K^2

You are treating T, g, and M as constants, though. Otherwise, you'd have a very nasty differential equation on your hands. And while M and g are very nearly constant at relevant scale, T is very positively not. If you were to say that Earth's atmosphere is 8km thick when layered uniformly, why should you use T as surface temperature? Why not other elevation or even some sort of average temperature? The reason we use surface T here is because scale height is used to model pressure changes, P(h) = P(0) * exp(-h/H). This formula works so long as T remains roughly constant, and we usually use it to model atmosphere near the surface. So saying that H represents thickness of the atmosphere in some way is not entirely correct. It works as a mathematical abstraction, but in no other way. But like I said, still useful for estimates. As a starting point, if nothing else.

I have. That is the model. I computed final velocity given initial condition and correction burn. If you are telling me that the exit velocity will be less than 10km/s, you have to tell me where the energy change came from.

Nitpick - this assumes uniform temperature, which it isn't. But yeah, that's Earth's Scale Height, and it's a useful tool in making estimates. In fact, there is a very simple equation of estimated delta-V losses to aerodynamic drag and gravity using it. vlost = 4gH/vt, where vt is terminal velocity at the surface. It makes a ton of assumptions, but it gives an ok ballpark estimate for Earth of something around 1km/s - 2km/s lost. (This estimate works way better in KSP) So at the most, we are fighting over these 2km/s. Which isn't nothing, but there are definitely bigger wins to be made. This is the same reason why we rarely launch rockets from airplanes. hms_warrior is right that we don't care about ignition, though. Air augmented rocket generates additional thrust from launch pad. Its operating principles are very different than these of a (sc)ram jet.

A 2kg rocket coasts at barely a few m/s towards a rogue neutron star with no significant neighborhood from a great distance. Both kinetic energy and potential energy are very nearly zero. As the rocket drops closer, it speeds up. Total energy stays roughly zero, with kinetic energy increasing and potential energy turning negative. It takes a while, but finally the rocket makes its closest approach. It is now traveling at 100km/s. The total kinetic energy is mv2/2 = 10GJ. And since total energy is still zero, its potential energy is -10GJ. At this point the rocket orients itself prograde and ignites its engines. After a brief burn, 1kg of fuel and oxidizer is expended, and the rocket is now traveling at 101km/s. So a 1km/s delta-V. Not a terribly good engine, I know, but we work with what we have. So the mass of the rocket is now 1kg. Its kinetic energy is now 5.1005 GJ. The potential energy is -5GJ, as the other -5GJ are in the exhaust. The total energy of the rocket is now 5.1005GJ - 5GJ = 100.5MJ, and the rocket continues on its escape trajectory. Eventually, it gets far enough from the neutron star, where its potential energy is insignificant again. The total energy is still 100.5MJ, since no significant forces besides gravity acted on the rocket. Since potential energy is zero, this is all kinetic energy. 100.5MJ of kinetic energy on a 1kg rocket, which means the rocket is now hauling at 10.025km/s. This is despite the fact that it only had 1km/s of delta-V in it, and it was only going at a few m/s before it encountered the neutron star. This is counter-intuitive, I understand that. Very few things in orbital mechanics make intuitive sense, which is why you have to take a problem and work through it. Obereth effect isn't an illusion. It's a very real way for rocket to gain "free" delta-V. If you have hard time picturing why this works, I challenge you to work through the problem without ignoring what happens to exhaust. What is its kinetic energy immediately after the burn? What is its total energy, then? How much of total energy of the system had to come from chemical energy of the fuel? What about conservation of momentum? Linear momentum is a pain in orbital mechanics, but you can just work with angular momentum instead. What you will find is that we managed to extract significantly more energy from the fuel than there was chemical energy in it to start with. And the reason we were able to do it is because that fuel had a much higher potential energy before we entered the star system, then following the burn. A rocket on escape trajectory utilizing Obereth effect not only uses the chemical energy of the fuel, but its gravitational energy as well. It's a non-trivial quantity in ordinary orbital mechanics, but becomes just batty when neutron stars and black holes are involved, greatly exceeding the chemical energy available.

