exchemist

I found your comment about the (H-bonded) polarity of water as a solvent leading to the exploitation by life of 2 phases (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) rather insightful. I immediately thought of bi-lipid membranes, for instance and the mechanisms for selective transport across them. Your final remark suggests we could try to imagine life developing with the use of other solvents. Liquid ammonia perhaps? Liquid CO2? Under suitable pressures, these could perhaps be feasible at temperatures high enough to give reasonable rates of reaction.

Modesty is not mentioned in the Agreeableness category, as far as I can see. My experience is that a lot of egocentric people can be socially very agreeable. It may be one of the things they use to dominate other people, being "the life and soul of the party" as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In fact I am always suspicious of "Hail fellow well met" types, as I've found in business they are often crooks, or out for themselves! But maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by "agreeableness" in this categorisation.

I think there is a spectrum there, from the perfectly normal to the pathological. Consider anyone working in the performance arts, politics, legal advocates or even surgeons. Many people enjoy performing to an audience, without being narcissists. Many of the classical musicians I know are quite shy and retiring people but put a violin in their hands or sit them behind a keyboard and they are away. I myself have performed solo, which I found very stressful but compensated by the reception from the audience. Enough to persuade me to do it again, a year later. But thinking more about this I suppose your point is that, with televangelists in particular, the performance often seems to be largely about them. There is more about them than about the gospels, even though the gospels are ostensibly the subject matter. That certainly does suggest narcissism. I don't myself think that consideration of a multiverse is required to dismiss the Fine Tuning Argument. It seems to me, rather, that the FT Argument rests on a misunderstanding of probability. Just because a particular outcome is one of millions does not mean that the outcome we observe is "impossible" and therefore must have been influenced in some way. After all, there has to be an outcome, which will be one of the millions of possibilities. For instance the probability of dying by being struck by lightning is vanishingly small, yet people do die that way.

You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.😉

We did have a discussion about that. I’ve decided to give him or her the benefit of the doubt for a bit. We’ve established this person is using Indian textbooks written in English but I don’t know how easy they find conversing in English.

There are also attempts at logic, e.g. the fine tuning argument or the (idiotic) entropy argument. Though you don’t often see the latter these days. It seems they’ve mostly worked out that one doesn’t fly.

Well it is a decent solvent for a great many things, including a wide range of gases and metal ions and, perhaps more important, is liquid over a temperature range at which chemical reactions proceed at a decent speed but sufficiently gently that complex molecules can form and avoid decomposition. But I take your point that the insolubility of catenated hydrocarbon chains offers a 2 phase environment that is exploited by life. Given that carbon's propensity for catenation is unique in the Periodic Table , a solvent that dissolved any complex carbon chain structure would not seem to be a good one for life.

I think that is a rather different aspect of human nature, though, isn't it? Televangelists are not setting out to be contrarian, I'd have thought. They probably have a complex set of motivations. They may (mostly?) be genuine in the beliefs they preach, but they also love performance, showmanship, the adulation of crowds and, in all too many cases, the money they can rake in. So they may start out more or less genuine and get corrupted by success, as so many do in so many walks of life. But certainly I would agree a lot of conspiracies are peddled with a view to gaining adherents in order to serve some ulterior motive. We see a lot of that in populist politics.

Yes I was about to make that point. Some people love to oppose convention for its own sake and get a kick out of being in a select, special group where they can indulge in feeling persecuted. Contrarianism is definitely a social psychological phenomenon. They may or may not really believe the position they adopt: for some it may be they are just striking a pose.

Yes, it is hard to envisage a biochemistry that does not require catenation, to permit the development of polymers and other complex compounds. Also I think it is hard to envisage a satisfactory alternative solvent to water. I used to like to imagine methane or liquid ammonia or something as an alternative, but it seems hard to make a convincing case.

This is a science forum, not Mumsnet.

Oh yes now I see. Thanks. So, to spell it out for @HbWhi5F , they say p(1).V(1)/T(1) = p(stp).V(stp)/T(stp) and rearrange to get just V(stp) on one side of the equation: p(1).V(1)T(stp)/T(1).p(stp) = V(stp) and then insert values of 273K for T(stp) and 760mmHg for p(stp). So evidently they are measuring p(1) with a mercury manometer. It might have been clearer if we had access to the figure 8.15 that the text refers to.

Yeah I think that's the right idea. In H₂S, the nominal oxidation state of S is -2 and H is +1. In effect you are pretending the compound is ionic, even thought it is covalent, giving a +ve oxidation number to the more electropositive atom and a -ve state to the more electronegative. Cl, being in elemental form, has an oxidation number of 0. After the reaction, H is still +1, but Cl is now -1 and S has gone from -2 to 0. So one can say that Cl has been reduced, whereas S has been oxidised and H has not changed. So H₂S overall has been oxidised by Cl₂. Something similar will go for the rest of them. And you are right NaH is a bit weird. But Na is more electropositive than H. This compound is called sodium hydride. It is in fact ionic and contains an actual anion of H, the hydride ion, H-. This has 2 valence shell electrons, making it isoelectronic with helium. Needless to say this compound is pretty reactive. Oxidation numbers are a bit of a strange convention in chemistry that takes some getting used to. Your problem 7.3 is easier in that you have some obvious metals that will have +ve oxidation states and obvious halide or oxide partners that will be -ve.

