to everyone for joining in today on the pre-Christmas webinar. It's a real pleasure for me to introduce Goul Zerze. Goul is a chemical engineer by training. And Goul has been working now. She's a postdoc with Pablo de Benedetti at Princeton. And I'm very jealous of Goul because she has managed to work and have conversations with Frank Stilinger, which is a dream of anyone who's worked in the water community. So I can only dream to be able to do that one day. And so some of you may already know this. Goul has published a very recent interesting paper in science on the second critical point of water. And this is going to be the subject of today's talk. So Goul, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for this kind introduction, Ali. And I have to admit that Frank Stilinger, I mean, he is an amazing guy. Although we don't work on water with him, he has an amazing insight into very random subjects, like very random stuff. But yeah, I'm definitely blessed to get to meet with Frank every single week. Yeah, I'm so happy. I'm so very happy. OK, hello again, everyone. Well, first of all, thanks again, Ali, for this kind invitation to give a virtual talk here. Yeah, I was saying that I probably should also be thankful for the pandemic as it made our lives all the way virtual. I probably wouldn't be able to give this talk otherwise. Anyway, pandemic or not, I'm so glad to be here today. And as Ali introduced, I'm a postdoc at Princeton working with Pablo de Benedetti. For people who may not know, we are a computational group in chemical engineering department. We mostly work in the field of statistical mechanics. And one topic that's been a particular focus in our group is low temperature phase behavior of water. That is something that we do care a lot about for the reasons that I will explain in a minute. But first, I thought most of you guys probably don't actually know me. So I want to take this opportunity to introduce my research a little bit, just to give you some ideas about the other things that I like to do, things other than cold water. So I just squeezed in this one slide. So I am mostly a classical modeling and simulation person, atomistic modeling and simulations of intrinsically disordered proteins, or I'll call them IDPs in short. That was the major topic of my PhD thesis. IDPs are special kinds of proteins. They live on a time scale that is far smaller than the time scale that normally foldable proteins are living. They are very dynamic. They rapidly interconvert. They rapidly reorient. They are like a dream subject for people studying statistical mechanics. And single molecule properties of IDPs is the area that I have contributed the most. I had thermodynamic characterization like free energy landscapes of IDPs. I had structural characterization, like determination of partial structural order in IDPs and their relevance to the diseases. I had kinetic characterization, like determination of time scales of contact formation and its relevance to the partial structural order. And in addition to the single molecule properties, I also have some studies about phase transitions of IDPs where we push the time and length scale limits of atomistic simulations. These are from collaborations with an experimental group, but we had some unique contributions there. For example, elucidation of structural ensembles that will give rise to particular NMR signals as well as determination of molecular and atomistic level interactions that possibly drive the phase separations of IDPs. Interfacial phenomena have also been a particular interest for me related to that I have some important contributions, especially for pinpointing the role of water mediated interactions and direct surface interactions of proteins and nucleic acids on a variety of different types of surfaces ranging from self-assembled monolayers to carbon nanotubes to even lipid bilayers. I guess you start to notice that water has a special place in my research. None of the phenomena that I just talked about would happen in absence of water. And all the modeling involved in my IDP research was about improved protein-water interactions. I have religiously used a model that improves protein-water interactions and that model provides a far more accurate representation of unfolded and disordered proteins. So my special interest in water in the context of biological phenomena is I think what brought Pablo and me together. Since I joined in Pablo's group in late 2017, we obviously did some very fundamental research on pure water, which is the topic that you'll hear today. But in addition to that, we also worked on the curious case of biomolecular homo-chirality. And this is one of the most mysteries and interesting thing that I know about biomolecules. All biomolecules in our bodies are exclusively homo-chiral, but no one really knows where it originated from. Now with this motivation in mind, we took a somewhat twisted approach and asked the question, what would happen if biomolecules were heterochiral? So we have some studies related to chiral perturbations to proteins where we looked at the folding transitions and we found that even the simplest possible chiral perturbation modifies the folding equilibrium substantially, it's even possible to create a library of alternative protein bolts by chiral modifications. Okay, I guess I took enough time to walk you through my past experience. I will be more than happy to talk more about any of these subjects later if anyone is interested in. But for now, let's go back to our actual business, pure water. Like I said, none of the biological phenomena that I found very interesting would happen in the way that we know without water. So there must be something that makes water very special. And I'm pretty sure you already know that there are a lot of things that make water very special. When we look at the physical properties of water, we see that they are fundamentally different from those of most other substances. I guess the most familiar one is the volumetric anomalies of water, by which what I mean is water shows a maximal density at four degrees Celsius. This is obviously at ambient pressure, but it is not just that. Thermodynamic response functions of water such as isothermal compressibility and heat capacity also show abnormal behavior. As opposed to the response functions of a simple liquid which would just decrease as temperature decreases, those of water increase as temperature decreases. So this is very curious and obviously abnormal behavior because each response function is associated with fluctuations in a thermodynamic quantity. And even the common sense tells us that they will just decrease as temperature decreases. And thermodynamic consistency demands that they cannot keep increasing indefinitely together. They either have to pass through a maximum and then decrease or they will diverge. And this divergence argument tells us that there must be a critical point, a point of singularity presumably located at deeply super cool conditions like this. According to the critical point hypothesis, there is a pressure where the response functions diverge as temperature decreases. And this pressure would be the critical pressure and the temperature at which the response functions diverge would be the critical temperature. TC and PC together as a state point, they would be the point of singularity. In other words, the critical point. Now, only little problem is this argument is impossible to justify or falsify to the current experimental technology because ice nucleates too fast before any measurements can be done in the super cool liquid. So this is the reason why, not one of the reasons why molecular simulations are extremely important in this field because simulations don't necessarily suffer from the same problem. I can keep water as a super cool liquid in my simulations for a long enough period of time to make reasonable measurements. Now, before going any further, I wanna talk a little bit about what would be the significance of this critical point if it exists. To understand that, I like to take a look at this phase diagram of water that's for non-crystalline water. It means it excludes the solid states, but it includes meta stable liquid states. Now, critical points mark the termination of phase coexistence lines. This one, for example, this is the well-known first critical point in water that terminates the vapor liquid equilibrium. And this is where the hypothesized second critical point is. Now, according to the computational findings, this critical point terminates the coexistence of a low-nensity liquid and a high-nensity liquid. Now, I'm telling hypothesized critical point and I'm also telling according to the computational findings because there is no rigorous experimental proof that shows the coexistence of these two liquids. Well, I guess I had to say, there wasn't until very recently because this past month, Nielsen and co-workers created another magic and prepared samples of supercooled high-density liquid, high-density