John Cuthber

The "two groups " could get along just fine as long as each stuck to its area of expertise. There are some things where neither side has any special understanding or authority- things like morality. Science has its role- such things as working out the origins of life and the Universe, explaining "visions" working out who to kill (the answer's nobody, cos it's bad for biodiversity) and who to lock up; establishing sensible bounds to reproduction and population growth and so on. On the other hand, religion has it's role too. However, as far as I can see that's mainly wearing funny clothes, singing a lot and such. I may be mistaken of course. Perhaps someone would like to tell me what positive benefits religion brings.

"I would like to know other's inputs on Issac Newton, and Diophantus of Alexandria in comparing my find to theirs.." OK, Diphantus was fairly close. Newton was closer. Yours i.e. "-10.86902388503848+14.01061653862827 = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510..." is wrong. Also, theirs are ratios, rather than sums which makes them more useful

For the benefit of those who don't think this matters outside the US you might want to have a look here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16546471

I wouldn't normally tell this joke, but anyone who has read this far down the thread isn't going to be offended easily and it does raise a technically valid point. Q How can you tell when your sister is having her period? A The dog's dick tastes funny.

"Taoist monks believe that sexual abstinence is the key to longevity. " Yet they keep on dying.

I can't help thinking that this "Dig in to these most important of reactions for bacteria; nitrifying denitrifiers & denitifying nitrifiers... assimilatory and dissimilatory nitrification!" was unhelpful to the OP. All the understanding in the world of the bacteria won't answer the question so it's a bit of a red herring.

Why are you talking about metabolism? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitric_acid#Industrial_production The NO produced in the 3rd reaction is recycled to the second. So, all the nitrogen atoms from ammonia end up in the nitric acid. How many nitrogen atoms are there in 1000 cubic metres of ammonia? How much nitric acid contains that number of atoms of nitrogen? How much does that much acid weigh?

It says there are a few ppm of sulphur there. Methionine should be something like 21% sulphur. On the other hand, as I have said there's something odd about the analytical results- they don't add up to 100% so they have clearly missed something, but we don't know what.

Your post borders on unreadable. Have a look here for guidance. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/7813-science-forums-etiquette/ Anyway, the simple answer is buy more lamps. Depending on the "look" you hope to achieve, you might be able to reflect the light around the stage with aluminium foil.

"Dig in to these most important of reactions for bacteria; nitrifying denitrifiers & denitifying nitrifiers... assimilatory and dissimilatory nitrification!" Or just count the nitrogen atoms.

If the analysis given is really "I had a lab do a CHNO test and it has hydrogen only from water. Carbon (wt%) 0.22% Hydrogen (wt%) 4.45% Nitrogen (wt%) <0.05% Oxygen (wt%) 23.36%" Then it isn't an N acetyl anything. In fact that's a rather odd anlanysis. Anyway, the really important question to ask is "where did this stuff come from?". Without knowing that it's pretty near pointless to speculate.

The earth does experience some sort of wear and tear. It's called weathering or, more strictly, erosion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erosion

There is a difference between our approaches. Mine answers some points yours answers none. In particular you fail to address the fact that religious beliefs kill children. Why do you do this? Do you think the child's life unimportant?

To a disappointingly good approximation you cropped all of it, which is different. I presume you couldn't actually reply to the questions raised by the fact that people get killed by religion even today in the West.

What? I can't even parse that. Anyway, nickel salts form a precipitate with ammonia solution, but they dissolve in an excess of aqueous ammonia. The solution looks a lot like the copper ammonia complex. Have a look here http://www.public.asu.edu/~jpbirk/qual/qualanal/nickel.html