I recognise 273K as 0C and I recognise 760mmHg as standard atmospheric pressure expressed, in old fashioned style, in millimetres of mercury. The IUPAC definition of STP specifies 0C, i.e 273K (actually 273.15K to be exact but nobody bothers with that detail) and 1 bar (100kPa). But exactly what they are trying to do here is unclear to me from the snippet you have provided. In particular I don't see where mmHg comes in. I feel there must be some extra text that discusses this.

OK, no, I asked you how many electrons there are in the valence shell of a neutral free oxygen atom. How many is that? I now realise in my first reply I mistakenly spoke about the -ve O atom, not the +ve one you actually asked about, so apologies for confusing you. However the same principle applies. For working out electric charge you count 100% of the electrons in the lone pairs, as they are located 100% on the O atom, and you count 50% of the electrons in the bonds, as these are shared (almost) equally between the O atom and the atoms it is bonded to. Then you compare that with the number of valence electrons there are in a free neutral atom and see if you have the same number, or more, or fewer. So the +ve O atom has one lone pair plus a half share of 3 bonding pairs right? How many is that in total?

OK I’ll stop reporting them then and wait to see what happens. They are fairly obviously bogus, though to what purpose remains unclear at this point. We’ll just have to let them evolve and maybe the objective will become clear in time.

Yes I'm in Europe too (London). You are now broadening this out to encompass fanaticism of all kinds though. I think that's a different subject. Creationists don't have to be fanatics, just people brought up with a set of beliefs that sets them against science in certain specific respects. Often they will be at pains to tell you they accept science in general and its products (e.g. medicine, engineering etc). I even once came across an astronomer who was a YEC! He accepted all of astronomy apart from the origin of the Earth, specifically, as the home designed by God for mankind! Weird what people can do to manage cognitive dissonance sometimes. Yet I think we all live with degrees of cognitive dissonance in our lives, of one sort or another. In fact I suspect it is probably what keeps us sane. If we insisted on joining all the dots, across every facet of our lives, into a seamless self-consistent whole, I think we would go mad. But that too is probably another discussion.

I see more of it this morning, clearly of Russian origin judging by the Cyrillic that is appearing. I wonder if someone is using AI to explore ways to defeat the various anti-spam measures on sites like this, by creating entities that resemble real people closely enough to beat the system.

There may be some misunderstanding about what is meant in science by a ToE. It is a concept specific to physics that seeks to completely unify quantum physics with relativity. The term is used because relativity and quantum theory between them underpin just about all of physics, which in turn underpins chemistry, which underpins biology, and so forth. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything Reading your post, I confess my heart sinks to read, yet again, the word "framework", as it is a word beloved of AI LLMs. I hope I am talking to a real person here. 😃

This seems to be closely related to your recent thread about debating with Buddhists: https://scienceforums.net/topic/136632-how-would-you-counter-the-science-was-wrong-before-argument/ I too have experience of dealing with creationists, nearly always Christian fundies but one or two Muslims too. No Jews, funnily enough. I don't think you can hope to change their minds on the spot. The best you can hope for is to counter some of the specific pieces of misinformation they have been fed, one by one, and maybe thereby make them a bit more questioning of their sources. Creationists almost always have been taught it from an early age and rely on the wealth of creationist material that has been developed, largely to serve the US Bible Belt. These sources issue a stream of bogus factoids and arguments to support a Gish Gallop rhetorical approach: the faster you can splurge disinformation, the tougher it is to debunk it all. (Trump does the same thing in US politics, of course - impossible to keep up with all the lies.) I think I would agree that the main justification for engaging creationists is to convince spectators who may be wavering that it is not the way to go. Often teenagers, for instance, will start to question what they have been told by their parents or their church and that's a good time to steer them in another direction. However one has to be gentle and not to rubbish their faith, as that is always counterproductive. With Christians, one can point out that creationism is only taught in a minority of fundamentalist Protestant denominations and it is not only possible but actually the norm for Christians to accept the science. I usually point out the existence of the well-established, non-literal interpretations of Genesis (which go back to Origen in 200AD), to help them find a path that allows for accepting science without making them feel they have to abandon their faith. I used to do this quite a lot on a few religious forums I once belonged to, i.e. where there was an audience that might be interested and could, I thought, benefit from it. Eventually though I simply got tired of making the same speech over and over again to different people, while many of the same diehards (the Jehovah's Witnesses were the worst) continued to spout their nonsense.

Yes. This however feels like an LLM-enhanced version, with multiple exchanges, prefaced by the usual ingratiating opening. I suppose it was to be expected. This curious thing is how many exchanges take place, between several pseudo-entities, before any spam is placed.

Bye.

Heh heh. I’m ever so ‘umble, Mr. Copperfield.

We now seem to have series of fake-sounding “conversations” going on between newly joined entities that I feel fairly sure are bots. Is this the prelude to another flood, I wonder….

Ask yourself how many electrons are in the valence shell of a neutral, free oxygen atom. And then count the electrons on the oxygen atom you are talking about: 3 lone pairs, plus a half share in the pair in the bond.