exchemist

Determining death has considerable legal consequences so it is inevitable that death must in practice have a definition in law. This legal definition, drafted by legislators as it will be, may differ somewhat from one country to another. But you cannot use that to draw any scientific conclusions. The law is not science. The law sets up rules that society agrees to be bound by. As such it may have to take account of a range of human, social, religious and political factors as well as science. For science, you need reproducible evidence. Arguing about law is utterly irrelevant. You've been told several times how death is established scientifically, but you seem to want to cling on to the notion that a person can be revived after circulation has stopped and brain activity has ceased for an extended period. This is contrary to current understanding. It is you that needs to substantiate that claim, by producing well-attested evidence of people whose brain activity has definitively been established to have ceased for a period of time, but who nonetheless have been revived. So far you have not done so. All I have seen from you is a collection of anecdotes, not involving any proper scientific monitoring, taken from newspapers etc. and a lot of argument. That is nowhere near good enough. You have not made your case. Where is the data?

This is in fact untrue. I quote from one commentator in 2006, after the Kitzmiller trial which basically destroyed ID: "We all remember a few years ago as Dembski spoke breathlessly about how Behe and Snoke's upcoming 2004 paper "may well be the nail in the coffin [and] the crumbling of the Berlin wall of Darwinian evolution." In fact, that paper ended up as one of the nails in the ID coffin in the Kitzmiller trial, as Behe was forced to admit under oath that their computer simulation had in fact concluded that an irreducibly complex protein binding site could evolve in only 20,000 years even when the parameters of the experiment were purposely rigged to make it as unlikely as possible." I think that's rather funny. Hahaha.

So all that stuff you wrote about entropy and about design didn't make any points, then?

This is very tedious. You do not understand entropy for a start. There is no reason why nature cannot spontaneously produce a lower entropy system from a higher entropy one, provided more entropy is created in the process elsewhere. This is what happens every time a crystal forms, for instance. Secondly, the whole notion of "design" in nature is a useless concept from a scientific point of view, because there is no way to define it objectively. There is thus no way to determine whether or not anything is designed. Thirdly, the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design was blown out out of the water years ago and its founder (a lawyer of course, not a scientist) is now dead.

You mean ε as in the formula for refractive index n=√(εᵣμᵣ) ? What happens is that the bonding electrons couple to the radiation, which can be thought of as a sort of forced resonance oscillation, in which the forcing is due to the oscillating electric vector of the radiation. This has the effect of changing the phase velocity of the light. It is a result of the material being polarisable by the light. The degree to which this occurs depends on the frequency of the light, making the refractive index different for different frequencies of radiation. This is what is called "dispersion" and is why a prism (or a raindrop) can split white light into the colours of the rainbow. What is interesting to me, from the point of view of physical chemistry, is that the polarisability and the change in phase velocity become greater and greater, as the frequency gets closer and closer to an absorption frequency for the material. At the absorption frequency itself, you have the limiting case, in which the material becomes effectively infinitely polarisable, the phase velocity becomes zero - and the material is then opaque and absorbs the light. In the case of silica (glass) there is an absorption band is in the UV, which occurs where the electrons in the Si-O bonds jump to a different, higher energy, molecular orbital. (There is another absorption band in the IR, which is due to excitation of a collective mode of vibration of the bonds in the crystal structure.) So what is happening with refraction is that the light undergoes a kind of temporary pseudo-absorption and re-emission process as it passes through. It is not a real absorption however. It's more as if the light finds itself walking on a spongy, bouncy trampoline, which slows it down. (The real model for this process requires a lot of QM maths involving perturbation theory, which I once knew at university but have long since forgotten.)

Yes. In the case of the polarisation in glass induced by EM radiation, we have to be talking about induced dipoles, i.e. in the electron distribution. One would not want to give the impression that light is able to alter the arrangement of the Si (δ+) and O (δ-) atoms in the crystal structure. But I do feel it would help to know what the context is for the poster's question. It could be to do with reflection, or with refractive index, or perhaps something else.

You are not providing much context to your enquiry, and this response of yours is similarly not one to which an informative response can be made. If you could explain in more detail what phenomenon you are trying to understand, we can help you further. As it is, all I can usefully say is that glass is polarisable, due to the electrons in its chemical bonds (the valence electrons).

It's like a compass needle. The configuration it spontaneously takes up is the one aligned with the Earth's magnetic field because that is the state of lowest energy. The opposite orientation is the one with the highest energy. The lowest energy is when the N pole of the needle is facing the S pole from the surrounding field, i.e. you have N-(S-N)-S rather than N-(N-S)-S. That's what the animated diagram in the link is illustrating. However in the case of the electron or nucleus, the quantum-allowed orientations are only partially aligned with or against the prevailing field, hence the 2 diagonal orientations shown in the animation.

