KJW

I'm having difficulty understanding your approach, but it seems to me that it has the flaw of disconnecting the maths from the physics. You talk about distance and time not being primitive ingredients whereas these are physical quantities that are measured. You seem to be invoking a hidden reality, whereas it seems to me that a correct theory of reality should be based on what we observe and measure.

No, these are not "critical points". And neither is a triple point a critical point. A critical point occurs in a phase diagram where two phases become indistinguishable. They only occur between two phases that have the same symmetry, such as liquid and gas. It occurs at a specific temperature and pressure (like a triple point) and is indicated by the disappearance of the meniscus. By taking the state of the system on a trajectory around the critical point, one can transform a liquid to a gas or a gas to a liquid without any phase transition. This is useful in the production of aerogels where the solvent has to be removed without destroying the fragile structure due to surface tension.

I am amazed at pretty much everything to do with rotational dynamics. I recently discovered the Dzhanibekov effect, which has shaken to the core my understanding of spinning objects. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/b/be/Dzhanibekov_effect.ogv/Dzhanibekov_effect.ogv.720p.vp9.webm

Let's see... This was added to my post, so I was able to edit my post. I reported your post as a test. It seemed to work. I could write why I reported the post, and I could submit that report. But I don't know what's supposed to happen after that. I couldn't locate anything to say that I reported your post.

Was it 3 days? For 12 to 24 hours before it came back online, it was down for me. But for about 12 to 24 hours before that, it was online for me, but the forum was eerily quiet. I even posted something in the Sandbox to prove that I could post on the forum and not just read because I suspected that something was wrong with the forum even though it didn't seem to affect me (until later).

Why is this forum so quiet?

The problem with this is it assumes it is logically possible for the constants to have different values. If one adopts this view, then one has given up trying to answer the question of why a given constant has the value it does. My own personal view is that the dimensionless constants are ultimately based on mathematical constants.

Consider mitochondria. It solves a fundamental problem facing living organisms. That problem is the conversion of energy obtained from redox reactions to energy that is to be used for dehydration reactions. How surprisingly difficult is such a conversion is highlighted by the extraordinary way mitochondria achieve it. First, it creates a hydrogen ion concentration gradient across a membrane. It achieves this in a step of the electron transport chain where a lipophilic quinone inside the membrane is reduced on one side of the membrane, taking up two hydrogen ions in the process, and the resulting hydroquinone is subsequently oxidised to the quinone on the other side of the membrane, releasing those two hydrogen ions. Second, the hydrogen ion concentration gradient across a membrane is used to convert adenosine diphosphate (ADP) to adenosine triphosphate (ATP). It achieves this using a membrane protein called ATPase which couples the passage of hydrogen ions across the membrane through the protein with the phosphorylation of ADP. The reaction is reversible, but with the hydrogen ion concentration gradient formed as above from the oxidation of food, ATP is produced.

In JW literature, one often sees the earthly paradise of the future depicted as a well-kept park in which among other things, children are playing with lambs and lions. I've been told that the Christadelphian are the closest to JWs in their beliefs,

Yeah, that is a JW belief. And they also believe that all animals including humans will once again be vegetarian after Armageddon. It is my recollection that JWs also believe that it did not rain before the flood, and that the rainbow that occurred immediately after the flood was the first time a rainbow had ever been seen. Instead of rain, it was the humidity that sustained living things.

You don't use it for the organics, What exactly do you mean by this? I've already said that water is a fairly poor solvent in organic chemistry. Also, many reagents used to perform chemical reactions in organic chemistry react with water, and therefore water is an unsuitable solvent for such reactions even if the substances are soluble. And many organic compounds are soluble in water, a property that can be exploited in various ways, as well as a possible difficulty to be overcome. My preferred work-up extraction solvent was dichloromethane for its relatively low boiling point compared to chloroform. I think I may have been wrong to attribute the importance of water to life to a single property. However, I do feel that the importance of water's ability to dissolve substances is somewhat overstated and simplistic. Water molecules have two hydrogen atoms and two lone pairs of electrons, a perfect match for an extensive hydrogen-bonded network in the liquid phase, especially considering oxygen's high electronegativity compared to the elements below it in the periodic table. Thus, water not only has the ability to solvate ions and other polar molecules, but also the ability to force hydrophobic substances into a separate phase to minimise the disruption of the hydrogen-bonding of the water molecules. It's worth noting that most biomolecules are water-soluble. This is either because the molecules used as an energy source and their metabolic pathways are highly polar (eg glucose, its metabolic pathway, and the molecules of the tricarboxylic acid cycle), but also because the molecules that biochemistry "chooses" as its reagents and catalysts appear purposely to have highly polar groups (I'm referring to such molecules as adenosine triphosphate (ATP), nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+/NADH), and coenzyme A (all three of which have nucleotides in their structure)). This would suggest that biochemistry has adapted to an aqueous environment more so than water being necessary for a hypothetical biochemistry.

