exchemist

I think you have hit on it, actually. It is the internet, and social media specifically, that have led to the rise of something called the "troll". Casual rudeness and the expression of hatred and facile, childish political opinions have become normal and socially accepted. Trolling has become the language of politics. The USA now has government by troll. The tech bros of course promote a different narrative: one of "democratisation" of opinion - and the establishing of "truth" by what is popularly believed on social media, rather that what can be objectively substantiated. This was the substance of that recent, self-serving article Peter Thiel wrote for the Financial Times. I don't know what it will take to make society realise where this leads. Maybe another world war. Or maybe we can learn to be mature about social media. There are signs in the next generation (people like my son who is 21) that they realise this and can discard the junk factoids and the abuse, in a way that perhaps people of @JohnDBarrow's age bracket often do not, especially if poorly educated.

You are making this up and it is ballocks. There is no dividing line, as you seem to imagine, between chemistry and quantum processes. All of chemistry consists of quantum processes at the "atomic and quantum levels". Tunnelling phenomena have been a part of chemistry for decades, e.g. the inversion spectrum of ammonia. And you have yet to provide any evidence that QM tunnelling or entanglement can shed any light at all on abiogenesis. When you say" Introducing concepts like the holographic principle takes us even further, suggesting that the key to understanding life may lie in the realm of information, beyond the atomic level." this is just quantum woo. It is meaningless. I repeat: show me please a citation, by any of the researchers you mention, that proposes a specific role for quantum biological processes at some stage in the chain of processes involved in abiogenesis. I bet you can't, because you have made it up. You have no understanding of quantum mechanics or biochemistry and because you don't understand either you are trying to make a religion out of them. This is cargo cult stuff.

That could be an important job if the rumours about TFG's lack of bowel control have any substance. Perhaps @JohnDBarrow can tell us more?

This is nonsense. Abiogenesis is simply a term meaning the natural processes by which biochemistry and thus life arose from pre-biotic chemistry. Quantum biology is just one, existing, small subset of the biochemical processes that science already considers, when investigating the chemical processes within cells. Quantum biology is not some magical extra alternative to biochemistry: it's part of it. I can't find evidence that Nicholas Gisin has interests in quantum biology, but I see Jim Al Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden co-authored a book on quantum biology. But this does not, so far as I can see, suggest anything special to do with abiogenesis. It seems to be about recent discoveries of things such as QM tunnelling by protons in certain biochemical processes and the possible presence of QM coherence effects in the process of photosynthesis. This is all just a subset of biochemistry, not some magical extra ingredient that somehow enabled life to form. If you can provide a citation from any of these researchers specifically involving a quantum biology process in abiogenesis I would be interested to read it. But I doubt you will be able to. As far as I can see none of these people has a background or expertise in abiogenesis research. (Michael Terry seems to be either an actor or a serial killer, according to my search engine).

He's a tool all right. 😆 Oh he's just come out of the closet now as a MAGA troll, like the new president. There will be a lot of idiots crowing like this for a while.

Haha, now you are arguing in bad faith - curiously, another common tactic of creationists. It is quite clear from my previous post that the "creationist claptrap" I referred to is the silly notion that just because we have not directly observed life arising from non-life, or reproduced it in the lab, therefore science will be unable to account for how it took place. I also made it clear that quantum biology is an established field of science - and therefore obviously I do not consider that to be creationist claptrap. Is it your normal practice to misrepresent what your interlocutors say in this way? If so, it is going to be hard to have a constructive conversation with you. As for your claim that some have turned to quantum biology as a potential "venue" (whatever that may mean) for life, who are these people? As I say, quantum effects are normal in biochemistry. What is in my admittedly non-expert view unlikely is any significant role for quantum entanglement, given the "warm, wet, noisy" environment of the cell. The only attempt at invoking entanglement I'm aware of is the largely discredited Orch OR hypothesis of Penrose and Hameroff to account for consciousness. Consciousness ≠ life, needless to say. So who are these people you have in mind? Can you give names and provide links to information about their hypotheses?

