Last time I considered this it was $10M, though I might need to update it for inflation now.

That is irrelevant here though, because a robbery is considered a life-or-death situation in law not because of the monetary amount, but because of the everpresent threat of bodily harm. Whether explicit, with a pointed gun, or implicit. “Give me your money!” … or else… is implied. If the criminal could reach into your pocket and take your money without use of force, without you even knowing, it would not be a robbery but a pickpocket larceny and precisely not covered by deadly force. But a criminal ordering you to give your money is a deadly situation, even if you only got $0.10 in your pocket.

You are implying we should value human life and just hand over the money, but that’s not the issue here. There is no guarantee that you would not be harmed even if you cooperate. A fast food place in my city got robbed, the cashier handed over all the money but the robber got mad there was only $100 in the register, and shot dead the cashier and the customers. The criminal has already demonstrated reckless abandon by engaging you in a robbery, there is no longer any expectation (as would be with any normal stranger) that physical harm would not imminently follow. Next to a literal attempted murder, a robbery is the most dangerous confrontation you could ever find yourself in. I am glad that the law of my state treats it as serious as that.

If you are in a robbery and you are absolutely sure that no harm would come to you if only you cooperate, that is nice, and you can graciously demonstrate your value of human life by handing over your $100, or $12k, or $0.10 or whatever, but such security is not a privilege everyone shares.

physicists are quite confident only blackholes can Hawking radiate

Good to know! I was starting to get worried :D

you absolutely need a horizon to get radiation

Does the particle need to travel all the way from the horizon to reach you? How long does that take? The horizon still exists on the centrifuge, if only for a moment, shifting slightly from one instant to the next. In principle, at any moment you could detach from the centrifuge and fire 10g rocket thrusters in a straight line instead. In that first instant there is no way to tell the difference between the two.

I say this because in the linked paper, the “acceleration” experienced by the positrons was the bouncing off the atomic nuclei in the silicon crystal, which takes place over the space of a few angstroms, or at most within the 3.5mm size of the crystal, in the time given by the speed of 178GeV positrons (+Lorenz contraction). This instant was sufficient to claim Unruh effects were occurring.

Yes, you are right! A scam is not one of the specified crimes. As I understood it from the article, the phone call started out as a regular bondsman scam, but then escalated into threats of harm to the old guy and/or loved ones held in custody at the remote end (?), which elevates the severity, possibly up to a robbery-in-progress. The caller must have dropped the pretense at some point given that the old guy realized it was a scam yet still had the money ready to go in a package on the table. I’d have to read the actual court case to know what really happened, which is too much work, so I wrote my response under the assumption that the old guy was told a family member would be harmed unless he gave the money to an associate who was on the way.

In such a situation, it would be reasonable to initially detain the courier for investigation. If police officers were hiding in wait at the house, they would have done the same thing. It was unreasonable to continue to believe the courier was an associate once it was clear it was an uber driver following an app. So the old guy was guilty for detaining an innocent person without qualified immunity, and crazy for not listening to an explanation of what an uber driver is. Notwithstanding this, there seemingly were threats of physical harm through the phone, so if the old man did treat it as a robbery, and if the courier had been an associate, and the associate did get detained (by the old guy or by the police), and the associate did attempt to escape, there could be a situation where there was an imminent threat that the associate would return to join his accomplice on the phone and the two of them would inflict the promised harm upon the family member they were holding hostage. That would justify the use force up to possibly deadly force to stop the escape. It depends on what exactly was being said on the phone, though again we don’t have the court transcript. Unlikely but possible.

Of course none of this happened, the courier was an innocent bystander, there was no hostage, and the old man was totally unjustified for opening fire under these circumstances. But that what the court trial is for. I do not dispute the outcome and I’m glad this person is now in prison. What I don’t like is the headline saying a crazy guy shot a taxi driver over some missing change (that he himself misplaced). And then people argue that all self-defense is unjust because it lets crazy guys like this get away with murder. Which he did not get away with. And he was not crazy in the way the headline described it, but was in an intense situation which he might have been led to believe was life-or-death. And in the process he did violate self-defense rules in three specific ways. So we’d better learn the rules, and consider in advance our personal approach to the use of force, so we can act cool under pressure later. It could happen to you too.