Vibration shouldn't be a huge factor in most designs, but cooling does play a role. Mostly, it comes down to extra weight and complexity, especially if you want your engines to gimbal. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that while it's a sizable boost to efficiency, it's not free, and is effective over very narrow window. Once you ascend past certain altitude, it becomes extra weight you're carrying. If you have a lot of stages, and discard the air augmented stage early, you get a net win on fuel. But most of the cost of the rocket isn't fuel. It's engines and other mechanical components that get expended. You win a lot more by reducing number of stages, improving their efficiency across the range of altitudes. This is the direction SpaceX has been going, and part of the reason why their launches were cheaper even before they started working on reuse. It's a great idea overall, but it doesn't mesh well with direction that chemical rockets are taking right now.

We're not talking about a free gravity assist here. We're talking about approaching "Moon" at 1km/s on trans-Lunar, picking up 100km/s in free-fall, kicking in engines to pick up 3km/s of extra delta-V at periapsis, loosing that 100km/s worth of KE climbing back out, and being left over with enough KE to be departing "Moon" at 25km/s, which is just about right for escaping Sol all together. This is the whole point of Obereth effect. Your fuel use determines your velocity changes, while orbits are all about energy and angular momentum. A small change in velocity when you are already going fast equates to a huge change in kinetic energy. If you have a sufficiently deep gravitational hole to play with, all transfers that intercept it are effectively free.

That's not actually true. Obereth effect absolutely continues to work with a black hole. You can think of it as converting gravitational energy of your fuel into kinetic energy of your rocket. And with a black hole, that can be a lot of energy. If your goal is ejecting yourself from Solar System with as much velocity as possible, having Moon-mass black hole instead of the Moon would make it a lot easier. You still have to get yourself to trans-Lunar, but from there, the ride out of Sol is almost free. There is definitely a limit to how much you can exploit it, because you'd have a limited window for a burn, but it'd still be quite useful.

Or slightly less than 1atm, with slightly elevated oxygen fraction, at perfect 20oC. Which you need for what, exactly? Most modern construction is hydrocarbons. A thick atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulfur, and water vapor is the absolutely ideal manufacturing environment. The quantities of heavy metals and semiconductors we actually need are cheaper to import from asteroid belt. Mining on Mars is just stupid-hard, even compared to mining asteroids. Mars has the worst possible amount of atmosphere and gravity for any industrial operations. Things are still heavy, so you can't just float cargo around, but not comfortable for humans. You still need a pressurized vessel, but you get dust everywhere. It's hard to imagine a worse environment for a self-sustained colony. There is almost no research benefit to having boots on the ground, and what little there is rapidly evaporating. More importantly, there is no need to send hundreds of people to a research base. We're doing perfectly fine with 6 in LEO. If your objective isn't to establish multiple self-sustaining colonies throughout the system, then you are on track for extinction. Mars is a dead end. It's a very bad place for a colony. Yet, for some stupid reason, we're spinning up infrastructure to colonize it. Martian colony is going to require constant upkeep for foreseeable future, and that completely defeats the purpose of having one. Venusian cloud colony can be self sustaining within a couple of decades, being able to expand, build daughter colonies, and at very least refuel, if not build from scratch, ships capable of reaching orbit, all using local resources. On Mars, fuel production alone, capable of supporting more than few launches per year, is going to be problematic, becoming one of the limiting factors on colony size. And yeah, a free-orbiting space-station is easier than colony on either planet. But it's not going to be self-sufficient until we have permanent asteroid mining infrastructure. That could be a century out. If we want to have a backup home for our species, Venus gets us there with least amount of effort and in shortest time. Diverting resources towards anything else is silly.

And with that paradise right in our backyard, we are looking at Mars for colonization for some reason.

The optical cross-section of such a small black hole would be tiny. Nothing we'd be able to spot from Earth, even through a telescope, and even if we knew were to look. You'd have to send probes, which would have to get pretty darn close to the singularity, before you could actually image it. Almost shocking little. See my signature. Moon is a bit heavier than Rhea, so the output will have effective temperature of a brown dwarf star coming from an absolutely tiny object. It would be entirely undetectable. If it forms a tiny little accretion disk, you'd be able to pick it up on IR cameras of a space probe orbiting nearby. All in all, Moon-mass black hole will be almost entirely undetectable, except for its gravity. It's fun to picture what a civilization living on a world orbiting or being orbited by a tiny little black hole would think of it. There would be absolutely no indication of any object, but rocks flying through that region of space would curve as if there was a moon/planet there. How long would it take astronomers to guess that there is a super-dense massive object there?

