mississippichem

OP, What concentration is pH a measure of? Once you can answer that then consider the definition of the acid equilibrium constant. EDIT: Be nice. people are only trying to help. By making you do the thinking we are helping you help yourself which IMO is a much better method than handing out answers. If I give you an answer, you'll say "okay" and probably forget later. If I guide you to discover it yourself you will learn to how to learn in addittion to learning about pH . Science isn't a collection of facts. It's a method to learn about the world. Go and learn. Come back here for guidance when you get stuck.

Appolinaria, Through spectroscopy experiments we have found that outer space is in fact littered with a plethora of organic "pre-biotic" molecules including but not limited to amino acids, primitive lipids, water, and various organo-sulphides. I don't know if pan-spermia is the ultimate answer to the origin of life on Earth but at least it is somewhat falsifiable and does not require a supernatural agent or ant blatant violations of established physics.

This does not invalidate the premise of the OP but I would be weary of any physics speculation asserted by Atkins. Some of you may know that his textbooks have been a staple in undergraduate physical chemistry classes for some time. In the last few years the quality of his books have gone down hill IMO. Some of us in the p-chem world have begun to wonder whether or not he is getting senile in his old age. I can't seem to find anything now but he's made some less than rigorous statements about QM in recent times. Let's hope he doesn't go the way of Pauling (great chemist fading into crackpot obscurity). Again this does not automatically make anything he says incorrect but I thought this was worth mentioning. Consider the source but don't let ad hom. kill an idea.

Feynman conveys the pedagogy of quantum theory quite plainly and succintly in FLP III in my opinion. I'm no physicist but this has been my understanding of quantum "objects" for some time. I agree with you and Feynman. Well placed reference. Cheers. The "shut-up and calculate" paradigm may be unsatisfying but it almost never lets us down or leads us astray.

Let's see your calculation OP.

Could this have to do with symmetry rules for cycloadditions in quantum chemistry? This might be way off base but that is one context in which I've seen those types of notation used.

Gotta hate those damn evil heterotrophic organisms...

I think you are conflating the efficiency of a nuclear device (a question for engineers and bomb designers?) with the theoretical notion of mass energy equivalence (a very "physicsy" notion). Another example comes from chemical reactions. I can calculate how much anergy should be released in theory by such a reaction, but in reality I can never harness or even release 100% of that calculated energy. There are always loses or imperfections in a system. I don't know if those losses in a nuke are from engineering considerations or some theoretical notion from nuclear physics but I know that blowing up a nuke and measuring the Joules that come out is not a valid test of mass energy equivalence unless you account for all those other losses and imperfections in the system.

I don't either. That's why I find it a bit silly to maintain that any organism in the universe is "superior" to any other. I find the OP to be a misplaced question and a bit pointless but the discussion has evolved (no pun intended) into something worth discussing IMO. EDIT: grammar stupidity removed

Bold mine throughout I'm of the opinion that we should teach reading and allow children to develop their own sense of morals. You cannot define an absolute morality and claim that it is the correct one. Some religious extremist in the middle east find it a moral act to kill their daughter who lost here virginity outside of marriage. Some people in the US think it is morally correct to teach anti-scientific creationist blather in public schools. Who is a teacher to decide what is moral for his students? The bolded statement is so false that I'm really going to have trouble addressing it. What about the huge advancements that "technological education" has brought in fields like medicine, agriculture, space exploration, and computing. How is that only useful to the military? I know you didn't say "only" but I think you are being disingenuous by not highlighting all the non-military uses of the great knowledge of science our society has acquired. The computer you are reading my post on is the result of technology. That same technology allows us to hold our governments to a level of accountability and transparency that was unachievable in the old days of newspapers and pamphlets. In another thread you are angry about the torture allowed to be perpetrated on enemy combatants by the esteemed Mr. Bush. I maintain that you might never have heard of such travesties were it not for modern technological forms of information distribution like the internet. A misplaced sense of duty against a non-existent enemy? I am 23 and I love it when older people project their feelings about my generation onto us as if they can know our inner motivations and rationales. You are using your anecdote about your grandson to project those qualities onto an entire generation. Do you not see the fallacy there? I've had a job since I was fifteen and have never gone longer than two months without employment since. I admit that my sense of morality probably does not coincide with yours. I hold scientific and quantitative understanding to be the ultimate form of understanding (accuse me of scientism, I'll take it as a compliment). Reason being that it is the only form of understanding that has consistently lengthened our life spans, improved our daily lives with convenience, increased the speed of propagation of other forms of knowledge (think internet, TV, radio, telephones) and, somewhat selfishly, been the reason my country and it's allies have been victorious in two global conflicts with authoritarian leaders (radar, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers). Would you like a side of strawman with your false dichotomy? Who said that we must choose between the two? In the western world at least, we have the right to choose what we study in college and to a large degree in pre-collegiate education ("highschool" in the USA, something like "A-levels" in the UK?). One would first need to assume the existence of a god but we'll not go there as that never ends well.

