exchemist

Thanks for the information - very interesting to see how you have approached this. You have clearly gone to a lot of trouble. I don't pretend to be expert on agricultural chemistry, unfortunately. Also, it's a little hard to know what would meet your needs, as you have not indicated any cost per tonne limit, where the sites of concern to you are in the world, or what materials you, or they, have to hand. However, shooting in the dark a bit, elemental sulphur and gypsum seem both to be used to reduce soil alkalinity. I also use FeSO4 in my garden (to grow calcifuge plants such as camellias), but I have no idea whether it is used on large scales. But you may already know this and have dismissed these for one reason or another. Bulk sulphur is quite cheap, being a byproduct of oil refinery desulphurisation of fuel. Current price seems to be < $100/mt in sacks, though it will be more by the time someone has shipped it to a useful destination. P.S. Just found this, which discusses sulphur - and FeSO4, so evidently that can have applications at the agricultural scale: https://www.canr.msu.edu/uploads/files/Lowering_Soil_pH_with_Sulfur.pdf

Curiouser and curiouser...... It seems very strange indeed to seal it at the top and only have a 2mm diameter vent low down. That looks distinctly unsafe, if you ever got any bumping in the solvent being distilled. But, from your latest picture, the shorter tube looks to me as if it has been cut. Notice the other one has a nicely rounded end, which the shorter one does not have . The two ends have quite different appearance. Mind you, even if it was originally longer that would do nothing to overcome your objection that the liquid would have to rise up through the joint in order to start the syphon action!

You may be onto something there. If there were any +ve charged oil drops, they would not be held suspended by the electric field but would be accelerated downwards. So the design of the experiment would have effectively filtered out any +ve charged droplets, allowing the experimenter to concentrate on those with -ve charge. But as I said in my first reply, my suspicion is there would have been relatively few +ve charged droplets anyway.

That looks like an oblique and rough edge. Are you sure something has not been broken off from there? It looks far too narrow to be any kind of effective pressure relief, to me. But my question was about the top end of the condenser. Does that vent to atmosphere as well, or is the long tube sealed to it at the top? I'm beginning to wonder now if this is a Soxhlet apparatus at all or whether you have picked up a chunk of someone's vacuum line, designed perhaps for quite another purpose.

It's a good question. I suspect it is to do with speed of motion. The electrons ejected from the oxygen and nitrogen molecules are light and move fast compared to the molecular cations left behind, so they will tend to encounter the oil droplets more quickly and more often, I imagine.

I think this is quite tricky, at least for somebody as rusty as I am. 🙂 If it were not for the H bonding, I think one would expect the ortho- substituted nitro group to increase the acidity the most, being closer. The H bonding will, I should have thought, tend to weaken the acidity, by providing additional binding of the H atom. In orthonitrophenol the H bond setup is close to ideal, as it forms a 6 membered ring, so it can be a strong H-bond. So that could explain why the acidity is anomalously lower than the para version. In orthobenzoic acid however, you have 7 atoms jostling to form the H-bonded ring, which will bend it out of planar and may make the H bond weaker. So perhaps the H bonding effect is not strong enough to disturb the usual order of effectiveness of the electron-withdrawing group. But I have to say, this looks like one of those things in chemistry that can be rationalised either way after the event, but can't really be reliably predicted just from theory. All a bit hand-wavy. But maybe @John Cuthber will have something to add (or tell me I'm wrong).

Yeah I remember him. Stroppy git, he was.😁 I rather think the relativity issue you refer to would be to do with the physicists' dismissal of the notion of time "passing", as in relativity it is just a coordinate axis and therefore doesn't have a "direction". Anyway I don't think it's related to this QM issue of interactions being what make reality tangible.

Sticking with the original mystery glassware, can you confirm whether the condenser is open to the air, at the "top" end, where the long tube loops over and down into it?

Oh, now I see with the second photo that there are two tubes protruding through the ground glass joint. And it is the shorter one that is connected to what I took to be the syphon tube. And indeed the U bend is too high for the syphoning action to work unless the liquid rises through the joint. It's very odd.

As you may or may not realise, we have actually been to the moon, and have orbited numerous spacecraft around it. So we know its diameter is nothing like what you say it is.

I admire your generosity. I think your first line is the understatement of the month!

I remember reading about this and find it highly ingenious and persuasive. It also has the beautiful paradox of entropy maximisation being the engine that drives the growth in order implicit in living organisms. Apart from its inherent appeal, it's a great one to tease creationists with! But it's all gone a bit quiet - at least, I have not seen any more articles developing the idea. I had wondered whether it had been shot down, on some grounds or other.

