exchemist

You could put a water wheel in it and get some power out, perhaps enough to light some LEDs.

Actually no, that is not what I am saying. Be careful not to make sweeping simplifications or you will get entirely the wrong idea. But it is interesting you make this mistake, as it is an assertion that one sometimes finds creationists making*, so it may be quite a common misconception. First, the word "chaos" is not one I used. I spoke of degrees of "disorder", or of "dispersion of energy". I could equally have said "dissipation" or "spreading out" of energy, it gives the same idea. This does not indicate "chaos" which, to me at least, implies total disarray and absence of any order whatsoever. That's a wrong idea. Entropy is a quantitative concept. It's not all or nothing. There are even entropy tables you can look up, for various chemical substances. Second, it is perfectly possible for ordered systems to arise spontaneously, so long as the overall entropy of the process involved increases. When water freezes, the order in the water increases, because the molecules all line up in particular positions in the ice crystal structure. This is a far more ordered arrangement than the randomly moving and tumbling molecules in the liquid phase. But what happens is that energy is given off (the Latent Heat of Fusion) as the bonds in the crystal form. This energy gets dissipated into the surrounding environment. Overall, entropy - the degree of dissipation of energy - increases in the course of ice forming, even though the ice itself has lower entropy than the water it formed from. * Creationists sometimes claim the increasing complexity of life in the course of evolution could not have taken place naturally, because it involves "order" spontaneously arising out of "chaos" (a word they love because of its association with creation myths). This ignores the obvious fact that organisms continually take in lower entropy energy (e.g. sunlight or complex, ordered molecules like sugars) and give out higher entropy products of respiration (lots of small molecules like water and CO2) and heat. So overall entropy goes up during all the processes of life, including replication of DNA etc. during reproduction.

There is nothing about quantum theory in this post.

Read more carefully. You have confused a rapid expansion of the universe, which is what the Big Bang hypothesis says, with an "explosion" (your words), taking place in the universe. The universe itself expanded. There was no "explosion", and no void into which the universe expanded. That is what everyone has been telling you. Read the responses again with this in mind and it should become clearer to you. And stop moaning: the problem is you, not us.

It seems Van Leeuwenhoek's observations of single celled protozoa were not taken seriously at first by the English Royal Society (to whom he had written, in Dutch), but within a couple of years it had sent over a deputation to review his findings and accepted them. So it doesn't seem to be a terribly convincing example of "the Establishment" rejecting science. What science?

There is no “void”, as you call it, because it was the universe itself that was expanding, from a small, hot, dense state. I mean, there are even internet links on this. 😄 But my troll detector is now starting to flash, prompted by your attempts to introduce further random elements of nonsense. This behaviour has a familiar smell.

Evidence for both has been observed, though we don’t know what they are. I don’t “know” they are not one and the same, but I can say there is no evidence that they are, so there is no justification for claiming a connection. Whereas you are asserting they are connected, without evidence. That is what is known as “making shit up”, which is not allowed in science.

That (rather confusingly laid out) article does not claim that dark matter and dark energy are "so intertwined they cannot be separated". It contains two separate sections, one on dark energy, then a brief one on dark matter, and finally something on the total energy and matter content of the cosmos.

Oh dear. My challenge to you, which was perfectly clearly stated, was that you have not justified your contention that dark matter and dark energy are "so intertwined that they cannot be separated". The passage you cut and pasted (without acknowledging it was copied from another source) does not support that contention in any way.

Dark matter and dark energy are placeholder terms for the entirely separate phenomena of the observed anomalous galactic rotations rates and the observed accelerating expansion of the cosmos. There is no evidence they are connected and no theoretical reason I am aware of why they should be. What you have just written does nothing to address the dark matter phenomenon. Do you have evidence dark matter and dark energy are related in the way you say? But now that your agenda has at last surfaced (I was wondering when it would), perhaps it's time this discussion is moved to "Speculations".

Now you seem to be confusing dark matter with datk energy. Which of the two do you want to discuss? Or do we need to explain to you the difference between the two?

I told you: in galaxies. The problem is what it consists of, not where it is.

That's intriguing. I suppose that strictly speaking radiation energy is not heat energy. So I don't think (though someone may correct me) that one has to treat energy conversion to electricity by the antenna as a heat engine.

