel scales is to determine the amount of energy that went into a given seismic event or sound. This is why we can make equivalences between earthquake magnitude, energy (Joules), and the energy released in a TNT explosion.
Because we had talked about it earlier, the Chicxulub impactor had about 4 or 500 zetaJoules (10^21 Joules) of KE, the equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT. If ALL of that energy were converted into a seismic event it would register 13.0 on the Richter scale.
In order to make my post about speakers last night, I used the following facts and reasoning: the decibel scale of sonic energy is a logarithmic scale. This means that an increase of 10 dB corresponds to a sound with 10 times the power (your banks of 10 and 100 speakers made the calculations easy). The ‘sound power’ page of Wiki gives a figure of 1 W for a 120 dB sound (jackhammer) which seemed like a good base level (incidentally, 140 dB (100 W) is also listed as equivalent to a ‘heavy truck’ if you like that better than ‘rock concert’ – the important relation here is 140 dB = 100 W). As I said before, at sufficient distance to consider 10 or 100 speakers a point source, you cannot tell the difference in the pressure waves generated by 1 speaker putting out a 140 dB sound, 10 speakers putting out a 130 dB sound or 100 speakers putting out a 120 dB sound.
[Robert] : “The decay of Cobalt-60 also produces 2 gammas. (not that it matters for my example) Point, line, and plane sources are used to represent energy, and how measurement of that energy cannot be used to calculate the source without defining the source to be a point, line, or plane, NOT the type of energy. I think you’re purposely trying to miss the point. If we were talking about shielding, then the type of radiation we were trying to address would be important.”
I just meant that most people don’t think of an electron when they think of ‘energy’. How many Joules of energy are generated in Cobalt-60 decay? Since the answer to this question is something like ‘the energy of 2 gammas and one electron mass plus its kinetic energy’, I think that this example is more likely to cause confusion than to alleviate it.
[Robert] “You’re not a scientist. [Search for ‘Kesseler KJ’ on pubMed if you’d like to see my publications (all two of them ;-)). Sometime in the next month I will submit a paper on a mathematical model of the G2 checkpoint that is 10 times as complex as anything in the literature currently (I’m pretty proud of it).] You’re a story teller. [Science is about telling a story. All of my mentors have taught me that a good scientific paper tells a story. I haven’t really done a good job of it here, but I feel like I’m starting to hit my pace.] When the laws don’t apply, you just disregard the required parameters and decide to apply them anyway. [The laws of mechanics and conservation of energy apply here. I have laid out my logic step by step and I will defend each and every one if necessary.]”
[Robert] “I performed an analysis (using YOUR numbers) based on the premise that a child used a slingshot to hit both buildings with rocks, which somehow caused WTC 1 and 2 to collapse in the same amount of time that we have accepted. Guess what? IT COULD HAPPEN. That’s what happens when you apply JUNK SCIENCE.”
Reproduce your analysis and I will explain to you what you did wrong.
[Bob] “I also have to say that I agree with Robert’s rebuttals to Slarti’s less than honest replies to legitimate questions.”
I don’t feel I have been anything less than honest (and up until now I’ve answered most questions). I’m settling in for the long haul now – I’m going to limit myself to one post per day, but I will go through my analysis step-by-step justifying every one if necessary. Looking back, I see that I did a lot of research, analysis and computation in the past month which, although it strengthened MY belief that I am right was certainly not apparent to anyone else. I threw out my conclusions with only a sketch of my analysis and computations and you had no reason to believe that I had done anything more than make them up. I am now trying to correct that by justifying what I did step by step so that even if I can’t convince you and Robert that I am correct, at least we can figure out where we disagree.
[Bob] “Epistemically speaking dear doctor, the only system you’re capable of analyzing is the one you’re capable of perceiving with empirical data.”
Yes, and we have an enormous amount of empirical data about the universe – in fact, all of the empirical data in human knowledge is about the universe. We don’t have to know everything about a system in order to use science to understand it. If I’m making a model of traffic flow patters, I don’t need to know what people are listening to on the radio. I can make valid model of a traffic jam (a friend of mine in grad school did this), I just can’t tell you how many people will be listening to Rush. In fact the whole point of conservation laws is because the details of most systems are too complex or unknowable (for example, we talk about the energy of an electron’s orbit, not its exact path). The number of forces and ‘jobs’ (let’s define a ‘job’ as an event involving work) and collisions in the collapse is far to big to allow for computation, but conservation of energy can give us significant (albeit general) information about the event.
Bob, you raise a valid concern about the fallacy of composition, but I am out of time tonight – I’ll attempt to convince you that I am justified in treating the multiple collisions that make up the ‘impact’ in aggregate (to the very rough accuracy of this calculation) in my next post. You are right that the ‘energy is destroyed statement was dismissive, I apologize.
Buddha,
Can you pass me a beer?
BIL,
You rang?
I also have to say that I agree with Robert’s rebuttals to Slarti’s less than honest replies to legitimate questions.