exchemist

On the contrary, @TheVat and I have been addressing the OP, which was asking about points of law concerning interception of correspondence by the state.

Firstly this is not the constitution and secondly there are two references in the section on Article 432 concerning the case of public officials acting “hors les cases prevus par le loi”. This implies there are other laws that may override this one in particular cases, most likely concerning public safety and security. I see little point in you trying to relitigate a case in a jurisdiction you know nothing about.

I don't see anything in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic about secrecy of correspondence: https://www.elysee.fr/en/french-presidency/constitution-of-4-october-1958 What are you referring to? As for the UK, there is, famously, no written constitution at all. In fact there are specific laws allowing the authorities to access correspondence, under certain circumstances. I don't know about other western countries but these examples indicate you are mistaken.

I made a post about, that a while back on this thread. But the idea of bonds, and thus the meaning of the diagrams @studiot showed you, should not be too hard for you to understand, I hope. Water is H-O-H. Carbon dioxide is O=C=O (double lines in the latter case denoting what are called “double” bonds. Note that in this case carbon still forms 4 bonds, even though here it is joined to only 2 other atoms.) So you can see O, oxygen, forms 2 bonds, C, carbon 4 and H, hydrogen 1.

By observing the proportions in which substances reacted. Once you have the atomic weights, if you carefully weigh the reactants and the products, you can deduce that one carbon atom reacts with 4 hydrogen atoms, or else to produce substances with the ratio nC atoms: 2n+2 H atoms. In other words, CH4, C2H6, C3H8………..etc. These are all hydrocarbons. Probably easiest to do it by burning some of a hydrocarbon and measuring the amount of water and carbon dioxide produced and looking at their ratios. And then it dawns on you that C is joining to 4 other atoms, either 4 Hydrogen or else to one or more C atoms and H for the remainder, but H is only joining to one other atom. The lines between that atoms signify that C can join to 4 atoms but H can only join to 1 . This led to the idea that the number of “bonds” an atom can form is characteristic of the element. And that is a very powerful principle in chemistry.

I'm not familiar with milk of lime. Isn't it just another word for lime water?

He will have in mind the oligarchs in Putin’s circle.

Oh that's better. I saw him on YouTube, in a video interview with a US news channel, and he looked as old as Methuselah and as if he was calling from a bed in a hospice.

Carville? He's virtually dead, though, isn't he?

I'm no biologist but it occurred to me there may be a threshold of toxicity below which the liver and other organs can manage to convert and excrete the toxic species, leaving a weight gain due to those sugars that can be metabolised successfully.

If you already have the answers to this, I’m out.

Hmm, I see what you mean. I see that L-glucose is a laxative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose Presumably this reaction produces racemic mixtures of sugars. Can that account for the diarrhoea, do you think?

Well at least I didn’t accuse you of being a paedo, which is what he does at the drop of a hat.😁

Bullshit. Malfeasance is a perfectly good word. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malfeasance Maybe it’s you who’s the dropout😁.

If you go way, way back, I think they tasted them and they were sour. Your tongue can detect acid this way. There is a bit of the history here: https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/tcaw/12/i03/pdf/303chronicles.pdf

Can you provide a typical analysis of the mixture? And can you summarise what you have read in the literature about formose? That would save a lot of reinventing the wheel.

For sure. But it was the metallic sheen I was trying to account for - which I think is now clear.

OK, I didn't expect you to be able to follow all the methods. I just wanted to indicate we have standard ways of identifying these compounds, so that is how it would be done if the question were to arise today with an unknown sample. But if what you are after is how these elements and compounds were identified historically, i.e. before modern day analytical chemistry was available, that's a lot trickier. I think I would have to try to explain that by examples. I gave you one example previously, of what Lavoiser deduced from burning phosphorus. He got a lot out of that: - 2 components of air: azote and oxygene - A compound (ash) in which phophorus was combined with oxygen (we would call that an oxide, though I'm unsure if the term existed in his time) - this compound produced an acid when dissolved in water - a phosphorus acid. Silver, gold and copper were obviously known in the Ancient world for coinage and jewellery and alloys of them. Zinc and tin were also known. Bronze is an alloy of copper with tin (e.g. the Bronze Age) and copper and zinc produced brass. Mineral acids, including nitric acid, were known to Medieval alchemists (though not under their modern names): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitric_acid So someone in Lavoisier's time could dissolve a piece of silver in nitric acid and realise they had a compound - which today we call silver nitrate. It's obviously not possible to trace all the stages by which all these elements, reactions and compounds gradually became characterised. It would take a book to do that and even then there would still be plenty of uncertainty about how many of the steps became known. The historical record is patchy and some of thee unknown alchemists guarded their knowledge. But I hope from this you get an idea of the sort of things they did and so how the early chemists were able to piece together some rules for elements and compounds. In fact, Lavoisier was the first to make a real list of elements and he still got some things wrong. Here's a quote from the relevant Wiki page: QUOTE The book contains 33 elements, only 23 of which are elements in the modern sense.[5] The elements given by Lavoisier are: light, caloric, oxygen, azote (nitrogen), hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorous (phosphorus), charcoal, muriatic radical (chloride), fluoric radical (fluoride), boracic radical, antimony, arsenic, bismuth, cobalt, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdena (molybdenite), nickel, platina (platinum), silver, tin, tungstein (tungsten), zinc, lime, magnesia (magnesium), barytes (baryte), argill (clay or earth of alum), and silex.[6] UNQUOTE From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traité_Élémentaire_de_Chimie It was a long and painful process that was only really sorted out in the latter half of the c.19th with Mendele'ev.

