mississippichem

Your signature tells me you are an organic chemist. The following post assumes an organic chemist level of knowledge. As someone who has done some work with C60, C80, their derivatives and a zoo of endohedral metallo-fullerenes, I can tell you that they have great potential in many areas; especially as additives that can greatly increase dielectric or capacitance properties. However, I can also tell you that they are hell to work with. They are barely soluble in everything and not very soluble in anything. They are expensive to purchase commercially and difficult to produce reproducibly in the lab. Zapping a graphite rod with enough current to fry anything doesn't tend to scale up well as you might imagine. If you want to use them for any kind of materials they need to be functionalized, for example hydroxylated, halogenated, or reacted with long urethanyl linked alkenyl chains to prepare them for polymerization reactions. The functionalization procedures are always rife with trouble. Most of the processes involve ball-milling (at least 24 hours worth), extreme reaction conditions and LARGE columns for purification in post. If you do manage to functionalize any of these devils (we did), then characterizing your products is another conundrum. We once spent over two months just developing a methodology to access the degree of hydroxylation (number of carbon atoms hydroxylated) of simple C60(OH)n. NMR gives a multiplet mess with and a lot of overlapping peaks. Quantitative IR showed a highly non-linear curve fit for degree of functionalization versus percent absorption. UV-vis proved to be just worthless for a multitude of reasons. We ended up using wet methods but the process chemists we talked to said "forget about it" with respect to any technique like that seeing the light of day in any kind of industrial scale procedure. So yes, the potential applications for fullerenes are huge and they are an active area of research, but we are a LONG way from making any of this commercially viable or even viable at all for the mass production.

How reputable does that source look to you rigney?

Don't you think that it might be your fault and not the fault of several tens of others (some of whom do this kind of stuff for a living)? To assume that all the people who have pointed out problems with your conjectures (they're not theories) are dillusional brings with it a level of conceitedness that makes me say...interesting. If all the cars on the highway seem to be traveling in the opposite direction to you, is it you or them who is in the wrong lane?

But you must admit that Dallas Cowboys fans are in fact the evil spawn of Lucifer!

Indeed on the bolded part. When I think Ike, I think about all the infrastructure he put in place that still lasts till today like the interstate system. Given, he had a nice post WWII economic boom to help him out but I really feel as though he made the most out of it and did not squander it like I think the Republicans of today would. Plus his demeanor and public appearance were just classic; very leader-like and presidential. Just the right mix of war hero and man of the people if you ask me. He made his business about long lasting progress.

A good approximation for the solubility of gases in liquids is found in Henry's Law: [math] p_{\chi}=k(T)c [/math] Where [math] p_{\chi} [/math] is the partial pressure of the gas above the liquid, c is the concentration of the gas in the liquid and k(T) is the temperature dependent Henry's Law coefficient. The Henry's Law coefficient is best found experimentally but is roughly proportional to [math] e^{1/T} [/math]. I think the intuition given above is a valid way to think about it. Keep in mind that heuristics can get you into trouble in physical chemistry though if you're not careful. Case in point, if you have a gas that has a different chemical identity in solution than it does in the gas phase (think CO2 and carbonic acid) then all of this is moot.

Same sentiment here. Obama is not so great, but he represents my values WAY more than the current state of the GOP. I think someone here called themselves an "Eisenhower Republican" once, and I think I'm about right there (which makes me a 2012 democrat).

Good for you. I don't trust a man who doesn't admit to having played D&D at some point.

Sounds like a Republican to me. First he goes into denial mode [think global warming, evolution], then he makes a bald assertion with no evidence [like Obama is a Muslim or not a citizen]. When all else fails he gets belligerent and makes a threat [analogous to threatening to not raise the debt ceiling].

I personally don't see how they can ever pull it off and make a profit. They are going thermodynamically uphill if they are going from carbon dioxide to alkanes (the primary components of things like gasoline or diesel). You can lower the activation energy for a chemical process with a catalyst but that doesn't change the overall energy change for the reaction. Unless they can figure out a way to do it with power from a renewable source, and one that you can collect passively like solar or wind, I don't think they'll ever be able to make this commercially viable. As usual the news story has no scientific details. Interesting story though. EDIT: Am I missing something obvious here?

If by clever bot, you mean this bot cleverbot.com, he keeps accusing me of being a bot! Not sure if that says something about me or him!

