mississippichem

This does not invalidate the premise of the OP but I would be weary of any physics speculation asserted by Atkins. Some of you may know that his textbooks have been a staple in undergraduate physical chemistry classes for some time. In the last few years the quality of his books have gone down hill IMO. Some of us in the p-chem world have begun to wonder whether or not he is getting senile in his old age. I can't seem to find anything now but he's made some less than rigorous statements about QM in recent times. Let's hope he doesn't go the way of Pauling (great chemist fading into crackpot obscurity). Again this does not automatically make anything he says incorrect but I thought this was worth mentioning. Consider the source but don't let ad hom. kill an idea.

This is the most basic, and thus first, thing one learns when studying quantum theory. Nobody is more correct on this point than Feynman. From his lectures V-III page 1-1

 

Never try to say it better then this I say.

Feynman conveys the pedagogy of quantum theory quite plainly and succintly in FLP III in my opinion. I'm no physicist but this has been my understanding of quantum "objects" for some time. I agree with you and Feynman. Well placed reference. Cheers.

The "shut-up and calculate" paradigm may be unsatisfying but it almost never lets us down or leads us astray.

Let's see your calculation OP.

Could this have to do with symmetry rules for cycloadditions in quantum chemistry? This might be way off base but that is one context in which I've seen those types of notation used.

Well, we function only by killing other life forms.

Gotta hate those damn evil heterotrophic organisms...

I think that E=MC^2 is slightly wrong.... I also want to add the fact that E=MC^2 was tested by atomic.bomb... According to me, 100percent of the mass is not converted inti energy..

I think you are conflating the efficiency of a nuclear device (a question for engineers and bomb designers?) with the theoretical notion of mass energy equivalence (a very "physicsy" notion). Another example comes from chemical reactions. I can calculate how much anergy should be released in theory by such a reaction, but in reality I can never harness or even release 100% of that calculated energy. There are always loses or imperfections in a system. I don't know if those losses in a nuke are from engineering considerations or some theoretical notion from nuclear physics but I know that blowing up a nuke and measuring the Joules that come out is not a valid test of mass energy equivalence unless you account for all those other losses and imperfections in the system.

It is. But being able to read this book isn't an instinct, as making a hive is. So I don't see how they can be compared.

I don't either. That's why I find it a bit silly to maintain that any organism in the universe is "superior" to any other. I find the OP to be a misplaced question and a bit pointless but the discussion has evolved (no pun intended) into something worth discussing IMO.

EDIT: grammar stupidity removed

Okay, maybe this thread can be what it is suppose to be. This site explains a little about McGuffy readers.

 

http://en.wikipedia....cGuffey_Readers

 

McGuffey was the first to make graduated reading books for children. The object is to not just to teach reading, but the reading is also learning morals. He ended his career life, by teaching morals at the college level.

Bold mine throughout

I'm of the opinion that we should teach reading and allow children to develop their own sense of morals. You cannot define an absolute morality and claim that it is the correct one. Some religious extremist in the middle east find it a moral act to kill their daughter who lost here virginity outside of marriage. Some people in the US think it is morally correct to teach anti-scientific creationist blather in public schools. Who is a teacher to decide what is moral for his students?

...Education for technology is not the education for individuality that was the Dewey's focus. Education for technology is pretty restricted to the narrow band of intelligence that is useful to the military. This does not transmit a culture, nor the principles of democracy, nor morality. Instead of advancing our own democracy, we are now what we fought against. Do you fully get, what is at the center of education for technology is the state, not the individual. It is a police state, because the individual us not prepared for independent moral judgment, but thinks morality is a matter of religion! The democracy that was defended in two world wars, can not survive, education for the state.

The bolded statement is so false that I'm really going to have trouble addressing it. What about the huge advancements that "technological education" has brought in fields like medicine, agriculture, space exploration, and computing. How is that only useful to the military? I know you didn't say "only" but I think you are being disingenuous by not highlighting all the non-military uses of the great knowledge of science our society has acquired.

The computer you are reading my post on is the result of technology. That same technology allows us to hold our governments to a level of accountability and transparency that was unachievable in the old days of newspapers and pamphlets. In another thread you are angry about the torture allowed to be perpetrated on enemy combatants by the esteemed Mr. Bush. I maintain that you might never have heard of such travesties were it not for modern technological forms of information distribution like the internet.

Okay my love, who do you think my commander is?

A misplaced sense of duty against a non-existent enemy?

I am saying, because of the change in education, our youth are basing their judgements on feelings, instead of reason. Morality is a matter of reason. Morality is understanding The Law and good manners. I am saying our democracy depends on this understanding and that education is no longer transmitting this information to our youth. If you want to prove me wrong, please do.

I am 23 and I love it when older people project their feelings about my generation onto us as if they can know our inner motivations and rationales. You are using your anecdote about your grandson to project those qualities onto an entire generation. Do you not see the fallacy there? I've had a job since I was fifteen and have never gone longer than two months without employment since.

