Ha! Awesome. Happy to know that even though I’m not a professor anymore there are still places where I can inspire more physics questions.

Yep, methane creates CO2 when burned. Atmospheric methane reacts with atmospheric OH to also make CO2 and water.

I can’t help but feel like this post was generated from a physics discussion I had the other day here.

Methane was rebranded as natural gas and is used to generate electricity, heat homes, and cook food. Among other uses.

And while it’s a potent greenhouse gas it breaks down much faster than CO2 in the atmosphere

Incorrect. Methane breaks down into CO2. After it causes the atmosphere to retain significantly more heat. As CO2 it continues to contribute to climate change.

You are welcome. Thanks for the interest in physics.

Well, parts of interstellar are accurate. :) That being said, time dilation due to gravity is real. Go someplace heavy for awhile and then leave and you will travel far into the future. The spaceship-observer example is special relativity. The gravity thing is general relativity. I’m not sure I have a non math explanation here so, simply put, time dilation due to gravity is different.

You can get a similar outcome by going somewhere real fast, then turning around, and going real fast again back towards the start. In the rocket frame that may take, say 10 years, but more years will have passed by on Earth.

You may think this breaks the symmetry I brought up earlier, and it does, but that symmetry breaking occurs when the rocket accelerates a whole bunch turning around and heading back home. On the outbound journey though the rocket will think the earth clock is slow, and vice versa. Similarly, on the return journey the same thing occurs. During the acceleration phase though things gets real weird. Or weirder I should say.

Correct. Everyone thinks their second and meter are unchanged. Everyone else’s second is slower and their rulers are compressed.

Hard to explain the details without using math. Relativity is not intuitive as we don’t encounter relativistic effects in everyday human life.

Relativity build upon the fact that there are no absolute reference frames. If time was absolute then sure, one person would appear slow while the other appears fast. But it isn’t absolute, it is relative. This means outcomes need to be symmetric. So a stationary observer checking out a spacecraft going fast is the same as going fast while observing a stationary spacecraft.

Yep. Relativistic effects are generally not what we would intuitively expect.

Yep.

Another physicist here. I see that the issue of traveling at the speed of light has already been addressed. So I’ll ignore that bit. Otherwise, yes, the time dilation would make it appear to an observer that the traveler is speaking slowly. It would also make it appear to the traveler that the observer is speaking slowly.

You started by claiming maximizing short term profits was required and now you are claiming maximizing long term profits are required. On top of that you keep claiming profitability has to be maximized even though that isn’t stated anywhere. While you may insist on hallucinating standards that don’t exist it isn’t even possible to determine if any action maximizes profitability.

Yet another justification for enabling psychopaths.

And Google has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize profits, basically guaranteeing this type of behavior

This is simply not true. Per the us Supreme Court, “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”. On top of that, even if the standard did apply, doesn’t ensuring the long term interests of a company provide more total profit? Maximization is an inherently difficult standard to enshrine in the law.

In the US states have reduced their funding for public colleges shifting the burden to students. On top of that universities have more programs and features than they used to. The university I was at constantly operated at a loss.

I’ve also seen professors who get kickbacks from the sale of textbooks up to and including professors making their own textbook that they authored a required text for the course.

Nobody is getting rich by writing a textbook. The most likely reason for using a book they wrote is that it includes information they thought was important.

I am well aware.

A hash function is still math independent of your interest. Bitcoin is the first currency that has self emerged without being mandated by the state. Feel free to ignore it.

Again your comments don’t actually address the argument at hand.

You are arguing in favor of government control of money and arguing I’m high? Ok buddy. Sure thing.