exchemist

Do you really think nobody would notice this "resource consumption" and take steps to limit it?

My actual sentence, part of which you have snipped out of the whole, thereby altering its meaning, was : " If the foetus has the normal complement of chromosomes and the mother has no problems in the pregnancy, it would seem there are no issues for the child, once it is born. " Down's syndrome involves an extra copy of all or part of chromosome 21.

All these issues seem to relate either to chromosomal abnormalities or to the process of pregnancy itself. If the foetus has the normal complement of chromosomes and the mother has no problems in the pregnancy, it would seem there are no issues for the child, once it is born.

Well yes, sure, if it is literally zero, but equally one can say density has no physical meaning if one has a zero-sized lump of material. What I suppose I mean is it that has physical meaning if instead one considers, let us say, an arbitrarily small volume of space close to the nucleus. What I'm rather more interested in, though, as I don't have the physics to know the answer to this, and I hope you might, is whether one can legitimately speak of an s-electron passing through the nucleus. I am not sure whether any of the interactions operating in the nucleus would prohibit this. Do you know?

I'm not sure I agree. It seems to me that the concentration of a dissolved chemical substance, or the strength of a magnetic field - or indeed the density of a material - has a physical meaning, regardless of what volume one considers.

Yes, I've got Roslin's book. What you say is trivially true, if your 0.001th percentile does indeed generate waste exponentially. But that nicely illustrates how naive (a polite way of saying "wrong") it is to model just about anything on the basis of a pure exponential - a point Roslin makes repeatedly. Nothing works like that. In the case of resource consumption, it is obvious that as a resource becomes more scarce, it becomes more costly and the incentive to substitute it with something else - or to stop the activity entirely- grows. So very quickly you get a departure from exponential behaviour. In the case of fossil fuel consumption, we do not see anything like exponential growth. We are still seeing growth, true, but it is linear or plateauing. So please put aside these exponential extrapolations. They almost invariably give wrong predictions. Just about their only use is to show people what would happen if nothing were done to prevent a runaway exponential.

Isn't that just tantamount to saying that a sphere of zero radius contains zero volume, so the chance of the electron being there is zero, the non-zero probability density function notwithstanding?

Bitcoin is just the latest IT fad, followed by a handful of nerdy and greedy people. It already looks doomed, because of its absurd energy consumption, cf. the recent reverse ferret by Elon Musk (now that he has made a tidy profit, no doubt). If Bitcoin doesn't fix this, it will get shut down. By governments. Human society has lots of ways of preventing runaway exponentials. Population growth is another. All the indications are it will stabilise, because as people get more prosperous they delay having children and want to focus more attention on a small number of them. More and more countries are now worrying about ageing or even falling populations, China included. Climate change and pollution are far more pressing concerns than bloody bitcoin*. * Once memorably described by Warren Buffet as "rat poison, squared".

Ah, I may have misinterpreted what you were looking for in terms of physical significance. Let me try another angle. You may have come across the problem with the original Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom that it can't account for why a supposedly orbiting electron does not emit radiation, lose kinetic energy and fall into the nucleus. In a sense you can view the s-orbitals as the QM version of exactly that scenario. Electrons in s orbitals have zero angular momentum, so they can't be said, in any sense, to be "orbiting " the nucleus. Instead, it is as if they continually fall towards it - even through it perhaps - and come out the other side. Being QM entities (Uncertainty Principle and all that), one cannot say they follow any defined trajectory of course, but the overall sense is of being able to touch the nucleus, rather as if they fall into it. Whereas p, d, f, etc orbitals have 1,2, 3 etc units of angular momentum and, lo and behold, all have a node at the nucleus, which is more consistent with some kind of "orbiting" motion, even though again, being QM entities, they have no defined trajectory. So I'be tempted to say the physical significance of non-zero ψ at the nucleus is a reflection of the absence of orbital angular momentum.

