exchemist

That would call into question the extent to which disciplines like socoiology can really be considered science. Generally speaking "science" is used as short for "natural science", i.e. the systematic study and understanding of nature. Human affairs are not normally treated as being simply part of nature.

"When the arrow is in a place just its own size, it’s at rest." is manifestly ballocks.

But both are very close to the -20C approx. temperature that was quoted. A 4-5C difference is pretty negligible compared to the extremes experienced by other bodies in the solar system. I don’t understand why you have decided to nitpick over this.

Yes you're right he relied on people like Stephen Meyer, Bill Dembski and Michael Behe to dream up the pseudoscience to underpin it. But the drive behind the ID movement and the strategy to get it into the schools was largely Johnson's, as laid out in the Wedge Document which Johnson authored and was accidentally leaked to the public. This makes clear the object was to combat what Johnson saw as a the march of "materialism" in society, by reintroducing the idea of God into school teaching, without actually calling it that. As such this was pure social engineering. Johnson's Wiki entry starts as follows: Phillip E. Johnson (June 18, 1940 – November 2, 2019)[1] was an American legal scholar who was the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] He was an opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), and one of the co-founders of the intelligent design movement, along with William Dembski and Michael Behe.[3] Johnson described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement".[4] I think it is important to note one key feature of ID which is distinct from creationism in general is its intrinsic deceitfulness. Run of the mill creationism simply denies the science, preferring to rely on the creation accounts in Genesis. That is ignorant, but at least honest. ID tries to go along with most of the science but simultaneously introduces the bogus notion that certain features of life could not, scientifically speaking, have arisen by natural means, thereby implying a role for a supernatural creator. It thus pretends to be science when it is nothing of the kind. In fact, it is a "science stopper" because it suggests certain features of biology have no natural explanation, so we should just accept they are due to miracle, give up researching them and go home. It's God of the Gaps*, dressed up in sciency concepts. *a term invented by Prof. Charles Coulson, whose lectures on theoretical chemistry I attended at uni, who was well-known as a Methodist lay preacher. Coulson, a committed Christian, had no time for the Argument from Design.

Normally one can work with a wave function without having an exact solution to the wave equation, based on its qualitative properties. The actual solutions are very cumbersome algebra and exact solutions are only possible for the very simplest systems, e.g. the hydrogen atom.

Almost nobody has to actually solve Schrödinger’s equation. You generally work with pictures of the probability distributions. The key thing is to understand the phase and the symmetry, where the nodes are etc.

I'm not sure I entirely agree about the mathematics. You can put people off needlessly by overstressing the mathematics. One can get a pretty good grasp of how QM works for most purposes with a decent understanding of the physics of waves. Sure, if you want to do it properly you have to get into QM operators, eigenvectors in Hilbert space and all that, but most chemists at least can get a feel for it by understanding the physics of waves: standing waves, interference and superposition, Fourier sum of frequencies and so on.

ID purported to offer scientific evidence that aspects of the development of life were miraculous. Which, being intrinsically fraudulent, it actually did not, but the idea was obviously appealing to US legislators in the Bible Belt, who were persuaded to include the ideas in school biology teaching, for a while. ID was a social engineering project, developed by an America lawyer called Phillip E Johnson, now deceased, under the guise of science.

There is a non-mathematical explanation of quantum mechanical concepts in “Quanta” by P W Atkins, which is well-regarded. But it is arranged alphabetically, so perhaps better as a reference book than to start at A and read cover to cover.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/952797.Quanta I would also recommend reading some of the history of how QM came to be developed, especially : - the “ultraviolet catastrophe” - the photo-electric effect - the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom and its limitations Do you have any background in physics, e.g. a school level understanding of the physics of waves? That would be helpful.

This is a princely 11 schools, in the whole UK.

This has changed over time. When I was a student in the 1970s, the scientists were thought more conformist and conservative than arts and humanities people, who were quite heavily into Marxism. There was a change in the 1990s I think, seemingly associated with the decay of serious intellectual thought on the Right. It appears this was replaced by a sort of reflexive rejection of technocracy and expertise, partly to do with the emergence of societal issues requiring collective action, such as health programmes, environmental pollution and climate change. Scientists found themselves cast in the role of priests preaching social action, which was anathema to the Right. And so the Right has come to retreat from knowledge and embrace ignorance, stupidity and now even mendacious conspiracy theories, in its place. It’s tragic. And dangerous. Who is that?