liquid water. And they have observed that it discontinuously transitions from high-density liquid to low-density liquid. And this transition happens on a time scale that is orders of magnitude smaller than the time scale of crystallization. Now, I'm not an experimentalist to reveal all the tricks that they have done, but I can imagine that it must be an ultra-fast heating because they obtained the high-density liquid from high-density amorphous ice in a pressurized tiny container. And then as they allow the expansion, isothermal expansion, they have observed a discontinuous shift from high-density liquid to low-density liquid. So this was a major, major breakthrough implying the coexistence of these liquids. And therefore the presence of critical point as well. But it is still not a rigorous proof of criticality. Proving criticality is still very important because it would be the criticality that explains the anomalies of water, like the increase in response functions as temperature decreases. So experimental illustration of coexistence of these two liquids was very recent, but the coexistence of the glassy versions of these liquids have been shown for a while ago. In mid-1980s, before I was born, Mishima and coworkers obtained the amorphous ice by pressurizing the ice crystal. And then they observed a first order like phase transition from low-density amorphous ice to high-density amorphous ice. And in 1992, Gene Stanley and coworkers formulated the second critical point hypothesis based on the series of MD simulations that they have with the ST2 model of water, where they found an evidence of first order like phase transition from low-density liquid to high-density liquid. And in this scenario, the liquid-liquid equilibrium line has been obtained simply by extending the LDA-HDA coexistence line into the lower pressures and higher temperatures, exactly as outlined here. So later on, of course, ST2 became a favorite model to study this interesting phenomenon. Like many people work further on ST2 and eventually unambiguous proofs of metastable criticality have been shown for this water model. This was the only water for which the criticality has been proven, including all other computational waters and real water as well. But there was a fundamental reason why we were not 100% satisfied with these findings to say, yes, this must be the scenario in real water. And the reason lies in the model. This model ST2 is known to over-structure water. What I mean by over-structuring is being overly tetrahedral. And problem with that is that over-structuring, like perfectly tetrahedral particles are already known to have this kind of phase separation. Water, on the other hand, is tetrahedral, but it's much more subtle as opposed to being a three-dimensional tetrad structure like ST2. So once again, we set out the look for an evidence of criticality, now in the most realistic classical models of water, like T4P 2005. And the challenge for these models is that the expected critical point is located at much colder temperatures. So you suffer from a severe slowdown in the kinetics. And the slowdown in the kinetics makes the free energy calculations of a phase separation impossibly challenging for these models, at least for today's computational power. So what we did here instead is we just approached to the critical point from higher temperatures. And for the first time, we unambiguously showed that meta-stable criticality exists not only in the model that artificially favors the phase separation at elevated temperatures, but also for the most realistic classical models of water. We used two very independent techniques to prove our point. In the first one, we simulated the scattering experiments. And in the second one, we used the modern theory of critical phenomena to drive the order parameter that shows the phase symmetry at the critical point. So at this point in my talks, especially when I give a talk in engineering departments, I often briefly lecture the audience about the concept of criticality and more importantly, the universal behavior of criticality. But that would be an insult to do at ICTP. So I'm not gonna do that. I will only note that there's one key assumption that we made in the beginning of this work, which we later validated. And the assumption is that if a second critical point exists in water, it will also belong to the icing universality class. This assumption will come handy in the analysis of my calculations. Okay, this is the first analysis where I mimic the scattering experiments. Here I did simulations at constant volume on the critical isochor. These are pretty large size simulations as they need to accommodate for diverging correlation length. And I calculated the structure factor exactly as in scattering experiments. For people who may not know, structure factor would simply be the Fourier transform of radial distribution function or G of R. And in the reciprocal space or in the K domain, the increased correlations would reflect them as at the low K region, S of K at low K. And that's the reason why I'm zooming in here so that we can clearly see that correlations are growing substantially stronger as temperature decreases. And then I used Ornstein-Zernike formalism, which is a relatively old theory commonly used for this purpose. The purpose is to calculate the correlation length and the limiting value of S or S of zero. Limiting value of S or S of zero is linearly proportional with isothermal compressibility. One of the response functions that would diverge as we approach to the critical point. And correlation length is correlation length. It will of course diverge as we approach to the critical point. And they are supposed to diverge following a power-low relation as a function of reduced temperature. TC here is the temperature of singularity. In other words, that's the critical temperature. And you can see that there is an order of magnitude increase in the isothermal compressibility as a function of reduced temperature. Now, we know that critical behavior is universal and I wanna remind you that we assume that second critical point would also follow icing universality. So based on that, I use the critical exponents expected of icing universality both for the compressibility and the correlation length. And I simultaneously regress them to obtain a TC that would satisfy the exponents expected of icing universality. And you can see that I obtained pretty high quality of the fits. The lines are fits here and symbols are simulation data. And I got a TC of 173.3 Kelvin. Now, what does it mean? The fact that it is a very good fit over an order of magnitude change, it is a very strong support that we are approaching to a critical point. And that critical point belongs to icing universality class. Go, can I ask you a question, Zary? Please. Yeah. So just how does... So was this done before for ST2? Like the same plot? For ST2, yes. And how different is it? Qualitatively, quantitatively. So quantitatively, they use the same exponents. They did it for icing exponents. But it is the temperature, the TC, the value of TC that is shifted for ST2. I think it's around 245. That is the TC. But once you pull out it in reduced temperature, they are the same. Like I haven't overlaid them. I haven't overlaid them. Okay, okay, thanks. Sure. So this was a very convincing and macroscopically related way of studying critical phenomena. But if you are a simulation person, there are other rigorous statistical mechanical techniques that would allow you to use the modern theory of critical phenomena. For example, finite size scaling. So we studied systems by systematically varying the system sizes where all of them are finite. Of course, I don't want you to get me wrong. All atomistic simulations are finite. What I mean by finite here is that the characteristic size of the system is smaller than the characteristic size of the correlation length. And then I initially intended to walk around my critical point. So I picked my state points to do the simulations. These are the blue points accordingly. But I don't precisely know where my critical point is. When we started this work, I didn't even know whether there's a critical point or not. I only have phenomenological guesses where that could be if it exists. So this is a problem because I'm trying to obtain properties of a point that I don't exactly know where that is. So how do I deal with that problem? A rigorous statistical mechanical technique, histogram, reweighting, I will explain the technique a little better in the future slides. But first I wanna show you one of the simulations that I have for the smallest particle size at the coldest temperature, which showed us convincing enough fluctuations between low density and high density. But I want you to note that this is only near the critical point. At the critical point or very, very close to the critical point, these fluctuations will be more perfectly two-state kind. But this information is still useful. The fact that I have simulations at