exchemist

I hadn't spotted that. But indeed: it is zero point energy, the very definition of which is that it can't be extracted, seeing as there is no state below the ground state.......or it wouldn't be the ground state! How absurd. As this is about water, I am always suspicious this may be to do with homeopathy, since serious money can be made out of that. The author, Claudio Messori, seems to be a physiotherapist. What expertise he has in QED or QFT seems rather unclear, ahem.

Yes. This reads almost like a spoof to me. I was intrigued that it references this guy Pollack and his "EZ water" idea. I've come across that before, about 4 years ago. I posted a summary of my brief investigations of it at that time on another forum, which I repeat below: Actually, I've had a chance to read around this "EZ water" thingie a bit more today. I found it was in fact referenced on the site I linked to earlier, about the various crank theories of water. The writer does not dismiss Pollack but, being a chemist, is sceptical, as am I! I think I understand what Pollack thinks he is on to. He thinks he has evidence that wetted hydrophilic surfaces (e.g. glass, or cellular proteins) can impose a longer-range order on the adjacent water molecules than is generally recognised. He thinks this order excludes solute molecules from a layer close to the surface, rather as solute molecules are excluded from ice crystals as they form. As you may know, the developing lattice structure in a crystal can achieve greater stability (shorter and stronger bonding) by excluding foreign items that disrupt the regularity of the order - hence why salt depresses the melting point of ice and so forth. What is bizarre is that he also thinks that IR radiation (O-H stretch frequency I think?) is required for this structure to develop. And he thinks the arrangement is one in which oxygen and hydrogen are present in a ratio of 2:3, giving the structure a -ve charge - as indeed one would expect from a ratio like that, which is effectively H2O.OH- . So that's where the "H3O2" claim I found earlier comes from. He thinks the viscosity of this semi-ordered layer is a lot higher than that of free water (I can imagine it might be) and that, because there are hydrophilic proteins within cells, these features (viscosity, exclusion of solute) can provide an alternative account of the behaviour of certain aspects of living cells. It is not clear what observational evidence he has, or whether anybody has tried to replicate his findings. Needless to say, this has nothing to do with "memory". However you will not be surprised to hear that garbled versions of this have been pounced on by various snake oil salesmen (e.g. some fellow called Mercola, who I think has actually done time for misrepresentation), sundry homeopaths, cranks and pedlars of water-based health gimmicks. I feel rather sorry for Pollack: this is attention he could well do without, if he is trying to get a serious hearing for his ideas. Regarding the last para, this EZ water idea has been picked up on by charlatans trying to promote homeopathy. I do wonder, looking at the history of the present thread, if there may be homeopathy or something pseudo- lurking somewhere, behind the scenes. This Voeikov guy looks dodgy.

Yes, it reads like a "we've-got-one-too" piece, rather than news of substantive progress. But the Chinese may be making progress with it: we've all seen enough recently not to sniff at their technological prowess.

As @studiotpoints out, the oceanic lithosphere and the mantle beneath are both solid, at least on a human timescale (though the upper mantle is more plastic than the crust). To understand plate tectonics you need to appreciate that even solids can deform plastically and flow under the influence of pressure and temperature, on geological timescales, that is, over millions of years. Forget magma in this context. Magma is formed only in a few pockets, deep in the crust or in the top of the mantle, where locally the temperatures is hot enough, and/or the pressure is low enough, and/or the melting points of some of the minerals at that location are low enough that partial melting can occur. Magma is an incidental byproduct of tectonic processes. If you read the link I gave you on isostasy you will see it is about less dense continental crust finding an equilibrium depth in the denser oceanic crust and upper mantle in which it effectively "floats". Even though both are solids, on geological timescales, they will find gradually find their equilibrium level. It is the fact that these islands of lighter minerals have formed (largely due to the fractionation that goes on in volcanism) which gives us the continents. As with ice in water, because the density difference is small, the continental blocks extend to a far greater depth, below the top of the oceanic crust that forms the ocean floor, than the bit that pokes up from the ocean floor to give us dry land. (I find on Wiki density figures for continental crust of 2.8 and for upper mantle of 3.3.) As for your remarks about gravitation and isostasy, the link you provided does not seem to support your claim that measurement of gravitation is at odds with the hypothesis of isostasy. Can you point to something specific in this link that supports your claim?

