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Split Thread The validity of classical physics (split from: DWFTTW)

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Oh, proof by assertion! Which ends with BISS ("because I said so!") rather than QED. Well, I can play at that, too. Here's my parry:

No numbers are really needed, because the difference is arbitrarily small.

You don't appear to have anything more backing up your statement than I do.

All the information that you need is in the question, or in this thread. There is an answer. I have not had one answer from any of you, that is nothing more that "all velocities are relative".
See if you can put that to work on my problem.
 
Greg, I don't think humber is a complete whacko but he has managed to build a system of physics noticeably different than the norm. It's more than just the cart that he doesn't understand, and a lot of the posts on this and the other thread are attempts to help humber get to a modern and correct understanding of physics.

Even if we assume that humber will never get newtons three laws, its not that big a deal. Assuming he isn't designing aircraft or rockets or some life critical component for some project, there's no harm in not understanding physics. A phrase from Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind: "mostly harmless".



Being brushed off by a newcomer that hasn't seen past the first couple of layers can be frustrating, as I'm sure you'll find out. Trying to get humber to understand is quite frustrating because of the few lucid moments that he shows..

It's frustrating because you want him to understand. But then some folks take the frustration and turn it around and start figuring out how to show humber he is wrong. I don't think humber is doing it on purpose, though, so I'm not going to hold it against him that I can't explain it to him.

My latest question for him was a description of a test that I was contemplating conducting on a sail cart. Have you tried to solve it?.

The "taking a cart and slowing it down with a fishing reel to figure out the air resistance" problem? I read it. I think it's over my head.

I'd look at it from finding the point where the cart can't go any faster, and that would tell you that the force from friction is equal to teh force from the prop/wheel. Since I think it should be possible to calculate the force from the prop/wheel for a given speed (I don't know how to do it, which is why its over my head), once you know what speed no longer has acceleration, I think you then know what the force from friction is at that speed.

I suppose if you want to measure the force of resistance at any other speed, you could do it by adding some kind of adjustable brake so you can add a resistance force to the cart to keep it from accelerating. Once you know that force, you should be able to throw that into the equations so that force from teh prop/wheel = force of friction + force from brake.

Either that, or measure the acceleration of the cart at the speed, and using f=ma maybe figure out what force is left over after friction to accelerate the cart.

So, either I'd add a braking force so that there is no accelaration and then all the forces have to balance and the only unknown would be friction, OR, measure acceleration and figure out what force is left over after friction to accelerate the cart. Either way, you need to be able to calculate the force from teh prop/wheel, and although that seems calculable based on prop-pitch, diameter, efficiency, and the gear ratio between the prop and wheel, I don't know how to od that part.

I'm not a prop guy.
 
Uote

Even if we assume that humber will never get newtons three laws, its not that big a deal. Assuming he isn't designing aircraft or rockets or some life critical component for some project, there's no harm in not understanding physics. A phrase from Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind: "mostly harmless".
Then you won't want to hear what I have to say. OK

It's frustrating because you want him to understand. But then some folks take the frustration and turn it around and start figuring out how to show humber he is wrong. I don't think humber is doing it on purpose, though, so I'm not going to hold it against him that I can't explain it to him.
I understand, but don't agree. Your arguments are false, Greg. They are like TAD's.

The "taking a cart and slowing it down with a fishing reel to figure out the air resistance" problem? I read it. I think it's over my head.
The question is itself, wrong, yes.

I'd look at it from finding the point where the cart can't go any faster, and that would tell you that the force from friction is equal to teh force from the prop/wheel. Since I think it should be possible to calculate the force from the prop/wheel for a given speed (I don't know how to do it, which is why its over my head), once you know what speed no longer has acceleration, I think you then know what the force from friction is at that speed.
Yes, it tests itself.

I suppose if you want to measure the force of resistance at any other speed, you could do it by adding some kind of adjustable brake so you can add a resistance force to the cart to keep it from accelerating. Once you know that force, you should be able to throw that into the equations so that force from teh prop/wheel = force of friction + force from brake.
Too many dependent variables, yes.

Either that, or measure the acceleration of the cart at the speed, and using f=ma maybe figure out what force is left over after friction to accelerate the cart.
So, either I'd add a braking force so that there is no accelaration and then all the forces have to balance and the only unknown would be friction, OR, measure acceleration and figure out what force is left over after friction to accelerate the cart. Either way, you need to be able to calculate the force from teh prop/wheel, and although that seems calculable based on prop-pitch, diameter, efficiency, and the gear ratio between the prop and wheel, I don't know how to od that part.

I'm not a prop guy.

