exchemist

Go to Dover, stand on the beach and look out to sea. You not be able to see France. Climb the cliff and look out to sea and France will be visible. But the whole flat Earth thing is so unbelievably silly that one can only assume people strike this pose for fun. In which case there is zero point in reasoning with them. I would not waste your time.

OK, it will oxidise in time in air. But there should not be significant amounts of air in the coolant system.

It's not "breaking down" exactly, but some components may be used up. Anti-freeze also contains things such as corrosion inhibitors which plate out on surfaces and eventually become used up. It's inevitable in cars that there will be different metals in contact with the coolant which can set up electrochemical corrosion over time. There can also be deposits from corrosion that accumulate in the cooling system and should be flushed out so that you don't get blockages in the radiator, for example. It's cheap and easy to flush out and replace the coolant so hardly a big deal to do.

OK but that’s rather different: what you now seem to be saying is that Dawkins needs a caricature of what religious people believe, in order to be able to disbelieve in that, rather than in what religions actually teach. Actually I’m to a large extent with you on that. My mother, who was a committed and thoughtful Anglican, always found Dawkins rather funny: “like Mr Punch, with a bladder on a stick”, she used to say. I certainly found his original style of critique superficial. He seemed to me to treat religion as providing an alternative account of the physical world, in confrontation with science, instead of recognising that religion is fundamentally about providing people with a guide to help them live their lives. Of course he’s dead right to ridicule creationism, which idiotically does attempt to deny the findings of science, but creationism is a distinctly minority pursuit, theologically (to put it politely). But though I don’t pretend to have followed the evolution of his views in any detail, my impression is that he has softened his tone and become a bit more nuanced in recent years.

What does that mean? Is it that Dawkins is in some way an extreme sceptic, who is always on the hunt for things to disbelieve? Do you have evidence he is like that? Or is it just an attempt at a cheap aphorism? Ciao, love and kisses.

This is self-pitying nonsense. It is not the job of national politics to sort out your love life. If you are motivated you can find time to cultivate a social hobby, perhaps get in shape, at least a bit (sport?), which will improve your mood and make you more attractive - and above all socialise. Most people meet partners through work, social activities or just at the supermarket. Dating agencies may have their place but there'a risk they encourage "meat market" thinking about the opposite sex - which makes you highly unattractive, needless to say. If I think back to how I have met girls in my life (I'm now almost 70), 5 were through work, 4 were through invitations to parties or other social events, one was through the rowing club, another through the sailing club, 2 while travelling. Don't sit at home moping: get out there, talk to people and when you do, show an interest in them.

I think this needs explanation. Why do you think what you term “dislike” of Jews (extending to to discriminatory laws and practices and sometimes physical expulsion) before the c.19th was not racism? Ciao, love and kisses.

This is word salad. There is nothing to respond to here.

Not quite a fair comparison, I suggest. New Zealand isn't your ancestral homeland and the setting for much of your religious scripture. But if antisemitism existed before the c.19th, doesn't that imply that racism existed earlier too? Or do you argue that prejudice against the Jewish religion, customs and traditions did not constitute racism?

OK that's good. There may well be nothing to worry about in your case but it's worth making sure, I reckon.

Yes I think it's the case that racism was certainly elevated to an ideological, moral, pseudoscientific footing in the c.19th. It helped to justify the competitive colonialism of the period. But before that time there seems little doubt people tended to have what we would now see as a racist outlook. After all, the slave trade was predicated on the notion that black Africans could be treated as subhuman. I also think the Four Horsemen of New Atheism indeed tried, for a while, a kind of evangelical promotion of atheism as a replacement for religion. I've even come across a film they produced, designed to inspire awe in the grandeur of nature and to ridicule traditional religion (silly cartoon animation of hell, with little devils with pitchforks). I think the idea was to appeal to that part of human nature that is satisfied by religious feeling, but it was hopelessly cack-handed and crude. This idea was never progressed, thank goodness. But your attempt to connect this to so-called "cancel culture" strikes me as unpersuasive. In universities there have always been controversies over what speakers to invite and protests over it. I remember this from Oxford in the 1970s. The irony is that this term, invented by the far-Right as a stick to beat the Left with, describes a practice that is now used as much by the Right as the Left, for example in the banning of various books from American school libraries. But this is not generally about religion (though some Right wing US school boards ban Romeo and Juliet because there is too much sexual language). I asked you earlier on this thread for examples of religious speakers being "cancelled" and got no response. I've never come across this and doubt it is really a thing.