The initial blast from the gravitational energy release will be quite significant. I'd have to run the numbers, but I'd guess enough to sterilize Earth and not enough to damage it significantly. From there on, though, the impact on Earth or the rest of the Solar System will be absolutely minimal for the next few billion years. That is, until the Sun grows into red giant stage. At that point, the moon would start accreting matter, eventually merging with the Sun. Radiation from that event might actually be sufficient to scatter what's left of the Solar System, leaving a sub-solar mass black hole as sole remnant.

I'm assuming, your coordinate system is relative to Earth's center. In this coordinate system, orbits around the Earth are subject to standard -μ/r potential of Earth's gravity, plus a periodic perturbation due to Sun's gravity and motion around the sun. That perturbation has a non-zero mean, which is why orbital speed is slightly modified. Because for a circular orbit it will average out exactly the same way, I'm going to ignore the precession of perturbation itself. In that case, a circular orbit would experience potential: U(r, θ) = -μ/r - MG/(R + r sinθ) - (Ω2(R + r sinθ)2/2) Here, MG is gravitational parameter for Sun, R is distance of Earth from Earth-Sun's barycenter, and Ω is Earth's angular velocity around the Sun. r and θ describe position of the satellite with respect to Earth's center. Note that I'm assuming that satellite is orbiting in the Earth-Sun plane here. You'll have to add an additional parameter for out-of-plane orbit, but hopefully you can manage that. At this point, we can start throwing in heavy machinery. We are only interested in average potential energy to make use of Vis Viva. We know that 1/(a + x) = 1/a - x/a2 + x2/a3 - ... So by taking only the r-dependence of potential above and taking only the highest even term (odd terms average to zero), we get effective potential. U*(r, θ) = -μ/r - MG/R3 r2sin2θ - Ω2r2 sin2θ / 2 We can further simplify, because MG/R3 = Ω2, as Earth itself is in orbit around the Sun, and using the fact that average of sin2θ is 1/2. U*(r) = -μ/r - (3/4) Ω2r2 And that gives us initial vy = sqrt(-U*(x)/2) = sqrt(μ/(2x) + (3/8)Ω2x2) Unless I've screwed something up, that should give you a nice circular motion around Earth, so long as the orbit is co-planar. If the orbit is out of the plane, this can still work under some cases, but will result in some orbital precession as well. Do check all of the above steps, though. I have an odd feeling about that 3/8 factor, but I can't find any errors.

First of all, it's important to keep in mind that these are the same thing. System that violates conservation of momentum in one coordinate-system necessarily violates conservation of energy in another and vice versa. This is because energy and momentum are components of a 4-vector known as 4-momentum. They are related the same way that space and time are. Distinguishable, but inseparable. Second, and more interesting point is that while these quantities are strictly conserved, change in velocity does not need to result in change of momentum or change in energy! Certainly, in classical mechanics, p = mv and E = mv2. So change in velocity requires reaction mass and expended energy. If you are using a conventional rocket, you're stuck with this. But the moment you step away from classical mechanics, things get more interesting. I won't go into details of Quantum, because they get complicated, but it's worth mentioning that there is concept of mass shell, and only on-shell particles follow the above rules. Off-shell particles can travel in direction different than their momentum vector suggests. Of course, off-shell particles have limited range and life time, and are most commonly found in various interactions. E.g. photons in electromagnetic interactions are off-shell. The more relevant caveats come from General Relativity. Here, momentum picks up a contribution from frame dragging. A very naive analogy is swimming in the river. You have to expend energy to move relative to the water, but if the current changes, you can speed up or slow down with it without doing any work. This is sort of how Alcubierre warp drive works. Ship goes from rest to moving, but it does so because it's local frame accelerated, not the ship itself. Consequently, ship's momentum and kinetic energy stay the same. Now, this still takes a huge amount of energy to warp the space-time, but that energy, at least in theory, is recoverable. So for example, you might power your ship with a kugelblitz - a miniature black hole made up of light. Let it evaporate in a miniature nova, redirect all this energy into curving space-time, and your ship is now in warp. When ship drops out of warp, the energy of the space-time curvature is released, and redirected back into a single point to create a new kugelblitz. Obviously, I'm glossing over many, many details. We have no idea how to manipulate these quantities of energy, and Alcubierre drive itself has very serious limitations preventing us from building even a proof of concept. But it can work!

That's mostly evaporative, though. Also doesn't work that well in the fog.

