exchemist

As it happens, neither of my parents was born in the UK, though both were English. One was born near Madras (as it then was) and other in Canton (as it then was). That's what happens when your country used to have an empire. Brits went all over the world. And now we are supposed to complain that people from those countries come over to Britain instead. Oh, and my son's mother was French so he's not British by these criteria either. Just like the King! And the children of millions of other Brits who have married people from other countries. It really is extraordinarily stupid.

OK yes ego but a very specific manifestation of it, which is suspicion of accepted ideas on principle and a need to assert being individual and different. “Everyone’s got it all wrong, hahaha…. except me.”

Yes, Ego >> Capacity => crank. But there is often another factor I think, which is a burning desire to show science is in some way wrong. Exhibit A being @Delburt Phend , for instance. I've read articles about the contrarian impulse. Apparently there is research showing quite a few of these people don't just go in for a single crank notion, or conspiracy theory, but for a whole lot of them. What they want to be is different: independent-minded people who work everything out for themselves and don't follow the herd. Unfortunately, if one combines that urge with a poor grasp of science, one gets silliness. However, perhaps this is straying from the thread topic.

The was a funny radio interview with one of these politicians, whose party is funded by an overseas billionaire, in which he was asked whether he considered the King to be British, given that his father was partly Greek and Danish and was born in Corfu. The guy wriggled and squirmed and couldn't give an answer.

Perhaps I should clarify that when I speak of models in chemistry I mean all chemical theories and principles. Science consists of models of the physical world. When I use “arrow pushing” in organic reaction mechanisms that is a model. No one think pairs of bonding electrons physically move exactly as shown by the arrows. Physical chemists are pretty dismissive of arrow pushing and theoretical chemists even more so. But the model works, because it (usually) predicts the reaction products and intermediates correctly. And it’s a lot easier than doing QM calculations on multi-atom molecules. But really all science theories are models of reality, not reality itself.

Plenty. Mostly funded by overseas money, ironically.

I am the first to agree that there are alternative ways to model many scenarios in chemistry and that one chooses the model most appropriate to the problem at hand while recognising all the options are only approximations. But that is effectively the “shut up and calculate” principle, applied in the chemical context. What is also interesting is to explore how the alternative models, ( say valence bond vs molecular orbital models of bonding) often merge together to provide a more complete description, though often in a way that is too complicated to be helpful in practice. It is probably only in physics that the systems studied are simple enough to allow modelling that is exact in its predictions. So that is where one can imagine, in principle, that the fundamental interactions might be somehow brought together into a single comprehensive description. But it may be a forlorn quest of course. There is no theorem that says it must be possible, just an aesthetic conviction.

I'm puzzled by your comment that nature might be unpredictable at heart. Surely we already know from the success of science up to this point that nature is predictable? Not 100% deterministic, sure (Heisenberg etc.) but still predictable to within certain well defined predictable limits.

I'm not sure any of that reduces the number of equations, though. It seems to me as a humble chemist that that the equations get hairier and hairier the deeper one delves into the fundamentals of matter and its interactions. Isn't it, rather, a search for philosophical or aesthetic satisfaction by tying together things that seem separate? There seems to be a deep conviction in physics that there should be elegance in nature and that everything should be connected in some way. That principle has served physics very well until now, though it is not clear to me why it should necessarily be a reasonable expectation. Perhaps what you are articulating is the same sentiment as that very funny quip of Feynman's: "You don't like it? Go somewhere else! To another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, OK?"

I don't anyone is suggesting an "end point" though. The suggestion is just that revolutionary breakthroughs of the magnitude of relativity and quantum theory seem less likely now.

Well if one takes the view, as I do, that science makes ever more accurate models of the physical world, one should expect an asymptotic approach to reality and thus fewer and fewer ground-breaking changes over time. There are some big unsolved issues though. Things in cosmology like dark matter and dark energy (I’m intrigued by entropic gravity which would be a radical change in how that is modelled) and in biochemistry around the origin of life. We will get some breakthroughs there, I’m sure. In particle physics I find it a bit suspicious that the fundamental unit of electric charge in leptons is 1 whereas for hadrons it is 1/3. Something fishy there, perhaps? And in the applied sciences, like medicine, there is clearly huge scope for progress.

