exchemist

If philosophical or religious ideas refer to scientific concepts, they need to use them in a manner that makes scientific sense. Otherwise, they are talking crap. No one gets a free pass to mangle science just because they call it something else. Personally, I am not in the least bit contemptuous or dismissive of philosophical or religious ideas, but if someone treats energy as a substance, or tries to endow spiritual concepts such as the soul with physical properties like vibration frequency, I am going to call bullshit, because that is Chopra-esque woo.

Aha, so that would I suppose indicate that formation of the rochelle salt is in fact favoured thermodynamically, compared to the the two unmixed salt structures. Interesting. And of course what it is known for is its piezo-electric properties. I'll have to look up how all that arises. (I'm just old enough to have had at one time a hi-fi amplifier with 2 inputs for record player cartridge inputs, one for magnetic cartridges and one for crystal or ceramic ones. Presume rochelle salt may have been use in the latter.)

Quite right I was talking nonsense, once the acid is fully neutralised it’s just a solution with equal numbers of Na and K cations. Serves me right for trying to do chemistry with brain fog from my ‘flu’. But will crystallisation produce just Rochelle salt, or a mixture of Na/Na, K/K, and Na/K tartrates, and if just Rochelle salt why? Is it a happy accident of thermodynamics that the mixed salt is preferred? My instinct would be that either Na or K would fit the lattice better and the mixed salt might be disfavoured relative to the one with the better fit.

Hmm, not sure about this. How do you know you will get the mixed metal salt,, rather than a random mixture of sodium and potassium tartrates? According to WIKI, Rochelle salt is made by adding NaOH to potassium bitartrate, i.e. potassium hydrogen tartrate, up to a pH of 8. This suggests you need a 2 step process, first generating the K bitartrate and then treating with NaOH. Generating the bitartrate suggests to me a process of gradually adding dilute KOH solution and stopping while the mixture is still acid, to make sure you only neutralise one end of the molecule. I have not looking into what pH that would be but no doubt you can look up the pKas for tartaric acid. The usual source of K bitartrate is the crystals naturally deposited in white wine barrels. There is potassium in the grapes and the acidity of wine is appropriately mild.

Well I suppose there is the “solvated electron”, formed reversibly by dissolving an alkali metal in liquid ammonia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvated_electron But that’s definitely in the “don’t try this at home” category.😀

Neither dark matter nor dark energy provides you with any justification whatever for imagining energy is a substance, nor for some wacky notion of souls with frequencies.

In the UK we had sodium vapour lamps for street lighting until only a few years ago, though now almost entirely displaced by LED. One of the curiosities of sodium vapour lamps was because they emit just the sodium D lines, you got false colours. But they were almost universal. I also remember mercury vapour street lights, which also gave false colours. I don’t know offhand what emission lines were excited - green and blue was the general effect.

Thanks, temp down for now at least but sense of taste still screwed up and lungs congested. Might be covid, I suppose, though the cheapo over-the-counter test didn’t come out +ve. When I have more energy I might try to work out the work function, i.e. latent heat, in eV, just for fun.

Ah yes, one could express that on a per molecule basis. Thanks.

Can one, then, define a sort of “work function” for a molecule to escape the attraction of its neighbours in a condensed phase. I’ve a feeling I should know this but, being in bed with ‘flu’, I can’t think of one.

“Paradigm” does seem to be one of those faux-intellectual buzzwords beloved of Chat GPT and the like. 😉

This is inevitable in systems of representative democracy, because you are voting for a person to represent you in government. You are not even voting just for the policy positions they announce, but for their wisdom and judgement in dealing with whatever unforeseen issues arise during the tenure of the government. The alternative is to hold direct referenda on individual issues. The snags with that are you will be asking people to vote repeatedly, leading to fatigue and so to low turnout, calling into question the legitimacy of the outcome of the vote, and, more seriously, the very high risk that people vote without really understanding the issue and the consequences of each decision they vote on. The Swiss manage to do it, to a limited degree, but they have had decades of practice. There is no perfect system. Representative democracy is rough and ready but does at least prevent tyranny, so long as the limits on terms of government remain respected.

Haven’t watched the video, as the picture shows something that would be insanely dangerous - and is thus clickbaitily misleading, as it is clearly not what is done. I presume the purpose of destructive tests of this type is to ensure failures of the rotating assemblies are contained safely by the casing. Not to see if the engine can withstand the insertion of the foreign object - which obviously it cannot.

Yes I have some sympathy with your view. I do think the modern environment is dreadfully noisy, due to all the machines - and often made worse by people adding yet more noise, e.g. music in supermarkets, for no good reason. I recall reading somewhere how quiet life in the middle ages was compared to what we experience today. I suspect we are all permanently overstimulated and that it is not good for us.

Heh heh.😄 Does the RB 211 have these features, or is it one the older type? I ask because the plane in the video I posted did apparently have RB 211 engines, one of which is taken out by a fairly small bird, a crow or blackbird or similar, by the look of it.

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 😆