Isn't this the Jeremy England hypothesis?

Could well be a Soxhlet extractor, yes indeed! I had not spotted, in the photo, that there is a glass tube extending beyond the upper ground glass joint. This could be the syphon tube for a thimble, to be attached via the joint. I had also thought there was no opening between the long tube and the top of the condenser, but looking again it seems there may be one. I'm not sure why there would be a spiral in the return tube from the syphon, though. Any idea?

To give a less mathematical response, it is the latter. For a QM entity to be in an exact place with an exact momentum is just not something that is even defined, in QM. The uncertainty is intrinsic to nature. From reading Carlo Rovelli's "Helgoland", it seems the "relational interpretation" of QM in effect denies that a QM entity even has any properties on a continuous basis. According to this view, all properties become manifest only in the course of interactions involving the QM system in question. In between interactions, it is not necessary to assume that it has any properties at all. The wave function (when the QM operator for a property is applied to it) tells you what range of values of the property the system may manifest when it interacts. Tying properties to interactions gets rid of the tiresome issue of "the observer", which has led all sorts of people astray over the years, even sometimes to the extent of speculating that QM gives a special place to conscious observers. This last is something that has spawned an entire industry of quantum woo (Deepak Chopra et.al.). But, on the contrary, any "observation" necessarily requires an interaction. It is the interaction that counts, not an act of observation. The further implication of this is that what we call "reality" is made up of the interactions going on all the time between QM entities. Which is not as crazy as it sounds. After all, something only provides evidence that it exists when it interacts with something else. Classically, we interpolate between interactions by assuming that objects possess properties with defined values all the time, in a continuous manner. But in QM it seems the only thing that unambiguously persists is the wave function, which represents the potential properties exhibited when an interaction "collapses" it. This, at least is my understanding. I find it elegant, as it seems to resolve a number of the paradoxes that QM throws up.

...as opposed to an experiment conducted somewhere else? Here, I've got an axiom for you, now: Brontosauruses are thin at one end, thicker in the middle and thin at the other end. Ha!

Because of your nonsensical posts, that suggest to me some kind of psychiatric disorder. Just look at your opening post. A Tesla turbine (metal rotating discs, propelled by steam, for power generation) has nothing at all to do with a rotating magnetic field in space. And why does doing it in vacuum, or under zero gravity, make any difference to a field? And why, in the name of God, do you think that a rapidly rotating magnetic field would break apart "the material world"? Or why would it create a "whole hole" (whatever that is) and lead to a "previous, next" [?? make your mind up] block of the universe. It's incoherent garbage, from start to finish.

I think you should probably see a doctor. But thanks for introducing me to the Tesla turbine:something I did not know about.

That’s really interesting. What experiments did you do and what did you discover? Perhaps you should start a new thread, though, since it would be a new topic.

Nope, all it means is you are double counting the k.e. Relativistic mass has fallen into disfavour nowadays, as it is not seen as very helpful. You are inadvertently illustrating why. The full version of the mass-energy relation, for bodies in motion relative to the observer measuring their energy, is E² = (mc²)² +p²c², in which p is the momentum. For objects at rest, p=0 and this reduces to the well-known E=mc². (For a photon, which has zero rest mass, it reduces to E=pc, thus accounting for why photons still have momentum in spite of no rest mass.) As I understand it - others better qualified can jump in - relativistic mass is the "fudge" you have to apply if you want to carry on using E=mc² even though the object is moving (which, if you are being rigorous, you should not really be doing). In effect it is just reconverting the k.e. back into its mass equivalent. In other words you either have a 4kg rest mass object with an additional k.e. of c², or you have an object with a relativistic mass of 5kg.

Er yes I put that link in my post....😃 But tell me, does CRC or anyone else maintain an on-line version of the Rubber Book? It seems like an obvious thing to put into a web-accessible database.

If you had read the Nature article, you would not need to ask me.

Aha! I suppose that makes sense, when one thinks about what happens during reflection. Thanks for the correction. This problem is fun! But I must break off, as I am going to watch Carlo Rovellis' Oxford webinar on this history and philosophy of science....

Actually I have more or less persuaded myself that the phase change on reflection is irrelevant, after all. If one is just measuring the change in path length between one peak (or trough) and the next, it doesn't seem to matter: the phase shift simply turns what would otherwise have been peaks into troughs and vice versa, but without altering their spacing relative to one another.

Nature's article supporting Biden was exceptional and due solely to Trump's egregious disparagement of science and encouragement of anti-science viewpoints, as was made clear at the time. So it looks to me as if you've got cause and effect the wrong way round here.