exchemist

Exactly what my question would be.

Well yes I can agree this describes a particular attitude within Dutch society, but not that it is the official policy of the Netherlands. If the author asserts it is the latter, I would take issue with that, on the basis of my own experience of living there. The elephant in the room is indeed Islam, but I suggest it is a particularly assertive form of what has come to be known as political Islam, which seems to be relatively recent movement within some branches of the religion. I can quite understand the society coming into conflict with that, as the whole point of it is to challenge the culture, mores and behaviour of the host society.

This reading of the Netherlands is incorrect. It indeed considers itself a secular state, as does France, but in neither case do they consider that merely following a religion makes somebody “non-integrated”. What might make someone non-integrated would be not speaking Dutch and not accepting or tolerating the laws and conventions of the Dutch.

Yes, I don't think V=iR is just a definition. While it is true that ohms can be defined as volts per amp and so on, the relation also means something physical: that there is a thing called resistance in a circuit, which impedes current flow in a way that follows an algebraic rule, and that if you double the voltage you will double the current, and so on. So a number of important concepts are embedded in that equation.

Yes, I wondered about that but decided against. The problem with it is it is only half the equation. The full version is E² = (mc²)² + p²c².

In science? I might vote for E=hν, on the basis that it is self-evidently very simple and is probably the most important relation for anyone who wants to understand anything about light and quantum theory. But then F=ma in mechanics is equally simple and fundamental to understanding. I'm not even sure there is any one simplest, though. Perhaps the question is a bit like asking what is the best cheese in the world. 😊

I suppose post-revolutionary France was the first example of a consciously secular state, though it did not try to make its citizens give up personal religious belief. Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin was probably the first state to teach children atheism and try to stamp out religion. It didn't work of course.

Well, no culture can be preserved unchanged in aspic, especially in the modern world with its IT interconnections and ease of international travel. But I simply do not buy this notion of some new culture taking over, at a national level. There is no evidence that national institutions, laws, education etc are being radically changed by some new culture. I do acknowledge there are places whose character has changed due to the natural tendency of immigrants to form ghettos. But elevating that to a national takeover is getting it out of proportion. Where I sympathise is that I do think there should be more of an expectation for incomers to fit in. Perhaps there is a role for the planning system and local law enforcement here, and maybe an induction process for people acquiring citizenship, as they have in the Netherlands: https://www.government.nl/themes/migration-and-travel/integration-in-the-netherlands/civic-integration-in-the-netherlands

I was impressed with the ingenuity of the Gateshead millennium bridge when I visited Newcastle a couple of years ago. I took me a moment to work out why the footway was curved and how it operated. Unlike the one in Bristol, this one is operated fairly frequently I think. Pretty shocking that the seals failed without warning on the Bristol bridge. Did they leave it for years without operating it?

Well, fairly obviously, people tend not to welcome military conquest. By the way, the Copts were not “replaced”. The indigenous people became Arabised, that is converted to Arab culture, language and religion. Today’s Copts are the Christian remnant of the previous Byzantine culture. But none of this is relevant to present day immigration to Britain.

I was intrigued to read this report in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/12/astronomy-discovery-new-cosmic-object-black-hole-star The Nature paper on which this is based is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10846-4 It seems there are a lot of these mysterious LRDs in deep space images taken by the James Webb telescope. Now a team has made a detailed spectroscopic analysis of one of these, at a redshift corresponding to 660m yrs after the Big Bang, so very early in the life of the cosmos. Apparently the red comes from (redshifted) Balmer emission of hydrogen, which has a very sharp cutoff, known as the Balmer Break or Balmer Jump. This I gather occurs at the ionisation limit of the Balmer series (transitions to or from the n=2 shell to higher quantum levels). I had not heard of this before, but I suppose it makes sense that while atoms in high excited states can drop down to n=2 to give a series of emission lines, once the atom is ionised, recombination of the ion with a free electron (of varying kinetic energy) can occur at any energy so the intensity at any given wavelength will be far lower, hence the Balmer break. This Balmer break seems to be a standard effect seen in the spectra of stars, but what is unusual in this case is that it is so pronounced. It also seems to be accompanied in the spectral signature of this object by Hβ (n=2 <->3 and and Hγ (n=2<->4) lines in absorption, i.e. there is gas in front of the emitter that must be already in the n=2 1st excited state. All this they say is consistent with a black hole at the centre of a hydrogen cloud hot and dense enough to populate the n=2 atomic level. They speculate that this and the other LRDs may be black holes in the early universe in a stage of rapid growth, ingesting gas clouds. They call these objects black hole stars, because of their emission. They would seem to be a new type of astronomical object. At least, that is my imperfect understanding of it. Corrections and comments welcome.

No more than the people of Ukraine appreciate invasion by the Russians, I imagine.

Surely all you have done here is to define "totalising", when applied to an ideology? There are plenty of political and religious ideologies that do not do this, but then you would presumably not call them "totalising". So then toleration of good faith disagreement in "totalising ideologies" is impossible, by virtue of your own definition. But there are quite a few of them around, it is true, from exclusivist religious sects to political movements. I think it is a form of tribalism. You have to be either with them 100%, or against them, in which latter case you are designated as the enemy. One sees this among football supporters, for instance. The demand for allegiance to an "in group" of some kind seems to be quite deeply embedded in human nature, which can all too easily lead to intolerance of those who are in some way different.

