According to his bio on Wikipedia, Dr. Toby Cosgrove has an undergraduate degree in history from Williams College, got his medical degree from University of Virginia School of Medicine, worked as an Army surgeon during the (American) Vietnam War, and worked as a surgeon and eventual chairman of its Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. So, while he’s qualified to be a physician he’s not a scientist, not a hematologist, and certainly not an expert in microfluidics or the design of complex medical diagnostic equipment.
That depends on how hard it is to make or duplicate, really. Science and technology work the same for everyone, after all; if somebody makes a copy in their lab to “disprove” that it’ll work, it’ll still work regardless of their belief.
On the other hand if how it supposedly works is kept secret, or it requires something like a few billion dollars and a space mission to even test it then yes, you can expect most scientists to not believe it. The former, especially; it’s a longstanding common feature of pseudoscience that either how it “works” is kept secret, or the supposed effects are subtle enough that, conveniently, only believers actually see them.
I don’t believe the statement that “causality doesn’t hold in quantum mechanics” is true. Causality, broadly defined as the fact that events happen in a time-ordered way such that an event can only have been influenced by events in its past light-cone, and can only influence events in its future light-cone, is fundamentally a statement about the speed of light and seems to me applies just fine in the quantum world.
Hidden-variable theories, both local and non-local, are essentially attempts to introduce determinism into quantum mechanics, and their failures (like violations of Bell’s inequality) speak to the absence of determinism, not absence of causality. ISTM that the two concepts are similar but not at all the same. While strict deterministic cause-and-effect is not necessarily observed in quantum behaviours, we do indeed observe a consistent temporal order of influences constrained by relativity.
I’m not sure what to say about time symmetry. It cannot in general exist in the macroscopic world because of entropy, though it can in specific equilibrium conditions. In the quantum world, it seems to be the subject of some debate, where it’s even been proposed that t-symmetry could enable retro-causality. But I don’t think that does anything to disprove the above-stated evidence for causality at the quantum level.
In the first sentence, the word “could” is doing all the heavy lifting. He makes no claims about the Theranos technology at all.
The second sentence is a generic statement about “healthcare innovation” without making any particular statement about what Theranos is bringing to the table.
It’s entirely possible that a couple of folks on the board of the Cleveland Clinic at the time leaned on the CEO to sink some of the clinic’s funds into this ill-starred venture, which caused him to make this non-endorsement endorsement. Possibly they would have done this because Theranos, taking on water at the time, was a company they were also invested in and they and wanted a chance at saving their investment. In any case, Cosgrove gave it rather less than a full endorsement.
There is no electric field inside a conductor, like the plate of a capacitor. The free charge collects at the surface to balance any external field. At the charge density in question, the accumulated charge density would be about the thickness of five atoms. In other words, the plate would become a plasma.
As I understand it, the charge is actually stored in the dielectric.
There is the famous Leyden jar demonstration where you charge it up, then lift out the inner bucket. Carefully with an insulating rod, of course. Then you connect it to the outer bucket so there is no potential difference remaining.
Then you replace the inner bucket, and behold: the voltage is back and you can show this with a spark.
Checked out the wikipedia description of Leyden Jars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar# It seems that the early researcher where a little confused. There was some residual charge due to dielectric absorption by water absorbed into the glass of their jars.
Addenbrooke (1922) found that in a dissectible jar made of paraffin wax, or glass baked to remove moisture, the charge remained on the metal plates