John Cuthber

OK, I'm an analytical chemist and I'd like to know who decided that there are "Four Types of Chemical Analysis". Also, you seem to have quantitative and qualitative muddled. The hint is in the name. Quantitative analysis tells you the quantity of material present.

If you did that a lot of the atoms you added would bounce off. Also a lot of the molecules you were working with would collide in transit and end up in the wrong places. It doesn't matter whether you think I have read and understood what you wrote, because what you are talking about is impossible. It's not impossible, because we don't know how to do it. It is impossible because we know why it can not be done. Do you understand that? Incidentally, except by hijacking biology, I don't think there are many things which mankind has made a quadrillion of. There's certainly nothing that numerous and with anything like the complexity of what you are seeking. So, your idea is also impossible technologically.

As you say, water has a high specific heat. So, when you put your warm hand into it, lots of heat flows out of your hand . That's why it feels cold. If you put your hand in a liquid with a very low heat capacity, it would warm up the liquid (at least the bits near your hand) quickly and once the liquid was warm, no more heat would flow. Acme, I have, from time to time had my hands in contact with liquid metals- specifically, gallium and mercury. If you hold a lump of gallium it feels distinctly cold because you hand supplies heat to it and that heat causes it to melt- so all the heat goes into melting the solid, rather than heating it. There's another experiment that shows ho bad we are at actually judging temperature. This sort of thing http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/how-to-fool-your-senses/

How are you ruling out coincidence as an explanation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

Do you understand that an area of space with little or no air or other gas in it is commonly referred to as a vacuum? Are you aware that people are mainly made of water? Do you understand that, in such a space, water would boil? Do you understand that, if there is much air or other gas present, that gas will bump into any surface- it may stick to it or it may just mess it up?

Are you talking about the idea of having a small robot build a smaller one and that smaller robot building a much smaller one and so on until you have a nanobot? I'm sure I have read a sci fi story about that idea.

You are still not paying attention here. The water will evaporate .

TLDR however, it is still impossible because if you build a person, or bits of a person, in a vacuum, because the water will boil off faster than you can tweezer it in. On the other hand, you can't play with single atoms or (generally) single molecules except in a vacuum because they get knocked about by the air. And then there's the uncertainty principle.

Why are you trying to argue with reality? People contain more water than carbon. That article doesn't mention ash and has nothing to do with the issue. Diamonds burn to leave no ash. Magnesium leaves a lot of ash even though it contains no carbon. Your original assertion was simply wrong. You are not going to get far trying to prove otherwise. Incidentally, you contradict yourself when you say "my contention is that ash forming substances contain a preponderance of carbon because ash emissions originate from an inorganic part of the fuel," Carbon is organic so anything that is high in carbon is obviously low in inorganics. As you say, the ash arises from that inorganic material. So something which is high in carbon (and thus can't be high in inorganic material) can't produce much ash.

I asked you to explain yourself; you didn't. http://xkcd.com/169/

I think you will find that the term "elitist" describes those in power due to their wealth and seeking to keep it that way. But, in any event, the quote I gave early in the thread where the guy explicitly says that he is ignoring the actual information provided by decades of research shows that he will not listen to reason. Yet we still let him speak. So, there's plainly no censorship is there? So, why claim it? Do you need to make false claims to support your assertions? What does that say about the validity of those assertions? Oh, btw, just because you lost the track, doesn't mean the track is wrong so this "you lost me when the first sentence included Koch bro's. Which makes whatever is written below it as nothing more than agenda driven drivel!" is a non sequiteur. Again, if you have to use faulty logic to support your ideas, what does that say about their truth?

Yahoo is hardly a peer reviewed expert. People leave quite a lot of ash when cremated. People are mainly water. They don't have a preponderance of carbon. Magnesium, which contains no carbon, leaves lots of ash. Diamonds, which are pure carbon leave no ash when burned. So, by simple observation, your unsupported assertion is wrong.

Could you expand on that please?

No it doesn't.