And it isn't because water is such a great solvent. In organic chemistry, water is a fairly poor solvent. It's because water provides a sharp delineation between the hydrophobic and the hydrophilic. For example, reaction sites of enzymes tend to be hydrophobic. But these sites are geometrically stabilised by water molecules forcing the protein structure into a conformation that has the hydrophilic groups on the outside surface and the hydrophobic groups on the inside. A solvent that tends to dissolve both hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances would tend to disrupt the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of proteins.

heterological

I think I for the most part agree with this. However, organic chemistry is uniquely able to provide the functions that would be necessary for all chemically based lifeforms (I suppose electronically based semiconductor lifeforms might be possible). The only other chemistry that I'm aware of that comes anywhere near close to organic chemistry is silicone chemistry based on repeating siloxane units instead of carbon atoms. I have an idea. If I had no idea, I would not have said anything. Obviously, anything said about life elsewhere in the universe is going to be speculative. I think we all understand that. But I think we can apply knowledge from physics, chemistry, and life on earth to say something that is better than nothing. And by the way, it was not me who downvoted you.

Yeah, that was a good episode. Actually, it's more "The Next Generation", "Deep Space 9", and "Voyager" that have human-like creatures with weird appendages that indicate the designer's struggle to come up with creatures that look alien. At least in the episode you mention, the alien creatures were truly alien. However, in the original series, the Klingons look oriental, which is kind of strange from a modern perspective. I think when it comes to aliens that are a feature of the storyline, the writers do come up with interesting characteristics. It's more likely to be minor characters in such places as Ten Forward that one finds the effort to produce an alien appearance. (In Ten Forward, the designers like to make the drinking glasses look futuristic in weird ways, but that's another story.)

Are you expecting that all life throughout the universe to be based on ribonucleic acids?

It's difficult to imagine that life could be any other way because we don't have any examples of life that is radically different from the examples we have here on earth.

Because I have an understanding of chemistry.

I think this would only be meaningful if one is considering the level of biology itself and not the lower levels of chemistry or physics (which would be the same everywhere). What specifically biological principles would you expect to be the same everywhere? I would accept that the principle of evolution would be universal, and that life would almost invariably be based on organic chemistry. But apart from that, I doubt that the more complicated building blocks of life that are more-or-less ubiquitous here on earth would necessarily be similar everywhere in the universe. For example, I'm inclined to think that it was a lucky accident that life on earth found the hydrogen bonding between purines and pyrimidines to be its basis.

When it comes to ToE and physics, it is reasonable to assume that the same physics exists everywhere in the universe, whereas we have no reason to believe that the same biology exists everywhere in the universe. I often laugh when I see Star Trek's portrayal of life from other planets.

What is the next number in the sequence: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ? The answer is 31.

@studiot Place "spoiler" in here Use the "Wrap in Box" option. In the Box Options, select "Expandable".

An arrow represents the movement of a pair of electrons. A fish hook is used to represent the movement of a single electron.

Not quite. For example, JWs do not believe in six 24-hour days of creation. Each day of creation was 7000 years long, and we are about 6000 years into the seventh day. Also, the earth and universe existed before the six days of creation, so JWs have no problem with the notion that the earth is billions of years old.

That's hard to say. Writing chemical names is much harder than reading chemical names because there are many possible ways of naming a particular chemical structure, and not all of them obey the rules of nomenclature. I have forgotten many of the finer points of chemical nomenclature. I believe 1-amino-4-ethyl-2-methybenzene is incorrect. The parent compound, methylbenzene, has only one isomer. Therefore, one would not have a number in front of it. And the methyl group would be in the 1 position in this case. Thus, it would be 2-amino-5-ethylmethylbenzene. By why not ethylbenzene as the parent compound? In this case, it would be 4-amino-3-methylethylbenzene. But no, the parent compound is (using the systematic IUPAC name) benzenamine. So, the correct name in this case is 4-ethyl-2-methylbenzenamine (or 4-ethyl-2-methylaniline using the preferred IUPAC name, aniline, for the parent compound). And note that it's 4-ethyl-2-methyl... and not 2-methyl-4-ethyl... because ethyl occurs before methyl alphabetically.