many other state points like this, I will be able to use the histogram reweighting to recover the density of states at other state points nearby, which will include the critical point as well. Now, briefly with the histogram reweighting, I obtained the histograms of my thermodynamic quantities of interests by extrapolating or interpolating. These are, for example, the density histograms, including extrapolations. I have actual data on 179 and 177 Kelvin, but all colder temperatures are actually extrapolations, where only the coldest one is showing a little bit of noise, the black one. So I'm pretty confident with the quality of my data. But what I want you to do is notice the splitting of these two peaks as temperature gets colder. As these peaks between low density and high density as these peaks split deeper and deeper, I'm actually passing through the critical point without showing a singularity because this is the signature of finite size effects. Singularities will be rounded and shifted as you already know, but still the question is, where exactly is my critical point? Now, given that my system's behavior is consistent with icing universality, I can compare my system once again with the perfect icing. For an icing system, there is an expected distribution of the order parameter at the critical point. Here, we are looking for an analogy to the icing system for our liquid system. And what we need to do is compare the spectrum of our density fluctuations with the known asymptotic distribution of the order parameter M for icing. So parameter M for icing is systems magnetization, spin up or down. So in analogy, we thought that our order parameter could be just density, but with a big difference. The two of the states, low density liquid and high density liquid are not symmetric of each other unlike the spin ups and downs in icing, which are perfectly symmetric. And this asymmetry between these two states yields a lopsided distribution of the order parameter. But there's a solution brought into that problem which is field mixing. The rigorously defined mixing of two fields, energy and density in this case, yields an order parameter, which I will also call M. And that is going to be symmetric for the two phases. I used my histogram revading data where I fit the distribution of the order parameter on the expected icing distribution. And this fit will eventually tell me the state point at which the distribution of the order parameter is closest to the icing. And that point I will call the critical point that belongs to icing universality class. So I did the same calculations for a few other system sizes as well, not just for 300 particles. For each size, I got a measure of TC and PC. And then I looked up the scaling of those. I am exemplifying the TC here as a function of system size, but I couldn't find any meaningful system size dependence within my numerical accuracy. I note that this doesn't necessarily mean that there is no size dependence. I would say it is most likely because scaling analysis is a very sensitive analysis and it requires very precise measurements. So with this size of errors, it is impossible to show a conclusive scaling. But at least we have this fit on the icing so we can estimate the TC and PC. So, okay, we are actually very close to the end, but I just wanted to show the computational cost of studying a realistic classical model near its critical point. In total, I think we approximately dedicated five million CPU hours and 0.3 million GPU hours only for this project that's spent within a little longer than a year, but it totally worth it for the results that I obtained. I hope you like them too. But before moving to conclusions, I just wanna show that we repeated all the same calculations for another model, tip 4PIs, first finite size scaling. So we studied bunch of state points again near the hypothesized critical point. So this is the fluctuations in one of them and I want you to notice the fluctuations here. In this case, it's a much better example of two state because this particular state point is much closer to the critical point. And then I fit all of them to the icing model for all the system, all different system sizes. Got an estimate of TC and PC. And you can see that I again, have no clear system size dependence. Then I repeated the structure factor calculations as well for tip 4PIs, the substantial growth in the correlation length as temperature decreases. And I got the correlation length and the compressibility from Orstein-Zernike and I again simultaneously regressed them using the exponents expected of icing. And I got high quality of fits and I got a TC of 188.6 Kelvin. This estimate is not very different than the estimate that I have from finite size systems. So bottom line is we were able to unambiguously show from two very different ways that these two classical models of water have a liquid-liquid critical point that belongs to icing universality class. The significance of this work is in the reliability of these models. With this work, we essentially showed that it is not just ST2 that has a meta stable criticality. Instead, these two classical models of water that are widely regarded as to be among the most realistic ones, they also have a liquid-liquid critical point. Still, this doesn't necessarily conclude about real water, but it definitely brings us one step closer to the real water. This work is published in Science, as Ali said, in the summer. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. I'm blessed to work with this couple of people in this work. Pablo is my postdoc advisor and Francesco Shortino of Sapienza University of Rome, Pablo's long-term collaborator. And I again, thank all of you for paying attention. It was great to connect with ICTP and I will be more than happy to take any questions you might have. Thank you very much, Gold, for that great presentation. I have a virtual clap for you. Okay, so we have lots of time for questions. I have many, but I will wait for the audience to start. So if you have a question, go ahead and unmute yourself and ask away. Yes, I take the opportunity. I have questions related with the densities, profiles that you show. I guess that they are global densities, yes. You are just measuring the density of the box that you are simulating, right? That is correct, yes. Okay, is there any correlation with some kind of microscopic measures of the density, like the five or something like that? That's a good question. Let me stop sharing for a moment and I'll share back in an instant. Let me start sharing again. I am looking for some additional slides that I have because I'm gonna show you something you may have found very interesting. So this is the density, the global density that we are measuring. So what I did is I have extracted the parts that I consider high density and low density. So the pink and red exemplifies high density, green and blue exemplifies low density. And when I measure the G of R and S of K for those sub-ensemble, let me say that way, I can see the structural differences. You see for the low density one, S of K indicates more structured configuration. And from larger simulations, what I have is, this is LSI index colored simulation box and the red one was I think the low density, the blue one was the high density. I see the formation of those large local domains of low density liquid and high density liquid in the case of big box. In case of finite size system, it's a flip. The system, the whole system flips back and forth between low density and high density. But in the case of more realistic system size, what happens is I see the formation of these large local domains of low density liquid and high density liquid. Okay, this is at the critical temperature, right? Not exactly. We are close, but not exactly at critical. It's a little bit about the critical temperature. Just a little bit, like a few Kelvin about the critical temperature. Okay, thank you. Yeah, sure. Can I ask a question? Go ahead, Uriel. Regarding this figure that you have on the screen, so this means that these two faces, they don't like to mix so much. I mean, because they seem to be kind of segregated, one from each other, from one another. You mean this one? No, the previous one. You have two faces, no? Yeah. No, yes, sorry. What happens is, you know, as I approach to the critical point, like, okay, I have another slide, let me see. Oops, sorry. Where was, where was that? Okay, so this is very similar to what happens in ferromagnetic particles, you know, the formation of the large local domains of two different phases. So of course, you know, well, about the critical temperature, they would be very well mixed. But the fact that I am getting close to the critical point, I see the segregation. Well, I'm not sure whether I should say segregation or I should rather say formation of large local domains of, yeah. So I wonder why, like, why is that? I mean, why is not, why it tends to be separated and not mixed, like the interaction between the two types of