Jones Beene
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:30:07 -0700
--- R C Macaulay wrote: > The CL2 gas released into the treated wastewater is distributed as gas ... and is "assumed" to transition from chlorine to a type of hydrochlorous acid ... Isn't it amazing, Richard, when science can clone a mammal and put a cat on Mars ;-) that some of these very simple transitions of Chlorine are NOT fully understood and precisely quantified yet, even by the experts? Makes you wonder how many huge but basic gaps there are elsewhere in physics today, doesn't it? The ironic thing is this: if Richard or anyone else were to be coming from an industry where the physics *is* more complete and well-known, which is most of them, then they would have a hard time believing that something as simple and important as water treatment has big gaps in understanding. When chlorine is involved, the time frame is often too short for us to "see" very accurately: i.e. our technology to probe these things in great detail has not advanced below the tens of picosecond range, so we are still about 10-100 times too slow for completely understanding chlorine. Plus there is a huge remnant mystery surrounding chlorine-hydrogen photochemistry, which is clouded in one of the few remaining historical black holes from the Manhattan Project. End of part one. Jones