"If enzymes stop working at temperatures below the temperature of combustion, then I would like you to explain how come it happened to me," To be blunt, there is no evidence that it happened to you (I'm allowed to say that because I'm the King of China.) However there is ample evidence of the denaturation of enzymes- not least, every time anyone makes apple sauce. "Decades ago, people said that a jumbo jet would be too heavy to fly." And they were wrong, because they didn't understand science. I think you see yourself on the wrong side of that argument. "If we are not open-minded then we will never learn anything new." I'm not closed minded- I'm just sensible enough to ask for evidence. You have none. "There was a baby named Rahul, who spontaneously combusted numerous times." Again, that's a claim, but there's no evidence. "If I recall it made the national news at the time, there are still many articles about him." Indeed, here are a few " http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/08/23/indian-baby-released-after-no-signs-of-spontaneous-combustion/ which is headlined "Indian Baby Released After No Signs of Spontaneous Combustion" or http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/rahul-spontaneous-combustion-could-child-2207486 "Doctors rule out 'human combustion' for mystery fire saying it 'could be abuse'" And that's what you consider to be evidence in your favour?

"Well I can say for certain that enzymes do not stop working at temperatures below the temperature of combustion" Oh yes they do. That's why apple sauce doesn't go brown the way that sliced apples do. Why are you trying to make a claim that anyone will know is not true?

Other people have learned this black magic. Given time and teaching, so can the OP. What's the timescale for the project?

What are people trying to do here? Shooting plasma across the room is pretty much a non-starter. Interestingly, though he didn't know anything about plasma, Newton could have explained the expected range of your weapon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth He may, or may not, have experimented with throwing feathers and such.

"And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to man made activity, I do not agree with that." What an idiot? Decades of evidence, but he backs his hunch. However I think there are two ways to eliminate this . The expensive way is to simply wait. Eventually, even folks like that will have to accept the evidence of their own eyes. The sensible way to eliminate that ignorance and bigotry is through education..

I am getting confused by the names you give to the dimensions of the ship Let's make an arbitrary assumption (we can check it later if we need to). The ship is 100 metres long and 45 metres wide. That gives an area of 4500 m2 It's a funny shape but... What volume of water is displaces when it moves down by 6 metres? How much does that volume of water weigh? If the ship was twice as long , but only half as wide, (200 by 22.5) what would the displaced volume be?

The 4500m2 figure in the question isn't a length. It is (confusingly) the product of the length and the depth. So your initial equation isn't set up right.

The fatty acid oxidase certainly needs oxygen to work (the hydrogen peroxide is a by-product). there's a paper on the measurement of the rate by looking at the removal of oxygen here http://www.jbc.org/content/173/2/753.full.pdf?origin=publication_detail The other oxidase enzyme also will need to use some other oxidant (most probably oxygen) "An oxidase is any enzyme that catalyzes an oxidation-reduction reaction involving molecular oxygen (O2) as the electron acceptor. In these reactions, oxygen is reduced to water (H2O) or hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidase so So the answer to the question as asked (i fill a cup full of a concentrated solution of fatty acids and drop the enzyme into the cup.) is "nothing much". There will be a slow reaction as the air diffuses into the mixture and that will make a little hydrogen peroxide. That peroxide will start to oxidise anything present. The easiest target for oxidation is the enzyme. So, after a while all the enzyme will be destroyed and the reaction will stop.

Well, for a start, there's the uncertainty principle. But on a more obvious note, there's the fact that you can't build anything like a human in UHV conditions because the water would boil away. If you try to do it at normal atmospheric pressure the air will add atoms (randomly) much faster than you can add them deliberately.

Have you ever tried to throw a ball of cotton wool across a room?

The frog isn't levitated precisely* and it isn't levitated with optical tweezers. * there's a non uniform field gradient which means the bottom of the frog is pushed up slightly more than his head. The effect is tiny and I don't imagine it bothers the frog, but, the imprecision is there. As has been pointed out before (post 57), we can't do anything precisely. The uncertainty principle forbids it.