liquids is somehow special or it has a preferential interaction with particles of the same, in the same, you know, phase. I see, so this is more of a philosophical question, I guess, because this is kind of a well-known behavior, like, as we approach to the critical point. Of course, yeah, of course, well-about to the critical point, they would be very well mixed and it actually is, you know, I don't have LSI colored example here, but they are actually very well mixed if you're well-about the critical temperature. But as we approach to the critical temperature, what happens is the system gets, the correlations get longer and longer length scales, length and time scales. As correlations become stronger, the system gets more and more correlated, that correlation is the reflection of the formation of these large local domains. When you talk about correlation, you're always meaning this geophile, like the Fourier transform of the geophile, right? Yeah, that would reflect itself at the low K. So this is not clear what happens in the low K because this is small box, the small simulations, the finite size ones. So K is not small enough to show the correlations, but in the case, you know, when the K is small enough, actually even this one looks better. If the K is small enough, that means your box is large enough, you can see that correlations at low K, yeah. I see. Okay. Yeah, low K means large R. Yes. Yeah. One more question. Sorry, can I, Ali, or?  One little question. So have you tried to do, these are kind of correlations like structural, know, based on the G of R. Yes. Have you tried to do a dynamical correlation, like time correlation functions to see, like, what? Yeah, good question. Yes, I did. Let me see whether I copied, pasted. Okay, I guess no. Okay, I haven't copied them here. But yes, I did intermediate scattering function, which is SKT. It's not just S of K, but it's SKT as a function of T as well. And the growth in time scale correlations is pretty much the same as in length scale correlations. So they become substantially slower as you, so there is a real critical slowdown that happens here. I see, I see, I see. Very nice, thank you. Sure. Okay, maybe I can, is someone wants to? Yes, hi. Yeah, go ahead, I do. Yeah, so I'm a bit curious about this histogram reweighting technique. How does the error propagate when you try to infer the histogram of the lower temperatures from that of the higher temperatures? Yeah, I think this is a great question. So the way that I checked the errors, the quality of my histogram reweighting data, I looked mostly up, I looked up the noise because as you extrapolate further and further, of course you cannot cover the whole, the entire range, the every single temperature, the every single pressure you cannot cover, there's a limit. And that limit I thought is, you're gonna understand that you approach that, you're getting to that limit as you start seeing the noise in your extrapolations. Data starts to be very noisy. So this was my sense of the error. Otherwise, the other way that I have estimated the error is I split it, my whole histogram data into two equal non-overlapping parts. And I looked up the difference between the histograms that I obtained from two independent samples and the difference between them are not very large. I don't have the data posted here, but that was one way that I have checked the statistical errors in my data. Thanks. Sure. Okay, Gull, I had a couple of questions for you. So the first one is related to the question that Alex asked, which is about local descriptors of what is going on. And it's related also to the point that, so ST2, which is an overstructured liquid, also predicts, let's say the right physics of, well, supposedly the right physics of the second critical point. Okay, it's a model that misses a lot of the molecular interactions, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, would you say that it's right for the wrong reasons and if it is, what else is going on in the more realistic models that's causing the shift in the temperatures and, yeah. It's actually not right for the wrong reasons. It's actually right for exactly the right reasons because the problem is that, the problem with ST2 is that it is way too tetrahedral. So perfect tetrahedral particles, they actually do have this kind of phase separation. They do split into two. They do have high-density versions and low-density versions. Problem with water is that it's not that tetrahedral. So that was, I think, the whole reason why people keep arguing about whether critical point is real or not, because the counter argument is that, if there's no critical point, the counter argument is that you are crossing through a spinodal, which essentially means that you cannot keep water in its metastable form anymore. And this is because of the subtlety in the tetrahedrality. It's so subtle, the real water is so subtle, whether you have that much of a tetrahedrality or not. But the thing is, these models, let me see whether I have a picture of it. I think I do. These models, they are not tetrad structures. They are not defined in three dimensions. This is only defined in two dimensions. It's on a plane, like the liquid water. So it's described on a plane. They just have one additional interaction site. So they are four sites because of that reason. So the problem in ST2 is it's too perfectly tetrahedral. So it gives correct answers for exactly correct reasons. Okay, okay, okay, okay, I see. But I mean, I guess related to that is, you mentioned this in your abstract, where you didn't say anything about it, which is, I know there is, I guess some recent work by Roberto Carr. Yes. On, let's say, ab initio neural network stuff. That's good.  I mean, it seems like the classical model gets it right. So what else do you gain from the ab initio? The first time I presented my stuff to Frank Stalinger, this water stuff to Frank Stalinger, the first question he asked was, how do you think the nuclear quantum effects will impact your findings? So I think those are kind of the stuff, important information that you would probably get from those kinds of models. Well, the thing is, well, Francesco Shortino has a work on how bond flexibility, bond GDT in S2 impacts the liquid-liquid-face separation, which is somewhat related to the nuclear economy, somewhat, not exactly, but on the same page. And what he found is the presence of such effects and bond flexibility and stuff, they favor the liquid-liquid-face separation over ice crystallization. But I guess, bottom line answer to your question is, more insights that you can obtain from things like nuclear quantum effects and things like that. Okay, I see, okay, thanks. Yeah, sure. More questions before I ask my next one. I have a question. I think, wait, hold on, Victor, sorry. I think Mehdi had a question and I stopped. Hello to everybody. Thank you for presentation. Is there any advantage for having larger system size for simulation? I mean, when you go to ice phase, there might be several polycrystallized structure in the system and it might be needed to have larger system size rather than the system size you have. Do you have any comments? I think, yes, you're absolutely right in that, but thank God I don't work on ice crystallization and it would be a much bigger of a trouble to try to nucleate the ice in a bigger system size. So in my case, the liquid system, the benefit of having more realistic, you know, when I say more realistic, a little more away from the finite size is that you can actually show the growth in the correlation length. So to get something like this, you need to have a large, very large system size because in the finite size systems, exactly as I showed here, what happens is the correlations are cut here. So you cannot get any useful information about the correlations in your system. And also as a result of the finite size effects, what happens is your system flips back and forth between the high density and low density.  What happens is there would be a formation of an interface and the box will split into high density liquid and the low density liquid, which I didn't observe because I didn't do simulations beyond the critical point. Well, I can't, it's just so slow. I can't do that. But I hope this kind of answers your question why, you know, what would be the benefits of having a larger simulation box? Okay, thank you very much for your answer. But when we are talking about interface, it might be a closed shape for a given interface and it might be needed to consider kind of a large system. So it might be, I don't know. No, we have to. We actually have to. Like I said, in a finite size system where the size of the system is smaller than the size of the correlation line, what happens is system flips back and forth. There's no interface formation. For interface formation, we absolutely need a much bigger simulation box. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much. Sure. Victor. Victor. Hi, so I have a question. You keep talking about high density and low density liquids, but you have actually seen ice formation.  