I admit that my sense of morality probably does not coincide with yours. I hold scientific and quantitative understanding to be the ultimate form of understanding (accuse me of scientism, I'll take it as a compliment). Reason being that it is the only form of understanding that has consistently lengthened our life spans, improved our daily lives with convenience, increased the speed of propagation of other forms of knowledge (think internet, TV, radio, telephones) and, somewhat selfishly, been the reason my country and it's allies have been victorious in two global conflicts with authoritarian leaders (radar, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers).

What do you think you are saying that is different from what I am saying? And for the education thing, what about replacing our liberal education with education for technology? There are huge social and political ramifications to this. Number one is no longer understanding the reasoning of our democracy.

Would you like a side of strawman with your false dichotomy? Who said that we must choose between the two? In the western world at least, we have the right to choose what we study in college and to a large degree in pre-collegiate education ("highschool" in the USA, something like "A-levels" in the UK?).

The greatest point of contention here is the matter of The Law and the word "God". Understanding The Law is vital to understanding morals, but perhaps we should have established an understanding of The Law, before discussing morals. Hey, everyone the thread about The Law is also about God. How about going to that thread and basing your arguments on the information provided there. Morals is about how God works, not the existence of God.

One would first need to assume the existence of a god but we'll not go there as that never ends well.

So man is no more intelligent than a bee? There is absolutely no notion of higher/lower intelligence in biology? All of our advancements are thanks to instinct, brought on by years and years of natural selection... and has nothing to do with the structure of our brains?

 

Sounds ridiculously wrong.

How is the structure of our brains not a result of natural selection?

hay. this is not reality. the above locks in place when it is correct. i am going to make another thread on the impossiblity for mutations to generate any new "information" like what n-d-t says they do.

That's the idea. Favorable traits get selected for and tend to stick around.

What the hell does marriage have to do with sex?

Once you get married you don't have it anymore?

Debate can't solve the problem, I have said, just do as you please.

Then why have you brought this to a forum where people typically come to debate!?

You are argueing in a circle.

Debate can't solve the problem.

You are arguing with poor sentence structure. You've yet to address even one argument raised in this thread. I'll accept that as your statement of defeat.

Just becuause I used entropy in my argument does not mean that I am using circular logic. Show me the circular logic in my argument. I was showing how entropy must exist in order to explain many of the phenomena we observe.

I ask again, what are the natural variables for internal energy? I find it I'll advised for you to evoke fancy stat. mech. arguments when you clearly do not understand rudimentary classical thermodynamics.

Thanks for your " suggest closing the thread " , I'm tired of debate.

You've yet to debate. I wish you would at least attempt to tackle even one of these arguments. People have put time into their posts and you effectively respond with "Nah-uh".

What I want to say is: Thermodynamics and statistical physics, from this, Physical chemistry, will be rebuilt, believe it or not.

And you expect to rebuild it without the presence of spontaneous endothermic processes, and a flawed interpretation of Liouville's theorem.

Thanks for a good laugh. Physical chemistry currently works fine and currently pays my salary. Physical chemistry was already built from thermo and stat. mech. Show where current chemical thermodynamics is inconsistent with these notions from physics.

I'm not going to let you keep making unfounded assertions and snide empty comments. Pony up or shut up. It's quite simple really.

Not surprising to me, since I don't think it was actually divinely inspired by an omnipotent editor. Which makes a lot of sense of e.g. "don't eat pork" and "don't eat food >3 days old" if it's recast as "these actions seem to be unhealthy, let's outlaw them by scaring people". Not that it's completely unfounded � trichinosis is/was a problem with pork, food spoils, people get infections and all of this was much more serious when they lacked proper medicine.

I too think that many of the OT laws are merely a health code that came around before germ theory (they didn't have a biology class or public health services, they had to scare people)

As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.

Sounds reasonable, next verse,

For the LORD your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.

Holy Shit!

5) I would like to answer anyone question RELATED to this theme, but if he could not understand, what to do next?

John Cuthber and I have been trying to point out to you that if you do away with the concept of entropy then you have no explanation for why [observed] spontaneous processes occur.

Allow me to clarify:

The internal energy of a system expressed in natural variables is:

[math] U(S,V,N) = TdS-PdV+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i} [/math]

By definition of the differential we have:

[math] dU=\frac{\partial U}{\partial S}dS + \frac{\partial U}{\partial V}dV + \sum_{i} \frac{\partial U}{\partial N_{i}}dN_{i} [/math]

By inspection we can see that T, -P, and "mu" correspond to the partial derivatives of internal energy with respect to its natural variables. Which, by the way, how do you intend to define the internal energy without S?