Now you know another reason why I don't answer quizzes.
My personal career is not important.

ETA:
As I mentioned earlier, Greg, I am not interested in the cart. yo-yo's are a distraction.
 
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My personal career is not important.

I keep having this humorous image of Humber "retiring" from the space program after providing NASA with his analysis of why it would be impossible for two spacecraft to dock in orbit.

"What about the KE?? My god, those things mass many thousands of kilograms, and they're each traveling at 27000 kph! When they touch, blammo, it's game over!"

Tunny
 
Now you know another reason why I don't answer quizzes.

I haven't asked you any questions to try to get you to fail anything.

My personal career is not important.

Well, I don't know what you mean by "maximum power theorem". I thought if you worked in "blah", I could google for "maximum power theorem" and "blah".

You don't ahve to say what you do for a living, but you still haven't said what you meant by "maximum power theorem". The only definition I know is a EE definition, and it has to do with chosing sizes of resisters in a circuit, not newtonian objects interacting with each other.

Can you explain what you meant by "maximum power theorem"?

As I mentioned earlier, Greg, I am not interested in the cart. yo-yo's are a distraction.

What does that leave? You're only interest is that a treadmill isn't a valid test?

If that's it, then why did you pretty much ignore my scenario with the windmill on the groudn generating one kilowatt in a 10 mph wind, and the same windmill mounted on a giant treadmill moving at 10 mph indoors (no wind) also generating one kilowatt?

I seem to remember you saying they weren't equivalent for some reason.

Does this whole thread come down to you disbelieving in inertial frames?

How does one go about proving that the cart on the ground in a tailwind is the same as teh cart on a treadmill indoors, that they are both equivalent inertial frames, if you don't care about the cart and the yoyo is a distraction?

I offered the windmill in a 10 mph wind, and a windmill on a treadmill moving at 10 mph, to show that in either case, the windmill will generate the same amount of power. But then you seemed to bring the discussion back to why the cart woudln't work. So you're not interested in the cart but you're interested in the cart.

If it's just inertial frames, the windmill in 10 mph wind and the windmill on a 10mph treadmill should be sufficient to show the two are equivalent. Do you disagree that the windmill would put out the same amount of power in these two scenarios?
 
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humber seems to be the sort of person that googles a lot of scientific sites but does not pick up the knowledge in them, just a few terms. Time after time he has used technical terms incorrectly, too often to site here, his use of "maximum power theorem" is just the latest in a long chain. Since he practically never answers a direct question, and on the few times he has he has almost always been wrong, I have put him on selective ignore. If he puts too much blathering nonsense in one of his posts I tend to skip over it. You will get no more joy in arguing with humber than you would have with a brick wall, and you will get about the same amount of useful information out of it.
 
Like "Cavitation" and "Negative Drag"

He's run a mile from those.

Really, it just gets you right in the Adiabatic!!
 
Sorry, Mender. The answer is, no. I made this clear, and there will be no trying to work around that.
The question is poorly framed and not likely to be of any use. You don't seem to accept that this is not a matter of me not understanding your ideas, that I do, but they are wrong. There is no point in 'testing' me.

Actually you don't understand, despite all my efforts to help you. You manage to prove that almost every time you post. The only thing you have been right about is that there is no point to testing you. I know what the results will be. And I think you know that too, hence your handy excuses for not answering anything.
 
Have Humber given a single argument or explanation for any thing he has claimed?

I only find him saing things like, that is true, that is wrong, you don't understand that, I am correct etc.
 
Have Humber given a single argument or explanation for any thing he has claimed?
Once in a while he does. It's usually pretty perplexing to try to read it. It looks like he's writing in English, until you try to make sense of any of it. That's some of the best stuff, there.
 
Ah Mr Humber, though you were not explicit, by the fact you responded and are still posting, I think it is wonderful, our first agreement! You do not believe it would be fine for the outcome of your body to crash a car into another one, even with the precaution of being mid-air and not "grounded". I know it was a trivial and banal contrivance of an experiment, I didn't mean to insult our intelligence, just wanted to establish a baseline. I was a little confused about your velocity and kinetic energy principles. I think I see now what you were getting at, since perhaps just after the collision, there may be no kinetic energy or velocity of either car with respect to each-other if we set things up well, but then (for metal cars at least) they would fail to pass each-other, silly test!