Yes. Let me see whether I have those here. Man, I have all of them here somewhere. Let me find it. Okay. I have to pull it up from. I didn't want to do this, but okay. I guess we have to. Let me see the supporting information. I looked up some properties. There's the supplementary. Let me click on PDF. Because in the supplementary, I have measured some quantities, supplementary materials. There you go. I measured some quantities that are related to ice formation. There you go. So we checked for cubic ice, hexagonal ice, collaterate interfacial ice. And we found very small fraction of molecules that forms ice in my box. And this is kind of good news for me because if it forms once, you cannot stop ice growing. So I'm glad that they didn't nucleate any ice during the time that I performed the simulations. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Sure. More questions from the audience. We've had quite a few already. Go, there's been all this discussion, of course, on the dynamical anomalies, breakdown of Stokes-Einstein. And its interpretation in terms of the LDHD business. I guess, now you have the trajectories. Is this something that you guys are thinking about, or are you able to go in, for example, and like for example, when you have these extended connected regions of low density and high density, would you be able to see my computing some dynamical quantities, like rotational diffusion, that that is reflected there as well? Yeah, that would be actually interesting. And I think it would be reflected, but there's not something actually I did calculate. I probably should have done that. But yeah, you're right that it would be reflected. It's just, I didn't... Yeah, no, no, it's really a monster of a project anyway. But so I guess, yeah, the challenge is that, yeah, I guess converging dynamical quantities would be even harder. Yeah, actually, so those, speaking of those dynamical stuff, now that I've pulled up the supporting information already, I can show that the SKT stuff, and you can see the time scale of relaxation. So this one, the smallest, well, smallest K vector, of course, is the slowest one because that's the largest, longest length scale correlation. And it takes, it's the slowest one. Let me see which temperature was this. So this was at 183, which is fairly above the critical point I need to say, because critical point is 173 Kelvin. So this is 10 Kelvin about the critical point. And even at the 10 Kelvin about, you see that the time scale of relaxation is on the order of microseconds or tens of micro, between microseconds or half microseconds. Very good. Okay. Yeah, so can you go back to the slide where you show the structure factor in GOVR? GOVR of the small systems or the, first let me find this one. Yes. And do you have an idea of qualitatively, like when you visualize the, I mean the structures in the high density or the low density, do you have an inkling about what is different between the two? Yeah, so these are actually the snapshots that I pulled up from my simulation boxes. So the low density one is the one that is beautifully coordinated, tetrahedrally coordinated one. The high density one is four molecules in the first solvation shell, four molecules plus one more squeezed itself in, breaking the hydrogen bonding network. So, you know, it overcrowded here, but so that's the reason why this is called entropically stable, this is entropically stable. This is more, yeah. So this is, so it's defective, like there's a lack of a hydrogen bond. There's a lack of a hydrogen bond, but at the cost of introducing one more molecule to the first solvation shell, a first neighboring shell, whichever solvation shell is not a correct, solvation of water is not very good term probably, but first neighbor shell, the first neighbor, yeah. But in terms of the geometric definition, you would still find, would you find that it's over coordinated or would you, or that it's under coordinated here? Well, this is what happens. Well, I wouldn't say over coordinated because this is, so this is actually what I mean when I said it's subtle. It is coordinated, but it is in terms of individual molecules, it is described by a single plane, not three-dimensional, you know, the individual molecule itself is not three-dimensional tetrad. Individual molecule is a planar molecule, it's a flat molecule, but it still forms these coordinated structures. So I wouldn't say it is over-coordination. Okay, thanks. Sure. Did you look at the lifetime of these hydrogen bonds? There will be actually quite interesting to do lifetime of the hydrogen bonds, but I didn't, but it would be quite interesting to do. And actually there are some folks in the lab right now who are doing it for other purposes, not for proving the criticality, but for other purposes, they are looking at the lifetime of hydrogen bonds. Do you have the diffusion constant between the high-density and low-density liquids? I don't have this either, but let me think. I did calculate the diffusion constant at some point, and I have seen that beautiful ballistic part, the diffusive part, but I didn't have any rigorous analysis of diffusion between high-density to low-density, but I'm not sure whether it relates to the criticality, though. But yeah, I don't have it. Okay. More questions? If there are no more questions, join me in thanking Gull again for a wonderful talk and for keeping a lot of time for discussion. I think this is very good for virtual talks. Actually, very short, but more time for discussion. Yeah, I'm so very happy to receive a lot of questions from you guys. I guess this is the first time that I'm receiving that many questions, and I'm very happy with that. I think it stirs a lot of beautiful discussions and further thought about the time. I actually have something else came to mind. So going back to the beginning of your presentation about your other problems that you've been interested in, water interfaces, proteins. What are the implications of, let's say these findings on water? I know it has implications, for example, water under confinement, right? Yeah, yeah. But can you say something about that? So the thing that we broadly call hydrophobic effect is technically arising from this. I mean, arising from the same reasons. The reason is water being tetrahedral. So I think this is the most important implication that I can immediately think of. The thing that's been broadly described as hydrophobic effect. It's very similar to what you said about confinement and evaporation of water between the plates. So, yeah, those arise for the same reasons. For the reasons that water is tetrahedral. And the argument about the critical point, whether it exists or not, like I said, the counter argument is spinodal. You're crossing through a spinodal. But the thing is, we wouldn't see, well, in the case of, but okay. If you're approaching the spinodal, you would also see those increase in the response functions as temperature decreases. You would see more or less the same thing. But what you wouldn't see is an icing like scaling. Icing like scaling only happens if you are approaching to a true critical point. And you need to get close enough to the critical point to be able to see an icing like scaling unless you are very, very close to the critical point, you would see more like a mean field scaling instead of an icing one. So, yeah, I think this was, this was, I think, very helpful for me in general. Phase transitions, I'm so happy to be able to develop analysis techniques for phase transitions because they happen pretty often in biological systems too. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. I know, very nice, very cool. Okay, very good. Well, thank you very much, Gull. Thank you all for joining in today. And I guess it's happy holidays to everyone. It was my pleasure to be here and happy holidays, everyone. I thank all of you for your attention and for the beautiful questions that you have asked. Thank you for joining us, Gull. Thank you for closing the tough year. Bye. All right, take care, guys. Thanks, happy holidays. Happy holidays. Bye, thanks a lot.


