Robert Leguillon wrote:
/snip/ Heffner is saying that since the flow rate may not be 60 L in 4 hours it might be zero. That is preposterous. /snip/ Because the flow rate was not at its max (it was sped up during quenching) and it decreases with back pressure (as demonstrated in the September test), we have no idea what the flow rate actually was.
THERE is where you are wrong. You go too far. "No idea" is an absurd overstatement. We have some idea. We know that the the vessel would have been empty if there had been no water flowing in. We can make a rough estimate of the lowest flow rate it might have been. A "rough estimate" is not the same as hand waving or guessing.
I do not understand why modern people are so unwilling to make a rough estimate, or a reality check. To go from the assertion that "the flow rate was not at its max" (perhaps . . .) to saying "we have no idea" is a ridiculous leap. It violates common sense, and natural science observational techniques. You can always make a reasonable estimate based on observable and irrefutable facts. There was definitely water coming out. It was measured often enough and observed and filmed often enough that we know approximately what the outgoing flow rate was. There was definitely water left in the vessel after the test. That can only be explained by additional tap water flowing in, unless you think water spontaneously appears out of nowhere, or mass is not conserved.
As I said in my parable, just because you do not know whether the airplane is at 600 feet or 1000 feet, that does not mean you have proved it is on the ground.
Honestly, how do you think people managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years before numbers and instruments and modern science were developed?!? Do you think they had no clue what was going on in the world around them? No idea whether water was flowing in a stream, no clue at all whether an object was too hot to touch or stone cold? Visual observations of natural events and first principles are a valid way of doing science, even with no instruments at all.
- Jed
