John Cuthber

Long enough for us to work out why it's not been eradicated. .https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2358959/ It's a bit like sickle cell anaemia. Were you aware of that, or just airing your ignorance?

True But there's plenty of money on offer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal So, you have to wonder why nobody has claimed it.

Unless it doesn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_dosimeter

Soviet era propaganda, designed to frighten the West isn't actually evidence of their success. However the fact that they use spies + satellites is evidence of their failure.

You seem to have solved the nuclear waste problem by personal decree. Or, maybe, you are mistaken.

Do you understand that scientists also observe nature and explain it without invoking a God. And do you also understand that nature is entirely consistent with there being no God? And do you therefore understand that nature is not evidence for God. It's like saying that it is theoretically possible that someone deliberately planted weeds in my garden. The weeds are there. So the phantom weed planter must exist!. The presence of weeds is consistent with His existence, but it's certainly not proof of it and, given that there are other more plausible explanations, it hardly counts as evidence for it. So, while nature is tangible, it's not evidence.

Fine; to save money, just tell them you filled the tyres with nitrogen (or kryptonite if it works better) but carry on using dry air.

I'm not surprised. Given this data https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp145-c4.pdf A picocurie of 222Rn is about 1.6E-17 grams So a pCi per litre is something like a millionth of a part per million (or thereabouts- I lost count of the zeroes). It's not being detected by chemistry at that level (not least, because it's inert). There are radon monitors that have pumps to draw in (which could be viewed as "sniffing") and there are detectors which rely on diffusion.

Zero is the number of declared sisters I have. It's also very probably the number of sisters. Whereas, for example 0.3 is certainly not the number of sisters I have.

Hi MigL The flip side of my rather blunt personality is that I'm not easily offended. If you took out your frustrations on me that's probably better than if you took it out on someone else. I'm aware that people spend money on stuff for dubious reasons. If they do that knowingly, I don't mind. I do get annoyed if someone sells snake oil to unsuspecting victims under false pretences.

Zero exists in the real world. It is the number of sisters I have. Physics doesn't have a problem with zero.

I wish I could "upvote" that more than once. Incidentally, the title is "So then if the universe did not come about by pure chance - what did happen? Perhaps a better question would be 'who' did it?" Turning that round, Since we can't find sensible evidence of a "who", we are forced to the conclusion that the universe did "just happen" about 14 billion years ago. It seems to have started off with a dense dot of very hot stuff, and since then has followed a handful of relatively simple laws. The scale is big, but the fundamentals are quite simple. The alternative is to propose that there was a "who" at the start, - we might as well follow convention and call them God. That poses a more difficult problem. Where did God come from? Well, given the choice between a simple thing- the big band and a handful of physical laws on one hand, and a massively complex , thinking, purposeful, powerful God on the other hand, statistics suggests I should choose the simple option as more probable.

Good point. And, to give credit where it is due, you already answered the question If you had bulk water (as liquid or solid) in your tyres you would be treating those tyres badly. But the effect of changes of vapour pressure would be small compared t the effects of thermal expansion. A stably running heat engine doesn't have a temperature. It has at least two- you can use them to calculate the theoretical thermodynamic efficiency. On a related, and probably a more interesting, note (it's not difficult). Are there any native French speakers reading this? I seem to recall hearing that the translators struggle to translate the common English phrase "room temperature" into French because there's no simple equivalent. Is that true?

Water at -25 in a tyre is not liquid. So, it is plain wrong to say " liquid water in my tires are a definite possibility at -25 deg C."? Now, perhaps you could get back to my question. How much does the vapour pressure change by?

Why not actually say what you mean rather than repeatedly saying something plainly not true?

No I'm having trouble seeing why you say When the water you refer to is not at -25C The ambient air (or the road) might be but the water isn't. And, it's very poor practice to have any condensed water in the tyre. How much difference will that make? How accurate is the gauge?

No Not treating tyres reasonably symmetrically is obviously a bad thing. It has nothing to do with nitrogen or He vs air. And the effect will be the same with He, N2 or O2.

Thanks for clarifying the distinction. Pointing out that liquid water might exist at -25C, but not in conditions that would be found in a car is irrelevant, and, therefore, nitpicking. And the change in temperature would significantly alter the pressure- just because hot gases try to expand. That effect is going to exceed any effect from water vapour pressure or any difference between air, oxygen, nitrogen or helium.

What do you mean by "sniffing"?

Thanks for pointing out that correcting errors like "water is liquid at -25 C" constituted "nit picking". Re "And again, a small difference is still a difference." Yes, and like the difference caused by changing the vehicle load, or temperature, it is inevitable. If it was a problem (and it's not), using nitrogen wouldn't solve it.

It's not a matter of me getting over myself- it's a matter of you talking nonsense. If you post nonsense, don't try to "double down" on it when someone points it out. Now, given that liquid water isn't going to be there at -25C and that you shouldn't have any condensed phase water in your tyres and that the deviations from ideality of both nitrogen and oxygen are small and they will be similar so the differences between the behaviour of nitrogen and oxygen will be even smaller than the differences from an ideal gas and that even if there was bulk water in the tyres the vapour pressure would be negligible and the changes in vapour pressure would also be negligible and that the viscosity of nitrogen is lower than that of oxygen (so, for a given hole, it's going to leak faster) and so on, can you give a valid reason for using nitrogen (other than that the oxygen may percolate through the bulk rubber faster) for spending the extra money? Carefully dried air is still cheaper than nitrogen. It's very easy to provide air that's "dry enough" for this application; you just compress the air to a pressure that's higher then the pressure you use in the tyre, wait for any water to condense, and then expand the air down to the right pressure. The relative humidity will fall with the pressure.

Bollocks. 25 degrees below the freezing point is not a good place to look for a liquid. Why on earth did you post that on a science web site? Does it say "but you would be fine if it was nitrogen"? If not the point's irrelevant Sometimes, deliberately selective quotes are the best option available.

You don't know what the word "theory" means in the context of science, do you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory This idea is no more a scientific theory than saying monatomic gold is unicorn droppings. Incidentally, whether pseudoscience likes it or not, we do actually know about the properties of monatomic gold. People make light bulbs that rely on monatomic gold. http://www.perkinelmer.com/product/lumina-hollow-cathode-2-lamp-au-n3050107 albeit, for rather esoteric purposes. One thing we know is that it's only available at high temperatures, in a vacuum.

How?