exchemist

Don’t be so touchy. On the internet we don’t know who we are dealing with and I’ve got burnt in the past by timewasters, as have many others here.It takes a while to develop a rapport and trust with someone new. That’s what I mean by bona fides. It was a peculiar question for you ask so I became a bit suspicious, that’s all. But up to you if you prefer to continue with someone else, of course.

Quite, though may be hard to do if you still want the military to be effective and professionally led. Fox presenters as top generals?

Well, there are funny people about, as those of us who have spent time on these forums know, to our cost. Establishing the bona fides of a new poster takes a bit of time, so you will have to excuse me for being cautious. It was a very odd question for you to ask, that’s all. Why did you ask it? Did you really not realise that chemicals can be bought from commercial suppliers?

I doubt he’ll do that though, since that’s the reaction he might get. The model is Orban’s Hungary. So the electoral process will continue, in some form, but rigged to ensure he or his successor is the next president and Repubican waxworks remain in control of Congress, with the aid of @CharonY’s cult votes, cultivated via social media. The idea will be to allow people to think if things go “too far” they would step in, but then carefully nudge along just below that threshold, while acclimatising people so that their threshold moves beyond the situation at any given moment - frog-boiling, if you will. I think civil - or military - rebellion, or at least mass demonstrations, may ultimately be needed, but the problem will be to identify a trigger point that motivates enough people.

You don’t need military force for the kind of soft coup that is now in progress, though. All you need is for the army not to get involved to stop you. Once you have ensured all institutions of the state are under your control and that future elections, if any, are sure to return your party, the job is done.

How would this work? From the little I have read, it does not seem there are reliable predictive signs that can be detected before a patient starts to experience seizures. But I'm not expert. I presume you have studied this. What types of sign would your IT system use as input?

OK. You start.😀

All good info, save that this is not what a "functional group" is in chemistry. That term is used in organic chemistry, to denote groups of atoms which are part of an organic molecule, conferring specific types of behaviour, or functionality. Examples would be amine groups or carboxylate groups. Acid/base and redox classifications would not be described as functional groups. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_group I don't understand your question about silver nitrate. This video does not relate to the dawn of chemistry in the c.18th, when there were real issues with correctly identifying the substances they worked with. For the last 100 years at least, people have been able to obtain chemical compounds from commercial suppliers. Are you serious or are you messing us about?

Exactly. The whole point of an authoritarian coup, a textbook example of which we have here, is that it is irreversible. Part of the programme is to snuff out democracy, or turn its procedures into a merely decorative ornament, as it is in Russia. Once the courts are ignored, as Vance advocates, the way is open for vote suppression, bribery of voters - which Musk has already piloted - and/or intimidation at the polls. It will be interesting to see how they do that but I have no doubt there will be a plan. But the cult aspect that you draw attention to will make the task easier, given the influence of Musk et al over social media and the cowing of regular media that is already occurring through lawfare and selective exclusions from briefings.

Yup very hard to reverse if indeed all the military are loyal to Trump instead of to the Constitution. But are they?

It's good for quite a few metals but doesn't help for everything. And there's also the problem of colours that look similar. But it is a useful thing. As @studiot says, it can be thought of as a very basic kind of spectroscopy. On the mole/Avogadro's number stuff, yes it is a lot to take in but we've covered quite a lot of ground already, thanks to your questions. Let's review it: - the periodic table and why it is structured the way it is, with similar properties among elements in each of the groups (columns) - protons, neutrons and electrons and what makes a element an element - Atomic number and atomic weight, and isotopes - atoms versus ions. - Avogadro's Number and moles, and their importance for the ratios in which substances react together. - Plus some history of the start of chemistry with Lavoisier's studies of combustion That's quite a lot already. This would have been several weeks of school study for my son, for instance. I realise I have not come back to you yet on how we know ions are ions. There is probably a missing piece on the history of how the concept of atoms and molecules was validated, considering they are far too small to see directly (the wavelength of visible light is of the order of 500nm, whereas an atom is of the order of 0.5nm across, so 1000 times smaller.) Ions are just electrically charged atoms, so if you accept the existence of atoms and find that certain solutions conduct electricity, there must be charge carriers of some kind, so it's not a huge leap to think there are atoms with electric charge.The substance produced at the electrodes are also an indication of what is happening, e.g. chlorine is evolved at the +ve electrode when a current is passed through a salt solution. The Cl- ions give up their extra electron to the electrode and make chlorine gas.

Take a look at the periodic table link I gave you and read up the physical and chemical properties of phosphorus. It's a bit complicated because there are different "allotropes" of phosphorus (from the Greek for other forms), but you can get an idea of what its characteristic features would have been, for someone of Lavoisier's time. I don't know which form of phosphorus he was dealing with, I'm afraid. But these guys were not mugs. Elements like sulphur or mercury, were known to them, from all the experiments the old alchemists used to do, in the course of their fruitless quest to turn lead into gold.