Theories aren't mushrooms. They don't just appear regularly after rain. Your approach sabotages the principle which we use to arrive at a theory. We take observations, we fit a model to it, and we see how well that model does against other observations. We adjust, and we continue. Theory shouldn't just explain the known phenomena. That's pointless. Theory should predict new phenomena. If I'm building an airplane, I need to know that the wings don't snap off. And I need to have a very high margin of certainty. So I take my model, throw in any uncertainties I can't account for, such as random fractures in the materials, and I get how thick I need to make critical parts to prevent failure with a 99.999...% guarantee. Now we take our current model. We make predictions, and they are perfect within our capacity to measure across the board. We take most pessimistic estimate of the odds, and we arrive at how certain we are about conclusions. Something that's going to have a lot of moving parts, like planetary trajectories, will have high uncertainty. We don't know the value of G all that well, we aren't tracking all objects in the system, and there can always be a rogue gravity wave. So you can't be too certain. But if you take something that follows as theorem from core principles, then you just take raw certainty in these principles. And as we've stated, that's a ridiculous number now. But then you say, "What if it isn't? We'll do better." How? You've just taken the only thing that actually let us arrive at a theory - ability to establish degree of uncertainty - and thrown it out of the window. If you are saying "It could be wrong," you are saying, "All of physics can be entirely wrong," because you are putting huge error bars on base assumptions. Everything that follows will be worse. How the hell am I supposed to figure out tolerances on an airplane, if you can't even give me certainty on principles it's based on. You can replace bad models, mechanisms we've misunderstood, and it will only impact things that were being modeled this way. You can't just discard the core of what all of your knowledge is based on, and then just shrug it off, saying we'll do better. You've just discarded the only way to get better. You are actively sabotaging the very means of obtaining knowledge by insisting on going by gut-feeling rather than theory on something so fundamental. Has rest mass. Has no other charges. This fully describes a particle, and literally the only thing that matches interpretation. Again, you're getting stuck on it being called "dark matter". The name is purely historical at this point. An electron has exactly the same description, except due to its other charges, I can also comment on some intrinsic DoFs. None of these are relevant for a particle that doesn't interact other than via gravity. What exactly are you expecting? What color it is and what it tastes like? That's not how you describe a particle. Do you understand distinction between empirical measurements and theoretical framework? If I gave you a ruler and asked you to measure circumference of the moon, are you going to claim that you can't do it because you don't understand how to use a ruler, and expect a better way to use a ruler to come along? Nor does it allow for unicorns! Why do you think that the ultimate theory has to allow for the specific magics that you expect it to? Some problems are just hard, no matter the complexity of the theory. Did General Relativity make it easier to compute interplanetary trajectories? Hell no. Again, emergent behavior is not inherently evident from underlying physics. We've had GR for nearly a century. Still don't know internal ground state of a rotating black hole. That one's just math, no physics involved. Equations are known, we just can't solve them. No "improvement" to theory will make that better, because the problem is entirely mathematical. We have pretty much exact equations for hydrogen atom. Certainly the best understood system. What do we know about metallic hydrogen? Pretty much nothing. Real physics is hard. Having simple fundamental equations doesn't make it easier. Just the opposite, usually. Oh, and we have numerous explanations for matter-antimatter imbalance. We just can't test any of them, because it sort of already happened. If you'd like to start a new universe, I can tell you what to look for. Would be great help.

Compared to interstellar space? Definitely. Compared to clouds? Typically. It's all relative. But the main point of the device is to bring it to temperatures bellow these of ambient air. If you were happy with how cool the fog is, you don't need fancy materials. Sheet of aluminum will work just as well. The challenge is to do better than that. And for clear or cloudy days, you can. For foggy days, no luck.