The Substance Abuse Advisory Council Secretariat is thankful for the donation of the nicotine replacement therapy, or NRT, by the Pan-American Health Organization, PAHO. NRT deals specifically with the physical-dependent aspect of habitual tobacco use, and provides an individual who is quitting the use of tobacco products with a step-down approach for adjusting to with the drill from nicotine. This is done by providing reduced and controlled dosages of nicotine through a therapeutic method, usually in the form of gum, patches, sprays, inhalers, or lodgenges. It may seem to some that nothing is happening and things aren't moving, but the needle has been moved gradually over time. We have known that in 2017 we had the placement of the alerts on our cigarette packages, which is one of the compliance requirements for the FCTC, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. We have also had the introduction of a cohort of persons trained to provide guidance and support to individuals who would like to transition from dependence on tobacco use. In 2021, we had WHO recognizing St. Lucia for our gains with Tobacco Control. As in 2020, we passed our policy and legislative framework for the prevention of smoking in public spaces, which was regarded as very progressive for the Caribbean for a developing state and something that we need to applaud. A 2019 step survey undertaken in St. Lucia indicated that the age group with the highest prevalence of tobacco use was between 18 and 44 years. The data also noted an increasing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, especially in young males who have become oxygen dependent. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sharon Belmar George said the impact of tobacco use is noted on many levels, with health being one of them, both personal and in general. Many users are not able to work, reduce productivity due to their reduced lung function and oxygen dependence, reduce quality of life as well. We look at the cost of the health system for the oxygen concentrators, which we had to actually develop a program to reduce the number of admissions at the hospital where we make the oxygen concentrators available to patients for use at home. Pao's country program specialist, Mr. Ronald Ewitt, said Pao was pleased to donate the NRT to the government and people of St. Lucia. Today, this donation was made possible through Ms. Henry, as was said earlier, and Dr. Amalia Del Rego is pleased to be part of this initiative. And as we hand over these NRTs, it is just a part of the measures that we consider important to win pieces or to help them to relay themselves of this dependence on nicotine. Pomenin Secretary and the Ministry of Health, Ms. Jenny Daniel-Searcher, welcomes the collaborative support to St. Lucia in its commitment to strengthening the health system and the national health profile. We are looking forward to the impact of the nicotine replacement therapy in helping us in our battle to do so. In recent years, through the leadership and program implementation of the Ministry of Health and our other ally agencies, St. Lucia has demonstrated its commitment to achieving the objectives of the FCTC, with significant milestones being achieved in recent years. Chairperson of the Tobacco Sensation Committee, Dr. Del Vida-Vena, said St. Lucia has been making targeted efforts to reduce the prevalence of non-communicable diseases, which in recent years has been the major cause of death. Smoking has long been established as a major risk factor for the development of almost all chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and others. It significantly decreases life expectancy and is complicit in six of the eight living causes of death worldwide. Currently, SACS runs a number of educational and sensitization initiatives such as the Tobacco Sensation Program and the Building Resilience for Drug Prevention Program, which form part of a wider, non-communicable disease program. From the Communication Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness, and Elderly Affairs, Julita Peter reporting.


I'm going to have to stop. Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour and W ozio radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, December 4 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes or a doubter five. And as usual, we have our co host one better line with us. Hello, I'm back. Hey, I'm the one back. Our guests today are Swedish Steve all the way from Sweden. Welcome, Steve. Well, thank you. Digital free thought radio hour is a talk radio show about atheism free thought rational thought humanism and the sciences. Firstly, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling you're the only non believer in your town, well, you're just not here in the middle of the Bible belt, we have a group of over 1000 of us. The atheist society or Knoxville or ASK, but we'll tell you more about that after the mid show break. So be sure to stick around. What's our topic today? It's a mail back episode. We'll be talking about belief psychosis and all listener feedback since, you know, our last couple of episodes. Well, we'll certainly address it. Nice. So normally at this point we would either do an invocation, or we start talking about John Richards quest for chaos as the leader of all atheists in the UK. You know, I, I it's really get an opportunity to just check in with everybody see how they've been. Sweetest evil welcome with you. You've got a new kid. You're living up there where it's still probably covered in 10 feet of snow. What's going on with you. How you been. Well, it's okay it's starting to get Christmas and people are like, we should go back to the old ways of the North. I love it. Yeah, it's it's fun for me. And we don't cut that much snow outside but it's darkest. Yeah, yeah, our are so you probably do time zone changes do you do like a daylight savings time thing where you are. Well, but Tennessee we live in a state that's very, very long so it stretches multiple time zones. And so one side always gets unfortunately the the short end of the stick and it's our side that does. I don't know Larry if you're on our side if you're more median but it's really we're in the Easter time zone so okay. We're central and it's dark when we wake up and it's dark when we go back to work or come back home from work it's terrible it's really bad waiting for it to be nice. Larry, how you been what's going with you. Oh, not a lot just working and playing computer games about it. Yeah, the one thing I hate about winter is not the cold it's the dark.  Nothing that I'm doing fine. You know it's not the cold and it's not the dark it's the hope that's the hope that I find really annoying, because every year, there's people being like well it's the last time we'll ever do daylight savings time. Oh, it's going to be the last one guys, it's going to be the last one getting pushed through it's the last one maybe next year we won't have it I'm just like you say that every year. Don't you realize we're in a spiraling pit of despair. No one's going to change for this we're going to live with this this thing that no one wants. Yeah, seems that way. Yeah this radically popular thing that everyone wants to get rid of, like every single so we have a we in the US we have a Senate and we have a house, the Senate hate each other.  And these are the people who all uniformly agree unanimously agreed let's get rid of the daylight savings time they did in a day they're like, we hate this get rid of it. We thought, oh man the Senate passing I guess the house has to as well. House is like now we don't want to deal with it right now I'm just like why not we all, all of America, even the Senate agrees that this is a crazy thing. All right, that's my day I apologize might be more to come there might be more to come but yeah, I've heard, I've heard a really great quote before we get into the topic of show that hope may not lead anywhere, but it creates when people follow it it creates a path. A path. Yeah, and that sounds nice but I just hope it's not a path to nowhere so let's try to make that into productive path. It's a circular path. Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to talk about some of the comments that we got over the last couple of episodes. We're sitting on, you know, about 17 over the last three episodes that we've done. I really appreciate all the feedback, not to mention, just like you guys willing to speak up and give us some really nice, not necessarily critical but really supportive words to mention and good questions go over. I want to talk about one of the questions that we got today. This is off of the topic. Can you choose your beliefs, where we were talking about people being able to choose their beliefs and is that potentially considered like potential mental illness if you can self delude yourself. And how would you address that what's the way we know what's the most beyond politically correct what's the most apparent way to describe something like that. And so, I'm just there, left us comment and asked, Why isn't believing that God is talking to you, not considered a form of psychosis. They also have an extra sentence here. How is believing that some invisible thing is talking to you not considered a form of psychosis. So, if you consider anything else like, if you believe that leprechauns were talking to your fairies or the Easter Bunny, that would be considered a psychosis, but it's a societal norm that steps in, and thinks, you know, maybe he is maybe God is talking to you, because we all know God is real. And he talked to people. So so in the Bible. This discussion with my, my Bible group. Yeah, I'm in the Bible group. And they start talking about how they met God and what he had said to him and Jesus and all that. He asked me, How do you feel when, when we tell you about these things.  