From one pic I’ve seen, it seems that the cover is pretty much on top of the coils.

The mutual inductance change ratio it does will be (r_initial/r_final)^2 If the towel is the same thickness as the cover, this’ll be r_final=2*r_initial (1/2)^2=1/4 whichll mean 1/4 the power

If the cloth is half the thickness of the cover, then r_final=1.5*r_initial (1/1.5)^2=.44

If the cloth is 1/8th the thickness, it’ll be 80% the same efficiency

We would need a diagram of the specific induction cooker to calculate this because you have to know the distance from the coils to the pan

Generally though, the dirt at the bottom shouldn’t matter. They’re generally at the micron level of thickness

Iconic website

I wish I were that funny

They just have a reputation of doing poor science. They’re smart people, but have a tendency to try and come up with something from nothing since the 1950s.

The high energy physics cycle for most of them is “hey we technically don’t know this isn’t true and if we finagle this in this way it technically fits all the old data but also predicts this” then an experiment some years later shows it isn’t true then they finagle a little more.

They also have to be writing something or they’re out of a job but the challenge is that the standard model is pretty exceptional so there isn’t many things to investigate more directly

Some quick research shows that there are people that have been trying to develop electron spin-based transistors for about 30 years now. The name of the transistor is spin transistor and the field of engineering based around developing stuff using electron’s spin property is called spintronics.

It doesn’t seem like they’ve had much success, but handling things with single electrons is extremely challenging since they’re quantum systems. Everything is probabilistic in nature and challenging to manipulate. Current transistors are having physical limitations due to being so small that electrons can tunnel to where they shouldn’t be (or so I’ve been told. I haven’t fact checked this. I’m not a hardware guy)

I’m pretty cynical towards particle physics, but I’m all for attempting challenging engineering

Calculating the digits of pi in modern times is pretty much purely for competitions

This is more particle physicists flinging stuff at the wall hoping something will stick. That’s kind of their thing

Disclaimer: Degree in physics but not a focus on particle physics

This doesn’t have much use for physical applications. It’s kind of particle physicists doing particle physicist things.

The goal of this experiment is to get a more stringent physical measurement of a calculated value. This has a few potential purposes:

1. physical measurements begin consistently never matching calculated value. This will suggest unknown interactions/particles. Particle physicists love inventing these. This leads to the third point

2. Gaining more information on the fine structure constant (one of the spooky fundamental values of the universe) (Probably the most useful aspect of this experiment)

3. the paper apparently ties this to dark matter in a very particle physicist manner. This measurement supposedly helps disprove some proposed limits on dark particles masses for them to just arbitrarily alter their equations to overfit the data.