You’ve left out the horse dewormer, invermectin.

Well check some dates and cross-check your sources, then. ID gained international notoriety around the time of the Dover School (Kitzmiller) trial in the US. That was in 2005. Since then there was an attempt to get it into the curriculum at certain government funded faith schools in the UK, which was roundly rejected by the Dept. Of Education. That was well over a decade ago. Since then ID has faded from the scene. The c4id website which I’ve just checked, still shows a 2004 video by Phillip E Johnson, who has been dead for over 5 years. The “Events” section is empty. It’s kaput.

The centre for intelligent design has been moribund for the best part of a decade. I know because I’m in the UK and used to keep tabs on it. You are quoting a Guardian article from 14 years ago. There is no current “debate” worth mentioning in the UK today. Where are you getting this rubbish from?

Very few have even heard of intelligent design. It is mainly a US phenomenon. And creationism, let alone ID, is not the teaching of mainstream Western Christianity (Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterianism). Such churches have no difficulty accepting the science. To the extent individual members of those churches may have creationist beliefs, it will because they don’t know or care much about science, not because this is what their pastors tell them. I suspect we who do think about science sometimes have a tendency to overestimate the degree to which our fellow citizens think about it - or follow through its implications.

Breaking the forum rules repeatedly, I imagine.

Your premise is faulty. It isn’t. Intelligent design only has traction in parts of the US Bible Belt and is fading out, now that its principal sponsor is dead.

Depends what about.

Just finished a novel by an Australian, Kate Grenville, called "The Idea of Perfection". It's an acutely observed meditation on the imperfections of human beings and the love they nonetheless inspire, in a low key, everyday sort of way. It's set in a small, remote town somewhere in Australia, the atmosphere of which is conveyed with brilliant economy. I was rather struck by how, unusually for a modern novel by a woman, two of the men in the story come across as displaying a kind of understated heroism, in spite of their various weaknesses and inadequacies. A book that does not judge people, and shows a certain warmth and humanity, I thought, which is a refreshing change after so many that seem to want to shock the reader. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2001.

No doubt.

Some good comments in this collection of clips from the British satirical panel game “Have I Got News For You” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG5osfcZ_gk If nothing else, the Freudian slip in the clip 30secs from the end is worth watching.

I think you are getting pushback on this because, this being a science forum, many of us have the habit of being careful not to exaggerate findings into black-and-white oversimplifications. "Struggle significantly to afford" is not the same as "cannot afford". I recall Gideon Rachman (I think it was), writing some years ago in the Financial Times, being advised as a young journalist that the way to make your pieces more readable was to "simplify, then exaggerate". That is certainly a rather prevalent habit in journalism. Most here would agree with what seems to be your underlying sentiment that what you describe is a scandalous state of affairs. However, even from a purely rhetorical point of view, it seems to me exaggeration ultimately weakens rather than strengthens the case, as opponents can pick you up on it for misrepresentation and turn the debate into an ad hominem attack on your credibility.

I was not previously aware of the magnetocaloric effect so thanks for drawing it to my attention. From the little I have (rather quickly and superficially) read up on this, it looks to me as if the warming up is due, not to kinetic energy added by moving the specimen into or out of the field, but to a change in its effective specific heat capacity. When the magnetic domains line up in the field it seems as if there is a reduction in the degrees of freedom of the atoms, reducing the heat capacity and so the temperature rises even though no heat has been added. But I'll defer to a physicist on this, obviously. 🙂

I've just given you an upvote to cancel it, as it was very obvious to me that a downvote was undeserved.

I'm still curious as to how your earlier post came to include a web link, for superposition, to entirely the wrong subject, viz. quantum theory. It seems an odd mistake to make. But as moderation has reminded us that speculation about your use of AI or otherwise is not the subject of the thread, I won't pursue it further. Of course I entirely agree - as would anybody with basic knowledge of science - with the general point you make, about younger strata generally overlying older and the evolutionary progression of fossils that can be traced in the geological column. If you look back in the thread, what is striking is the feebleness of the challenges from creationists. They almost all rely on carefully cultivated ignorance. No doubt that is fine when they talk among themselves, at chapel or bible study class, but what beats me is why they choose to come to a science forum and try the same arguments on people who know some science. It seems extraordinarily naïve.