exchemist

I originally thought the same, but actually I find a quiet but unmistakable whirr, which is the artificial noise most EVs seem to be equipped with (at low speed only), is helpful to me as a pedestrian, e.g. when cars manoeuvre or come up behind you in a residential street. Interestingly, TfL has started fitting the same noise maker to the front of its fleet of rear engined hybrid buses. When I’m on the bike and sharing a bus lanes with these things, it is helpful to be able to hear them now, rather than getting a shock when you check behind and find one right up your arse. @JohnDBarrow is being a jerk as usual, pretending he thinks the noise is to make the car sound macho. I am getting rather tired of his sealioning schtick.

I guarantee a frozen chicken would wreck a turbofan. Even a (defrosted, soft ) crow can be enough: Is there an actual spec for that?

No. And can you refer me to an example of a "digestion specification"? I am unfamiliar with this term.

Well, she should get taken to some decent restaurants, at least.😀

Yes, yes, no need to copy/paste formulae for the particle in a box. But you are not addressing the point at issue. Your claim, at least as you originally stated it, is there is nowhere where there is complete nothingness. Yet at the nodes in the wave function of bound systems, the probability density is zero. So surely it must be false to say that there is nowhere where there is complete nothingness, mustn’t it?

Christ Almighty! But you do come across such people. I remember a charming, attractive and well-read young woman, Jenny, who was one of my neighbours in the house I had in my rowing days, who I went out with a few times, thinking it might lead somewhere. But I found, on the second date, she had read a book called “The Hot Zone” about an Ebola epidemic in Africa and was convinced it was going to kill us all by melting our internal organs. There were other things too, which led me to the conclusion she was just one of those people - I have encountered others- who “go in for ballocks”. But if this chap has blown $15k on a biocharger, either he is rich enough to have money to waste or he has something missing in his sense of reality. You could buy a car, or have a new kitchen, for that sort of money.

What you describe is not a boundary, though, as there isn’t anything outside it. I must say also that the QM wave function stuff seems to be a mere truism. Clearly, if a QM entity exists, i.e. a wave function can in principle be written for it, it must be detectable somewhere. Therefore the integral over all space must be unity. This is trivially obvious and not some great insight on your part. I’m also intrigued by the point made earlier by @studiot, that wave functions with nodes imply there are points in space at which the probability of detection of the entity is, in fact, zero. How does that square with your idea?

Yes but I think Trump does make it much worse. That man has been gaslighting the US public ever since he started running for president and has never let up. Given that a large chunk of the population wants to take his side, for reasons of tribal political loyalty, that has led a lot of people to learn the habit of distrusting the reputable news media, government authorities, the justice system, etc. This removes the usual yardsticks we use to tell fact from fiction, predisposing them to believe all sorts of rubbish from weird corners of the internet instead.

That was before the Trumpy reality-distortion field was at full strength. I was out to dinner last night in London with a Brazilian family I’ve known for many years and was amazed when the man in the group started talking about this in credulous terms. He claimed the drones were the size of a van, that they had picked up radioactive materials(?!) and so on. I half expected him to get on to anal probes! People seem to have lost all sense of the plausible and to believe utter shit these days. It’s the baleful effect of social media, I suppose.

That has been done……https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren't_Real 😆

No. Gravitation is proportional to the mass of an object, and does not depend on the object’s composition. The molten Fe/Ni core of the Earth is responsible for its magnetic field, but not gravity.

OK I see. I think in that case it makes more sense to refer to this idea as an existence "principle" rather than a "boundary", as the latter implies some sort of edge or limit, in either time or space, beyond which some other regime may apply, whereas what you mean is a universal feature of the cosmos. It seems to me what you are doing is restating the old philosophical idea that "nature abhors a vacuum": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui_(physics) There does seem to be a certain truth to this, in that even the vacuum has quantifiable properties (ε₀, μ₀ and hence c). The vacuum therefore can't be said to be "nothing" in a philosophical sense, since how could mere "nothingness" have measurable physical properties? By the way it seems to me that is a conclusion one can reach without even going into such things as the QFT theory of vacuum fluctuations. However, like @swansont I struggle at the moment to see how this idea of yours is a scientific idea, as it seems to have no observationally testable consequences.

Surely if no region of space can be said to be truly void, that is saying there is NO boundary to existence, other than the limits of the cosmos itself? If so, where is this boundary?

That’s not chemistry, though. These are nuclear reactions, which belong to physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation It’s not exactly a new concept, as you can see.

Just to correct you on on one point of fact, Catholics are Christians of course. Catholicism is by far the largest Christian denomination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members

This strikes me as a flawed line of argument. First of all, only one religion, Christianity, was founded 2000years ago. Surely you need to consider religion in general, not just Christianity? Secondly, I have no idea why you refer to the "the first Islamicists and psychologists". There were no psychologists in the ancient world. And why focus on "Islamicists", when nearly all of the other major religions of the world are far older than Islam? Thirdly, your idea that religion was developed as a means of control of the population, while it may some have truth in it, needs more justification in my view. There were and are a variety of power structures in society, religious authority being only one of them. It seems more likely to me that religion originally developed as a way to help people come to terms with the vicissitudes of life. You see this not only in the teachings of the Abrahamic religions but also in religions such as Buddhism, which does not seem have a religious hierarchy exerting control in the way that, for example, Christianity did historically. I suspect what happened is that in some religions, religious authorities grew up as the theology became more sophisticated and that these then became, in addition to their earlier function as theological experts, a source of power over society. I certainly do not buy the notion you seem to suggest that a group of clever individuals sat around and dreamt up the idea of inventing a religion, in order to exert control over society. Fourthly, there is no evidence that people in the ancient world were any less intelligent than modern mankind.

What is your point? Pfizer makes a lot of very useful drugs, including the Covid vaccine I have received several doses of. Do you want the company wound up, or what?

From this response, I take it you are receiving some kind of psychiatric treatment and that you reside, at least from time to time, in a hostel. I think what you say about psychiatrists, as a profession, is nonsense. Psychiatric medicine is largely science-based, after all. I therefore suspect your view of them is quite likely coloured by whatever mental illness you are being treated for. So I don't think what you have to say is going to be very informative. I'm not going to be interested in reading an entire book about it.

What psychiatrists are these?

That actually occurred to me while I was typing. But I thought I’d better leave it to an American to articulate the sentiment🙂. In fact, Venezuela may also be an example of the famous “resource curse”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

No, it is not silly to point out the effects of corruption in places like Venezuela. The level of corruption in such countries is of an entirely different order of magnitude from that in mature industrialised countries. In places where the average person, or business, cannot trust the law to be applied more or less fairly, cannot trust accounting standards to be applied and cannot trust government officials and regulatory agencies to do their jobs without bribery, it is very hard for economic development to take place at all efficiently.

Quite. Nothing about Argentina.

On the other hand, they have produced a lot of very useful drugs. Obviously they are driven by the profit motive, so they will pick and choose what areas to research, which is why we can’t rely on them for all the drug research we need. But they do quite a lot of it.

Who did?

This is so bad it looks like an attempt at trolling.