exchemist

But the farmers will be up in arms. And Trump needs the rural vote. I can't see how this can work for him, except in the very short term. It's bound to bite him in the arse eventually, surely? And research will go on in other countries which will become available to the US public, so attempting to control the narrative on things like epidemics is pretty well doomed, I would think. Things have moved on since Stalin.

I've just seen this clip, of a press conference given by Senator Chris Murphy this afternoon, which strikes me as spot-on. Trump is acting like a Stuart era monarch :

Yes, I was referring to your comment about not knowing were in the world this poster is.

I think she's in the land of children's television (click on bottom left where it says watch on YouTube):

The lower explosion limit for hydrogen in air is 4% by volume.

Good point. Whatever happened to Bill Kristol and the rest of the Project for a New American Century crowd? I expect they now find themselves, to their amazement, on what Trumpies regard as the Libtard Left! For instance I see that old walrus John Bolton has just had his security protection (against being assassinated by Iran) removed, purely because he has criticised Trump.

No. I see various references and even a Wiki article, but everything seems to be by researchers with Chinese names. In view of the huge number of bogus and/or bad Chinese papers flooding the science literature these days I would be more convinced if I could see some European or N American researchers were working on it. But maybe someone else here knows about this.

You know, I really, really hate this patronising style, talking down to people as if they are tiny children and full of unnecessary exclamation marks. I do not think even children will find it appealing. I think they will see it as "Trendy Vicar Syndrome" , trying unconvincingly to "get dahn wiv ve kids". https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trendy Vicar I would advise you, or the owner of the crapbot responsible, to change to a more "straight" style of presentation, one that shows at least a bit of respect to the reader. And just to reiterate what I told you before, this is a science forum, so talking to the readership here as if we are kids that don't know any science is not appropriate.

Heh heh. I have a nitroglycerine spray on my bedside table.😁For medical purposes.

Ha. That guy gave the lectures on my Quantum Chemistry course, in 1973-4. Brilliant lecturer, and he can write, too. I have his Quantum Chemistry book, which contains quite a few unexpected choices of phrase. One of my favourites is, in the middle of a rather dry mathematical derivation, he writes, "We can now make a quick scamper towards one of our goals." Atkins is a short man, so the image of him scampering is rather amusing. 😁

I'm sceptical because smell and taste are almost the same thing, using the same olfactory organ in the nose - apart from the basic sweet, sour, salt, bitter aspects of taste which are detected in the mouth. I suspect anything with a smell will have a roughly corresponding flavour. Although, thinking more about this, there may be some exceptions. I recall the first time I encountered jugged hare, in college, the smell was quite offputting but the taste was delicious. One gets the same thing with other fermented foods, like strong cheese e.g. Époisses. I can't think of any chemical with a smell but zero taste, but then one is not generally encouraged to go around tasting things in a chemical laboratory. I don't know if there is anyone on the forum with experience of food chemistry. That's probably what we need here.

Yeah, actually I didn't mean the deliberate, Bannon-style "Flood the zone with shit", so much as just the junk and bad information that is piling up. I read just the other day, in the Financial Times, about social media being full of AI-generated "slop". It's not just us people on science forums who can see how bad these chatbots are.

Oh marvellous, the end of the US monopoly on chatbots to fill the internet with shit. Now we can have Chinese shit too. Splendid, splendid.

Let's get real here. You are in no position to "remind" me - from your position of almost total ignorance - of approaches to abiogenesis that do not exist. Nobody, I mean nobody sane, is trying to apply string theory, let alone the holographic principle, to abiogenesis. That's because neither has anything to offer. I have just told you what string theory is concerned with: attempts to develop a mathematical structure to support a theory of quantum gravity. It is obvious that a theory of quantum gravity (if it is ever developed) has no bearing on the study of abiogenesis. Nor are you in a position to make judgements about the likelihood of success of abiogenesis research. You do not acknowledge the very simple reason why it is a hard problem, even though I have explained it to you. And you seem determined to ignore or belittle the progress that has been made, preferring instead to sit on the sidelines and whine stupidly about nobody having made life in a test tube. But I think you are now reaching the stage of just repeating these empty assertions of yours. I for one have had enough of your stubbornly ill-informed opinions on abiogenesis. We'll see what others think.

You have not demonstrated any relevance of this highly speculative notion to abiogenesis. And it is not a “model”. There is no tested scientific theory that makes any use of this idea. It is an entirely speculative idea that some string theorists play with. String theory itself is not, so far at least, a scientific theory, as it makes no testable predictions about observations. These mathematical conjectures are related to attempts, so far unsuccessful, to develop a theory of quantum gravity. In fact, some well informed people, like Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder, think it has become a self-sustaining cottage industry going nowhere: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ There is absolutely no reason whatever to think this idea can be fruitfully applied to the study of abiogenesis. It is a useless suggestion.