Yes I had colleagues who learnt some Norwegian while posted to Oslo. But what I was getting at is that, say, potential migrants from former British colonies like Pakistan, India or Nigeria are likely not only to speak English already to some level, but also to have connections with Britain: relatives or friends of family, people who have at least visited, some existing community of people from their country to help them find their feet, and so on. So it's far less of a leap in the dark to go to Britain than trying their luck in Norway. The same goes for France vis-a-vis W African countries or SE Asia. In fact, as an Englishman, the view I take of the migration issue is that it is largely payback for British colonialism - and, like the original colonialism, it is a mixture of good and bad influences on the country.

No one is going to open an unknown file that could contain malware. If you have information about this "energetic array", you need to post it as text and/or pictures, here on the forum rather than expecting readers to click on files of unknown provenance. Andrew Basagio, whose "project" Project Pegasus appears to be, is quite obviously delusional. It is therefore a bit unlikely there is anything of substance in it. But if you can describe this energetic array for us , here on the forum, people can try to evaluate it on its merits in terms of physics and engineering. By the way, where does the term "tesserac" [sic] come from? Is this a name given to it by Basagio? Or by you?

I respond with some trepidation because (i) Tesla is a great favourite of cranks, possibly because some of his ideas were crank ideas, (ii) because you refer to time travel, which is pretty much a crank idea and (iii) because you refer to an unlikely-seeming conspiracy theory about the US government seizing Tesla's inventions. As I understand it, the FBI did take the papers found in his hotel room when he died in 1943, because it was the height of WW2 and it was felt there might be some material of value which should not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. But there wasn't. (Tesla was very eccentric and some of his ideas were pretty crackpot. We had a guy on this forum who was trying to emulate Tesla's quest for a heat engine that would run on ambient heat, in violation of thermodynamics.) I do not recognise this "energetic array" you refer to. Can you describe it? I know that a tesseract, with a final t, is the 4D analogue of a cube. But I have never heard of a “tesserac”. But I've looked up this Andrew Basagio.....and burst out laughing: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Andrew_Basiago. This guy is obviously nuts. He claims to have met Obama on Mars! Perhaps he’d get along with Elon Musk?🤪

No it doesn't at all. This is reminiscent of creationist claptrap. There are many fields of scientific knowledge that are acquired by observation without anything at all being done in a laboratory, and many natural processes that we have understood even through they cannot be observed to take place on a human timescale, for instance star formation, or plate tectonics. It is trivially obvious that our knowledge of abiogenesis is incomplete, so sure, there are key steps to be elucidated, but this is true of any active area of scientific research. There is nothing unique about life in that respect. There is no evidence of a qualitative "gap" that is somehow unique to the understanding of how life arose. It is just a question of the obvious difficulty of piecing together something very complex by extrapolating from present biochemistry back 4bn years and fitting it to what we know of pre-biotic chemistry on the Earth at that time. As for quantum biology, this is nothing special either, really. All chemistry depends on quantum mechanics. Quantum effects are everywhere in biochemistry, though we are finding (or speculating about) new processes in some of which relatively exotic QM phenomena, such as tunnelling, have been invoked. There is no way I can see that considering such QM effects would materially alter the challenge of understanding abiogenesis. Understanding abiogenesis is just a very, very big jigsaw to assemble. I don't understand why you keep harping on about some mystical missing element - unless you are creationist who doesn't want to admit it, of course.😁

It is not clear what you are talking about here. It is perfectly obvious how inanimate matter (e.g. food substances, oxygen) become incorporated into living tissue. Do you really think we don't know how that happens? Or are you saying we don't know how abiogenesis occurred? That is undeniably true, since it is one of the hardest problems in modern science, due to the lack of direct evidence from almost 4bn years ago when it took place. However considerable progress has been made. Contrary to what you seem to be trying to insinuate, there is no reason to think there is some special magic ingredient, beyond the scope of biochemistry, involved. Life is quite evidently a process of biochemical reactions and biophysical processes, occurring within cells. Can you clarify what it is you are suggesting is missing?

I’ll certainly be intrigued to see how this mass deportation is going to work out. In what numbers? Where will they be deported to, and how? Will the receiving countries accept hordes of displaced people plonked on their doorstep? What agency will carry it out and at what cost? What effect will it have on local economies when these people are taken away from the jobs they have been doing? Or will it be like Trump’s “wall”, i.e. do a little bit, declare it done - and quickly try to change the subject? There are Danish neo-Nazis, certainly. And some far right anti-immigration politics in Sweden.