Perhaps I could entertain you with a better experiment. Would you be willing to try this one? I will be "driving" a large SUV. You will be "riding" a motorcycle. We will be doing 150mph as read on our respective speedometers, but don't worry, with respect to the room we are in, we will be stationary. It will be a rather large room though, and the entire floor will be the belt surface of a very massive and powerful treadmill. Now, you are "riding" just next to me, say 1 meter to my left. Would you want your helmet on? Is there any chance of something going wrong? If, perhaps I sneeze and inadvertently swerve left, surely with only a meter separating us I would not collide with you at a great rate. And anyway, neither vehicle has kinetic energy wrt the earth, apart from the rotating stuff, but we'd just use our brakes to get rid of that, wouldn't we? What techniques could we use to analyse and try to predict if this is safe?

Can we do this Mr Humber, please?
 
Actually Christian, that was The Captain's claim.
However, there are electrical and mechanical analogues for negative resistance or drag.
How about discussing why the cart on the treadmill, is not like a toy car with a sheet of paper under it? Did you try it? You can buy these toys for less than 2 Euro.

Because the toy car doesn't have a propeller geared to the wheels and it's on a piece of paper, not a treadmill belt. Too easy.
 
I think that I have shown at least 3* ways in which "treadmill wind" is not like real wind.
Gravity and friction dependence, the boundary problem, the lack of actual wind power or motion, the way the wheels spin at "windspeed" that contradicts motion, no velocity w.r.t the ground, no significant KE from any "frame". Operator interference, instant acceleration to winspeed, experimental fitting, falsifiability, no ground (the belt is not the road, but the earth), lack of any work and of course the solution to the cart 'balance' claim. Other than that, it's 100% good.
... has been reduced to...
1, Paddle wheel. (No)
2. The opposing motion of wheel and belt, with no axle movement.(No)
3. The relationship between friction and wind force. (No)

The no's are your failure to refute them. Want to try again, Clive?
I need the laugh.
Wow! What happened to all the other stuff you mentioned earlier? Where's the "no significant KE from any frame" and "cart 'balance'" stuff? Does their omission from this new list mean you have withdrawn those earlier claims? (That would be sensible in my opinion, but you should tell us so we know, and you did say you would.)

In any case, it's not up to me to refute your crazy (but occasionally amusing) fantasies. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." (Actually, even a tiny shred of proof would be a start in your case.) You are the (very) odd one out here. It's up to you make some kind of coherent arguments to support your various claims. Instead you have demonstrated an uncanny ability to string words together in more or less meaningless sentences for a couple of months on end, but not much else.

Anyway, let's look briefly at at the first item on your new list:

"1, Paddle wheel. (No)"

What is that paddle wheel all about? In my view it is a completely unnecessary complication (introduced by you of course). It seems to be a only a very roundabout way to describe the difference in velocity for two "layers" in the air above the treadmill belt and road. Why not just subtract one "1-dimensional velocity" (using signs for direction) from the other? You have to do that anyway to determine what your paddle is going to do! This all relates to your claim that the behaviour of some part of the boundary layer above the treadmill belt relative to the non-boundary layer air higher above that would be significantly different to what would be seen in the "equivalent" road scenario. (Same wind, surface type, etc.) Something (never clearly described) was "going the wrong way" according to you.

The ball is in your court on this, and has been for a long time. John Freestone presented you with several straightforward questions about the issue, and I (and probably others) put similar questions to you before that. We had to do that because nobody could understand any of your garbled attempts to explain yourself before that. You've made no serious attempt to respond to John's questions, or the earlier ones. Why? It seems pretty obvious to me - you can't answer without looking like a complete idiot. You have to either persevere with your original fantasy in the face of the results from a thought experiment that a five year could probably follow, or shoot yourself in the foot by suddenly agreeing with what everybody else has been telling you all along. In other words, that the flows above the belt and above the road, relative to the road or belt respectively, are essentially identical in all cases.

So, if you "seriously" want to resolve the boundary layer question (hah-hah), then respond to those questions. In the absence of any coherent and logical response, I will continue to observe that you are apparently incoherent and illogical (and increasingly non-responsive also).

Let's get that first one out of the way before wasting any more time on the others.
 
I suppose if you want to measure the force of resistance at any other speed, you could do it by adding some kind of adjustable brake so you can add a resistance force to the cart to keep it from accelerating. Once you know that force, you should be able to throw that into the equations so that force from the prop/wheel = force of friction + force from brake.

So, either I'd add a braking force so that there is no acceleration and then all the forces have to balance and the only unknown would be friction, ...

Yes, Greg, that is what my little exercise is about. A sail cart in a ten mph wind. A fishing reel with a brake. Zero force measured on the scale when the cart is at 9 mph. A braking force applied to slow the cart to 8 mph, and a reading taken (arbitrarily 100 grams). From that and an understanding of the physics involved, the answer is - what? Humber couldn't get it but you are on the right track.
 