Again, I can't be bothered with most of that post so I just cropped it. I left a couple of the more glaring faults to respond to. The process is generally called science. It involves checking things. If Aristotle had been a real scientist (in the modern sense) he would have looked in a few people's mouths and counted the teeth. It's not a demanding experiment. He didn't. So, on that basis (among others cited earlier) I claim that Aristotle was not a scientist. It's not a silly claim, it's a perfectly obvious one. What is silly is that idea that "They also didn't have as much to work with as they were starting from scratch so their conclusions were destined to be rudimentary or wrong. " No, we are talking about the ability to count teeth here. It's not rocket science- a school kid could do it. "their conclusions were destined to be rudimentary or wrong. That didn't make it less scientific." No, failing to make any observation made it unscientific. Face it- Modern science as we know it was unknown to the Ancient Greeks. If you believe in objective morality and inalienable rights do you also accept that religion (or at least people under the influence of religion) has been responsible for the ultimate immorality and refusal of those rights? Here's a recent example http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13452575 What do you think about it? Do you believe that the child should have been killed? Do you accept that belief in witches is a religious matter (there is no evidence- so it must be a matter of faith) Also, as I have said, in comparing the inquisition with Stalinism, you are just comparing one religion with another. Both are bad; so what?

"And Cuthber specifically refered to solubility of Ag2S as determining whether or not ammonia could break the chemical bonds." Yet another simply untrue statement from Greg. The exchange was ""If you put tarnished silver in liquid ammonia then the solubility of Ag2S in water is totally irrelevant to whether or not the ammonia is capable of breaking the bonds in Ag2S." Except that, if ammonia broke those bonds, then it should still do so in the presence of water." So, I said that it's the ability of the ammonia to break the bands that determines the solubility, not the other way round. Anyway, the stuff doesn't dissolve: it never did and it never will. I'm thinking of starting a book on how long it takes Greg to accept that he was wrong from the very start.

I think it would be better to start another thread for that. It hasn't anything to do with this topic.

OK, we have a bit of data to play with. Lets see what happens when we look at the numbers. I'm in a bit of a rush so I hope I get this right. The solubility of silver sulphide in water is about 10^-16 molar. Adding 1M ammonia will complex all but 1 in 10 million of the ammonia so the solubility should rise roughly 10^7 fold. So the solubility in 1M ammonia is about 10^-9 Molar Using conc ammonia (about 10 molar) should increase the solubility about a hundredfold. That takes us to about 10^-7 M It's not clear if the effect of temperature even goes in the right direction but, just for the sake of having a number, lets assume the effect is that same as the effect of solubility on silver iodide (since Greg gave us some numbers for that). That gives us roughly another 10 fold improvement. That takes the estimated solubility of silver sulphide in hot conc ammonia (under dangerously high pressure) to something like 10^6 molar. I think that's rather less than one part in a million w/w. So Greg, now do you believe me when I say it won't work?

"If you put tarnished silver in liquid ammonia then the solubility of Ag2S in water is totally irrelevant to whether or not the ammonia is capable of breaking the bonds in Ag2S." Except that, if ammonia broke those bonds, then it should still do so in the presence of water. "I am interested to know if it would really make any noticeable difference to dissolving Ag2S tarnish. I don't have any silverware or silver wire on hand although I could make myself a small amount of 0.88M ammonia. Used to make it in my younger days for the purpose of making touch powder and I still have the flasks and stoppers etc. " I bet you don't mean that. The ammonia solution I used ( and found not to work, even on heating) was more than 0.88M.

