exchemist

My degree, my career, at least in part, and a lifelong interest.

Quite. The book is old news and was discredited years ago, as the Wiki article on it explains: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_Black_Box Behe* has had no credibility since his appearance at the Kitzmiller / Dover School trial, back in 2005. Basically, the pseudoscience of “Intelligent Design” is dead, but the corpse still twitches from time to time when people surface from the creationist community. * though he still seems to have tenure at Yee-Haa university or somewhere..............

Your ignorance is showing. Nobody uses carbon dating for objects more than a few thousand years old. I won’t bother with your other statements. Posting this level of junk on a science forum is pointless.

Yes I think that’s about right. Let’s see if our poster is willing to argue some specific points of contention here on the forum. My guess is he won’t want to try.

It seems vanishingly unlikely. As, by your own admission, you can’t be bothered to read what Darwin wrote, why would anyone take seriously a book recommended by you criticising his ideas? in any case, criticising Darwin is of little interest to scientists. Science has moved on quite a bit in the 150 years since Origin of Species came out. You seem to be flogging a dead horse.

It must have been some sort of trial of behaviour in which it was important that the feeding intervals were truly randomised, to exclude the possibility that the pigeon could be acting in response to some other, time-related, factor, or something.

Excited I don’t know, as I don’t follow abiogenesis research enough to know how radical this finding is. But if mafic glasses available on the surface of the Hadean earth can catalyse RNA polymerisation, that has to be an important piece of the jigsaw. Are there models for where the nucleoside phosphate monomers could have come from?

Suggest you try the test I recommended, by changing the angle of illumination and watching what happens to the colours as you do so. Rotating the specimen slowly may do the trick. If the colours are due to diffraction, as both @sethoflagos and I are proposing, you should see them changing. I think it unlikely that Iridium is responsible. The colours after which it was named were not those of minerals, but colours of the halides in various oxidation states when the element was dissolved in "marine acid" (HCl). The explanation of oxidation of the surface to goethite seems far more likely.

Energy does not have a direction. That should be obvious to you, if you think about it clearly.

Bingo! Well done. Prompted by your response to look up goethite, I found this: https://www.rockngem.com/iridescence-understanding-the-rainbow-in-the-mineral-world/ , which also explains the iridescence is indeed due to interference from microscopic surface irregularities. So now it seems we have a fairly complete explanation.

Yes. This poster has been posting blogs like this for at least five years now, in various places. It has never made any sense and it still doesn't. He makes no effort to interact with readers who ask questions or make observations, just carries on blogging regardless.

Suggest you look it up on the web first, and then revert here with any more specific issues you want to discuss.

But since that would be silly, that can't be what science is saying. I'm not a cosmologist but as I understand it, the age can be estimated, in the Big Bang model, from the temperature of the observed cosmic background radiation and the observed cosmological red shift. The temperature tells you how much space has expanded since the "surface of last scattering", which was the point at which it would have been effectively emitted, while the cosmological red shift gives you an expansion rate. Put the two together and you have an age estimate, back to the surface of last scattering. Extrapolating back from that on the basis of general relativity, you end up with a singularity about 300,000years earlier. So the model is based on observations of features of the universe that we have reason to think would be general, rather than specific to what we can observe with current technology. It is quite good at accounting for other observed features of the observable universe as well. There is more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model

These look like high magnification pictures of the same pyrite specimens you showed us earlier. The iridescent colours look to me as if they could be due to interference fringes, caused by diffraction arising from surface irregularities. You might be able to test this by seeing if the colours change as you move the source of illumination, so that the angle of incidence of the the light changes.

What has this to do with power? ?

Bye.