How is the structure of our brains not a result of natural selection?

That's the idea. Favorable traits get selected for and tend to stick around.

Once you get married you don't have it anymore?

Then why have you brought this to a forum where people typically come to debate!? You are arguing with poor sentence structure. You've yet to address even one argument raised in this thread. I'll accept that as your statement of defeat. Just becuause I used entropy in my argument does not mean that I am using circular logic. Show me the circular logic in my argument. I was showing how entropy must exist in order to explain many of the phenomena we observe. I ask again, what are the natural variables for internal energy? I find it I'll advised for you to evoke fancy stat. mech. arguments when you clearly do not understand rudimentary classical thermodynamics. You've yet to debate. I wish you would at least attempt to tackle even one of these arguments. People have put time into their posts and you effectively respond with "Nah-uh". And you expect to rebuild it without the presence of spontaneous endothermic processes, and a flawed interpretation of Liouville's theorem. Thanks for a good laugh. Physical chemistry currently works fine and currently pays my salary. Physical chemistry was already built from thermo and stat. mech. Show where current chemical thermodynamics is inconsistent with these notions from physics. I'm not going to let you keep making unfounded assertions and snide empty comments. Pony up or shut up. It's quite simple really.

I too think that many of the OT laws are merely a health code that came around before germ theory (they didn't have a biology class or public health services, they had to scare people) Sounds reasonable, next verse, Holy Shit!

John Cuthber and I have been trying to point out to you that if you do away with the concept of entropy then you have no explanation for why [observed] spontaneous processes occur. Allow me to clarify: The internal energy of a system expressed in natural variables is: [math] U(S,V,N) = TdS-PdV+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i} [/math] By definition of the differential we have: [math] dU=\frac{\partial U}{\partial S}dS + \frac{\partial U}{\partial V}dV + \sum_{i} \frac{\partial U}{\partial N_{i}}dN_{i} [/math] By inspection we can see that T, -P, and "mu" correspond to the partial derivatives of internal energy with respect to its natural variables. Which, by the way, how do you intend to define the internal energy without S? Alright so now let's define the Gibb's energy which is a great measure of spontaneity near equilibrium. We can get an expression for the Gibb's energy and all the other thermodynamic state functions by Legendre transforming the internal energy any number of times. For the Gibb's energy we Legendre transform in V and S: [math] G= TS-PV+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i}-V\frac{\partial U}{\partial V}-S\frac{\partial U}{\partial S} [/math] differentiating with knowledge of the coefficients established above gives: [math] dG(P,T,N_{i})=VdP-SdT+\sum_{i} \mu _{i} dN_{i} [/math] You can do some algebra and show that the enthalpy is hidden inside the expression (yes I know technically you can't integrate the expression as is because S has a T dependence but the approximation is valid near equilibrium and for a relatively small temperature change): [math] dG=dH-SdT [/math] [math] \Delta G= \Delta H - T \Delta S [/math] So for spontaneous processes [not just chemical reactions by the way] that require a net input of energy, i.e. those with a positive change in enthalpy, there must be a change in some other quantity in order to meet the spontaneity requirement of the change in Gibb's Energy being negative. How do you explain that? This is all from classical thermodynamics. But your argument also makes no sense on a statistical mechanics level. Entropy is a volume on the phase space of an ensemble. I don't see how entropy being not directly experimentally measurable, or not unique affects that. Do you not agree that for a larger phase space volume there are a greater number of accessible microstates? I read your paper by the way. No matter what you justify through the Liouville Theorem or by redefining the Carnot cycle, your result must agree with observed experiment. EDIT: LaTeX hiccup

Indeed. I'll go a step further and move this to speculations.

How did he manage to get rid of friction and thermal losses? Do you understand what the second and third laws of thermodynamics are all about?

What is confusing about hyperconjugation in trans isomers specifically? I don't see how it would be different in cis isomers. The interaction happens from the sigma bond beta to the sp2 carbon so the location of the substituent on the other side of the alkene should only make a negligible difference with respect to the orbital overlap comprising the hyperconjugation.

I would like to hear how he explains the occurence of spontaneous processes that are endothermic (dH>0).

So you are saying that there are other non-classical frameworks in physics where planck's constant (or reduced plancks constant) is not seen in the important commutators?

I think someone here on SFN once defined classical physics as anything that doesn't use [math] \hbar [/math]. Can't seem to remember who said that, but I like it.

The closest thing I can think of is an isotope, which has already been mentioned. Hydrogen and deuterium constitute an interesting example. A deuterium atom is about twice as heavy as a 1H atom and as a result there are noticeable chemical and spectroscopic differences. I've always thought that the term "superatom" was a bit sensationalist. Scientists pretty much give that name to every novel naked metallic cluster discovered. In other words, it's really just an exotic molecule with interesting electronic and orbital properties. Interesting though.

I can get behind that.

anotherfilthyape, The difference in theory and techniques used make it a very valid difference.