OK, regarding weighing atoms - and thereby the protons and neutrons that make them up - this comes down to knowing what number of atoms there are in a given weight of substance. Avogadro's number is the standard number used in chemistry. It defines what is called a "mole" of the substance. ("Mole" comes from German "Mol", which was a term derived from "molecule"). One mole of any substance contains 6.02 x 10²³ molecules of it (or atoms of it if it is an element). This extremely large number is Avogadro's Number. The number is chosen such that the weight in grammes of one mole is equal to the atomic (or molecular) weight of the substance. For example, one mole of carbon weighs 12g and contains 6.02 x 10²³ carbon atoms. (If you look it up you will see the atomic weight of carbon is 12.) One mole of water contains 6.02 x 10²³ molecules and weighs (2 x 1 + 16) = 18g, because its formula is H₂O, and the atomic weight of H is 1 and that of O is 16. It is very important to know the number of moles of a substance when considering chemical reactions, because that determines the proportions that will react together. For instance, taking water again, the formula H₂O means that 2 atoms of hydrogen are combined with one of oxygen in each water molecule. So in, say, the combustion of hydrogen, which produces water, 2 moles of hydrogen atoms will require one mole of oxygen atoms. In terms of weight, every 2g of hydrogen will take up 16g of oxygen. So when you do a lab reaction, you can weigh out the proportions you need and not have unreacted material left over at the end. Coming back to protons and neutrons, In practice, nobody tries to express the mass of a proton or a neutron in grammes. But from the above I hope you can see we do have the relationship between the number of protons and neutrons in an atom and the weight of a set number of them in grammes, via the mole and Avogadro's Number. There is a nice little write-up here of how Avogadro's Number came to be determined: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-was-avogadros-number/ Admittedly it refers to a number of other pieces of physics and chemistry, but that's the way with science: everything is interlinked and feeds off other stuff. So to learn it there are times when you have to decide not to follow up all the loose ends at once, or you risk getting lost in a swamp of information. I'll come back to the question of ions separately, so that we can keep these strands of Q&A apart. Actually this is doubtful. A flame test requires a steady, non-luminous flame. This became available for the first time in the mid c.19th with the Bunsen burner.

Partly right but not the whole story in my view. Classic Trump behaviour includes floating outrageous ideas and letting them lie for bit, while the Overton window is shifted by his tame news media and political outriders, and then returning to them later with more seriousness. This Canada one may indeed go nowhere, but I think it would be a mistake to count on it being merely a distraction technique.

This reads like word salad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad Impossible to comment on its content, as none is discernible.

I’m going to break up the replies so we don’t get a lot of hares running in different directions. First, Lavoisier didn’t have anything like spectrometer, back in the 1780s. He would have recognised phosphorus from its physical and chemical properties, as was done for all chemical substances before spectroscopy became an analytical tool, which was in the 1st half of the c.20th. I’ll come back to the discovery of protons and neutrons later. But as to the question of weight of atoms, that comes down to weighing a sample of a substance and working out how many atoms are present in the sample. For that we need to introduce the concept of Avogadro’s Number, which is extremely important in chemistry and deserves its own post. So I’ll come back to that a bit later today, too.

Ah, but that's just because they don't yet know they want it. False consciousness and all that. 🤪 Autocratic zealots have all the answers........

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch.