The Nordics seem to have largely escaped this far right surge. I suspect it is because (i) they were not recently colonial powers and (ii) because nobody learns their languages. So they are not an obvious choice for migrants.

Hmm, seeing as China is rapidly becoming a totalitarian surveillance state, I'm not sure that would be my first choice. One has to hope Trump will depart after 4 years, though I would not be surprised if he changes the rules to stay in power, as that is what would-be autocrats always do. One also has to hope his presidency craters through infighting and cack-handed attempts to execute unworkable policies. One also has to hope his party's effort to gerrymander the electoral system do not succeed in locking in a permanent bias towards the Repubican [sic] party. So that is maybe three pious hopes. And then of course there is Macmillan's famous "Events, Dear Boy". We cannot know what surprises will come along to derail everyone's plans, including those of Trump and his supprters/puppet masters. Meanwhile it is up to the opposition to develop policy alternatives that seem credible and relevant to people's lives and to produce an articulate communicator to sell them. This is what is known as leadership, a quality sadly lacking in most democratic politicians today, obsessed as they are by focus groups that tell them what people happen to think today, as opposed to what arguments can persuade them to think differently, tomorrow, about important issues. (If you've had it with the US I would consider Canada.)

I hope that is true.

That's debatable. Science aims to understand how nature works, by making models that successfully predict what observations we can expect. Views vary as to the degree to which science tries to uncover "reality". After all, history shows us that our models tend to be imperfect, requiring periodic revision, sometimes radically so. It has been said that all scientific "truth" is merely provisional, pending some possible new development, requiring a better model. (In my own subject, it is commonplace to use different models for the same thing, depending on the problem at hand. This is done in the full knowledge that the models are approximations and not to be taken entirely literally. So what, in that case, is "reality"?) My personal view is that science seems to approach reality asymptotically, getting closer and closer but never quite definitively getting there.

Good post. +1

Eh? That is what I wrote:”NaCl is progressively converted to NaOH”.

This articulates precisely the fear many of us in Europe have about what has happened to the USA - and the astonishment and consternation we feel about the mindset of the Americans who elected Trump. It is exactly what I meant (on @JohnDBarrow’s silly thread) about the yearning for an absolute monarch who will ride roughshod over the institutions and processes that sustain a working democracy. One hopes of course that the USA and the world will be saved by Trump’s incoherence and incompetence, when it comes to implementing these hare-brained ideas. But there are clever men in or close to the administration for whom Trump is the useful idiot, and who will try to forge policies out of the ensuing goat rodeo to their own advantage. In fact there is already a fight - between Bannon and Musk - over whose useful idiot he is! But one is left with a sense that fascism, or semi-fascism (fascism-lite?) is now on the march, across the world. It is extraordinary to me, as a post WW2 cold war child, that the USA should be leading this. It all seems to have been triggered by the election of their first black president. Slavery continues to cast a long shadow.

There are no methane "particles". It's a gas at ambient temperature.

Regarding a "king", it seems to me the majority of US voters are yearning for someone to rule like a king: capriciously, without regard for the other institutions of the state: an absolute monarch. Certainly it seems to me that the USA in 2025 is a lot closer to an absolute monarchy than, say, the UK, Denmark or Spain. I gather from my son this happened in the Roman Empire, when Julius Caesar was adopted as dictator, after the people got tired of the arguments and political gridlock in the Senate. What is for sure is that American political culture and traditions are being destroyed - by the impending new administration of oligarchs.

You're not wrong, it's just that you've forgotten about the hydrogen:- 2Cl⁻(aq) -2e⁻ -> Cl₂(g) ; 2 H₂O(l)+ 2e⁻ -> H₂(g) +2OH⁻(aq) So the hydroxide anion takes the place of the chloride anion that has been converted to chlorine gas, i.e. NaCl is progressively converted to NaOH. But with evolution of both chlorine and hydrogen. As @TheVat says, at higher dilutions there is competition from direct electrolysis of the water itself.

But you are the one claiming these lyrics are racist.

So what? How does this do away with the need for extra, invisible mass to account for the observed rotation rates?

So you think these are racist lyrics and you approve of them as such, right? So you are calling yourself a racist, apparently. 😁