Yes indeed, my pleasure! Your remarks about childhood ideas about God and Pavlov's dogs are uncalled for. (I can't speak for other contributors but I happen to be a practising Catholic.😊) What I and others have been objecting to is that @Luc Turpin has been firstly misrepresenting abiogenesis research and secondly using that misrepresentation as an excuse to introduce very ill-defined concepts, without any indication of how they could be relevant to scientific study of abiogenesis. In one of my posts on this thread I took the trouble to say I see value in considering aspects of human experience beyond the physical world. What I object to - in line with Cardinal Newman's sound advice from over a century ago - is the attempt to look to things in nature that science currently can't explain as evidence that only something beyond science can explain it. That is bad logic, because science progresses. Furthermore, it is utterly pointless to witter on about "the holographic principle" and suggesting "complexity emerges from information encoded in the universe" without explaining WTF that means, what evidence for it might look like and how it could actually be applied in abiogenesis research. Science works by clarifying - demystifying - what seems to be going on in natural processes. Trying to get all mystical, woolly and vague in a discussion about abiogenesis is the polar opposite of a scientific approach.

The bonding of Spock's silicone ears to his head, you mean? 😆

Haha. And then there is this stuff, which keeps coming round at regular intervals..........:

This is begging the question, again. Who says there is “information” that “guides the emergence of life”? Why should life’s emergence be “guided”? And if so, how could that possibly work? How could “information” , whatever you mean by that, physically affect pre-biotic chemistry? How does “information” “flow”, in your opinion? This all sounds as if you are trying the edge the discussion towards “intelligent design” without admitting it.

Haha yes, it’s a bit “pope found to be Catholic”, I realise. But it is not intended as a profound insight. 🙂

Just like that, eh? 😀 Aside from the sheer impracticability of anything so complex, one basic difficulty is that Si is less good at catenation, i.e. forming long chains. Wiki has a nice discussion of catenation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenation. You will see that although Si can be made to form chains, these tend to be unstable relative to other compounds at higher number of catenated atoms. The valence p orbitals of Si will be more diffuse than those of C because of the higher principal quantum number. This not only makes the Si-Si σ-bond weaker than the C-C bond, but will be especially an issue when it comes to forming π-bonds. So, for instance, any protein-like molecule made from Si in place of C would almost certainly be less stable, not more, than the C-based original. Carbon really does seem uniquely suitable for developing a viable biochemistry.

EXACTLY! The continued refusal to accept abiogenesis as an objective fact implies @Luc Turpin wants to leave the door open to processes other than natural ones, i.e. magic poofing. I note you cannot agree to my point 1. I regard that as a warning light that you may be a creationist, perhaps of the cdesign proponentsist variety. So I'm afraid I continue to suspect you may not be what you say you are. Regarding this "encoding information" tosh, it is still just as meaningless as it was when I criticised you for it before. What are you talking about? How would "information" be transmitted to molecules so as to react them together and organise them into the structures we think are important for biological processes. This is just Chopra-esque hand waving woo.

Yep. We don't have an exact solution to Schrödinger's equation for the electrons in the hydrogen molecule, let alone anything more complex. And I seem to recall we can only get an "exact" solution for the hydrogen molecule cation, with one electron, if we invoke the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Physics is hard because of the maths, but this is fairly simple algebra at the level it is taught to 11-12 yr olds. The qualitative principles, at this level, are fairly clean, simple and logical. Biology is complicated in that there are a lot of facts, but it is largely descriptive of things one can actually see, either directly or down a microscope. So that's fairly easy to conceptualise. But chemistry involves a lot of different liquids, solid or gaseous substances, all looking very much alike and which change into others, according to a complicated set of only very loosely observed rules, governed partly by the Periodic Table, with all its numerous elements, and partly by other rather abstract concepts such as acids and base or, even worse, oxidation states. It's very messy. I don't believe it is a coincidence that chemistry was the last of the main physical sciences to get put on a proper footing, in the c.19th.

Bet he didn't include this though:

As indeed was I, until I read the draft dissertation. My French mother-in-law used to refer to faïence to mean stoneware as opposed to fine porcelain. That is what it seems to mean nowadays in modern French. But it used to be far more specific. The word apparently comes from a town in Italy, Faenza, where tin-glazed ceramics were pioneered in, I think, the early Medieval period, continuing through the Renaissance. Egyptian "faïence" however bore no relation to this. It was sintered glass and seems to have been highly prized in ancient Greece and elsewhere for decorative objects, being found in archaeological sites of palaces and high caste dwellings. They used alkali, e.g. from natron, a soda mineral alkali (from which the Na symbol for sodium comes) mined in places like Wadi El Natrun in Egypt. The alkali lowers the softening point of quartz, allowing the surface of the objects to acquire a glazed impermeable outer layer. Copper compounds gave these objects a green or blue colour. It was an alternative to lapis lazuli. There are, according to his dissertation, signs the manufacturing technique may possibly have been exported to the Levant at some stage, but it is not certain. Quite interesting, actually. The dissertation was all abut the archaeological evidence for the trading and uses of these objects, not the chemistry of manufacture. But when I read it, of course that was the bit that intrigued me, so I started looking it up.