Yeah. Okay. Well, you can, you can have a range of replies to that. The most blunt would be, you know, you're lying. You can also be very kind and say, you interpret what you feel as something that is coming from a supernatural source. You know, because of the way that you were raised the input that you got, you know, growing up from the people you trust most. You know, it could be anywhere in between. My question is, in the Bible, there are lots of supernatural beings, including Satan. When you hear a voice telling you to do something, how do you automatically jump to the fact that it's a God or your God, or not an angel, not Satan, not a demon. You know, it's just God, it could be any of those, according to the scriptures. Yeah.  Yeah, that's pretty bad. So I have a bit more of a nuanced take on this, because obviously if you, if you lost, if you believe in something so, if you believe in something that's, you know, clearly not demonstrable to the point where it's making you lose contact with external reality. That's a psychosis, right? But there's a lot of different reasons why people believe I'm only saying this because I used to be a believer. And I ran into a situation where I knew it wasn't real, but I chose to believe anyway, because that was, one, what I was told, two, would make my life easier. Three, I was trying to believe in it because I wanted to be a better Christian. I wanted to have that relationship with God. Like, and this wasn't always the case. When I was a kid, I believed anything, right? But like it was when I was beginning to lose my faith and I wanted like hard curve back. I'm like, I know you can't just touch water and have wine come out of it. Like wine has completely different molecular structure than water. There's additional atoms there that you're adding in. That's not just a standard transition you can do at room temperature. Like if you just, it's not Kool-Aid for crying out loud. There's a lot more to it. I know you can't walk on water. I would never try walking on water. I've never seen anybody do it. I'm like, I know what ice is, and I know surf to tension. Like that's not going to work. I know it didn't happen. But maybe that I don't have to believe in those crazy little stories to believe in the big picture. Like I'm constantly hedging my, my belief towards the big picture, which is a God does exist. Maybe a lot of the stuff in the Bible is in true talking snakes, all this other stuff. I know that's not real, but I will still choose to believe in that God. Is that, is that wishy-washy-ness of a Christian where I'm like just trying to find the most objective path to that God? Is that a form of psychosis? Or am I lying to myself? Like what would you guys call that? I'd be interested. Larry, I'll start with you. What do you think about that? I know it's not true. I think a large portion of wanting to believe is wishful thinking. You feel that the problem was with you, not with the belief itself. It was what I thought of when I was in college, I mean, in high school growing up. My mother was a very religious woman and she always told me, you know, that what's in the Bible is true. You know, what I needed to believe in to make sure that I always believe that. Because as soon as I don't believe it, the devil will get me the type of thing out. But, you know, I internalized it in that I was thinking that my doubts are my own. It's the devil testing me. And I'm sure there are a lot of Christians out there right now that think that. I mean, that's just part of it. It's just part of the world view of the religious person. That's a really good point. You feel like the problem is with you. You internalize it, right? The pastors tend to reinforce that as well. Very true.  So it's like, hey, this really great thing happened to me. Thank God. This really terrible thing happened to me. I need to ask for forgiveness. That's on me. That's why it's never God's fault when you fumble the ball. But when you make that touchdown, right, right, right. Sweetest Steve, what do you think if I know something is not true, but I choose to believe it anyway, is that a psychosis as well? No, I mean, there's a lot of things where we choose to believe in non Christian religious ways. Just Marga, for example, that's the big lie. Sure. And we have lots of that kind of things. So I wouldn't say it's a psychosis, but I wouldn't say, I would more say like Larry said, you allow yourself to lie. Ah, that is trading room says in the chat. I know that Santa Claus doesn't exist, but I choose to believe in him anyways is in fact a totally illogical and nonsensical statement, but most people don't realize this fact. They simply have never really thought deeply about what it means to believe.  You know, they have a they have, they seem to have a problem with that. And here's here's my here's my other take, you know, the whole nature of faith, right, is explicitly believing things without critical thinking application applied, right. The actual definition is what is it. There's two of them in the Bible. One is the substance of things hope for an unseen belief or conviction without actually, you know, having any evidence and I'm just like that's a terrible explanation of what that could be. The Christians who are watching this show are like, that's a terrible definition. Ha ha. Let me show them with the fact and if you read it from the definition is the actual Bible is even worse than my summary. But the main thing is, don't use critical thinking, don't think too hard, be like a sheep, blessed are those who don't ask questions, right, blessed are those without any kind of testing. Like, that is such a terrible foundation to put such a such an important claim, or such a statement of the thing that's most important to you. Like, you shouldn't even test it, but it's it's endemic of don't critically think. And so if someone says you need to believe in God, and they're also telling you don't think critically about it.  I'm selling you a lie that I believe, just believe in it too so that we can profit off of it, you know, we'll get the good stuff. But the more you think about it, the more it falls apart. And the only thing that that happens to is lies, because the truth wants you to keep thinking about it will truth wants you to keep poking around at it. So I'm really unfortunate. I think it's a really unfortunate thing that we just have, you know, a lot of people will wishful thinking to the point where it actually is affecting not just external reality but my reality as well. Oh, we'll do another comment. Pom the needle driver says when you gather enough followers instead of being considered psychotic you're just a prophet.  That could be really dangerous right. There's a, there's consequences with changing the way how people believe. And what about it as a mental illness Swedish Steve would you consider them, you know, people who are ardent in their faith is that a former real mental illness. No, I would say the mental weakness but I wouldn't say illness. Like, for a person like me, I have bipolar disorder with schizoaffective problems. I've had psychosis. And what I feel afterwards is not like it was real. No, critical thinking. Now, the Chinese ain't spying on me. They're there ain't people moving around talking to me via telekinesis and stuff. Yeah, so a weakness but not an illness. I love the way you said that I'm going to keep that in mind. It's not a work mental illness is a mental weakness because it's something that could be overcome with some practice and training. Yeah, I remember that phrase. That's a good one. Yeah.  And it was molded into the way how society wanted, and it took my effort and willingness to hold myself to a higher standard I had to work out my brain, you know, and and I got better as a result. And now that I'm at the position where I'm at, it's not like I'm saying, listen, I'm never going to change my mind again. You guys are all wrong. It's just the standard of what you're using to the standard you're using to believe this incredible thing is so low that I can't possibly lower my standard down to meet that. But if your God exists, ask him to meet my standard. I'm one human being just have him meet my standard and I'll believe whatever he wants to to it's not up for me to figure that out. It's up for your powerful God. That is if he wants you to believe. If he wants me to believe it's not my problem. Like all the preachers say, you want you to believe well he's got the capacity to show me the evidence to make me believe. Yes, he also knows what that evidence is. Yeah, he knows everything. Right, but there's he hasn't shown me. So sweet Steve you'll love this there's a show in America called baggage baggage is a great show. It's hosted by Jerry Springer. It's a dating show. It's one I and three girls or one girl and three guys, and they each have three cases of luggage right. And they'll come out at the beginning of the show and the girl has to choose which of the three men she'll go out on a date with but they open