OK he is going to see if he can access the site from his new laptop and, if not, see if he can join under another name. He’ll report back and then we can see what to try next. Suggest we give him 48hrs or so as I don’t know how busy he is. Thanks for the help.

He says he has (now) a new laptop. But he has been unable to get on for months, apparently, so that is not the issue. I wonder if, given he has a new computer, the best thing is (1) for him to try to join under a new name and (2) if that doesn't work, ask you guys if you can delete his account entirely and let him rejoin afresh, if that is possible. Let me talk to him before you do anything further.

Oh goody.

In case anyone is interested, several people including myself went through @Delburt Phend 's notions pretty exhaustively on the .com forum, 9 (nine) years ago. I had forgotten that the Atwood machine featured in it even back then. https://www.scienceforums.com/topic/29662-experimental-proof-that-energy-is-not-a-conserved-quantity/ In the end we decided he must be posting in bad faith. I am not optimistic that this will go any better. Curiously, back then he was able to post in fairly lucid English. I wonder why he seems unable to do that any more.

Sometimes free energy cranks can provide amusement by providing a chance to analyse their proposed devices without recourse to the laws of thermodynamics, just for the hell of it. I’ve taken part in a number of those, over the years. There is always a flaw in their reasoning, but it can take some discussion to identify it. That’s because the crank invariably constructs a device or scenario sufficiently complicated that they cannot analyse it correctly, which of course is why they have persuaded themselves they have found a way to break the laws of thermodynamics. But you are in a class of your own, because you don’t accept the principle of conservation of angular momentum either. Basically, you don’t understand the mechanics of rotating bodies. I am not sure how many people here will be interested in attempting to teach this to you, especially given that you won’t want to learn, as it would knock your idea on the head.

Hoho, you again! It’s been so long, since the satellite tether (was it?). So now it’s Atwood’s machine, eh? Still hoping to show energy is not conserved, I presume. But as @swansont points out, you will need to able to explain it a lot more clearly. Perhaps a diagram might help. Last time round I seem to recall you had difficulty with the concept of angular momentum. I wonder if that is where this new attempt will founder.

You are fantasising. I guarantee there are no UK professors following your work, whether in science or theology faculties. 🙄

There is no science in your ramblings, but I was interested to learn what sea glass is. It’s very pretty. I gather the best place for it in Britain is at Seaham, on the coast of County Durham, as there used to be a glassworks there making bottles.

Yes the “Hammer of the Scots”. A tough guy. But left rather a mess for his son, who wasn’t up to it.

Other sources, the market’s lack of belief in whatever Trump says from one day to the next, and release of US strategic oil stocks. The last of these is getting close to running out. If and when it does, then if the Strait remains blocked at that point, we can expect $100/bbl again. So far as I know, no one is talking about $200/bbl, though there was a bit of wild speculation of that order back in March.

Welcome to the Enshittocene, then. But you have a point: it feels in some ways like going back to the 1970s, in which we used to speak of "producer mentality". This was the notion that organisations were run to optimise things for the producer rather than for the consumer. So you had to wait 6 weeks to have a telephone installed, because that suited the monopoly telecoms provider. In the 1980s and 90s, deregulation and the encouragement of free market competition for a while gave consumers back some power, as buyers who could shop around for better service. Things got immeasurably better for consumers. But with the internet era we have seen a handful of powerful corporations, almost all American, wrest back market power by advantages of scale and by suppressing incipient competition (often by buying it) to snuff it out before it can scale up and provide alternative for consumers. Basically, the anti-monopoly (anti-trust) regulations have not kept up with businesses based on control of intangibles like data. So consumer power is now too weak to force these businesses to put their customers first. Indeed, it is a moot point who actually are the customers now. Is it the users? Or is it, rather, the advertisers? So it's back to producer mentality. We need politicians willing to regulate these businesses toughly, instead of being held in thrall by "jam tomorrow" promises of AI advantage, much of which I suspect is self-serving horseshit.

Balls.😁

The Journal of Cosmology seems to appear on Beall’s List of potentially predatory journals and to have a highly dubious reputation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology I see you have had your ideas published by SCIRP journals. SCIRP also appears on Beall’s List. Interesting that you say your theory is known at “theological universities”. Do I take it that your theory is theology, then?

Right. So it's all ballocks and they should damned well stump up the extra.