You refuse to look at the big picture even in the context of the single argument, trying to create an epistemological battle over every phrase. I'm not going to get dragged into it. You are clearly certain that we're having this discussion, as you keep participating in it. That means you accept not only objective reality, but also ability to interact with it in meaningful ways. You can claim doubt, but your actions run in contradiction to it. Saying "I doubt everything" is a standard fallacy, as the person who does cannot make that statement. Yet you do express doubt in core features of field theory, and objectively, you have these two mixed up in priority. You having a very vivid hallucination right now is almost infinitely more likely, as that doesn't require entirety of human knowledge on physics to be wrong. Your other claims do. Let me try to translate this into a simple analogy. I'm telling you, "There are infinitely many primes, there is proof." And you reply with, "You can't say that, you don't even know if 16546516576546468461(insert many more digits) is prime!" - That's not how it works. That's not how reasoning works. That's not how arguments work. And again, in trying to show off, you've failed to even grasp distinction between unknown properties of dark matter (spin, flavor...) and known qualities, which is how it interacts with space-time. And I could sort of at least see where you'd be coming from if there was something special about dark matter in this aspect. But there isn't. It interacts with space-time EXACTLY the same way anything else does. It just happens to have no charge, and is therefore not visible to telescopes. It's interesting that there seems to be another particle field, which lacks any local interaction, but it's not surprising. It doesn't break any physics. The only reason we know about it is because it actually follows absolutely every law of physics we know, which is what lets us detect it. And in that way, it's not different than any other form of matter. Field theory supports arbitrary number of intrinsic degrees of freedom, allowing for countless particles and types of matter. We might not have found them all, but we have a way to classify and describe absolutely every single one. That's why Higgs shocked absolutely no-one. That's why dark matter is not nearly as exciting as it sounds. And it's why if we find twenty other kinds of particles next week, it'll be business as usual. Now, if we found a new particle, that behaves differently somehow, that'd be a thing of note, but that simply hasn't happened since gauge theory became a thing. We simply found more symmetries. The closest thing to a surprise was the TCP. And even that fits neatly into the pattern, it just wasn't what scientists expected. Again, I can see how all of these things sound crazy to a non-scientist. I promise you, they are absolutely mundane. There hasn't been anything really new in physics in half a century. And we're overdue. But physics is a field where we can put very strong bars on what's going to change with the next discovery. It's only in movies that Einstein blows up everyone's mind. In the real world, real scientists have been bracing for relativity and QM for half a century by that point. And with as revolutionary as these changes were, none of the fundamentals changed. They were only reinforced. Action, symmetries, and conservation laws are still at the foundation of physics today. You'll forgive me if I don't continue giving that detailed of replies to each of your complaints. They follow exactly the same pattern. You fail to understand a feature of theory, you throw in a factoid you've misunderstood from a third source, and you claim that it implies that something else is as equally wrong as the statement you've just made. That is not an argument in good faith. There are a handful of axioms on which all modern physics rests. I can take these and derive from them families of particles, all fundamental forces, and various properties of objects of all scales, including estimates on observable quantities. I have done much of that for my research. Newton's gravity just described motions of planets. And it had errors that people knew about for decades before GR came about. Modern physics describes these without error, describes motion of stars and galaxies, formation of new stars and death of the old ones, it describes objects of infinite density and objects of infinitesimal size. It correctly predicts spectra of atoms and time distortions on GPS satellites. All from the same few assumptions and with zero indication of any oversight under a unified theory. There is a lot more to physics than just these base axioms. There is plenty we don't know and plenty we think we know that can be wrong. But if you want to insist on these base assumptions being questionable, and argue it in good faith, you'll have to give up breathing first, as your belief that it's necessary for your sustained existence is infinitely less founded. Since you're not dead yet, I can only conclude that you're either arguing in bad faith or from ignorance. I'll let you try and figure out which for yourself.

It still works. Clouds are considerably colder than the surface, and thermal radiation is 4th power in temperature. Roughly speaking, under clouds, you'd be at half efficiency. Ballpark, as that will vary quite a bit. But that's far from useless either way. Your worst case is fog or a dust storm, actually.

GR and QM have been unified since mid-50s. Dark matter is very well described. We don't know its particle properties, outside of obvious ones, which are hardly relevant at universe scale. LHC has confirmed everything it was expected to and found nothing surprising or shocking. You keep coming up with examples that do not support your thesis, because you have no idea what's going on in modern physics. Just what you've read in popular media. Again, there is a huge difference between dropping weights from a tower and getting 12 decimal places on experiments based on the same underlying field theory in two extreme cases of electron and neutron star. This isn't a net 12 decimal places. We are talking about precision which would be impossible if the core assumptions were not valid. The odds of getting these results without being absolutely right on the fundamentals have so many zeroes after the decimal point, that there is no sensible comparison. There are very, very few things that are as certain as properties of entangled particles. Conservation of energy and momentum are the only two that come to my mind immediately. Compared to odds of these things being wrong, chances of you floating away from Earth in the next ten seconds because gravity suddenly stopped working are a sure thing. When I'm saying that these assumptions being wrong would make ALL OF PHYSICS WRONG, I am not throwing it around lightly. We can talk about warp-drives, visitors from parallel universes, time travel, and psychic powers, and I'll tell you that they are plausible with varying degrees of unlikely. But momentum is conserved. And there is no communication via entanglement. Trying to bury it under "nothing is certain" is just stupid. It's not constructive and subverts the very purpose of learning. There are varying degrees of uncertain, and some things in physics are more certain than absolutely every single one of the things in your daily life that you take absolutely for granted. We are talking about one of them, and you seem to refuse to grasp that.