I don't believe there are any simple exponential processes that are relevant to this issue. Almost everything proves to be self-limiting in some way, eventually. (And actually, I've never understood the Fermi paradox. It seems to me that, given that in space travel all the numbers are awful, any intelligent race of aliens would work out that embarking on interstellar travel at all is a pointless exercise, and consequently signalling to the void is equally pointless.)

To build a bit on what @swansonthas said, yes it does have profound significance in chemistry. Because the s orbital wave function has no node at the nucleus, it implies that the electron spends some of its time up close to the nucleus. This means that, in multi-electron atoms, the s electrons are exposed to the full nuclear charge more than electrons in p , d or f orbitals, which are more "shielded" from the full nuclear charge by the electrons in shells closer in. S-orbitals are said to "penetrate" the cloud of electrons surrounding the nucleus more than the others. As one goes up* the Periodic Table, the increasing nuclear charge progressively pulls in the s orbitals and lowers their energy more than it does for the others. This is the reason why the Periodic Table has the shape it does. It results in s orbitals having lower energy than p, d or f orbitals of the same shell. This even happens to such a degree in the 4th row that at potassium, the 4s has lower energy than 3d. This is why the first row of the transition elements (d block) appears after K and Ca. It is only then that the 3d has come down in energy enough to be filled, in preference to 4p. *This concept of progressively filling subshells with electrons as the nuclear charge increases from one element to the next is known as the Aufbauprinzip (= building up principle).

While everything you have said is illuminating (to me, anyway), it presupposes an already high degree of order in living things, viz. a system of heredity, mediated by codes of bases on a long molecule. So it seems to me it can't address the fundamental argument in the (creationist) claim recited in the OP. Though I suppose it does address the issue of the probabilities involved in how more complex life arises from simple life through variation (and selection), once an RNA or DNA type replication system is up and running.

The latter: https://mecadi.com/en/literature_tools/encyclopedia/categorial/Elastomer_Thermoset/Acrylic-nitrile-Butadiene-Rubber_Buna-N_NBR

That strikes me as a rather penetrating question. +1. The answer, I think, must be that for Ca++ to pinch an electron from O-- would involve it getting a lot bigger, because the electron would have to go into the next shell (4s), which is at a greater distance from the nucleus than the 3s and 3p subshells, which are already full in Ca++. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ca++ and O-- are of similar size and can pack efficiently. A larger Ca+ ion would pack less efficiently. The larger size would push the neighbouring ions apart, reducing the strength of the ionic bonding and leading to a higher energy state overall for the crystal. In other words, it would reduce the so-called "lattice energy".

This question is too general to be answerable as it stands. There are plenty of solvents for resins of various sorts, depending on the resin. Raw linseed oil seems a rather peculiar choice in the first place.

No.

No H⁺ cations. CO₂ reversibly forms H₂CO₃ (carbonic acid) in water, so if you can convert CO₃²⁻ to H₂CO₃, you will evolve CO₂ from the solution. That's what happens when you add acid to a carbonate solution: it fizzes. It's why acid rain erodes limestone. But without a source of H⁺, you can't form H₂CO₃.

If you are incapable of taking in the simple fact that the autopilot and MCAS are different systems, then that is your problem, not mine. Why don't you look up MCAS on the internet and find out what it is for yourself?

I think it is hard to make this claim, seeing that the period immediately after the war was an extremely fertile one for science. And, on the technology front, it is often claimed that war accelerates technology. WW2 in particular led to some rapid advances (radar, rocketry, the atom bomb...)

Thermodynamically, there is no difference. That is what we are saying. You can find innumerable ways to distinguish Man from other creatures, or to distinguish living organisms from inanimate matter. But don't look to physical science for that, which is what it looks as if you are trying to do. Physics and chemistry work the same for everything. You started this thread with a claim about random events not being able to produce order. That claim has been shown to be false, given that the universe is governed by laws that impose order. (Kinetic Theory and Statistical Thermodynamics embody the science of how randomness at the atomic scale gives rise to the ordered bulk properties of matter that we see, due to the operation of these laws. It's very interesting and mind-expanding, in my opinion, to see how that arises.) Now, you seem to be doing something a lot narrower: to find the differences between human beings and inanimate matter. That's kind of obvious, though, at one level, isn't it? I suspect you may need to rethink what it is you are really trying to do.

