exchemist

Thanks again, I appreciate the clarity you are bringing to the background to this thread subject. Everything you have said here reinforces my view that Harrop has not been straight with us about his background and motives, that he has an evangelising agenda not supported by the science and that he has been doing things he should not be doing without, at the very least, oversight from a gastroenterologist. But as so often I've learned something here: that there is an unregulated trade in stool samples going on, among people who are medically unqualified.

Yes I think, as @swansont said previously, you have got this a bit arse about face, as we say in Britain. 😁 If you find π "emerging" in the course of exploring algebraic relationships in physics, that will be due to one of the reasons he and I have mentioned. What you cannot - and I mean really cannot - do is to claim that π itself, i.e. the transcendental number defined in mathematics, somehow arises from physical properties in nature. It may well pop up in what to you are unexpected places in the algebra of physics, but these relationships are not what defines π and makes it what it is. For example, ("h bar") is commonly used in quantum theory as it makes the algebra a bit simpler than Planck' constant itself, h. That's because a factor of 2π otherwise crops up a lot in QM. Why? Well, QM is about the wave properties of matter and a wave cycle comes back to where it started every 2π radians. So we shouldn't be surprised to find a few 2πs scattered about the place.

Chabots are programmed to engage you in chat. So they will always encourage you and tell you what you want to hear. You need to aim off to correct that bias, or you may end up with false confidence in something that is actually ballocks. Chatbots can't think. What they are clever at is constructing sentences that seem human-like. The content of those sentences can, not always but surprisingly often, be garbage. @swansont has nicely explained why π crops up so often in physics. Any form of cyclical process or behaviour is going to be something we can express mathematically using π somewhere along the line. (An angle of 2π in radians describes a complete circle, so every 2π-worth of whatever it is gets you back to the start and begins a new cycle.) And anything to do with, say radiation, or a field, that spreads outwards from a point evenly in all directions, is going to have spherical symmetry, for which again π is going to come into the maths in many cases. π is thus part of the mathematical toolkit for describing these phenomena.

Interesting topic, but hard to work what's going on just from reading the exchanges in the link. Can you summarise what happened, in a paragraph or so?

Regarding the bit in red, you have certainly implied it. To quote you (from the other thread): "i challenged the current thought process.. im not the first to do this, many theories did the same and were rejected at first (a very important and proven theory comes to mind). And no, i do not equate myself to giants like Einstein., just saying." and "You may ultimately be right, or wrong, but closing the door on a thought simply because you know better is exactly why progress is stifled." But OK, you seem to be becoming more reasonable now, so that's a good thing. (By the way, Einstein's relativity theory was taken up with alacrity by the science community. It is a romantic myth that he somehow laboured on in spite of rejection. His 1905 publications immediately made a great impression on the scientific community and he was appointed professor (which in those days didn't just mean a college lecturer but was a very senior academic position) within five years. But Einstein accepted his ideas would be challenged to see if they were robust, and he knew his physics and of course his maths. He also, later, went to get help with the maths he needed for general relativity.)

Ask yourself who it is that enforces court orders in the USA. And who they report to.

No, this is a rabbit hole I don't think I want to go down. People trying to invent theories when they have not studied any science never ends well. What they forget, when they invoke people like Einstein and accuse others of closed mindedness, is that innovators like Einstein or Heisenberg mastered the existing science first and only then, once they understood the theories of the time and knew what they were talking about, did they go on to innovate. In other words, they did not "make shit up", as my friend PhDemon used to put it. I'm glad to have helped you avoid murdering mathematics and logic, but preventing you murdering physics would be a longer campaign. I'll leave that to others, I think.😉

I wonder if I was wise to try to help........

Yes but they are trying to get rid of the residual salicylic acid, aren't they?

It is my firm view that people without medical training should not dabble in offering medical therapies to others, whether profit-making or on a charitable basis. I just think it is dangerous.

OK thanks. I wondered whether it was something to do with agricultural use. Evidently you know Michael Harrop, then. You have already provided more detail on the reasons for his conviction that FMT will help than he has, in 3 pages of this thread. Thanks for this. What bothers me now is that you say you obtained FMT from Harrop's "own business, when it was in operation". This gives me the queasy feeling that he has tried to make a business out of providing FMT and went bust, which puts his appeals for support on this forum in a new and not entirely favourable light. I can't speak for others but I am very cagey indeed about supporting alternative quasi-medical enterprises, especially if the aim is to turn a profit. If he is, or has been, dabbling, without medical training, in providing medical treatment to others, then I would disapprove of that very strongly indeed. P.S. Just found this on the web: https://www.humanmicrobes.org/about Harrop has not been up front with us about this.