If you don’t want racist political parties to succeed, you have to be able to understand what drives people towards them. In my opinion, the culture issue is real enough in places like London’s East End or Leicester, without invoking racism at all. Though obviously it will tend to breed racism. (I’m disappointed to hear of your wife’s experience, especially in a fairly prosperous suburb of Southwest London.)

On the assimilation point I think that's a 2 way process. The host community comes to accept and see benefits from the incomers' culture, while the incomers adapt to the ways of the host country to some degree and fit in better. You see this in things like the proliferation of different styles of food, different style of music, and even respect for different attitudes to alcohol. I see a lot of mixed race couples in London, too, presumably growing from being at school and college together and getting comfortable with one another. My son has Muslim friends from school and university and has just returned from a camping trip with an Indian physicist (doing a PhD in string theory). For people of my generation this would have been very unusual, though we did have some Jewish friends.

Yes. Remember, that’s what Brexit was all about. Although culturally, Europeans are obviously far closer so easy to assimilate.

It is not skin colour, but cultural: the language, the script, e.g. on the shop fronts, the dress, the mosques. You are right of course. We have had a Chinese area in Soho for decades. It has become an accepted part of the London scene and where everyone goes for good Chinese food. But these things take time, for the previous inhabitants to adjust, move out or die, and for the incomers to start to smooth off the rough edges by adapting to some degree to the ways of the new host country. Islam is particularly tricky right now as there happens to be a movement towards more rigid observance of its cultural codes, notably the way women are allowed to dress. So rather than becoming integrated, some muslim communities appear ever more intent on being alien. (One has a bit of that in Stamford Hill with Ashkenazi Jews, but that's on a very small scale by comparison). But there you go. Britain had an empire, got rich on the backs of the colonised peoples, taught everyone English..... and now, surprise surprise, the previously colonised people come to Britain! One can hardly argue it is unfair.

Intellectually yes of course you are right. East London has always had its waves of minorities. In the late c.19th it was full of Jews. But they gradually assimilated, became more prosperous and moved to north London, spreading out and diluting themselves as they did so. Now the better off Jews are in Golders Green and St. John's Wood and the poorer ones in Stamford Hill. The Bangladeshis have taken their place. (Tower Hamlets council is now riddled with Bangaldeshi-style political manipulation, intimidation and corruption:https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/lutfur-rahman-tower-hamlets-mayor-aspire-b1205024.html) On a larger scale we have the Midlands city of Leicester. This dynamic pie chart shows the radical change in ethnicity since 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Leicester#/media/File:Ethnic_demography_of_Leicester_from_1961_to_2021.gif I do think we need to be aware of the emotional effect of radical change on the people directly affected when neighbourhoods change so rapidly over the course of a generation. I am sure this is one of the chief sources of support for these new far-right parties. As for what the prescription is to deal with it, I think there is not much to be done apart from controlling further immigration and then waiting for time to assimilate the minority communities. They will gradually adopt the "western" way of life of their adopted country (which has its attractions for Muslim and Hindu women especially!) and intermarriage. But there will be many bumps in the road.

I do understand how some areas can get taken over by immigrants, to the consternation of the previous inhabitants. This has happened in a few places, e.g. in parts of the East End of London, which frankly reminded me of Dubai rather than London: most of the shops with signage in Arabic script (Urdu), people in dishdashes and salwar kameez, women with veils, newly built mosques, etc. If you are over 40 and grew up there you must wonder what the hell has happened and feel a stranger in your own neighbourhood. I was shocked to drive down a road I used 40 years ago to commute from Essex and find it unrecognisable. But trying to elevate this to some sort of existential threat to the nation is obviously unjustified. And in fact, many of the supporters of these far right parties live in areas that are 99% white British, with almost no immigrants!

As it happens, neither of my parents was born in the UK, though both were English. One was born near Madras (as it then was) and other in Canton (as it then was). That's what happens when your country used to have an empire. Brits went all over the world. And now we are supposed to complain that people from those countries come over to Britain instead. Oh, and my son's mother was French so he's not British by these criteria either. Just like the King! And the children of millions of other Brits who have married people from other countries. It really is extraordinarily stupid.

OK yes ego but a very specific manifestation of it, which is suspicion of accepted ideas on principle and a need to assert being individual and different. “Everyone’s got it all wrong, hahaha…. except me.”

Yes, Ego >> Capacity => crank. But there is often another factor I think, which is a burning desire to show science is in some way wrong. Exhibit A being @Delburt Phend , for instance. I've read articles about the contrarian impulse. Apparently there is research showing quite a few of these people don't just go in for a single crank notion, or conspiracy theory, but for a whole lot of them. What they want to be is different: independent-minded people who work everything out for themselves and don't follow the herd. Unfortunately, if one combines that urge with a poor grasp of science, one gets silliness. However, perhaps this is straying from the thread topic.

The was a funny radio interview with one of these politicians, whose party is funded by an overseas billionaire, in which he was asked whether he considered the King to be British, given that his father was partly Greek and Danish and was born in Corfu. The guy wriggled and squirmed and couldn't give an answer.

Perhaps I should clarify that when I speak of models in chemistry I mean all chemical theories and principles. Science consists of models of the physical world. When I use “arrow pushing” in organic reaction mechanisms that is a model. No one think pairs of bonding electrons physically move exactly as shown by the arrows. Physical chemists are pretty dismissive of arrow pushing and theoretical chemists even more so. But the model works, because it (usually) predicts the reaction products and intermediates correctly. And it’s a lot easier than doing QM calculations on multi-atom molecules. But really all science theories are models of reality, not reality itself.

Plenty. Mostly funded by overseas money, ironically.