Jump to content

exchemist

Senior Members
  • Posts

    3273
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    45

Everything posted by exchemist

  1. There is an article in today's Financial Times, saying that the European space industry is also going down the route of commercial competition. So yes, this is a natural progression, once a technology has been sufficiently mastered and once commercial exploitation opportunities open up in the field in question. It was not so long ago that nuclear power was all in state hands. But now, it no longer is. But the private sector needs a return on investment that justifies the level of risk in the enterprise. Where there is little or no commercial return, and/or the risks are high, private enterprise will not get involved. Private enterprise may also be denied access to a sector if there is no prospect of effective competition (anti-monopoly legislation). So these are the areas where governments have to step in. I am honestly not sure I understand what point you want to make, apart from having some kind of animus against NASA.
  2. If this becomes its unofficial name I shall be highly gratified. It does resemble its creator, rather: Bezos should avoid roll-neck sweaters at all costs.😄
  3. It does, thanks. Looks as if my organic chemistry tutor might just have been becoming aware of this around the time I sat finals.🙂
  4. Do you know when this reagent was introduced to the organic synthesis arsenal? I learned my organic synthesis back in the 1970s and I don't have a record of this one in my undergraduate book (ROC Norman) from that era, though it does of course have the dichromate method you mention. I see from Wiki this chlorochromate route was discovered "by accident" but there does not seem to be any information about when and how this came about. I wonder if it is more recent than my old books.
  5. Probably from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyridinium_chlorochromate
  6. Yes you must have misunderstood, I think. It is populations of organisms that evolve, collectively, rather than single individuals spawning a whole new species. If it were the latter it could only happen by extreme in-breeding, which we know doesn't work out well.
  7. I think with Big Pharma the problem is the Cinderella areas. They can make billions out of cancer but some of these 3rd world conditions barely get a look in because there's no money in it for them. We obviously need both approaches.
  8. I think Big Pharma will be speaking of innovation in the sense of product development rather than ab initio research. Product development is extremely costly - and high risk.
  9. What about Starlink, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink But I’m now confused as to what you are arguing for. It’s clear that private enterprise can do a good job of research when there is an identifiable commercial goal. But it is equally clear that other, more fundamental, types of research are also needed for science to progress. Governments have always realised this, which is why state-funded research programmes continue to be supported. None of this is new.
  10. Have you not heard of Elon Musk’s Space X? https://www.spacex.com
  11. The government, at least in the UK, does fund a certain amount of research done by organisations such as universities and the Natural History Museum.
  12. The Man Who Haunted Himself?
  13. Yes. My understanding is that collisional broadening, or pressure broadening, is also due to the uncertainty principle as the collisions shorten the lifetime of the excited state. But it's an interesting question @sethoflagos poses. The expectation values of energy e.g. of an ensemble, are conserved of course, but whether that is strictly so for an individual pair of absorption and re-emission events by the same atom I feel less confident.
  14. I think there is also broadening due to the Doppler effects of random atomic motion, at least in gases.
  15. I understand Pfizer's patents on Viagra in Europe also expired some time ago. So anyone can make it, without paying for a licence to do so.
  16. Yeah....assuming you can create -ve energy density somehow........ Which is a bit like switching off gravity, if I'm not mistaken. 😀
  17. But there is no theoretical way to move space itself. It's a bit like saying we could all fly if we could switch gravity off. Which is sort of true, except that we can't switch gravity off.
  18. In electronics, what's the difference between a topological surface and a.......surface?
  19. I've had a thought about what may be the source of my confusion. It only makes sense to apply conservation laws in the context of an interaction. An interaction "collapses the wave function", or at any rate the property in question takes on a specific value at that instant. So then there is no uncertainty principle issue, as the value of the property has become definite. (But I am conscious of struggling with half remembered stuff from half a century ago, so I may well be speaking ex ano.)
  20. UNQUOTE Would you mind not corrupting the text of my posts, when you quote them, with spammy links? Thanks. Reported for spamming.
  21. Hmm, fair point about energy. I'm afraid I don't know QFT, so I am not sure of the connection between the path integral formalism and the uncertainty principle. AS I understand the concept of expectation values of a property it is the average result one would get from a series of measurements on a series of identical systems. Some individual members of the series would be below and some above. So if the expectation value corresponds to the value predicted by conservation, some of the results might not. Is this a wrong picture?
  22. Yes. That's why I would welcome comment on my understanding of this point by a real physicist. @Genady's previous contribution did not seem to me to tackle it head on. But for instance, vacuum fluctuations imply a temporary violation of conservation of energy, I think, which averages out to zero.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.