mississippichem

There is a punishment for violations the second law too. Run a process that doesn't increase the entropy of the universe...nature still keeps the books and you'll have a loy of pent up entropy coming your way in the near future *(not something you want). *statement not strictly true, consume for humor value and not scientific insight.

I agree. I think that if sequential absorption/emmission was the case, the Stokes-shift that accumulated after several absorptions/emmisions would become large which is obviously not the case we observe for a light shown through clear glass. Do you think Mie and Rayleigh scatteting have something to do with the slowing of light in a medium? I don't know.

Those are both applicable but I was hinting at People cast their ballot at the voting booth out passion or fervor for issues that don't matter or don't exist. For anyone who watches South Park: (American comedy cartoon, probably not funny to people not living in the US) I get the "Theytookerjubs!" vibe from the beligerent anti-Obama crowd sometimes.

No, the joke is baseless assertions stated as fact. From the evidence presented, I must conclude that only believe these things because you want to . There is a relevant Winston Churchill quote here...I think most of you already know it.

I have read said lament before. Some powerful ideas those are. I think every math teacher should be required to read and summarize it before being allowed to teach. +1

I think it is noteworthy that discussing, in theory, what might result from a dangerous procedure is very different from advocating that someone conduct said procedure. Also it's very different than giving explicit technical/logistical details on how to carry out that dangerous procedure.

Have you considered dynamic light scattering instead? EDIT: spelling

I assume you have an x-ray crystal structure for it if you've isolated it...

Any idea what the proposed structure is? Everything I'm trying to come with on my end looks crazy. I would like a link to the work as well.

Thank you for your polite concession. I've enjoyed the discussion thoroughly and will be glad to continue if you have further questions or comments.

Nope. As I said before, the electronic structure of benzene is such that no excited state will yield a Kekule structure! Do the Huckel calculation for the groundstate and it will be obvious. It's not a question of what might happen, we already know. The book is closed on aromaticity.

I try to imitate my dog's philosophy on life: Eat, be happy, don't question it. Simply exist. Chew computer cables if you get bored.

Saying it again doesn't make it so. Assuming your original premise is true (it's not). How are the two resonance forms of benzene distinguishable?

I don't see how. It explains a known phenomenon with a process that is known not to occur. There is already a different explanation available that is in line with the experimental evidence. The two resonance forms of benzene do not convert between each other. Any explanation that claims they do is of no use IMO. So you are saying there are cyclohexatriene like excited states of benzene? Surely not. The first excited state of benzene promotes a pi electron into a pi-star orbital. That's not a sigma orbital . You'll never be able to get the symmetry of a cyclohexatriene. I can't see how any conceivable excited state of benzene would give you a C3v structure.

If the switching between resonance forms is unphysical, why consider it at all? It provides no computational insight and no useful intuition.

The statements I bolded are problematic. It is known that the resonance forms of benzene do not convert back and forth in time, by definition of a resonance hybrid. Also, there is no spectroscopic evidence of two degenerate electronic states switching back and forth. All six hydrogen atom protons are equivalent on the NMR timescale meaning that they all are de-shielded equally. You can also use reactivity arguments to show that this is not true. If you want to approximate the energy gap between the first excited state and the ground state of benzene (what would explain its UV absorbance) you need to solve a Schroedinger equation for a particle on a ring which has energy eigenstates [math] \frac{n^{2}\hbar ^{2}}{2mr^{2}} [/math]. That will give you an idea of where the first excited state lies. Subtract out the ground state energy and you'll get a decent number for the maximum absorbance wavelength for the [math] \pi \rightarrow \pi ^{*} [/math] transition in benzene. Also, remember that you can't neglect the sigma bonding electrons here either because they occupy the lowest states of the ring so the transition is not from the first to the second state on the hypothetical ring. If you want a good calculation you'll need to setup a Slater determinant of the basis functions and feed that through the Hartree-Fock equation. For a decent calculation that is easier than the Hatree-Fock, you can evoke the variational theorem and use Huckel theory to diagonalize an easy Hamiltonian where all the non-adjacent overlap integrals are taken to be zero (a pretty good approximation...sometimes). I think you may be mixing up the concept of degeneracy with aromaticity. The ground state for pi electrons in benzene is doubly degenerate, which only by coincidence corresponds to the two degenerate resonance forms that constitute the resonance hybrid. The excited states have 2n-fold degeneracy so this analogy is useless in the excited states. You can't mix valence bond theory with molecular orbital theory!

Let's see it! An experiment, a mathematical derivation...anything would be an improvement on the evidence you've presented thus far.

I'll have what he's having.

As is mentioned above, observable quantities in QM come by allowing operators (you can write them as matricies, just like good ole' linear transformations) to act on states represented by vectors. There is an inherent uncertainty between conjugate pairs of observables because you have to pick the order in which the matricies operate on the vector, and it matters. Google "commutators in quantum mechanics" for a better and more rigorous explanation.

It's not seven minutes of terror for the hypothetical Martians who will observe a terrifying Earth craft whizzing down from orbit to drop off a robot?

dapifo, Are you familiar with matrix multiplication?

You're not really making any sense friend. Can you try to explain your ideas using standard science terminology? Science words have very precise and very specific meanings, failure to follow this convention results in mass forum hysteria and people not understanding your points.

As you noted before, the rules of chemistry are no where near random. It should be insightful to point out that organic chemistry would be impossible if every reaction yielded a complete random mixture of every possible bond beaking broken and or made. The calculation is even more crappy if you consider that different molecules have different half-lives and different energetic barriers to decomposition/subsequent reaction. You can throw a hundred reagents in a flask and, in theory (perhaps not in practice) predict all the products and their relative abundances. NOT random at all!

I would simply give humans all the deepest secrets of physics, sit back and watch what fascinating contraptions they build. My holy book would read more like a textbook. The Book of Mississippichem 13:7: thou shalt conserve thy energy, and it shall not be created nor destroyed lest I smite thee...and the inner product shall be unto the integral as the integral is unto the inner product; and the people rejoiced as their polynomials had been normed in his holy metric.

Is there anything specific about perpetual motion, or the impossibility of, that you would like to know? You can look at this from many angles. There are thermodynamic and mechanical arguments to name two.