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New Results Contradict Long-Held Chemistry Dogma
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that the long-held belief that only the outer, valence, electrons of an atom interact may be false. Computer simulations have shown that at pressures like those in the center of the Earth the inner, core, electrons of lithium also interact."
Dogma?
If it was dogma the priests of chemistry would be denying the evidence and punishing its discoverers.
That's the difference between science and religion. For science, new information enlarges our understanding of the world. For religion, new information only threatens sanctified prejudices.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
High-pressure reactions are an almost completely unexplored aspect of chemistry; and the research that has been done shows that atoms and molecules behave much differently under high pressures. For example, a lot of research is being done now utilizing ultra-high pressure water as a replacement for organic solvents, for greener chemistry. If there's one thing we've learned from these high-pressure experiments, it's that everything acts different, so it really doesn't go against our "dogma" at all; it just goes against the "dogma" of STP reactions, which makes sense, as this was not an STP reaction. It's an incredibly cool finding; just not something that's going to turn all of our current chemical understanding upside down by violating "dogma."
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
For supposedly trying to be neutral, a lot more posts negative of religion or the right get modded up.
Who promised you "neutrality"? Good posts that are negative of religion or the right are just easier to write. You see more of them modded up because more of them are posted.
Instead of whining that everyone is biased, why don't you just mod up posts you agree with if you don't like it, or start writing posts "positive of religion or the right" that are actually insightful or interesting?
Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
The caveat to organized religion and extremist religion is that its really politics and not religion.
When crazies say God / Science / cowboy neal made me do it, chances are they're just crazy (except maybe the cowboy neal part). We should treat them as crazies and not their respective religion, science, or nealism.
Religion, much like science has done a lot for humanity. Don't forget the early humanism movement which came from the church methodically explored science as a means of understanding their religion.
lol: You see no door there!
At one time they thought the sound barrier was impenetrable too!
Actually, the "sound barrier" was considered to be a problem of engineering difficulty and not a fundamental "speed limit" imposed by nature. As an aircraft approaches Mach 1, a formerly inconsequential drag effect called wave drag begins to increase faster with velocity than parasitic drag. Aerodynamicists of the late war- and early post-war period knew about this from theoretical development and actual data from high-speed testing. It is difficult to design an aircraft that has good flight characteristics in subsonic, transonic, and supersonic drag regimes, but even though it had never been done before (never been "proven" if you like), engineering studies showed that it was possible in principle.
But these engineering studies revealed another big problem (given contemporaneous technology): it would require a *way* more powerful engine to overcome wave drag than was either available in the first-generation jets or their descendents. The dissemination of both German jet and rocket technology changed this outlook; the Bell X-1 was a rocket plane. (Remember; the German V-2 reached 3500mph during its development and deployment in 1944, and was still supersonic when it hit the ground at half that speed.) It wasn't until the huge advance of the General Electric J-57 (and the Pratt & Whitney J-79) during the 1950s that routine supersonic flight (of aircraft, anyway) became practicable.
So the "sound barrier" was just thought of as an engineering problem that was "barrier"-like because the design problems were hard and nobody thought there were going to be suitably powerful engines in the forseeable future. It was never thought of as a barrier imposed by nature; that is a popular misconception held by people who are unfamiliar with the subject matter, which is most people.
I know I've encountered this on the web before, but I don't have a link presently. The book "Mach 1 and Beyond" by Larry Reithmaier is very light on the pertinent aerodynamics, but does describe the history correctly (for the most part).
The speed of light is a different kind of "barrier" altogether; examining nature through observation and experiment indicates that the speed of light in vacuum is a bound of nature. If you have mass, you cannot go from sub- to superluminal or vice versa. This is an observation of how nature works, not a "mere theory" in the creationists' pejorative, popular understanding. Further, we know by Bell's theorem that relativity and quantum theory do not create a paradox (the so-called "EPR paradox). Saying "Scientists sure are stoo-pid" or "Scientists sure are arrogant" is just so much hot air from the relativity deniers who 1) don't understand relativity theory, and 2) think that a naive and/or intuitive understanding of nature must be right, uh, just because!. Humanity has tried intuition for a long time on a lot of things, and with physics, it just didn't pan out.
I find the whole "everything that can be discovered has been discovered" attitude of certain sects of the scientific community equally exhausting and detrimental to scientific progress.
It is presumptuous, naive and cocksure of you to assert that "certain sects" ("cosmology", perhaps??) are wrong, you're right, and above all ignorant to assert that that they (cosmologists, of course) claim already to have discovered everything that can be discovered.
A relativity-denying rant might have been intellectually defensible as late as the 1880s, when people started reallizing the problems in reconciling electromagnetism and the Lorentz transformation with a "luminiferous ether", or even as late as about 1915-1920 (because Even though Einstein had made elegant sense of it, this elegant sense could still have been in conflict with nature itself, and the tests were about to be made). Similarly for quantum mechanics and the standard model.
But that is no longer a reasonable posit