I must say I find that argument disingenuous bullshit. I and several others have given good reasons why it makes sense for the make-up of the highest court to have representation from a variety of the social groups whose laws they have to interpret. There is no suggestion by anybody serious that a professionally inadequate candidate has been selected, because of skin colour. Not even Petersen alleges that this candidate is not fully competent to do the job. And the US Senate has agreed she is competent. So it is pure hysteria to suggest anyone is being "stripped of their dignity" by this process. What rot.

Oh dear. I'm not a doctor but your last two posts look to me very much like "word salad", in its medical sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad I suggest you seek psychiatric help, if you are not already getting it. And I'm now out of this discussion.

It is recognised in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK, that senior judges, because they are appointed towards the end of distinguished legal careers, tend to reflect the social makeup of the legal profession 30 years before. Judges are famous for being a bit out of touch. Yet these people make the law, today, for the whole of society. It can make sense, therefore, to prefer a candidate - if, as in this case, a sufficiently able one is available - that widens the range of social representation on the bench. (You can look up tosser if you like - it is impolite and chosen for that reason.)

You need justices that represent the range of people they are judging. And by any standards this candidate seems better qualified than some of the recent appointees. If she were no good she would not have been confirmed. (Peterson is a bit of a tosser, in my opinion.)

Haha. It won't work. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever.

I think I may now have understood why you think that this device could work. I notice you said in your opening post that:- "The trick is that the weight that rotates upwards does not move further away from its fulcrum at the top right of the disc. So technically no work is performed moving the weight closer to the axle of the wheel. The work performed is the wheel rotating." It looks as if you think that because the torque exerted by the descending weight, which is at full extension along its arm, exceeds the torque due to the rising weight, which is progressively being wound in along its arm, there is a torque imbalance in favour of accelerating the wheel. This would of course be in conflict with the energy analysis, which would be that as the rising weight is returned to the same height as the descending weight, no net work is done and thus the wheel will not accelerate. But I think you will find there is an additional source of torque, exerted on the arm of the rising weight, due to the mechanism used to pull it in. This will exactly counteract the torque imbalance arising from the difference in leverage from the weights themselves. So no free lunch.

Then what the hell are you talking about Nietzsche for, you berk? This is pointless. I've had enough.

Medical mistakes are commonplace. However it is extremely rare indeed for an error to be made when someone is pronounced dead, since that is pretty easy to determine, as has been explained to you several times now.

The fact that cars sometimes crash does not call into question the laws of mechanics. Similarly, occasional medical incompetence does not call the science of what happens at death into question.

OK so two ideas: a struggle that some people have against poverty, and Nietzsche's idea that if one does not believe in God one has to replace the role of God in some way. The first one seems to be a social issue rather than anything to do with religion. Marx, at any rate, did not seem to think religion helped with it. On the second, you will need to explain first of all why Nietzsche thought that a replacement for God would be needed, if one did not have religious belief.

Read your own link: https://mashable.com/article/woman-wakes-up-in-morgue

Eh? Who the f*** is "Fred", suddenly? And why don't you answer my question? A struggle has to be against something. Who is struggling and against what? Is this "Fred" person struggling against a "wealth gap", or something? If so, who cares? And what does this have to do with atheists believing in religion? Or are you just someone who habitually makes no sense?

None of these links has any scientific evidence of a person resuming life after being dead for hours. At best they are unsubstantiated anecdotes and, in one of them, the article even explains why they were not actually dead.

And yet you are unable to produce any of this supposed evidence. ( [whispers] That is because it doesn't exist. We all know that, you see.)

Don't worry, there are plenty of people here who are at least as adept at mathematics as you are likely to be. It's a science forum. By the way, I watched the video and burst out laughing. The wheel conveniently moves only a quarter of one turn...... and then one of the weights falls off. Hilarious. Why not wait until the thing can perform a full rotation - without bits dropping off - before trying to make a video? But of course the snag then, from your point of view, will be that it will be obvious it doesn't work. As always, a video is fairly useless at describing a mechanism. One needs a diagram with a written explanation, showing how the wheel is constructed. I notice for instance that the weight that is initially at the bottom starts to slide inward on its shaft as it rises. It is not clear what mechanism is doing that and this is crucial as it is obviously doing work on the weight against gravity. Can you provide a diagram and explanation of the mechanism that lifts the weight? There is an Earth Science section on this form, with a whole sub-section devoted to climate.

You are still trying to shift the burden of proof onto your readers: "Prove me wrong!", the age-old cry of the crank down the centuries. Science relies on reproducible evidence. Without that, you have nothing to persuade anyone to take you seriously.

It won't work of course, so you are wasting your time. The reason why (apart from the obvious point about violating conservation of energy) is that when the weights are closer in to the wheel and have less leverage, there are more of them. This counteracts the torque of the weights that are at full extension from the wheel on the other side. As for your point about gravity having energy, yes we know: it's called "gravitational potential energy" and we learn about it in school, around the age of 11.