It radiates as a black body at wavelength matching its temperature. The fancy bits here are that it's reflective to incident sunlight, transparent in the same wavelengths as air, and is a good thermal insulator to conducted heat. That allows the opaque "inner" layer to cool relative to transparent/reflective "outer" layer that's in contact with ambient air.

Common assumptions don't give you 12 decimal places on experiments on particles AND neutron stars. If you don't learn to distinguish between gut feeling and centuries of accumulated knowledge, you will not be able to constructively contribute to any scientific argument. I get it that you don't know which facts about modern physics are important and which aren't, because you clearly haven't studied any of it, so you cannot possibly see the big picture. But take it from somebody who spent over a decade studying particle physics. What you're saying is absolutely wrong. And the way you're building a defense, by trying to prove that everyone else is as clueless as you are, is anti-intellectual. It's the same tactic used by religious fundamentalists and dictators to subvert dissent. You are basically arguing against knowledge and learning on a science sub-forum. That's not a good tone, at a minimum, and I would argue is destructive behavior in any setting.

Ok, these are tin-foil levels of argument. Roughly the same way creationists argue that it's just a valid a "theory" as evolution. You're not creating a good impression by following suit.

There is no such assumption in modern physics. In fact, we know it not to be true. Universe expands faster than light. FTL travel is impractical, but all you have to do is travel fast enough for long enough, and you WILL be going FTL relative to Earth. Care to try again? The state of the black hole is now entangled to the original system. Whether that matters depends on which state it was. If, like in most experiments, you're entangling angular momentum, then angular momentum of the black hole itself is now in a super-position entangled with the state of the test particle. This isn't Voodoo or some dark secrets. It's not even rocket science. It's literally first year course in QM.

You are confusing ad-hoc parameters with core assumptions of the model. This isn't like gravity being wrong in Newtonian physics, and still acting as a good approximation. This is like if conservation of momentum in Netwonian physics was wrong. That is a total deal-breaker. Superposition is one of the core assumption of field theory, and leads directly to concept of entanglement. And absolutely all of modern physics is built on top of field theory. From high-energy physics to cosmology. Entanglement allowing for communication violates the most fundamental assumptions. Throwing these way means throwing away the entire theory. It wouldn't make it just imprecise, but absolutely wrong at its root. In other words, you can't expect entanglement to produce communication, and at the same time being able to use modern physics to predict anything. To be that wrong on entanglement, it has to be wrong on everything. That's also why communication via entanglement is a statistical impossibility, but that's a separate talk. No. If you are going to argue this point, I suggest you first learn what entanglement is from perspective of relevant mathematics, and look up derivation of no-communication. It has nothing to do with paradoxes. Entanglement works exactly the same way even in conditions where time travel is a thing, such as T4 space-time as the most trivial example. You have to be super-careful with these, but you can absolutely deal with time travel in QM setting without any serious issues. More importantly, this is not an assumption based on an axiom. It is a theorem. Which means, if there is superposition, there is no communication via entanglement. If you can find communication via entanglement, all of the physics is wrong - see above. That's how logic and math work. Science is what we build on top of these concepts, and you don't get to apply scientific method to mathematical formulae. It only flows the other way. No, that video talks specifically about time not being reversible. You're actually 100% wrong about it. If you flip t to -t, some left-handed particles start working like right-handed particles instead. Now, if you flip charge, parity, AND reverse time, then you're good. So we still have a symmetry to work with, it just happened to be a bit more complex than we thought. That's another example, by the way. Fact that we were off on the nature of symmetry, is the ad-hoc part. Fact that symmetry is there is fundamental to theory. If we don't have SOME form of TCP equivalent, we have to throw all of our physics away. But if it's merely TCPXYZW sort of symmetry, we can keep going. THAT is how science works. And particle physics is probably where it is illustrated the best.

^ Grapevine, specifically, since Georgia is known for their wines and brandy.