Yes I can see the logic of that, especially for someone with what sounds like a rather ghastly experience of religion in youth (I was more fortunate). I am merely pointing out it is not a distinction you can necessarily expect others, in other English speaking countries, to understand automatically by these terms. Faith is not a pejorative word over here. Its connotations are generally neutral to positive. "Blind faith" would be pejorative, however, and I think that is what you are describing, actually.

I can't immediately see what this reply of yours has to do with the question you asked or the answer I gave you. But let me see if I can help dispel any misunderstandings. Light, or other EM radiation, is not energy. EM radiation has energy. Not is, has. Energy is one of the properties of EM radiation. It also has other properties, such as velocity, amplitude, wavelength, frequency, direction, and (somewhat counterintuitively) angular momentum or "spin". Energy is merely one of these properties. The time dimension is obviously important to describing any wave. This is not specially profound, I think.

OK but you are talking about one (particularly crude) view of religious faith. The term is broader than that, at least on this side of the Atlantic, in speech and in the written word. One may speak of faith in an institution, or in a person, or in predictions, e.g.of the Met Office or a financial adviser. Admittedly such usages may be intended to draw a parallel with religious faith, but in a positive sense, whereas the sense of belief at variance with evidence would obviously have a negative connotation. But maybe in view of this exchange I should be careful not to use the term in discourse with Americans.

Interesting. My OED says, for meaning (1), "Confidence, reliance, trust (in the ability, goodness etc of a person ; in the efficacy or worth of a thing; or in the truth of a statement or doctrine). It does go on to say "in early use, only with reference to religious subjects; this is still the prevalent application and often colours the wider use". So not exclusively to be used in religious contexts, though it often is. There is nothing at all, in any of the meanings, to suggest that belief despite evidence to the contrary is in any way intrinsic to the meaning of the word. (In fact, its use in everyday speech makes it obvious that cannot be the case.) So I think you have made that bit up. 😄

What we call cornflour, then?

Maybe you are right, I was a bit thrown by the enumeration of the ingredients in the soy sauce. I don’t know what modified maize starch is for - a thickener perhaps? - nor what function yeast extract paste serves. But aside from these and some of the soy sauce components, the other ingredients seem broadly recognisable.

Not sure I agree. We have faith in the theories of science, after all. These theories are not facts but provisional models, yet we trust them - or many of the better established ones at least. That is faith, surely? But different from religious faith, certainly.

You can't just recycle it, because of "entropy", but you may be able to get some further use out of it, depending on the circumstances. The basic problem is that heat energy is the kinetic energy of random motion of atoms and molecules. It is thus in a sense "disordered" and cannot be completely re-ordered again. All non-reversible processes lead to an increase in entropy, which means (loosely speaking) a dispersion of energy in a way that cannot be completely recovered. However waste heat from many processes can be put to further use. For example waste heat from power stations can heat homes, commercial greenhouses, or swimming pools. And heat pumps can raise the temperature of heat energy from ambient air or the ground to something useful for home heating, although some extra energy has to be put in to do that. High temperature heat energy has lower entropy than low temperature heat energy, so the higher the temperature the more uses it can be put to. Machines like car engines and power station turbines are "heat engines", which rely on converting high temperature heat energy into mechanical work. However, due to the disordered nature of heat energy, they can't convert 100% of it, so there is always waste heat rejected from any heat engine, usually more than half of it in fact. I've tried to explain this in simple words, but really you need to read about the second law of thermodynamics and a bit about the concept of entropy, to see what the limitations are.

No. “Pure” energy is Star Trek, not physics. Energy is a property of a physical system. You can’t have “pure” energy any more than you can have “pure” velocity. It’s a meaningless idea.

Yes fair enough I was thinking more about the colours than the temperatures. A roaring Bunsen flame is also blue but nowhere near as hot as oxyacetylene.

The yellow flame is what you get without premixing of air and gas. This gives less efficient combustion, as shown by the yellow colour which is due, if I recall correctly, to incandescent unburnt carbon particles, formed by thermal cracking of the hydrocarbon fuel before it has a chance to burn. These flames have to burn from the outside in, as air reaches progressively further into the gas stream. My understanding is that the blue colour in the (far hotter) premixed flame is not just due to black body emission but to chemiluminescence of some of the species generated during combustion, which are formed in excited states and emit light as they drop down to the ground state. There is a reference to CH. and OH. radicals, which do this, here: https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345390/ But flames are very complex systems, chemically speaking, involving branched chain radical reactions in which a large range of molecular fragments take part.

No, it was to me. You must be confusing it with a different idiotic response.