The truth is I get pissed off with people who make false statements based on a half understood theory, I usually start off rebutting them quite politely. For example in the thread referred to the OP asked about the mechanism and details of the technique for removing tarnish from silver using aluminium foil and soda. Greg's reply was " For example, silver chloride and silver sulphide salts are both insoluble in water, but if you add enough ammonia (as in cloudy ammonia) these insoluble salts will dissolve to form Ag2(NH3)4S and Ag(NH3)2Cl. " Now, let's be clear about that: it was scientifically wrong. The sulphide does not (as at least two experiments here have shown). It was also nothing to do with the original question. I really don't think my reply was "provocative". I said "I'm a long way from sure that the ammonia complex is strong enough to dissolve silver sulphide. It won't dissolve silver iodide and I think the sulphide is even less soluble than that. Anyway, it doesn't actually answer the original question." Greg's next comment was, once again, simply incorrect: he said "As far as the formation of complex ions goes, it is irrelevant how soluble the simple salt is to begin with, whether it is silver sulphide or silver chloride." As has now been proved, it jolly well does make a difference. He then added "With ammonia, the silver ammino sulphide that is formed is completely soluble in water " Again, he is repeating something that is flat out wrong. A few posts later I listed all the false statements he made. Now this is a science website. Posting stuff that isn't right, repeatedly and after you have been told it's wrong is not an acceptable way to behave. How long should we put up with someone saying things that simply are not true before we stop being polite about pointing this out? The funny thing is that much the same happened with the thread on Nd compounds. Chemistryoftheelements assertion that "Oxidise this resulting solution to produce Pr2 O(SO4)3(?), a higher basic sulfate of praseodymium which will be insoluble." simply isn't true. He never put forward any sensible evidence for it and he ignored the fact that it goes against the established data. Now, if he were proposing to waste his own time on this that would be his problem, but he was expecting to send another forum member on what could only ever be a wild goose chase. I guess people will make up their own minds about it. In particular I guess Greg will realise that sending insulting personal messages is unhelpful.

"Again, you fail to grasp the very simple concept that science is a process, not results. " No, I understand that. I understand that part of the process is looking at the real world and seeing if you have got things right. Aristotle clearly didn't do that or he wouldn't have believed that men had more teeth than women. He wasn''t alone in doing that sort of thing. That was the nature of "science" at his time. The modern approach to science took a lot longer. I think the essence of you problem here "By this I can assume that you believe that atheists can be religious, then? So your primary argument against theism, the restrictive nature of religion, apparently applies uniformly to atheism and atheistic societies more regularly than to theistic ones." is that all Alsations are dogs, but not all dogs are Alsations. "When confronted with the existence of millions of people dying in an atheistic state you then simply argue that these states were religions. This is not compelling and screams of confirmation bias, or worse." Not quite. You are deliberately ignoring the fact that I cited reasons for my opinion. It seems to me that you are the one playing with confirmation bias. Can you explain why communism (as in the USSR) isn't a religion?

If I post something here then look at it, I can see the signature and work out how much effort I put into it. (EDIT) Not a lot it seems.

I can't be bothered doing a point by point rebuttal of that but here are the highlights. "The scientific method has been traced back to Egypt circa 1600 BC. But the scientific method used today started with Aristotle's development of empiricism in the 4th century BC, and was drawn directly from his texts." The absolute bollocks examples I chose to illustrate the failure of the ancient Greeks (i.e the fact that there are more than 5 elements, objects tend to fall at very nearly the same rate whatever their weight and that spiders do not have the same number of legs as flies." are all attributed to Aristotle. He got things totally wrong which he would have got right had he used the empirical method, This shows that science really didn't start with him. You say "But your insistence that science started with "Bacon" I assume you are arguing Francis Bacon " Perhaps you should have a look at what I wrote i.e. "It's probably not realistic to say it was down to one individual". "But, in the real and more complex world, I see that the basic human rights that the West believes are inalienable are, if you believe the atheistic view, completely arbitrary and alienable, whereas in the theistic view there is a "why not" to stand in the way of alienation." Why do theists think the have a monopoly on morality? Human rights are straightforward sensible self interest. They have nothing to do with the existence of any God. On the other hand they are often ignored in the name of religion. No doubt this feeds you belief that " it does seem to be rather standard to rush to the Inquisitions when other avenues of debate are failing.". Well, why shouldn't we point out that religion kills people in a way that science doesn't? Incidentally, it's not easy for me to distinguish the insane policies of China and the Soviet Union from the insane policies of religion. Both are maintained by a belief (based on faith rather than evidence) that the perpetrators of these crimes are "following a higher power" whether that's God or teh Communist Party. From my point of view, Communism was a religion where God was relabelled as "The Party".

"but if you know the distance or and speed and angle you were traveling when you observed that photon" Speed and angle relative to what?