Alright so now let's define the Gibb's energy which is a great measure of spontaneity near equilibrium. We can get an expression for the Gibb's energy and all the other thermodynamic state functions by Legendre transforming the internal energy any number of times. For the Gibb's energy we Legendre transform in V and S:

[math] G= TS-PV+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i}-V\frac{\partial U}{\partial V}-S\frac{\partial U}{\partial S} [/math]

differentiating with knowledge of the coefficients established above gives:

[math] dG(P,T,N_{i})=VdP-SdT+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i} [/math]

You can do some algebra and show that the enthalpy is hidden inside the expression (yes I know technically you can't integrate the expression as is because S has a T dependence but the approximation is valid near equilibrium and for a relatively small temperature change):

[math] dG=dH-SdT [/math]

[math] \Delta G= \Delta H - T \Delta S [/math]

So for spontaneous processes [not just chemical reactions by the way] that require a net input of energy, i.e. those with a positive change in enthalpy, there must be a change in some other quantity in order to meet the spontaneity requirement of the change in Gibb's Energy being negative. How do you explain that?

This is all from classical thermodynamics. But your argument also makes no sense on a statistical mechanics level. Entropy is a volume on the phase space of an ensemble. I don't see how entropy being not directly experimentally measurable, or not unique affects that. Do you not agree that for a larger phase space volume there are a greater number of accessible microstates?

I read your paper by the way. No matter what you justify through the Liouville Theorem or by redefining the Carnot cycle, your result must agree with observed experiment.

EDIT: LaTeX hiccup

0/0 etc. are questions that belong in mathematics. They have nothing to do with the physics of the universe.

Indeed. I'll go a step further and move this to speculations.

Aldo Costa already builded a few decades ago and it's working and he didn't get any price at all. Everybody turning heads away from him because he defied the laws of termodynamic. People are very ignorant in that sense. Specialy Oil companies are fighting against perpetula motion machines very hard. They have control over patent offices etc. So law of thermodynamic is their major excuse. But they don't know how to explain Aldo Costa spining wheel. Formulas we learn in schools are wrong to ceartan point.

I would give him a Nobel Prize. He deserve it.

 

 

sorry, my spelling!!

How did he manage to get rid of friction and thermal losses?

Do you understand what the second and third laws of thermodynamics are all about?

I'm confused as to how hyperconjugation can exist in trans alkene isomers. In order for this to happen the antibonding and bonding pi orbitals have to physically overlap - how is this possible? Also, how does hyperconjugation provide a stabilizing effect - does it make it so the double bonded carbons "think" there's 8 electrons around them/next to them all the time vs. only part of the time like with pi bonds?

What is confusing about hyperconjugation in trans isomers specifically? I don't see how it would be different in cis isomers. The interaction happens from the sigma bond beta to the sp2 carbon so the location of the substituent on the other side of the alkene should only make a negligible difference with respect to the orbital overlap comprising the hyperconjugation.

I would like to hear how he explains the occurence of spontaneous processes that are endothermic (dH>0).

That is a reliable way to spot if the equations you are dealing with a quantum in nature or not. But this is selling it short.

 

Consider the CCR

 

[math][x,p] = i \hbar[/math]

 

You should then think of Planck's constant, up to i and two pi as measuring the noncommutativity on the quantum phase space.

So you are saying that there are other non-classical frameworks in physics where planck's constant (or reduced plancks constant) is not seen in the important commutators?

I think someone here on SFN once defined classical physics as anything that doesn't use [math] \hbar [/math]. Can't seem to remember who said that, but I like it.

Is it possible to make different atoms of different elements,but with a small mass?Like having an element which behaves like oxygen but it has the mass of hydrogen.

The closest thing I can think of is an isotope, which has already been mentioned.

Hydrogen and deuterium constitute an interesting example. A deuterium atom is about twice as heavy as a ¹H atom and as a result there are noticeable chemical and spectroscopic differences.

sometimes whole molecules act like giant atoms.

so it would in theory be possible to increase the mass.

but not decrease

I've always thought that the term "superatom" was a bit sensationalist. Scientists pretty much give that name to every novel naked metallic cluster discovered. In other words, it's really just an exotic molecule with interesting electronic and orbital properties. Interesting though.

Mucking about with the electrons in molecules is chemistry. Mucking about with the electrons in atoms is physics. I think the dividing line, fuzzy though it is, happens when you form or break bonds between atoms.

I can get behind that.

anotherfilthyape,

The difference in theory and techniques used make it a very valid difference.

I would call it applied chemistry or inorganic chemistry more than physics because there is no study in the physical behaviour of the matter but on the composition of the matter...

Usually chemical reactions involve the transfer of electrons, bond breaking/forming or spatial rearranging of molecules . It's just a categorization though, and an arbitrary one at that.

You could always argue that changing elements in a metal lattice will change the properties of the solid. That is indeed a chemical matter.

The no side effects claim will hurt your chances of clinical trials. ALL treatments have medical side effects. Loss of money is always there as a side effect as well.