exchemist

Since we are talking physics in which a degree of precision in terms is required, rather than our vague British notions of Indian cuisine, I suggest a fairer comparison would be to ask “what is an electron?” I suspect you and I could produce a fairly credible and concise answer to that. But space? Rather harder.

Yes this is intriguing but, being untestable it's metaphysics rather than science. I think the issue of what space - or the vacuum- "is", is however far from trivial and quite hard to answer, as it does seem to have evolved considerably as physics has developed.

Nearly all pollution I think, since we have had almost no fogs in London at all since about 1960. I remember one smog as a small child, maybe in 62 or 63, but that's all. Foggy days are about one per year now and never last more than a day or so.

Fog in London is vanishingly rare. In the past it was due to atmospheric inversion combined with the smoke from coal fires.

Observational evidence is that quantum indeterminacy is real. How do you account for that?

I've just told you where the error is.

What silly rubbish. Getting AI to dress it up is just putting lipstick on a pig. The fact that the law of cause and effect operates at the macro level is not proof that a certain degree of indeterminacy can't exist at the quantum level.

Well that's a really good question and I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer. It certainly seems to have some properties, so it's not just a total absence of anything. Apart from its electromagnetic properties connected to the speed of light, it also, according to QFT, has zero point energy. It can, in places, possess, or be permeated by, fields of various kinds. It can, according to GR, possess non-trivial mathematical properties too. But at the same time it is not material. I believe Einstein at one point said it could be thought of as a kind of aether (there were aether theories around not long before he did his work on relativity) though he was keen to stress not of a material kind. I'm tempted to say it just is what it is, or better, it seems to be what it seems to be. And on that basis we just get on with it. Perhaps a bit like the "shut up and calculate" school of interpretation of quantum mechanics. Again, there are here more questions to which science doesn't really have an answer. Perhaps the real philosophical point here is that the job of science is to construct models of the physical world which enable us to predict how it will behave. In the poplar imagination, science tells us all what physical reality actually is. But in fact its aims are more modest: to model physical reality without claiming to have the whole truth about it. This is very clear in my own discipline, chemistry, in which because we deal with messily complex systems (atoms with lots of electrons, molecules with lots of atoms and so on), we often have more than one model for the same thing. We choose the model appropriate to the task, knowing that all the models are only approximations to the real situation. It is also clear from the history of science that one model may be superseded in time by another. We have no way of knowing whether or when the last of the Russian dolls may have been opened.

Well I agree it is all a bit mysterious why the order is the way it is and why the various fundamental constants have the values they do. Why does the speed of light have the value it does, or equivalently, why should the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability of the vacuum take the values they do? Ditto the fine structure constant. And so on. There is a school of thought that attributes this to the Anthropic Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Personally I'm not a huge fan of it but it's not a silly idea. But I don't see why this kind of intrinsic order in the cosmos has to be located in space, exactly and I'm not sure what it means to state that it is. It's a property of the cosmos, certainly.

I wouldn't do this if I were you. They don't like people restarting closed topics here. We can perhaps continue to debate the distinction between science and metaphysics in the Philosophy section, if you like, but your polymorphic whatevers are done, I suspect.

Ah but it's not up to you to determine what are the "right questions", is it? What you are asking is not physics but metaphysics. It is not the job of physics to answer philosophical questions, though many physicists do in fact also ponder the philosophical implications of their theories in their spare time. So while you may be frustrated that nobody in physics wants to pick up the baton and ask where the observed order* in nature comes from, perhaps you should instead ask the people who do deal in such issues - the metaphysicians. (Your own attempt at answering this, by the way, gets us nowhere, since if the order in nature is intrinsic to every "polymorphic unit" of spacetime, you can then equally well ask how that came about. In the end one always reaches a limit at which one has to admit "we don't know". *I prefer the term "observed order" to "laws" for a couple of reasons. First, because it stresses the central role of observation in science. Second, almost all the "laws" are man-made interpretations of what we observe, named after the human beings who first formulated them. They are often approximations or simplifications derived from limiting cases and as such are often not followed exactly in most real situations.

Nope that is not a question being widely asked in physics, so far as I am aware. By the way, deploying the buzzword "paradigm" doesn't alter that. As I told you 3 years ago, it is always possible to dream up metaphysical questions that science can't answer. That's because science has boundaries to its field of enquiry, set, as I've explained to you before, by the need to tie theory to what can be observed in nature. So if no "progress" is being made on the metaphysical question you raise, it is for the simple reason no one, so far as I know, is trying.

Room 1303 I thought but otherwise yes, that exchange has been standard on the Far East business raveller circuit for several decades. Back to the subject, I'm not sure where all these people are who would be willing to take part on a huge programme like this, even f it the science stacks up, which I am far from convinced about.