Good question. I have no idea. That would be a good one for Suzie Dent, our charming TV lexicographer. 🙂

I'm still baffled by your question. You know it's silver nitrate because that's what it says on the bottle and you bought it from a reputable supplier. But if, for instance, some idiot transfers it to an unlabelled bottle, you can confirm it is silver nitrate by carrying out some characteristic reactions with a small sample of it: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Analytical_Chemistry/Supplemental_Modules_(Analytical_Chemistry)/Qualitative_Analysis/Characteristic_Reactions_of_Select_Metal_Ions/Characteristic_Reactions_of_Silver_Ions_(Ag) You can also confirm nitrate by infra red spectroscopy and silver by its visible/UV spectrum: https://www.atomtrace.com/elements-database/element/47 Is that OK as an answer? I have the feeling I may not quite have grasped the significance of your question.

What makes you think you will have a new administration in 4 years? 😄

Right, now I feel I'm starting to grasp this. I've now found this very informative link, which explains a lot of what we have been discussing: https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/Introduction_to_Inorganic_Chemistry_(Wikibook)/10%3A_Electronic_Properties_of_Materials_-_Superconductors_and_Semiconductors/10.05%3A_Semiconductors-_Band_Gaps_Colors_Conductivity_and_Doping So indeed the conductivity is orders of magnitude lower than for a typical metal, consistent with the idea that thermal population of the conduction band is due to just the very tail end of the Boltzmann distribution. There's also a discussion of colours, which touches on what you were saying about photon absorption - and the link to how LEDs work which, thinking about it, is obviously the converse process. Anyway I think, subject to any further comments either of you may have, that I have the answer to my original question about metallic lustre of non-metallic compounds. I see for instance that iron pyrite, "fool's gold" has a band gap of 0.95eV, and in fact it is a semiconductor being studied for photovoltaic applications! My undergraduate chemistry focused on the populated bonding orbitals , i.e. the valence band, without giving much attention to the (nominally) empty antibonding orbitals, which merge to form the conduction band in an extended solid array. We didn't study solid state physics at all really. But when you think about it, as one descends a Group in the Periodic Table and the principal quantum number goes up, the orbital overlap between a pair of atoms gets less efficient, so the splitting in energy between bonding and antibonding orbitals grows less. And so we get a narrower band gap and start to see semimetallic properties, due to start of thermal population of the conduction band - bingo! Cool stuff.

Hmm. As I understand it, near IR ~1eV, mid IR ~0.1eV and far IR ~ 0.01eV. I recall from the specific heat of diatomic gases that vibrations - which give rise to near IR absorption bands - are not appreciably excited at 300K, which fits with what you say. Whereas rotational spectra are in the far IR. Nevertheless it is clear that in semiconductors there must be some thermal excitation of electrons across a band gap ~1eV, to account for the increase in electrical conductivity of these materials with temperature - and to account for their metallic sheen, which is what sparked my original interest. Perhaps the issue is that we are seeing the effect of the tail of the Boltzmann distribution, i.e. we should be thinking of this on a logarithmic scale. One may not need too many charge carriers to see an increase in conductivity on a logarithmic scale - and the development of a superficially metallic appearance. I suppose one has to look at the distribution of phonon energies in a solid and see if the high energy tail end of these can reach ~1eV at 300K.

I think there is an awful lot of hype and hot air around the whole subject. One day maybe but at present, whilst machine learning focused on specific applications clearly has vast potential, a lot of generative AI seems to be crap. So much so that any self-developing AI would produce a sort of village idiot.

Hmm. How would photon absorption work in this case? I presume if thermal excitation can work then the equivalent photon absorption would be in the IR rather than the visible. Whereas reflection presumably is elastic, with no energy absorption. So perhaps there is an IR absorption band which pumps the conduction band and then the resulting population of the conduction band produces reflection in the visible. By the way I’ve now found something that says that, in semiconductors, valence band electrons can absorb a phonon and be thereby excited to the conduction band. So this would be the thermal excitation mechanism.