exchemist

If he doesn't, we may have to resort to the Telegraph.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. E=mc² returns a result of zero for a massless entity like a photon. You need the full formula including momentum, which for a massless entity reduces to E=pc, which in turn, via de Broglie's relation, gives you Planck's formula E=hν. More fundamentally, "light is energy" is just wrong. Energy is one of many properties of light. You seem to have watched too much Star Trek.😀

Bagasse is already used to provide power to run the sugar mill, with excess sold to the electricity grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagasse.

If our poster is being consistent, he or she won't even see your response! (I'd have thought that posting on a discussion forum, with the express intent of not reading or reacting to responses, defeats the goal of the forum and should probably be treated as spamming. But perhaps I'm being harsh.)

It could be a uric acid crystal. Here's a picture I found of some on the internet: To me, your picture does not look biological, but more likely chemical. But I am prejudiced, of course.😀

Can you provide a source for these reports you speak of? I've never heard of this before.

Oh I don't know that scam. I must look out for it. But people are naïve. Several quite educated people I know think these Brita water filters must be good because you see a few black particles in the water reservoir at the top. In fact that's just a bit of the activated carbon filtration material that has escaped: they really work mainly by ion exchange but use carbon to trap chlorine etc. (I use one because it makes better tea, with less insoluble tannin deposit in the cups and teapot).

This all sounds a bit hysterical. We most certainly are not "assaulted by thousands of deadly chemicals" every day. If we were, we would be, er, dead. Yet life expectancy continues to rise in the developed world. That would not be happening if what you claim were true. So it's obvious there is no "chronic onslaught" on our bodies- or not one our bodies are not coping with, for the most part. There are some artificial substances around, e.g. endocrine disruptors, where there seems to be a case for reducing our levels of exposure, and there have of course been some scandals in the past. We learn more every day, but it is quite wrong to talk in such apocalyptic terms. No. If you want to know more about ageing, I suggest reading a bit about telomeres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Association_with_aging Forget "toxins". That is mostly health woo for the gullible.

There can be, obviously, and these cause what we call "poisoning". But by and large these are specific agents, not generally encountered in normal life by most people.

It seems to me the whole idea of "toxins" building up in the body is a bit bogus. It's a term used almost exclusively by people trying to peddle health gimmicks, and not by health professionals, so far as I can see. There are a few real toxins, I suppose, such as lead or mercury, that can be picked up from some polluted foods or environments, and you can get poisoned by substances such as alcohol or drugs, but these aside I don't think it's in general a very helpful idea. Your liver converts most substances capable of causing damage into forms that can be excreted normally via the kidneys or bowel. Drink plenty and eat healthily and let those excretion systems handle it.

I understand it could shed light (haha) on dark matter. If it's confirmed and has the right mass, or something, ........................

Yes we all suffer, Ducky. I do most earnestly say unto thee: "Get thee gone, thou facetious timewaster".😁

Aha but that’s different. It’s one thing to say HAVING energy, as a property, is enough for an entity to be said to exist in some sense. It’s quite another to say - as apparently he didn’t - that it IS “pure energy”. It is that which is ballocks, because it implies that energy is something that can have independent existence. It can’t. And you don’t provide the context in which his remark was made, which would shed more light on what he meant by what he said. Taking individual remarks out of context is always liable to create misunderstandings as to what was meant.

That’s interesting, certainly. I’ll have look up the bit about the redness. Presume it signifies absorption bands in the green and blue.

No physicist would ever say an entity was pure energy. It’s a stupid thing to say, like saying something is pure electric charge or pure mass, or pure momentum. I guarantee this person you are claiming to quote said no such thing. Energy is not “stuff”. You can’t have a bottle of energy. You can a bottle of stuff that HAS energy of course, but that is different. It’s much more likely a physicist would say light is a disturbance in the electromagnetic field, which has various properties, including frequency speed and wavelength, momentum, spin and energy.

Well there I agree. I think it more likely that some form of monitoring of radiation might take place, as in SETI for instance. I’m afraid that, not having a TV, I didn’t see the programme you refer to. What was it called, and on what channel? And what chemistry did it talk about?

It seems hard to believe a Physics prof like Flip Tanedo would say what you quote him as saying. “Pure energy” is Star Teek, not physics and the rest is bad English. Where did you get this from and what was the context?

I would suggest it was because we could get back, within our own lifetimes, to pass on what we had learnt and thereby advance the sum of human knowledge, and sometimes because we could bring back something to our societies of commercial value. The problem I see with interstellar travel is this is not possible, almost irrespective of the lifetime of the organism that travels, because, as Douglas Adams observed, in space travel the numbers are awful.

If there more than three reasons, let’s hear them, so that we can pursue the discussion. I am willing to have my scepticism overturned if you have a persuasive argument. But I’m not interested in playing games. If you going to be coy and demand that I play cards I don’t have, while not playing the cards you claim to hold, I’m out of this.

If you think I can come up with 3 reasons (I can’t, obviously, or I wouldn’t be saying what I’m saying), why don’t you propose some yourself?

What would be the point of commissioning voyages lasting tens of thousands of years, without even knowing what you would find, and with no means of sharing the knowledge obtained?

Rumsfeld was quite right, of course - though wrong about almost everything else. But interstellar travel seems to be pointless unless relativity is completely wrong, for which there is no evidence. So one would need more than just a new phenomenon to be discovered. And the absence of interstellar visitors to date is at least consistent with relativity being right.

I’m afraid it looks very much as if your hovercraft is full of eels.

Agree about the ZZZzzzz..........😆

Every word you write seems to drip creationism, even though you may deny that ID is inherently creationist. There is plenty of room for scientists to be religious believers, but none at all for people that try to shoehorn supernatural agency into science. Science looks for explanations of nature in nature. In other words, the scientific method employs methodological naturalism. That has been at its heart since natural science first developed after the Renaissance. Also at the heart of science is the requirement for a theory to be able to predict what we should be able to observe. It should be obvious that ascribing phenomena to supernatural agency, not bound by physical laws, defeats any hope of explanations that are predictive. For these reasons “intelligent design” is not only pseudoscience, but actually anti-science. I find it far easier to respect the views of an overt creationist than someone who pretends to be scientific while undermining the very principles on which science is founded. For these reasons I despise Behe and the rest of the (diminishing) ID gang. ID was always a political, social engineering project, originally conceived by a lawyer who is now, thankfully, dead. ID will soon go the same way, deservedly.