It is insane to shoot a taxi driver for giving you the wrong change. It is not insane to shoot in self-defense someone robbing you for $12k. Unless you are so anti-gun as to argue that self-defense is never justified and we should just roll over and let ourselves be robbed/kidnapped/murdered, but then I’d say it is you who are insane. Even in my liberal guns-practically-banned state, shooting and killing a robber is perfectly legal (NY PEN 35.15 2b). Here, a robber doesn’t even need to explicitly threaten to use deadly force against you first - being in a robbery is specifically listed among a few select crimes automatically considered to be a life-or-death situation. You can also, even as a non-police officer, use force to detain a criminal or to prevent escape from custody, which is the situation that happened in the article.

Under the law, you have to shoot or detain the right person though. You not only have to think they are guilty, and not only does your thought process have to be reasonable, they have to also actually for real be guilty. If you kill an innocent, you are liable for murder. If you arrest an innocent, you are liable for kidnapping. That’s what the court trial is there to determine. The old man failed on the latter two requirements and was justifiably found guilty. A police officer has an additional qualified immunity. They can arrest someone who they think is guilty, and not get in trouble if the person turns out to be innocent. As far as I understand it, legally this is the only distinction between a police officer and a private citizen in US law.

Also, neither a police officer nor a private citizen can use deadly force to prevent escape (other than a few special cases, like in prisons). That’s another strike against the old man. If a police officer had shot the courier trying to walk away like that, they too would be (or ought to!) put on trial for murder, as that’s not covered by qualified immunity. Like in the example of that guy who got killed on video in 2015 while trying to walk away from a traffic stop.

Misleading headline. As written, it sounds like someone shot their taxi driver for mistakenly thinking they gave them the wrong change. In reality it was an uber parcel courier who was shot while unwittingly acting as a money mule for a phone extortion scammer.

Usually these scams involve money mules who are in some way complicit, in the “ask no questions and look the other way” sense, and who receive a cut of the money they launder. But this time it was a bona fide courier from a courier service (the article mentions Uber working with police to identify the user account that placed the delivery order) - a case of literally shooting the messenger.

So the old man did not wrongly think he was being scammed, he was literally being threatened and robbed for $12k, just not by the uber courier. The headline is clickbait for not making that clear. The courier was not being scammed, just performing a routine paid delivery that happens to be for a criminal.

Another complication is that even if the centrifuge slows down as it gets heavier, you can recover most of that mechanical energy when you hop off the centrifuge with your now full jar. Then you can boost it back up almost up to full speed. So I’m not sure exactly at what point you input energy into the system to instantiate the particles. When they hit the belljar bottom transversely maybe? Is this some kind of Maxwell’s Demon situation where you need to close the jar before the particles fall back out?

Also good to mention Earth! Logically, if Hawking radiation works for black holes it seems as if it would also work for any star or planet! But I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere.

Oh for sure, science is never boring :D but compare the intense situation in the troll science pic to the displayable results from the actual experiment (fig. 1c):

Tip: evidence for the Unruh effect you are looking for is this 2mm difference right here:

The teal dashed line is the power spectrum predicted from theory including the Unruh effect, and violet dashed line is without it. The data points match the teal line better. But you can’t even see that by eye from the noisy dots! You need to do chi-square statistics to even prove it. (The dots below 30GeV - outside the “accelerated thermality” region - are not included in the analysis because they are guaranteed to be incorrect, as the experiment wasn’t sensitive in that range.) Boooring!

What the authors of the paper glance over in a single sentence before moving on to better things is that they had to shoot a FRICKING POSITRON DEATH BEAM FROM THE MFKING LHC through a crystal target and watch the resulting Bremsstrahlung gamma rays that would melt your bones off to obtain these datapoints. Talk about intense!

Like many other popular weird physics effects, it has been accepted non-controversially by scientists and then popularized for decades in fun thought experiments and pop-sci videos, all of which neglecting to mention that no actual experiments have yet been performed. This lack of grounding leads to spread of confusing statements like “the Unruh particles exist in the accelerated frame but not in the lab frame”, which make no sense, for how can there be two separate realities that coexist? Luckily we now do have a first Unruh experiment from 2019 https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00043v7 and the temperature did rise and reality did not split apart. So no longer hypothetical, just routine and boring.