I like these questions. When one is familiar with an area of science it is easy to ignore the original basis of the concepts one uses all the time. Some of these questions force me to go back and review the history of it all, which is informative. 🙂 OK, a reactant is something that takes part in a chemical reaction. For instance if you burn hydrogen, it reacts with oxygen and produces water: 2H₂ + O₂ -> 2H₂O. Hydrogen and oxygen molecules, shown on the left hand side of the chemical equation are the reactants and water, shown on the right, is the product of the reaction. So one quite commonly speaks of reactants and products. Yes good balances were available, as they were needed by gold and silversmiths for assay purposes. Joseph Black seems to have been the first to use one for chemical purposes at the end of the c.18th. He had one that was accurate to 0.1g, apparently. So by the mid c.19th I expect they had them good for 0.01g or so, which is fine for the sort of thing they were doing. Re phosphoric acid, Lavoisier would obviously have known he had made an acid derived from phosphorus. But the modern term phosphoric acid probably would not have been applied to it until later. Regarding atomic weight, you will see that shown for each element on the periodic table, along with atomic number. It works like this: Atomic number denotes the number of protons in the nucleus. In a neutral atom this is the same as the number of electrons. When it comes to atomic weight, electrons are so light their mass is negligible, at least in chemistry. What counts for atomic weight is the numbers of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. Protons and neutrons weigh almost the same and the number of neutrons in a typical nucleus is normally about the same as the number of protons, though with some variation. So the atomic weight is generally about double the atomic number. Atomic weight is quoted in units of protons or neutrons. For example the atomic number of oxygen is 8. The atomic weight, on the table I linked to in my earlier post, is given as 15.999, so almost 16 but not quite. The reason why it is not exactly 16 is because although almost all oxygen atoms have 8 neutrons, a very small proportion have a different number. The number shown in the table is an average. (These nuclei with different numbers of neutrons are different "isotopes" of oxygen, from the Greek for "same place", i.e. they have different masses but occupy the same place in the periodic table. That is because, so long they all have 8 protons, and therefore 8 electrons, they have identical chemical behaviour - which is what defines them as the element "oxygen". ) This post is getting long, so I'll start a new one about ions. Right, ions. An ion is an atom in which the number of electrons is not the same as the number of protons in the nucleus. That means it will have a net electrical charge, +ve if it has fewer and -ve if it has more electrons than needed for electrical neutrality. I gave an example earlier with H⁺. This is a hydrogen atom with its one electron taken away, leaving just a proton. (If you've ever had an ulcer, you may have been prescribed a "proton pump inhibitor". This just means something that inhibits the mechanism in the stomach that secretes acid, so fewer protons, or hydrogen ions (H⁺) are produced.) You can have ionic compounds: common salt is one. It consists of equal numbers of +ve sodium ions and -ve chloride ions, which attract one another and form a regular pattern in a crystal of salt. Both of these have lost or gained one electron per atom, but higher numbers are possible, depending on the element , e.g. Ca²⁺ or O²⁻ . One way you know you have got ions is if you dissolve the substance in water and see if it conducts electricity. Salt water conducts well, because +ve sodium (Na⁺) ions are attracted to the -ve wire and chloride (Cl⁻) ions to the +ve one, so a current can flow. (By the way the chemical symbol for sodium, slightly annoyingly, is Na, from the Latin natrium. The word originally comes from Wadi El Natrun in Egypt, where natural deposits of sodium carbonate are to be found. As Michael Caine would say, "Not many people know that".)

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By 1875 they had a pretty good idea of how to characterise chemical compounds. Mendele'ev's periodic table came out in 1871. The basic way the c.19th chemists worked was by careful measurements of weight changes. They weighed the reactants and the products and from this were able, eventually, to work out the atomic weight of each element. Once they knew the atomic weights, they could use weight changes during reactions to establish the chemical formula for each substance. It all started back in the time of Lavoiser, at the end of the c.18th (he lost his head in the French Revolution, in fact, poor fellow). He studied combustion, through which he was able to find out things like the fact that when you burned something it absorbed only 20% of the volume of air available. So that told him there were 2 components in air, the 80% component being inert. He called it "azote", from the Greek for lifeless, which is French for nitrogen to this day. He also found the ash from burning phosphorus weighed more than the phosphorus before burning, and that this ash was acid when dissolved in water. So he realised the component of air that reacted had become part of the ash, along with the phosphorus - a chemical compound. Because the ash was acid he called the reacting component of air "oxygene", from the Greek for acid-generating. What he had made was phosphorus pentoxide P₂O₅, and when he dissolved it, he got a solution of phosphoric acid. (Lavoiser was subsequently shown to be wrong in associating oxygen with acidity, when hydrochloric acid was shown not to have any oxygen in it. In modern chemistry, acids are substances that release hydrogen ions, H⁺, in solution. So it was 2 steps forward, one step back.) It was by painstaking experiments like this, carefully weighting reactants and products, or carefully measuring volume changes in the case of gases, that by degrees the identities of chemical elements and compounds and their formulae came to be discovered, from the proportions in which they reacted.

Marketing was the key to the success of the cars, though. History is littered with great designs that don't get to market effectively. And the rocket business was the result of his inspiration and drive, even though obviously he was not a rocket designer himself. He's not just rich, he has put his money to work in a very unique way and very effectively. None of which stops him having turned into a Nazi, of course.............. (I feel like Bryan Ferry, who famously got into terrible trouble for pointing out the Nazis had fantastic iconography. 😄)

But it was Musk's business that took it to market, was it not?

He made electric cars sexy and showed that Gerry Anderson had the right idea about rockets. Both fantastic achievements. But then he went mad after his son changed gender and disowned him, started to live in a far-right bubble, raving about the "woke mind virus" and has morphed into a megalomanic Nazi.

Yeah and there is an arid city on the top of Ben Nevis, right? 😄 In fact I have only been up it once, on a May bank holiday in the 1990s. It was 22C in the glen at the bottom and we heard a cuckoo. At the top it was snow.