As I recall, when a non-fluorophore is excited by absorption of radiation, it can lose energy in a number of ways that are non-radiative. These will include collisional deactivation and also in some cases bond-breaking (e.g. if excitation is to a state involving a suitable antibonding orbital). I'm not sure I've seen the word "phosphorophore", but some molecules lose energy radiatively, not by fluorescence but via intersystem crossing to a triplet state, emission from which is known as phosphorescence rather than fluorescence. Conjugated organic molecules are far from the only compounds that can fluoresce*, but their extensively delocalised π-orbitals have fairly low lying excited states that often emit in the visible region of the spectrum without bond-breaking (the σ-bond will hold the molecule together when various π* modes are excited). Since the Stokes shift is something observed when a compound fluoresces, I'm not sure how it can be used to predict whether or not something will fluoresce. I'm afraid I don't know anything about the use of fluorescent molecules in biochemistry (I'm sure others here may), but it is to be expected that some organic molecules may be able to bind to nucleic acids, so synthesising one containing a fluorophore is not hard to envisage in principle. *The word fluorescence comes from the visible glow from fluorite (CaF₂) when it contains certain impurities, under UV illumination. Many minerals fluoresce.

Are they especially colourful? I think Ir compounds are mostly oxidation state +3 or +4 and quite a few of them are black or dark brown. But frankly Ir is not an element I know much about. Which salts do you have in mind?

Hmm, good as far as it goes, but my understanding was that the acidification of the oceans caused by higher atmospheric CO2 tends to make survival harder for all corals. Presumably this effect is global and not confined to warm waters.

Not even that, in the main denominations. Basically, there is no dispute between thinking Christianity and science. Christian thinkers have long since worked out that it is p***ing into the wind trying to oppose science with religious argument. People like Cardinal Wiseman had already realised that, back in in the c.19th.

Your view is consistent with what I understand to be the standard view, adopted by the main Christian denominations - and any Christian with half a brain.

I think the best thing would be a curve showing how the take-up of water varied over the 5 hours. One would expect an exponential of some kind, not a straight line. Obviously a lot depends how how much dessicant you have, since as @studiotpoints out, if it is a small amount it could get saturated. Is this a homework question, or a real scenario that you have?

Your question, as posed, does not make a lot of sense. Salts are just ionic compounds resulting from the reaction of an acid with a base. As most minerals are not acids or bases as such, they can't really be said to have salts. Most coloured salts are compounds of transition metals. This, as I recall, is due to the presence of partly occupied d-orbitals, whose energy levels tend to be split, by the ions surrounding the meal atom in many of their compounds, in such a way that transitions between the levels involve energy in the visible region of the spectrum. Well-known examples of coloured salts would include CuSO4 (blue in hydrated form, white in anhydrous form), CoCL2 (blue in anhydrous form, pink hydrated, FeCL2 (pale green) and so on. But maybe you are trying to get at something else?

But this is exactly the language I find confusing. Binding implies achieving a lower energy state, so that work has to be done to free the bound entities from what binds them. Whereas what we seem to have here is a higher energy state than the quarks would theoretically have if it were possible to observe them separated (and at rest). But I'm getting a sense from you and @swansont that the term "binding energy" is best avoided in this context. The mechanisms are clearly quite different, probably related to this asymptotic freedom idea that I have not fully got my head around.

Not at all. The dipole is due to a distribution of electron density that is offset, to some extent, from the +ve charges of the atomic nuclei. The internal structure of the nuclei has no bearing at all on this. The dimensions of atomic nuclei are far too small compared to the dimensions of the cloud of electrons. A molecule like H-Cl has a dipole because the electrons in the bond between the atoms are biased more towards the Cl atom than the H atom, giving the H atom a partial +ve charge and the Cl atom a partial -ve charge. That effect arises due to the way the electrons occupy successive quantum mechanical states, starting with those of lowest energy. Elements on the right of the p-block of the Periodic Table have valence orbitals that experience a strong nuclear charge in relation to their average distance from the nucleus, whereas those in the succeeding s-block are in the next quantum shell out, so they are not attracted as strongly by the nucleus. It is all to do with the quantum states available to the electrons.