OK borderline dyslexic, that explains the occasional wacky spelling, that's fine, I just wondered. But you have to understand that attaching units to π is nonsensical. Perhaps you could get around the problem by introducing some factor with your chosen dimensions that has a value of 1. You could multiply π by this factor and the product would have the same numerical value as π but now with dimensions. So if the factor is F with units kg . m / A2 . S3, you could write πF = π kg . m / A2 . S3. Then you would need to explain the physical significance of F and why it has a value of 1.

Eloquently expressed. If we can't determine objectively (in a way broader society would accept as fair and reasonable) who might warrant pre-emptive intervention, and we don't in any case have the treatments, I'm not sure what there is to discuss.

What is tet? Tetracycline?

OK, so what then did you mean by saying in Planck's constant the "2 s" can be cancelled making it independent of time? To quote you, you said: " for example, when looking at planks constant, it is almost always shown as the factored version (cancelling the 2 time aspects) i did not, the reason, when i was trying to find the meaning of the units, one of the time units was a higher value than the other but the units themselves cancel out leaving just a number." How can you reconcile that with what we have just gone through? If you want anyone to read it, you will at least need to give them a reason to think it may not be crap. If you persist with trying to apply dimensions to π you have no chance of that. I strongly advise you to get rid of that notion. By the way it is spelt "without" not "with-ought". Is English your first language?

OK so that now agrees with my units, right?

What? That doesn't make sense. The dimensions of energy are ML²/T², so kg m²/s² in SI units. Planck's constant has dimensions of energy x time, so ML²/T, i.e. kg m²/s. though it is more usual to express it as an energy unit x time, i.e. in joule-seconds (J.s) or electron volt - seconds (eV.s).

But I'm afraid in the real world there is such a thing as ballocks. And if you talk ballocks people will point that out. As a former contributor on another science forum, who was a school teacher, used to say, "In science, you can't just make shit up." Ideas have to conform to logic, including mathematics, and they need to be testable, at least in principle, by observation of nature. Inventing a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't rule for applying dimensions, when you feel like it, to a mathematical transcendental number like π, has to fail as a scientific idea. I'm sorry to be harsh but there it is. You are free to think what you like. But if you persist with this idea you will be thought a fool, that's all. Up to you entirely.

What is A? Usually it denotes Amperes, i.e. electric current. Planck's constant has the dimensions of "action", viz. energy x time. That is always true. You can't just cancel the time element, that's nonsense. And there is only one time element. I don't know what you mean by there being two of them. You must have misunderstood whatever you were reading. (Or you were fed a load of garbage by AI: we see increasing amounts of that on this forum.)

There are other dimensionless constants in physics, one well-known example being the fine structure constant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant But in any case, π is not a physical constant but a mathematical one, as earlier posts on this thread have pointed out. It is not solely related to circles in Euclidian geometry either, but has a more fundamental significance, as shown for instance by Euler's relation, which is not intrinsically geometrical (though you can represent complex numbers geometrically). You are not at liberty to arbitrarily give π dimensions only when it appears in certain physical contexts: either is it is dimensionless or it is not.

Well against my better judgement I see am being trapped into taking part in this thread after all. 🙂 If there is no defined condition, you have no business deciding to try to treat it - even if a treatment were available, which there isn't.

I know what you mean. I gather "What if the sky were made of concrete?" comes from the US military, as an example of a pointless hypothetical scenario with with no useful answer. In fact you just feel tired even trying to start thinking about how you would answer it. Very funny, as so many of these military things are. (There's another great US Army one, in a performance review of a soldier, which simply says: "Got a full six-pack, but kinda lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together." We've all worked with people like that.)

Must say I rather dislike this "What if the sky were made of concrete? type of question. There is no clinical diagnosis of psychopathy and there are no magic ways to fix it. So discussing it seems an empty exercise to me.

Haha true, dat. As we know from the Post Office scandal, what really gets the attention of politicians is a media storm alleging injustice of some kind. Hard to see where that would come from in this case. Pretty hard to argue people are dying due to lack of funding for faecal transplants. I mean they may be, possibly, if they have some specific conditions, but jolly hard to prove, other than in well documented applications like c. difficile.

OK, the discussion has been about why we should agree to do such a thing. One side of that is whether and why faecal transplants might be effectlve in the case of this person. The other, which you are focusing on, is whether writing to elected representatives is likely to produce a result. As I say, I think this is going to require publicly funded research rather than relying on drug companies. So maybe writing to elected representatives could be one way to promote that research.