Yes. You need to take into account the principle of isostasy.https://www.britannica.com/science/isostasy-geology The continents are less dense than the oceanic crust in which they float. There is no disturbance to the centre of gravity when they move around, any more than the centre of gravity of your cold drink shifts, if you move all the ice cubes to one side. Furthermore if, as you propose, the ocean level were to drop, in the era of Pangaea, no significant land masses would be revealed, because all the continental crust is part of Pangaea. All the rest would be oceanic crust, at a depth of several km below sea level.

Exactly. It's the state of preservation that is remarkable. From what I understand, it shows that the embryos of this species of dinosaur were folded up inside the egg in just the same way as modern birds. Which is interesting, but perhaps what one might have expected rather than not.

Yes, it is my understanding that the Casimir effect can be accounted for in terms of London (dispersion) forces between the plates. However I recall reading that the dispersion forces model is actually equivalent to the vacuum fluctuation model. I do not know any QED however, so I'm in no position to understand how this equivalence may arise. The common feature would seem to be the concept of random fluctuations, in the one case arising in the vacuum and in the other arising in the charge distribution of the electrons of the plates. If anyone here can shed more light on this I'd be interested.

Reflection certainly implies the matter in question must interact, i.e. be polarisable by, EM radiation. If it can be polarised by it, there will be some wavelength at which it will absorb and emit, won't there? And, if it reflects, wouldn't we observe reflected radiation.

I'm a bit lost. Surely if S is a surface area, then dF/dS is a pressure function rather than an energy, isn't it?

Expiry date won't make a difference, since neither oxidation nor bacterial action are likely to cause any more dangerous species to be formed when the item is burnt. But burning anything in an open hearth generates smoke - fine particulates, part-pyrolysed organic compounds etc - which tend to be damaging to the lungs and potentially carcinogenic. Here's a short article on the subject: https://www.barbecue-smoker-recipes.com/barbecue-smoke-dangers.html which mentions some of the chemical species that are troublesome. Of the particulates, it is the "PM 2.5" that are considered the most injurious to health. But if it's only a bit and you don't breathe the smoke then I doubt there is much to worry about.

Because when a QM entity is confined by a potential barrier, the wave function penetrates the barrier to some extent. The barrier can be thought of as "damping" the wave function progressively to zero. The lower the barrier, the further the wave function penetrates. If the barrier is also sufficiently thin, the wave function may not be damped to zero by the time it reaches the far side. In such a case, that represents a finite probability of detecting the QM entity outside the confining potential barrier.

Yes in the USA (and the EU) it seems 10ppb is the current maximun for drinking water: https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/drinking-water-arsenic-rule-history One of the problems in modern life is that our ability to detect chemical species is now so great that we can scare ourselves by finding trace levels of all sorts of things everywhere. Even if there is "no safe level", that does not mean you run a significant risk at very low levels. It just means nobody has found a level at which they can confidently claim there is zero risk. Life is not risk-free. By the way, if you drink bottled water you may still find it has arsenic: https://southernscientificireland.com/arsenic-in-bottled-water/ But I confess I do not much like the sound of 500ppb. Anything over 50ppb would seem to be a bad idea.

Yep.

The spin angular momentum is an intrinsic property with a fixed value. Orbital angular momentum is not. I'm not a relativity expert but I would not have thought that linear relative motion would affect the observed angular momentum.

From what I can see the main risk is via ingestion. If you live in the developed world, I doubt any approved water supply would have enough that taking showers or baths would be likely to do you any harm, and the amount left behind on dry dishes would be pretty minimal I should have thought. But what level of As are you talking about?

