exchemist

I don't think it makes any sense to tinker with language in this way. All languages have strange things in them. It's part of their charm and reflects their convoluted history. To try to remove them all would be to lose all that richness - and deprive writers and poets of the opportunity for puns and deliberate ambiguities. Take a word like "mine". That can mean either an excavation in the earth for minerals or a static explosive armament. But in fact they have a common origin. The original explosive mine was gunpowder placed at the end of an excavated shaft, dug to blow up (undermine) the walls of a castle. Hamlet speaks of "the engineer hoist with his own petard" (a synonym for mine) and goes on to say "but I shall delve one yard below their mine and blow them at the moon".* I think discovering the common root of these things is fun. And then we have different spellings and meanings for the same sounding word: rite, write, right, wright. English has more of this sort of thing than most languages, because it draws on both Germanic and Latin roots, forming in effect two vocabularies. Historically the upper classes spoke (Norman) French and used Latin-derived words, while the peasants used an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. To this day the Germanic words sound more "earthy" and less refined than the Latin-based equivalents. This was brought home to me in the Netherlands, when I was sent for a blood test, at the "prikpost". I understood what it meant, but it sounded a bit, well, blunt. So I'm in favour of leaving these things alone and enjoying the diversity. * If you visit St Andrew's, in Scotland, there is a ruined castle where you can see both such a mine, dug during a seige, and a "countermine", dug from inside the castle to stop it. You can go through, down a ladder, from one to the other, at the point where they meet.

Not appreciably, though. That's why I qualified my statement by including that word. As for QM, I don't follow you. Schrödinger's equation is based on electrons possessing kinetic, as well as potential, energy, is it not? So movement seems to be implied, even if trajectories cannot be defined. Furthermore in heavy atoms, my understanding is that one has to make relativistic corrections to allow for the "speed" of the electrons becoming a significant fraction of c, which makes the orbitals more stable than would otherwise be the case (e.g. why Hg is liquid, why Au is yellow, etc.)

But if that were so, things would get appreciably heavier when they became warmer or entered excited states. We don't observe that, do we?

How do you explain the weight of a lump of concrete?

You will find the number of moles is a suspiciously convenient number....... But your residue is a mixture of oxides: BaO and XO. (You are told it involves XCO3, not X2CO3 or X2(CO3)3 or something, so X has to be divalent and presumably produces an oxide with formula XO.) You now know how many moles of X you have but not how many of Ba, yet. That's where the acid reaction comes in, I think. I have not worked it through myself but, looking at the problem, I think that's what you are supposed to use to find the answer. Good luck.

This is too mad to be worthy of a serious response.

How many moles of CO2 are driven off?

And I speculate that you are just pulling random stuff out of your arse in a bid for attention😁.

That is mere speculation on your part, with no evidence to support it, and it is impractical for several reasons, as this thread has pointed out.

There is plenty of information about this on the internet, if you are genuinely interested (which I am not convinced you are, since if you were you would already have read it). There is no reason for people here to duplicate it. I suggest you read the portion of this Wiki article that relates to the Earth's core first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_Earth#Core , and then revert with any specific issues you may want to discuss.

Oh, maybe I misunderstood. Pumped storage hydro is well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity Do you mean doing this at the level of the individual household, then? Have you done the calculation on what weight of water you need for a battery of adequate size? I have a feeling it might be rather large. But if you can give an idea of how many kWh storage would be needed, we can do the maths. P.S. Lifting 1mt through 1m gives you 10kJ, so if we take a 10 m high building, that would be 100kJ. Storage of 1kWh would require 3600kJ to be stored, i.e. 36mt water. That would require quite a structure to support it.

Bleach is a terrible choice if you're just wanting a weak base, as it is highly reactive in its own right and can evolve poisonous gas (Cl2). A good weak base is something like baking soda, NaHCO3. That will fizz and evolve CO2 in contact with an acid, but all it does to what remains is to introduce some Na+ ions. What intrigues me about the reaction is the possibility of producing some elemental sulphur. That will be insoluble in aqueous solution so you should get some kind of yellow precipitate if you let it all settle.

OK, thanks. I don't consider Mathematics to be natural science, which is what I understand by the term "science" as it is commonly used today. I don't think it is clear that science has anything to contribute to the idea of consciousness, until someone can provide an objectively measurable yardstick to describe consciousness. I don't think anyone has actually done that, have they?

