On Wednesday, November 23, 2022 at 4:23:07 PM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 21:10:02 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
> <C...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:58:37 -0000, Fredxx <fre...@spam.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> On 23/11/2022 20:40, Commander Kinsey wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:25:10 -0000, Fredxx <fre...@spam.uk> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 23/11/2022 13:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:

> >>>>> There must be some insulators which cannot form dipoles.
> >>>>
> >>>> Only useful if you know what a dipole is, and an insulator.
> >>>
> >>> I'm quite sure the engineers making the inter-country connections do.
> >>>
> >>>> Of course taking into account, there is no such thing as a perfect
> >>>> insulator, and no such thing as a perfect conductor, superconductors
> >>>> excepted.
> >>>
> >>> It doesn't have to a be a perfect insulator, just one that's rubbish at
> >>> being a dipole.
> >>
> >> I think we have discovered the problem in your understanding. An
> >> insulator rubbish at being a dipole, would normally be called a conductor.
> >
> >Idiot. Different insulators have different dipole properties.

> I don't think a monatomic gas is considered to be a dipole, but their
> Er > 1.

That's Stark effect; an imposed E-field changes the electron orbitals. In theory,
you could identify a nuclear perturbation, too.

On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 21:32:00 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Wednesday, November 23, 2022 at 4:23:07 PM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 21:10:02 -0000, "Commander Kinsey"
>> <C...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:58:37 -0000, Fredxx <fre...@spam.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On 23/11/2022 20:40, Commander Kinsey wrote:
>> >>> On Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:25:10 -0000, Fredxx <fre...@spam.uk> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> On 23/11/2022 13:30, Commander Kinsey wrote:
>
>> >>>>> There must be some insulators which cannot form dipoles.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Only useful if you know what a dipole is, and an insulator.
>> >>>
>> >>> I'm quite sure the engineers making the inter-country connections do.
>> >>>
>> >>>> Of course taking into account, there is no such thing as a perfect
>> >>>> insulator, and no such thing as a perfect conductor, superconductors
>> >>>> excepted.
>> >>>
>> >>> It doesn't have to a be a perfect insulator, just one that's rubbish at
>> >>> being a dipole.
>> >>
>> >> I think we have discovered the problem in your understanding. An
>> >> insulator rubbish at being a dipole, would normally be called a conductor.
>> >
>> >Idiot. Different insulators have different dipole properties.
>
>> I don't think a monatomic gas is considered to be a dipole, but their
>> Er > 1.
>
>That's Stark effect; an imposed E-field changes the electron orbitals. In theory,
>you could identify a nuclear perturbation, too.

I did a summer job working with microwave spectroscopy, at the
University of New Orleans. There was a long, 30 foot maybe, waveguide
with some gas inside and a metal electrode right down the middle. We
applied kilovolt-level square waves to the sceptum and that split the
spectral absorption lines. It was enormously educational: HV square
wave generators, transmission lines, xmitting tubes, thyratrons,
Tektronix scopes, klystrons, mixers, lockin amps, liquid nitrogen,
better than a couple of years in EE school.

I personally bought a non-inductive wirewould power resistor ($3 at
Radio Parts on the former Jackson Circle) that happened to match the
txline impedance of the sceptum in the waveguide, and resolution
leaped. Dr B was shocked. I think the traveling wave of the HV steps
might have matched the prop delay of the microwaves, or at least we
killed a lot of ringing. Cool stuff for a high-school junior.

It was Dr Beeson's project. He was working on the atomic structure of
some organic molecule which I can't remember, but I do remember
getting a gigantic super-resolution Stark spectrum from OCS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonyl_sulfide

Stinky. Big dipole moment. Big dipole moments seem to be associated
with lethal gasses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole#Molecular_dipoles

SF6, used to fill circuit breakers and eyeballs, is non-toxic and has
zero dipole moment.

Not being a student, UNO couldn't pay me. So they created a fake
student ID number, 20,000, and then they paid me 85 cents per hour.
That must have got confusing some years later when there was a real
student number 20,000. I got to use their library too and read the
entire MIT RadLab series.

I recall that there is some case where an electric or magnetic field
manages to change some nuclear property, maybe half-life. In NMR,
nuclear precession frequency is of course proportional to mag field
strength, 4 KHz/gauss for hydrogen.