FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[silvia]

[Roger Warin]

Chemistry seems to me to be the best way to understand minerals and even the birth of the first molecules in the cold nebula.
Don't despair of the future...
Mother Nature goes the easy way: species stability.

[silvia]

[Roger Warin]

Jordi,
Excuse my remarks which seem out of forum, but not so much, because I try to rehabilitate the alpha formicaite, misunderstood by the IMA.
It cannot be compared to superficial alteration in a slag heap for example.

Silvia,
We are lucky to live in a young universe. This is when “Nature” finds its imagination to materially create the world we know.
Much later, our universe will disappear (in billions of billions of years), because when you consider the structure of a single atom, it is already a miracle that it exists! There exists in it an www.spam.og vacuum which will be filled when the forces which maintain it as such, will be exhausted.

The dust and gas protoplanetary disk of the star TW Hydrae was observed recently with the Hubble Space Telescope. I think this extrasolar nebula is the youngest known to date, only 5 to 10 million years old.
Water, methanol and ammonia were deposited on dust grains at low temperature (77°K) and under fractional pressure (10E-7 mbar).
Formic acid was discovered there in quantities equivalent to those of methanol.
Formic acid H-COOH is the first of the carboxylic acids, acetic acid being its higher homolog CH3COOH.
In the reference, the nature of the dust is not specified, but I believe that it is various polymorphic varieties of carbon, which pollute space like our chimneys. Indeed, the stars burn during the various nuclear fusions. This beautiful proof of love from the stars provides the materials necessary for the origin of life on Earth, coincidentally, among the most abundant, and especially carbon, a universe all to itself.
The presence of amino acids often cited because too easily revealed by ninhydrin: they already constitute an advanced stage in the synthesis of biotic molecules. These are not the initial bricks as is often said.
On the other hand, in the presence of ammonia NH3, formic acid forms thymine, a monomer of nucleic acids. Thymine is a stable aromatic heterocycle because this compound is said to be aromatic.
In the randomness of space, the probability of formation of this nucleic base (which enters into the constitution of nucleotides) is therefore favoured.
PS: chemists know 4 isomers of calcium formate: α, β, γ and δ.
The γ and δ phases are only stable at high temperatures.
α, β polymorphs are stable at ordinary temperatures.
The polymorph β is Fleischer's "formicaite", painfully formalized by the IMA.

Excuse me, Jordi.

[silvia]

Very nice photo Roger and I did enjoy your discussion.

I think FMF is now mature enough to include more work in the area of Chemistry and Physics – no offense Jordi.

I fully agree with you about the pleasure of living in a young Universe (approximately 13-14 billion years old). My partner claims that in a very distant future, some trillions of trillions of trillions of years hence, the Universe will be devoid of all matter. It will be full of photons at near zero Kelvin temperature. However, scientists have been wrong before, not that it matters as we will obviously not live to see it. I have spoken to many Physicists, Sabine Hossenfelder, for example who are now having second thoughts about the standard model, the existence of dark matter and dark energy and are very critical of the work at CERN. Perhaps the universe will not turn into a sea of Photons – we can only hope!

[James Catmur]

Moved from 'Silvia's Collection', as this is not a discussion about the collection and the photo is of a specimen that is not in Silvia's collection (I have done the same in the past and it got corrected).

[James Catmur]

I guess it all depends on your view on the multiverse. Are the multiverses running in parallel or will they run in series, or is it a monoverse? I like the parallel multiverse view but am not clear we know, or can ever know.