On cosmology? I think chiefly the issues of dark matter and dark energy. Both of these are placeholder labels for observed phenomena, crying out for explanations that physics is currently unable to provide. Regarding the laws of physics and the big bang, my understanding is that if one extrapolates back far enough one reaches a regime in which these laws either don't apply or become meaningless. I agree with you that it is just an assumption that the laws of physics are the same throughout space and history, but there seem to be no compelling reasons to believe otherwise. Our model of cosmology fits with observations, using that assumption so, that being so, Ockham's Razor is invoked. However one of the models for dark matter (MOND) suggests maybe the laws of physics may not be quite as we assume, at large enough scales etc. So it would be unfair to say nobody in physics is prepared to think outside the box on the question.

By coincidence there's an article in today's Guardian from a law prof at Amherst College, that touches on this. I quote it in full: "January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”. So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”. What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of inequity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police. Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed. Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”? While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants. Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day? In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest? Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots, and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days. As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable." So while I concede that I may be jumping at shadows, being a European, I can relate pretty strongly to Fraenkel's analysis. We've seen this all before. I don't really see what makes the US so fundamentally different, especially as it seems this is what to close to half the country either wants, or is happy to accede to.

Not if your idea has no observable consequences it isn't. If you can't address this requirement of science, I suspect your idea will be binned pretty rapidly.

I naturally hope, fervently, you are right. But the speed and comprehensiveness with which the US system has already been neutered or dismantled does not make me optimistic that the Project 2025 people around Trump won't have a plan to deliver the mid terms safely into their hands. The docility of Congress is key to all the rest, as it is that which gives Trump carte blanche to act like an absolute monarch. If Congress sets the dates, the current supine Congress could easily agree to postpone them.

What you mean is it would not be science, then. Period. If you can't show, or least suggest, what observable effects should be associated with your theory, you aren't doing science. You have been told this before. Using buzzwords like "paradigm shift" doesn't absolve you of the need to link your hypothesis to observation. That's a fundamental part of science. "Framework" likewise is a buzzword, one that is now fast becoming a cliché as it is particularly favoured by AI, that does not get round this requirement.

Quite. "Bags tables" reminds me of "Ass ruin torino fee, strangle ache, etc." (I expect you know that one. It starts: "Morny, ruin sorbees".)

No, but close to a majority voted for a dictator at the last presidential election. Not just the hardcore MAGA morons.

For this to be a scientific theory, you would need to be able to describe exactly what a "unit of polymorphic spacetime" is and how one could, at least in theory, test for its existence. In other words you should be able to say what observable consequences there should be from their existence. Can you do either of those things?

Yes my expectation is that riots will be stirred up on some pretext or other (and blamed on pinko woke libtard Democrats), so that a state of emergency can be declared and the mid term elections suspended. It is what we have seen all over the world in similar situations, where an authoritarian wants to hold onto power without explicitly abandoning the fig leaf of democratic process. But maybe they hope the gerrymandering of voting districts will be enough. We'll see.

While this has already been adequately covered by others, I think one concept that could help understanding is what used to be called in my day "dative" bonds. These are bonds in which both electrons can be thought of as coming from only one of the two atoms, instead of the more standard idea of one from each. Dative bonds were shown by an arrow, e.g. O=O->O indicating from which atom the 2 electrons notionally come. Thus for your ozone diagram, the central atom donates one of its lone pairs to share with the oxygen on the right, thereby completing its octet, but at the expense of acquiring a +ve charge, because both electrons would need to stay on the central atom if it were to remain electrically neutral. This charge separation (polarisation) is observed experimentally, by the way, so it is real. The second idea is the notion of so-called "resonance hybrids". This is the idea that as the single bond can just as well be on the left as on the right, the bonding in the molecule will actually be a mixture of the left and right options, with one and a half bonds to each and half a -ve charge on both the outer oxygen atoms. (You may know that the bonding of benzene is likewise a mixture of the 2 Kekulé bonding schemes with alternate single and double bonds, the real molecule having one and a half bonds between all atoms, indistinguishably.) The term "resonance" hybrid is now out of favour as there is no physical "resonance": it's just a static mixture of the 2 bonding options. If you do the bonding with "proper" quantum mechanics, using the "molecular orbital" method, you get exactly the same result, viz. an electron density across the molecule that corresponds to a "mixture" of the two structures. So it's an easy way to represent the bonding that gives the right answer, most of the time at least, without getting into MO theory.

That sounds like a quite likely explanation. Ah so that's it. Quite nice in a way that old Tube stock gets a new lease of life on the Isle of Wight. I've never been there, though I visit Portsmouth regularly to catch the overnight ferry to St Malo. I should go one day. They have a lot of fossils, I understand. Apart from ancient Underground trains, I mean......

I know. But for some reason those always seem to have been Tube stock. This one is ex District Line, so built to the full BR loading gauge rather than having to fit into a 12ft diameter tube: The pic shows A stock which served on the Metropolitan Line, but the dimensions are almost the same. I can't think why the Isle of Wight chooses Tube stock. They're not all dwarves, are they?