joigus

(My emphasis). I think the importance of this comment cannot be overstated. How can there be a discrepancy between an energy density and an energy? It's like stating that there is a discrepancy between the speed of light and the radius of the proton.

Your title confounds me. What delusion? You seem to be of the opinion that Dawkins is deluded. Could you elaborate?

I tend to forget biologists are sooo carbon-centered...

Of course. Watch out for things like, \use_package amsmath 1 \use_package amssymb 1 \use_package cancel 1 \use_package esint 1 \use_package mathdots 0 \use_package mathtools 1 \use_package mhchem 1 \use_package stackrel 1 \use_package stmaryrd 1 \use_package undertilde 1 etc on your headers, that some of these editors automatically generate but doesn't 'tell' you about. Good point.

An interesting option is to get hold of a good WYSIWYG editor --there are many--, and generate the LateX code to copy and paste. You only have to worry about the code-wrapping symbols.

Thanks. You're right. I also said "produce" when I meant to say "consume".

Plants do cellular respiration too. It's only that they are nowhere nearly as energy-demanding as animals are. Plants have mitochondria, not just plastids. They do 'produce'. Google for: "animals have many more mitochondria than plants"...

This is a point I've been meaning to bring up too. If you insist on saving the aether, you can, by introducing cumbersome hypotheses that clocks in motion slow down somehow and certain 'tensions' shorten the moving lengths somehow. Hendrik Lorentz did try something like that for a while from what I know. Old quantum theory was derived with the idea that particle positions were well defined. Later developments showed they aren't. Early relativistic ideas (Lorentz, Poincaré, etc) were developed with the idea of aether/absolute space. Later developments showed you can drop it and nobody would be any the wiser. You should read what other members are telling you: It's invariant, not constant. It produces the same reading in all inertial frames. You should also do the exercise that @Eise suggests. Just a pure mathematical exercise, with no appeal to any ether. It produces what's observed. You missed the point, I'm afraid. I didn't say that. Unless you're willing to admit that moving is a matter of perspective. Then I did say that. But then, staying where you are (not moving at all) is but a particular way of moving. And moving in general, is tilting an angle along a hyperbola.

The 'change' in simultaneity is 'real'? Simultaneity is a frame-dependent concept, rather. The Earth 'suddenly ages' for real? The accelerating twin finds a path in ST for which proper time is less, rather. Time dilation/length contraction are real. As much as anything else that you see. They're very much like foreshortening. Is foreshortening just a matter of 'perspective', and therefore 'not real'? If you think that's the case, try to get a 4m-long pole inside a garage through a 3m-wide door with the pole's length parallel to the door. A clever person --who knows the laws of foreshortening-- manages to get the pole inside the garage by rotating it, and then rotating it back once inside (the close equivalent of the twin's U-turn). Don't get me wrong. You seem to be trying to make sense in an honest way, but you're trapped in an early-20th-century illusion. That's why you express yourself in such an obscure --and incorrect-- way. Some of the things you've said, though, sound like you're groping towards Mach's principle. But with the wrong toolkit taken from the junkyard of discarded ideas. And with the wrong outlook. Your 'ether' or 'absolute space' is (if anything) the distribution of energy in the universe.* That's why most of us look at you in disbelief, like the proverbial Earth-bound twin, wondering, "where have you been all these years? Your ideas haven't changed at all since the early 20th Century!" ----------------------------------- * Unfortunately (or not) Mach's principle is not a very useful constructive starting point in order to reach the right theory of gravitation. Although GR is definitely Machian in spirit: The distribution of stuff tells you how much you must deviate from locally inertiall in order to be aware that you're moving.

This is only true on a field that is of characteristic > 2. In discrete arithmetics it's not true that 1+1=2. In binary arithmetics 1+1=0 or 2=0 (mod2). The moral of my silly little story: Don't take anything for granted. Not even aether theory. Yes, I know what acceleration is. I wonder whether you do. As to your last statement, it went badly wrong the moment you wrote 'so if'. Because nothing you said after that follows from the antecedent. But don't mind me. Carry on with your enthralling conversation.

Will you just read what's answered to you??? Otherwise it's a monumental waste of time for everyone involved. (my emphasis.) The returning twin is subject to accelerations. Is it not? This is the major bone of contention with people who don't understand the twin's paradox. (Or should I say it just goes over their heads?) It is practically a socio-physical theorem that there will always be people who don't understand it. You are living proof of it.

That should be fun. I'm wondering what the n-1 level of stupidity would look like.

What do you mean non-relativistic photons? Photons are always relativistic. Am I missing something? Everybody else seems to understand what you mean, but I don't. Because they're always relativistic, the equation of state (pressure as a function of density) is what it is in the matter term of the Friedmann equation.

