Random Thought of the Day

Quote: rxwine

I thought of that, but would it work in this case?

It depends.

For starters your material needs to be susceptible to magnetic fields. Not everything is. A gas can be ionized rather easily, which gives it an electrical charge. Liquids and solids can't.

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With some powerful computer program you could possibly control a liguid with multiple controlled puffs of air from hundreds (or thousands) of small tubes to suspend it. Sounds extremely difficult, but it would be something today's computers might be up to.

Ah, but a universal solvent would dissolve the air around it :)

Maybe you can keep the bubble in place, more or less, but you'd be losing some of it as it reacts with air.

Quote: Fleastiff

Oh, no... its pure utter bunk. I'd have never thunk it. It seemed so sensible.

Now don't get me wrong, I sure as heck know that there is no fish that leaps out of the water and swims up a cascading plume of urine into a man's urethra, I mean not even if he is standing knee deep in the Amazon would that happen.

Yet, I had been told and believed that there were these tiny fish that followed the smell of urea up into the urethra and made themselves to home there complete with hooks, barbs, etc; the fish being used to enter the gills of other fish following the secent of urine.

Now I find out its all poppycock. Ain't no such fish at all in the Amazon.

Disillusioned I am. I tell you, disillusioned.

Well, take heart buckaroo... there's still Loa Loa the parasitic eye worm you can get from fly bites; and a brain eating amoeba called Naegleria fowleri that swims up your nose when you go swimming in the Colorado River.

Quote: Nareed

If you made a universal solvent, what would you keep it in?

Itself.

Quote: Nareed

It depends.

For starters your material needs to be susceptible to magnetic fields. Not everything is. A gas can be ionized rather easily, which gives it an electrical charge. Liquids and solids can't.



Ah, but a universal solvent would dissolve the air around it :)

Maybe you can keep the bubble in place, more or less, but you'd be losing some of it as it reacts with air.

Can you manufacture it in deep space? Then you just let it float where it will barely interact with anything. Of what use this would be, I don't know. But if there any universal solvents, I imagine they exist in deep space.

Other wise, I keep it in a bottomless pit??

Quote: Face

Itself.

Then it wouldn't be universal, would it? There'd be one thing it cannot dissolve: itself.

This isn't as pedantic as it seems. Nitrogen is so reactive, that absent other elements it reacts with itself. The thing is the N2 molecule is incredibly stable. Monoatomic nitrogen is thus incredibly rare. Oxygen also reacts with itself, but the O2 molecule isn't very stable.

So a universal solvent would not only eagerly react with everything else in existence, but also with itself. If it then produced a stable compound, it would no longer be a solvent. But it might produce something unstable that now can dissolve everything but itself. Only it wouldn't be universal any more.

Still, where would you keep it?

Quote: rxwine

Can you manufacture it in deep space?

Sure, given enough time and funding.

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Then you just let it float where it will barely interact with anything. Of what use this would be, I don't know. But if there any universal solvents, I imagine they exist in deep space.

Acids are stored in glass jars because most acids don't react with glass at all. There's one, though, called hydrofluoric acid, which does dissolve glass. It's sued in glass etching and frosting.

Due to this, many people think it's the closest thing to a universal solvent.

It's not. It does react with metals, for example, but only weakly. If you wanted to dissolve iron, for example, hydrochloric acid would work much better. It doesn't react much with some plastics, either. So it's kept, in solution, in plastic jugs. Only you need to be very careful because plastics are permeable to it. It's very dangerous as it's a potent metabolic poison, and you can be poisoned on contact with it.

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Other wise, I keep it in a bottomless pit??

Then how would you reach it?

Quote: Nareed

Then it wouldn't be universal, would it? There'd be one thing it cannot dissolve: itself.

If it could dissolve itself, wouldn't it be unable to exist?

FWIW, I was thinking of different phases. I naturally thought of liquid when you mentioned solvent, and then thought of freezing it into a container to be filled with itself.

Not one of my better ideas, but then again, I just started thinking =p

Just call the Post Office and tell them you need to send it Priority mail and they will send Face over to collect it.

Quote: Face

If it could dissolve itself, wouldn't it be unable to exist?

Yes, of course. See above what I said about nitrogen.

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FWIW, I was thinking of different phases. I naturally thought of liquid when you mentioned solvent, and then thought of freezing it into a container to be filled with itself.

What would you freeze it in?

I wish I knew where and how the idea of a universal solvent comes from. I vaguely recall a cartoon with one, which dissolved anything it came in contact with rather violently. That in itself is ridiculous. Not all chemical reactions are violent. Have you any idea how many chemical reactions are going on within every cell of your body right now?

A universal solvent that reacted with itself slowly would be stable enough to be useful. If it reacted slowly with other things, it could be kept in containers made of such things for minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months....

Or you could cheat and make it a binary compound, where each part of the solvent is inert. But that's cheating.

It's making me think of the funniest joke in the world.

AS soon as you read it, it kills you from laughing, so no one knows what it is. It started by killing its author.

(I think that was the premise)