1) A review of Coulter's screed by a journalist in Dover
2) A review of DaveScot commenting that, "Ultimately the universe is governed by gravity. It is the strongest of all the forces in the big picture." and "By the way, gravity is the strongest force in nature. It overwhelms the electromagnetic force to form neutron stars. It overwhelms the weak nuclear force to form quark stars. And finally, when it overwhelms the strong nuclear force, a black hole is formed. Thanks for playing."
3) A review of how gills evolved into pharyngeal arches, and into the human parathyroid from there
For more on DaveScot's comment, see my analysis below:
Well, we seem to have a problem...trusted authorities in science and physics often claim that "gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental fources". (see here for more)
DaveScot has obviously claimed the opposite. Who to believe? Well, I don't like "belief", so let's do the physics (the following was left as a comment on the site)--
First, lay out the equations to make sense of the controversy:
F = G *(m1 * m2) / r^2
That's the force given by gravity, and if you use kg for mass and meters for r, then the units that come out are in N.
Couloumb's Law for the force between two point charges:
F = 1 / (4*pi*vacuum resistivity) * (q1 * q2) / r^2
Now, let us assume for a moment that we want to compare the two forces. In order to do this fairly, we ought to use the same values for all of the variables in the two equations which we can -- in this case, r. Let's just use an r = 1 meter. This gets rid of the r^2 term in both equations.
Now, let's set the two equations equal to one another and see what happens:
(m1 * m2) * G = 1 / (4*pi*vacuum resistivity) * (q1 * q2)
Let's get rid of all of the constants:
(m1* m2) / (q1 * q2) = 1 / (G * 4 * pi * vacuum resistivity) = 1.3 * 10^20
What in the hell does this mean? It means that the ratio of multiplied masses to multiplied charges has to be 10^20 in order for the forces to be equal to one another. That's the regime in which the forces can be equal. Obviously, you can do the algebra to see that the when charge is dissipated and mass built up enough in neutron stars, they do indeed surpass this ratio.
In this sense, Dave is right, in that inside neutron stars, gravity has overcome electromagnetism. Perhaps that is simply what he should've said to begin with, that the potential for gravity's force to overcome the force of electromagnetism is there, so long as the ratio of m/q is high enough. That doesn't mean that gravity "is stronger than" electromagnetism, of course, when we consider "non special cases". For instance, do a simple calculation of the gravitational and electromagnetic force between a proton and neutron 1 m away from one another, and this is where the ratio originally cited by Kibitz in the comment above came from. Kibitz is thus correct in concluding that:
Electromagnetic repulsion is approximately 10 to the power of 42 (that’s a million billion billion billion billion)times more powerful than gravity. If your right bicep represented the strength of gravitational force, then your left bicep would have to extend beyond the edge of the known universe to represent the strength of electromagnetic force.However, since the Chandrasekhar mass [where the ratio of m/q is high enough] is only achieved in stars which can accumulate enough Fe56 to collapse inward, the "regime" is limited to stars which start out at least 15-30 solar masses, and go through stellar evolution, and arrive at a neutron star potentiality. This is the one time when gravity "wins out".
So, I don't know what to conclude from here...Dave was right and wrong. It is *possible* for gravity to overcome the other forces, but it is, indeed, by far the weakest of the four in 99.99999% of the possible scenarios you can speculate on in our universe. Perhaps Dave will show some humility in admitting this?
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Technorati tags: DaveScot, Intelligent Design, Creationism, Discovery Institute