The alleged title, Doesn't even make syntactical sense. It's perhaps significant that this OP seems to be in answer to one of the main objections to previous bogus thread on "fluorine-based biology". In particular the part that says,

This is basically the picture in my mind, but of course it would be interesting what @CharonY, @exchemist and the rest of the (active) experts have to say.

It seems like they do. Close to 50% as much carbon as fluorine for fluoroalkanes. More if double bonds C=C or higher occurs (or other radicals). Linear chains 2n+2 F's per n C's cyclic chains 2n F's per n C's 2-cyclic chains 2n-2 F's per n C's That assuming nothing else is goin on but C-F bonding, which sounds pretty boring. Carbon is still the structural scaffolding in FC's. And F is monovalent, which leaves little room for anything interesting going on IMO.

This definition of the principle of causality as applied to classical mechanics is indeed a meaningless nonsense one, as you don't include time in it, or the paradigm of the differential equation, which is the way in which causality is implemented in physics. Fortunately neither Newton, nor Laplace, etc said anything of the kind. It is, rather, state of A, B, C at time t1 causes state of A, B, C at time t2, which causes state of A, B, C at time t3, and so on.

Molecules can vibrate, rotate, twist, and scissor, etc. In fact, there are DOF that are not obviously rotational/vibrational, etc. but some complicated so-called normal modes like, https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Spectroscopy/Vibrational_Spectroscopy/Vibrational_Modes/Number_of_Vibrational_Modes_in_a_Molecule Recently, a key to why CO2 (kinda mysterious, as it's just a boring non-polar linear molecule) is such an important agent in global warming has been found to have a root in resonances of such non-obvious normal modes due to Fermi resonances: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.15177.pdf

Sorry. Here's a lowdown of the vocabulary I've used. Tell me, please, where the problem is: Degree of freedom Temperature Specific heat internal (rotational/vibrational) vs external (CoM) cutoff (making some energy --or wavelength-- domain irrelevant; see next) freezing (as in freezing degrees of freedom by making them very unlikely to store energy under thermal-equilibrium conditions).

Absolutely. Sorry I missed this very good argument for so long. It's only because of what you say that different molecules have different specific heats as a function of temperature. The internal degrees of freedom are totally relevant. This is exactly the reason why different molecular components have different specific heats. What other reason could there be for different gases to display different specific heats if only the CoM DOF were relevant? Quite a different matter is how quantum mechanics introduces a cutoff for short-length degrees of freedom (independently of how poly-atomic a gas is), and how this played a crucial role in the dawning of quantum mechanics itself. (Birth of the old quantum theory as a mechanism to freeze the short-wavelength DOF.)

Agreed. @martillo's suggestion is not going to work. Your suggestion is, if I understand correctly, a valiant attempt --let's put it that way-- to try and make sense of their hopeless intention to define temperature as an attribute of one molecule or atom. I think you're right to say that the ergodic theorem is essential to define thermodynamic equilibrium. If most typical physical systems we deal with were not ergodic, I don't think statistical ensembles would work at all within the context of variables such as the partition function, temperature, Helmholtz's free energy, entropy, and such. It would be a disaster. The least I can say is those variables would be as good as useless. So why bother trying to make sense of something that just doesn't? Just to spite me? Temperature is an ensemble-related parameter. There is no operational definition that would allow us to measure the temperature of a molecule either. There is no theoretical framework that allows us to define it in such a way except by way of the ensemble. Temperature is an ensemble property. Even more so than entropy is. At least the microscopic entropy of a molecule can be defined as the volume of phase space for that molecule, which is always the same. Not so for temperature.

Sorry, pseudoscience is beyond my scope. I'm out.

I'm sorry I was disrespectful to the geometry[?!]. I think you're trying to talk about the Arahonov-Bohm effect. Now I'm positive that's how you connected the words "Bohm" and "holonomy". It's about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov–Bohm_effect Aharonov-Bohm holonomy has nothing to do with realism, locality, or any of that, even though the word "Bohm" appears there too. It's the De Broglie-Bohm theory that does. Kinda like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution has very little to do with Maxwell's equations, except for Maxwell. Do these comments help a little bit?

Hey, nice account. BTW, I recommend you Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. It's about that (in)famous meeting, and offers a possible development that I can only conceive as happening with a many-world view.

From what I know (and I know one case personally) it wasn't obvious during pre-pubescent stage and there were environmental factors that triggered it post-puberty. So what you say checks with my personal experience. That's why gene-based diagnosis is sure to become essential in the future.