True, if your school syllabus includes teaching religion, which is however excluded in some countries, e.g. the USA and France. You do not teach religion in science lessons, though. You teach it, if you teach it at all, in classes on religion. Creationism is not basic theology however. It is one of the beliefs of certain Protestant denominations - and possibly some versions of Islam, I think. Ciao, love and kisses.

That very much depends on the age of the children. In the 6th form, yes, in a class on religion or philosophy it can be instructive to expose the students to the issue, seeing as by then they will be alert to the philosophical distinction between religious and scientific ideas - and will most likely be aware of the politics lurking behind the issue. However it makes no sense whatever to confuse younger children with rival models, one of which is known to be false, and most certainly not in a science class. After all, we don't teach them the caloric theory of heat, the phlogiston theory of combustion, or the geocentric model of the solar system. (Such things might be taught in a history of science class, later on, to show how ideas have developed through time.)

Yes, your visualisation is good. If you draw lines radiating out from a point, the density of the lines will fall off with the square of the radial distance from the central point. This gives exactly Newton’s inverse square relation. It’s just the same as the way the intensity of illumination falls with distance from a point source of light. It’s a consequence of the surface of a sphere being proportional to the square of its radius. You have the same number of lines in total, passing through a bigger and bigger total surface area, as the radius of sphere increases. But for calculation, the algebra is a lot more useful than the visualisation.

No, QM tunnelling offers no such possibility, I'm afraid. For a start it is only significant at the scale at which the wavelike nature of matter become important - in practice, objects the size of an atom or a subatomic particle. And then, as I've been saying it's a statistical effect from the way a probability cloud is resolved into a measurement.

You’ve lost me. Why should there be a connection between QM tunnelling, which involves no motion, and a warp drive?

Not a field, just a wave function. The suggestion of time lapses is what I don't follow. To me, that makes no sense.

No, I don't think thinking about passage of time is helpful. No change takes place - apart from the detection event that determines where the QM entity is. The problem here, it seems to me, is that what is called "tunnelling" is a rather misleading metaphor. There is no motion from inside to outside. The wave function of a QM entity will extend a bit on the far side of a potential barrier, if the barrier is narrow enough and low enough. So a detection event - which resolves the "probability cloud" into a definite position, may occasionally find the entity outside instead of inside.

Must admit I don't follow this. My understanding of tunnelling is that the wave function of the state in question extends through the potential barrier and out the other side to a small extent. In other words, the barrier is not high enough and/or thick enough to damp it out to zero on the far side. That would seem to me to mean that a particle in such a state has a finite probability of being found on the far side when an interaction collapses the wave function. So there is no faster than light travel: in fact there is no "travel" at all. The particle is already on the far side of the barrier, for part of the time, if you like. It's just a matter of there being a low, but non zero, probability of detecting it there as a result of an interaction. Is my picture of this wrong, or is it perhaps the article that has got it wrong in the search for an eye-catching headline?

"single pain" appears to be a Freudian slip.😄

Not in my case. There was some sensation, which I would class as discomfort rather than pain, and in fact I was slightly unnerved by a smell of burning, but not too bad. And it may have saved my sight in that eye. Thinking back, I suppose there may have been a bit of an occasional ache, afterwards, for a day or two. In fact I needed two sessions, one at the St G clinic and another at Moorfields itself, as the first one didn’t quite reach far enough into the corner. I was able to go home on the Underground straight away after both sessions, once the dazzle had dispersed. Though they might not have wanted me to drive, I imagine.

Also flashes in your vision. But I would see a real ophthalmologist if you can, not just an optician. I originally saw the optometrist at the local optician, who diagnosed PVD but missed the flapping edge of the retina - it was over in one corner. I was initially reassured by her and left it for a few days but was not entirely happy, as the flashes and floaters continued, and booked myself to see a consultant ophthalmologist (I did it privately, reckoning it would be £250 well spent). I'm glad I did as he told me to go and present myself at the Moorfield's eye unit at St George's within 24-48hrs, for urgent laser treatment. I think if I were you I might go to the eye unit at your hospital. You'd need to take a book of course as you might be waiting several hours to be seen, but you would get seen by a proper eye doctor.

Have you been to the ophthalmologist about it? If not I suggest doing so without delay. New floaters can indicate posterior vitreous detachment (PVD). While common enough, these can result in retinal detachment in 10% of cases. I had a PVD last year and needed laser surgery to weld the flapping edge of my left retina back in place. This was regarded as very urgent by the doctors.

The enlightened man certainly turns away from meaningless ballocks dressed up as profundity.

What conference was this and what was the charge?