Er, this has been done for decades. But it is not always easy to find suitable reservoirs at higher elevation.

OK but why seize on mathematics, when @Jasper10's comment was to do with science and philosophy, rather than mathematics? Philosophy obviously does have a connection to science, since science relies on a certain approach to understanding the world which implicitly makes philosophical choices, e.g. reliance on methodological naturalism, the role of observation in developing and testing theories, and so forth. Regarding mathematics, I'm not sure what you mean by antithesis. I'd have though the true antithesis of mathematics would be something that was not quantitative and did not employ logic. Poetry, perhaps?

I don't know the reactions of pyrite but found this paper: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/15/12/4181/html which suggests the product of oxidation of pyrite with nitric acid may be FeSO4 and elemental sulphur: FeS2(s) + 8 HNO3(aq) → Fe2+(aq) + SO42−(aq) + S0(s) + 8 NO2(g) + 4 H2O(aq) But the way you are going about this is not very scientific - and not at all safe, as you have now found out. Why are you adding "bleach" and what is the chemistry of this bleach? Doing that is not going to help you determine what is in your yellow or reddish solution, is it? I think you need to weigh the quantities and calculate how much nitric acid to add, knowing its concentration, then test the resulting solution with pH paper before going any further. Then think about what else you might test for to see what is present. If you have excess acid and you start chucking in NaOH, or something nitric acid can decompose (like the hypochlorite often used in bleaches), you are asking for a trip to hospital. Eyesight is a precious thing. It's great you are having fun with chemistry but please take care. Test with small quantities, in vessels with wide necks (not a graduated cylinder), so any sudden evolution of gas or heat can escape and with plenty of ventilation or in the open air if you are trying this at home. Gloves, face protection and long sleeves strongly recommended, as you say.

Quora is a lousy reference source to rely on, and adopting such a snooty tone won't win you any friends, but I now agree you were right about the principle of this - and I was was initially wrong. So I've learnt something. However the notion that neolithic people actually floated megaliths in mercury is still outlandish, for the reasons given in this thread.

Oh, my commiserations. Hope it goes well and they get it all out. I dimly remember a derivation of Archimedes' principle at school, based on calculating the upthrust, from pressure at a point at given depth, due to a column of liquid above, multiplied by the area in cross-section, parallel to the surface, of the object to be floated. This gives you a force equal to the weight of fluid occupied by the object. So I think all you need is a column of fluid of sufficient depth to make a "hole" that it big enough. It's the hole that does it, rather than the fluid that would be in it.

According to my reading, it seems the torsion pendulum was used to detect the thrust allegedly produced from this RF resonant cavity thingie. I recall that torsion pendulums have been used in determinations of big G, so are known to be capable of responding to very small forces. So now it makes sense - even if the physics doesn't........

I initially thought this, but I now think it is wrong. One has to consider carefully what "displace" means in this context. It means the object to be floated has to occupy a volume below the surface of the fluid which, if it were filled with the fluid, would have a weight equal to its own weight. It does not mean you have to have that volume of fluid present initially and then physically move it out of the way. The upthrust required to float the object results from the pressure exerted at depth. So it results from the height of the column of fluid exerting the pressure, integrated over the dimensions of the object. (Hg has a density of 13.6, by the way - a number familiar to anyone who has worked with manometers 😉.)

What is a "low thrust torsion pendulum"? Torsion pendulum I understand, but "thrust"?

Yes I think you are right. So long as the mercury rises up the side of the stone enough that the volume occupied by the stone below the surface is that which, if filled with mercury, would be equal to its mass, then it will start to float.

Sorry, I meant 60 cubic metres, i.e. 60, 000 litres.

Yes, cinnabar has been used for thousands of years as a pigment. What evidence is there of mercury metal being produced, at the scale of hundreds of litres, by the people that built megalithic monuments? That's crap - as in fact one of the respondents in that Quora thread quickly points out. Floating indeed requires displacing an equivalent mass of the object. So a 20t megalith needs >20t of Hg to float it. It is true that the density of , say, sandstone, is about 2.5 whereas that of Hg is 13.6, so Hg can float a volume of sandstone about 6 times its volume. But for a 20t stone that is still more than 3000litres of Hg. And your 800t stone will need about 60t of Hg to make it float.

I hope you are not imagining that Neolithic people had access to hundreds of litres of liquid mercury. That would be quite mad.