Two hours of my life I'd like back

hustin1

One advantage (or disadvantage) of recovering from gall bladder surgery is that I spend a lot of time lying down watching TV. I just finished watching a show on H2 called "The Devil's Graveyards".

What unbelievable garbage. They call this history?

The underlying premise appears to be that a radioactive isotope of aluminum (Al₂₆) causes weird electromagnetic "vortices" that threaten to stop the convection of Earth's iron core, which would in turn cause Earth's magnetic field to disappear (and doom all life). It purports to follow a team who propose to neutralize the isotope by creating an EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Some things are just too hard to watch. This is what I get for earning a Master's in Physics.

Al₂₆ exhibits β⁺ decay, which results from the weak nuclear force. It causes quarks in atomic nuclei to "flip": an up quark changes to a "down" quark (which has less energy), changing a proton (u-u-d) to a neutron (u-d-d) and emitting a positron and an electron neutrino. The process has absolutely nothing to do with the electromagnetic force, and no amount of EMP will "neutralize" the isotope.

I know that most people wouldn't know this (and I admittedly had to look up Al₂₆ to find out its decay modes), but still -- how can they put this out with a straight face?

valwryn

That's why I watch the SyFy channel for more scientific realism.

silence1x

valwryn said:

That's why I watch the SyFy channel for more scientific realism.

And Wrestling