I don't know if you are guilty of a strawman or not. I haven't looked over the recent posts in detail. I was just clearing up the fact that "resident experts" are in fact staff members even if we don't lay down modnotes or ban. Carry on. Don't let me get in the way.

I think you actually seem to be quite knowledgeable in some areas. Don't down on yourself for not having a pedigree! I know I've had some fun speculating with you about exobiology anyway. Not that I know a damn thing about exobiology other than how general chemical principle might apply to it. Come to think of it...does anyone know anything about exobiology? So far we have a sample size of one with respect to abiogenesis.

Might be worthy of note that though he is not a moderator, John Cuthber is in fact a staff member (denoted by the two stars inside the blue bar). By the way, "starmanning" is that thing you do in Mario games where you become invincible for a few seconds .

My dead grandfather who invaded beaches in the south pacific just rolled in his grave.

What makes you think that a hypothetical "ToE" (I actually hate that phrase, it's too sensational) won't be quantum mechanical? So far, all signs point to the fact that it will be.

illuusio, What criteria would you use to distinguish valid scientific work from nonsense?

If you could display some of your reasoning I'll be glad to help further. Answering the question for you doesn't do you a favor. Anyway, for now I have some questions for you that will hopefully nudge you in the right direction. 1) When something is burned in air, the compound or element is being oxidized so what gas in our atmosphere is a good oxidizer? 2) What does it mean to oxidize something? 3) Pure copper metal is in what oxidation state? What are the other common oxidation states for copper?

+1 for leaving open the possibility that you might be mistaken. You have no idea how much that is appreciated around here considering many that post speculations seem unwilling to be falsified. Seriously, no sarcasm; I appreciate it. I see you have relatively few posts so welcome to SFN if no one has welcomed you yet.

So is a half-halfling a "quarterling" or a "three-fourthsling" ? A true taxonomical conundrum.

Response to me quoted in its entirety and bolded by me You said that the math (in your proposal) is exactly the same as in SR: Then you said: You see? You made a claim that you had knowledge you didn't have. You've never that kind of math in your life, yet you claim to know it well enough to know that the math in SR is no different from the math in your theory! What part of that is not dishonest?

Then how are you to show that the "resisted" work is valid? Don't you agree that work being resisted and then later being confirmed to be incorrect is a success for the scientific process? Should we just accept any crap that comes along? How are we to separate valid work from quackery? Your perspective is of no consequence as you have already stated that you are not a member of any scientific community! If you are not taking the time and effort to read journals, read technical blogs, or discuss with colleagues how can you make any claim to know what the current state of affairs is with respect to work being accepted/rejected? Phi for All was telling you that, in this modern era of rapid communication, the review process has sped up a lot and now we can sit on our couches from home and judge the validity of work by simply reading the work on our laptops and phones. Then we can use email, forums, and social media to share our opinions and debate topics. How is this not a good thing? Should we go back to writing paper with a quill pin and papyrus and having to hope that the church approves of our work? You keep moving goalpost, albeit subtly. This is not an honest way to debate or discuss.

Bold mine I actually agree with you up until the part where you say we "can not ignore" the motion of the proton. Think about the proton mass versus the electron mass. The motion of the proton can be ignored, and is, daily by people working in the relevant fields. If you've ever tried to solve the coupled Schrodinger equations for the electronic and nuclear motion simultaneously you would know that they are quite nightmarish. That full Hamiltonian is often not diagonalizable and you have to resort to numerical methods that may or may not be stable. I understand what you are saying: not accounting for the motion of the nucleus leads to some inaccuracy in the solutions for the electron energy levels. I'm just trying to say that the approximation of not considering the nuclear motion is not as bad as you think and actually provides tenable results for many applications. I realize that there are situations in which this approximation becomes much less valid as I stated above. As far as your comment concerning the reduced mass, yes I've seen people stick the reduced mass for the electrons+nuclei into the constant the term scaling the kinetic energy operator in the Hamiltonian. You should read the "derivation" section in the wikipedia article for the Born Oppenheimer approximation. Wikipedia: Born Oppenheimer Approximation Be warned that though the derivation is fully non-relativistic, it is fairly hard-nose and might take some time to understand. I'll be glad to assist if you need some assistance. This is one of those exercises everyone should do once and never again . It's kind of like learning to write down the Laplacian in spherical polar coordinates from scratch, tedious and hairy but instructive.