I haven't asked you any questions to try to get you to fail anything.
Well, I don't know what you mean by "maximum power theorem". I thought if you worked in "blah", I could google for "maximum power theorem" and "blah".
You don't ahve to say what you do for a living, but you still haven't said what you meant by "maximum power theorem". The only definition I know is a EE definition, and it has to do with chosing sizes of resisters in a circuit, not newtonian objects interacting with each other.
Can you explain what you meant by "maximum power theorem"?

Quote: Greg London
'It's frustrating because you want him to understand. But then some folks take the frustration and turn it around and start figuring out how to show humber he is wrong. I don't think humber is doing it on purpose, though, so I'm not going to hold it against him that I can't explain it to him'

Really? Poor benighted humber. ( I need to add this, for others)

benight /bI"nVIt/ v.t.LME. [f. BE- 4 + NIGHT n.]1 Cover, hide, or involve in the darkness of night. Usu. (and arch. exc.) in pass. LME. 2 fig.

Involve in intellectual or moral darkness; darken, cloud.

Freq. in pass. E17.1 DE QUINCEY The tourists were benighted in a forest.2 W. DAVENANT Now jealousie no more benights her face.J. WILSON What men..call Religion, now benighting half the earth.ISAIAH BERLIN The mass of the proletarians themselves were too benighted to grasp the role which history had called on them to play.benightedness n. the state of being benighted M19.benightment n. (rare) M17.

Perhaps you could (all) learn something before trying to teach me?

It is about power transfer in general, Greg, not only electrical. See Carnot Cycle, thermodynamics, load matching, load lines...
Electrical analogues are common practice in a wide range of disciplines.
Use them. http://www.eas.asu.edu/~holbert/analogy.html

Here is some forum chat on the topic. Some people have trouble with abstracted ideas.
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=159381&page=76

"CFD" works for heat flow too.
You have to learn it, to understand it. It does not come in internet forum bites. It is quite common to find professionals who do not understand first principles. They 'learned' but that was all.
What does that leave? You're only interest is that a treadmill isn't a valid test?
Yes.

If that's it, then why did you pretty much ignore my scenario with the windmill on the groudn generating one kilowatt in a 10 mph wind, and the same windmill mounted on a giant treadmill moving at 10 mph indoors (no wind) also generating one kilowatt?
Patently true. Why would you even bother to mention it? Did you expect that I would be surprised?

Heth'etheth's fish tank. Looks at drawing...mmm...cam on the floor, trailing castor operates sluice (gate)...so that goes CCW...text below says fish comes from right....OK...so that's how it works...
Imagine possible variants. Two minutes, perhaps?
Nothing like the treadmill, not even close !

I seem to remember you saying they weren't equivalent for some reason.
They are not "equivalent", but would generate much the same power. And?

e
Does this whole thread come down to you disbelieving in inertial frames?
No. Inertial frames are not applicable. It's about the machine that is the treadmill, and that makes false appeals to that idea. Sounds impressive at Arby's, though.

How does one go about proving that the cart on the ground in a tailwind is the same as teh cart on a treadmill indoors, that they are both equivalent inertial frames, if you don't care about the cart and the yoyo is a distraction?
By proving that the cart is doing what it looks like it is doing. Almost motionless, spinning its propeller. Anything beyond that is imaginary.

I offered the windmill in a 10 mph wind, and a windmill on a treadmill moving at 10 mph, to show that in either case, the windmill will generate the same amount of power. But then you seemed to bring the discussion back to why the cart woudln't work. So you're not interested in the cart but you're interested in the cart.
Another way it to pick up the treadmill and drive the generator prop directly with the belt. And?
Not interested in the cart, but the treadmill/cart.

If it's just inertial frames, the windmill in 10 mph wind and the windmill on a 10mph treadmill should be sufficient to show the two are equivalent. Do you disagree that the windmill would put out the same amount of power in these two scenarios?
Why not? Is this idea the wonder of the ages? All motion is relative. How else?
In fact, should you not be surprised at the result? Isn't your 'real' wind generator moving 1000km/hr as the Earth rotates?
Perhaps that is also true of the one on the treadmill too...perhaps its only the local difference that matters...
There you go. A full course in "inertial frames of reference". In this thread, an idea about nothing.
Do you all not understand that this is utterly orthodox? "Ground power" is one thing that is refuted by that same precept.
The power is generated by the action of the wind on the prop. That is 100% of what is available. Wind/prop and wind/ground are not two separate identities.
The idea of relative motion, is inflated to cover every possible situation but without any support. Mostly assumption, and knee-jerk reaction.
 
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