So you say. But that is exactly what a malware spammer would say too, isn't it? Why would I believe you, when I have no idea who you are? As several others have now also said, post relevant text directly here if you want to discuss something. Apart form the malware question It is bad form, and a bit lazy, to send readers off-site, without providing at least the gist of the issue in your own words here, first.

There is not much point people here reciting basic information that is widely available on-line. Suggest reading, say, the Wiki article and then asking any questions you have arising from that. But I must say this is a very odd question for someone who teaches astronomy to be asking.

No one is going to click on an unknown link with potential malware. If you want a response, I suggest you copy and paste the relevant sections into a post on this forum.

Yes indeed. An atom is of the order of 0.1 nanometres in radius. A water molecule is about 0.3nm across. So in a cubic nanometre, which is 10⁻⁹ of a cubic micron, there are about 3 molecules on a side, i.e. 30 molecules in the cube. (So that checks out with my arithmetic above, phew!)

The key to questions like this one is Avogadro's Number, which is the number of carbon atoms in 12g of carbon, or, say, the number of molecules in 18g of water. This number is roughly 6 x 10²³, (6 followed by 23 zeros, if you write it out longhand). One can use this to work through your aerosol droplet example. 18g of water has a volume of 18cm³ (because the density of water is 1 in these units). There are a million (10⁶) cm³ in a cubic metre, so this becomes 1.8 x 10⁻⁵ m³. Let's pretend your aerosol droplet is a cube rather than pear-shaped, as the error in doing this is not great and it makes the calculation simpler. A cube with a side of 10μ has a volume of (10⁻⁶)³ = 10⁻¹⁸ m³. So it will contain 10⁻¹⁸/1.8 x 10⁻⁵ ~ 5.5 x 10⁻¹⁴ of Avogadro's number of molecules, so the number of molecules will be 5.5 x 10⁻¹⁴ x 6 x 10²³ which is about 3.3 x 10¹⁰. This is 33 billion molecules. That's if I have not made any blunders in my arithmetic (which is easy to do with all these powers of ten, admittedly). Each molecule of water has 3 atoms in it: 2 of hydrogen and 1 of oxygen. So the number of atoms would be of the order of 100 billion. I'm not sure where your 1.3 million comes from but it looks far too small to to me. You can do similar exercises for other small volumes of other materials, but you need to know the molecular weight (molar mass) of the material and its density.

I was always taught the best thing is to clear it off the ground before anything melts - which seems to be what you have been doing.

Something odd about the linked article. It claims half a gallon of fluid can gather in the head: "SANS is not a problem on Earth, where gravity pulls fluids down into the body each time a person gets out of bed. In space, the lack of gravity prevents this daily unloading process, allowing more than half a gallon of body fluids to gather in the head and apply pressure to the eyeball." What can this mean? There is no way that any significant extra volume of fluid can get into someone's head, given the rigidity of the skull, surely?

Barely. With deuterium you can see some differences from regular hydrogen but that's because the mass is doubled. This affects things like some spectroscopic properties and reaction rates a bit. With heavier elements to a first approximation they don't differ.

Hmm, I'm afraid this doesn't seem to mean very much. "All cause is relative to infinite effect"? Eh? And what is an "infinite cause", when it's at home? This sort of guff reminds me of Chopraesque woo. Whatever it is you are asserting, it seems unmoored in evidence and nothing to do with science.

He's right about the breeder blanket, according to the link I included in my post of 10th Dec. This is proposed, in the DEMO reactor, to run at 300-500C, be cooled by helium and thus provide the heat for steam-raising. So whatever it is made of it must be able to convert the energy of most of the neutrons to heat. It will have some Li in it, for breeding more tritium. ITER has a blanket, though it won't breed and won't generate power: https://www.iter.org/mach/Blanket