There is no difference, fundamentally, so you are right not to see it, I think. Schrödinger had some funny ideas in later life, as quite often happens to famous scientists. Many processes in nature involve decreases in local entropy, that is, in part of the thermodynamic system. But they are always accompanied by a greater increase in entropy in some other part of the system. For example, when water freezes, the entropy of the ice crystals is lower than liquid water, but Latent Heat is exported to the environment, increasing its entropy. Similarly, the metabolic processes of life generate waste heat. So entropy increases all the time a living organism grows. There is nothing special going on, thermodynamically speaking.

No, the opposite of random is something like "ordered" or "predictable", for example the motion of the planets. As for entropy, I think what you mean is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics predicts, which is that entropy (a measure of randomness at the atomic scale) always increases in spontaneous processes. That is just as true of life as it is of inanimate matter. If you need an explanation of how that happens, we can easily provide it.

Nobody has ever argued that the complexity of life is due to randomness alone. That's a particularly silly - and annoying -creationist representation of evolution (tornado in a junkyard etc). The complexity of life is due to natural selection operating on variations in a population. There's nothing random about selection. So we can dismiss the monkey argument as far as life is concerned. When it comes to non-living "complexity", it is unclear to me what you mean. The anthropic principle is not about complexity, so I don't really follow where your hypothetical monkeys come into it.

Like all these things it gets more complex when you delve into it. Electron affinity is the energy released by an electronegative atom when it gains an extra electron and becomes an anion. For example, all the halogens release energy on gaining an electron, meaning the anion has lower energy than the neutral atom. The same is true for oxygen when it gains one electron. However when it gains a second, that is energetically unfavourable, due to the repulsion from the net -ve charge of the anion towards a second electron. (I had forgotten this, and only remembered after looking it up.) However electron affinity is only a measure of the energy change when a free atom or ion gains an extra electron. In the case of metal oxides, the oxygen atom is not free. It is sitting in a crystal lattice, in the present case (CaO) surrounded by 6 nearest neighbour Ca2+ ions. That makes its environment much more energetically attractive for oxygen to pick up a second electron and form O2-. Hence it is common to find metal oxides with O2- anions even though, if the oxygen atom were free, you would have to "force" it to accept a second electron. (It's significant that if you put these oxides in contact with water you never get hydrated O2- ions. When they come out of the crystal lattice they pinch an H+ ion from water to make OH- (hydroxide) - plus another OH- from what is left of the water molecule: O2- +H2O -> 2OH- . As for the question about close proximity lowering potential, that's just replaying what you said, in effect, about magnets. You bring opposite magnetic poles together, or opposite electric changes together, and you lower the magnetic or electrostatic potential energy. That is reflected in the fact that you have to do work to pull them apart again. And, as they come together, magnets can gain kinetic energy, just as you said, at the expense of the magnetic potential energy. Similarly, ions with opposite charges approaching one another gain kinetic energy at the expense of electrostatic potential energy - which, in the context of molecular scale processes, means the heat energy given off in an exothermic reaction. The alkaline earth (Group II) metal oxides react with CO2 in the air, yes. I'm less sure about the alkali (Group I) metals. The carbonate anion has a charge of 2- and this means it needs 2 M+ atoms to go with it, so I'm not sure how the kinetics and thermodynamics of that work out.

There is no real distinction, though I suppose someone might - rather loosely - speak of a "vapour" until the critical point is reached, i.e. the point at which the gas/vapour can't be liquefied by application of pressure. But whether you call it vapour or gas, it is the same state of matter.