up their small little suitcase of baggage first and the first one's like I eat my toenails. I have 40 cats. The other ones like I never brush my teeth and it's just like, why are these the guys like you got to know the baggage first, we're getting it out of the way so you don't end up marrying them and realize they like to bubblegum with every weird part of their body or stuff like that. It's just like, let's get all the baggage out of the way ahead of time. One of the guys, their baggage was, I'm an atheist, and on my head I'm like that's not that would be baggage to me baggage. Some people it would. Yeah, some people it would be and the lady was like well I'm very very spiritual is that a problem for you and it's like no it's not a problem for me if you're spiritual. And he's just like well why don't you believe in a guy's like maybe you should ask your God that. Does he talk to you. There will be more baggage. Exactly it's like, I shouldn't have to answer that like if you have a God that you believe in that's all powerful. Why don't, why don't you ask your God why I don't believe in him and he'll he'll happily tell you, or he'll be like I'm gonna turn on Jerry's believe there you go. Great. Yeah, I love the way how he handled it he didn't win. And I don't think it would have been a good match anyway but I'm remembering that comment as far as like good comments for a thesis like don't ask me why I don't believe ask your God why I don't believe and see if that's a good answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, love that little. So I'm going to throw out a couple more comments. What do you guys think about. All right, so it is decomposer who also posted on the comment of why isn't religious belief considered a psychosis says it is, but only by us atheists, and it's maddening our politicians brag about having the psychosis, and they control our lives. And that's why we all need to meet here and console each other on the internet beats other less healthy coping mechanisms. And he lists some things like drugs and stuff like that. So it's like yeah. I have made the point that it does feel like when you're an atheist and you're out, it does feel like living in the Twilight Zone sometimes where your politicians your your parents, a lot of authority figures. Like God or our cross cross your chest and just like dang it for me. I'll put something out before around table but like when I see like the struggle of black people in America, we put ourselves we've been in chains for a long time, and both like physically and mentally and then like we we've been freed right. And then I still see guys with like these giant chains around their neck with the cross on it I'm just like that's another chain, because it's controlling how you're thinking it's controlling how you treat women and see other people. You bifurcated society as a mess of them like you could break that chain do this like I'm not in chains like you literally got one around your neck. That's just me and his mind. But it's not just why people it's just anyone, I just feel like, why yourself. Yeah, Steve is a Christian iconography when you see that is it so bizarre to you that you're like I need to talk to this person, or, or like, yeah. It's so alien for me. Sweden was a great place for me to come out as an atheist because like nobody cared. They're just like, yeah, and tomorrow is going to be Tuesday like why. Great. Yeah, it's frightening because I came from Georgia at that time, the South and so like there was a lot of societal pressure. And then when I got to live over there for a while, it was just like, no one cares. I was just like, I'm an atheist, no one cares. I don't believe in God, no one cares. It's like, Oh, this is amazing. This is so great. And then I came back and it was just like, Oh, this is rough. I'm going to need like 40 different friends.  It was great. Larry, when you see people with Christian iconography, do you think that's a person suffering from mental illness, maybe someone trying to show to their peers that they're in the fold, but maybe they're not a genuine believe. Yeah, I mean, one of the major memes going around the internet right now is how can you tell someone's an atheist. The answer is they'll tell you. And it's like, we're always out. We're always in your face. We're always telling you that we're atheists, whether you want to know or not. They don't realize that the Christians are doing that all the time. They have crosses, you know, that they wear all the time. They put Jesus fish on the back of the car. You know, they, what's worse for me is when I go into a doctor's office or receptionist or something, and they have this Christian stuff all over the place. And I'm wondering, you know, how much of this medical recovery. Are they going to just hand over to God and not take responsibility for it themselves. But it makes me just concerned a little bit about how they view the patient client. I mean, relationship. Okay. Okay. Good points.  You know, I didn't tell her, you know, that she should have a secular day. And it's like they're always pointing at us for things that they do. We got, we got one last comment before we go to the show break. I'd love to actually hear Swedish Steve respond to this. This is to you, Swedish. It says, Hello there, Swedish. I'm a 24 year old boy from Greece that three years ago suffered from psychosis as well. It was really strange experience. I went from agnostic to believing that there was Jesus Christ or the Antichrist psychosis made me religious. I thought that I met God through depersonalization. I thought that I had lost my soul for three days. And the third day I was resurrected again. And for a really long time, I thought that God was sending me signs. Like when I go to do something that I disagree with, I would hear a horn honk and think that was God who ordered me not to do it. I wanted to get baptized and I also wanted to become a monk. It seems so funny to me that after three antipsychotics and one antidepressant that, but then it's after I take my medicine, it just seems so real after I take the medicine didn't seem real. I thought I also made a sin to never follow any faith and that God has punished me for that. Right now, I try to avoid believing in any deity. Getting religious is like a sickness for me. So I avoid anything associated with God. Even if I have a religious delusion, I can say, but I'm an atheist. The belief in the Antichrist is Christian and I disagree with it. And the delusion just goes away. Yeah. Guy just affirming his life story. Yeah. I'm happy you do that. I'm happy you now have a mantra that can at least help you get away from your psychosis. That's really good. Yeah, really good. I can't but also going from I feel like I'm susceptible to psychosis and having all these religious stories and religious pressure versus I need to get rid of this and taking the secular route and taking actual medication and like getting like actual tested lab tested fixes to real world problems and dressing them in a more objective way. It's a benefit for him compared to just reinforcing those beliefs with more superstition. My heart really goes out to people are in that same situation. If you do suffer from that. What would you recommend sweetest if if you are suffering psychosis. Get help. As soon as possible. Good points and modern medicine has a pretty good understanding of the treatments now. So the help is available. Often the best help is just get get into a hospital and get sleep and they will have the medication to get you to sleep because often it's it's the lack of sleep that that that makes your head spin. Yeah, so I'm not even create the situation so you don't get sleep for a long time. We need to take a break. Any thoughts before we do. No more comments after the break. Let's do it. Okay, stay tuned for the second half of the digital free thought radio hour here on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after the short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm daughter five and we're on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. John Richards from England has joined us welcome. Hello. Let's talk about the atheist society of Knoxville for just a moment. ASK was founded in 2002, we're in our 20th year and have over 1000 members here in Knoxville. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening at Knoxville's old city at Barley's tap room in pizzeria right after working lesson till about eight. Look for us inside at the high top tables, or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. We also have a Tuesday evening zoom mask meetup. If you'd like to join us email us for details that ask an atheist at Knoxville atheists.org, or email to let's chat I see at gmail.com. You can find us online at Facebook meetup.com or go to the website at Knoxville atheists.org. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one star. That's right. Where you want to pick up. Hey, I want to talk about the nature of belief and who better to handle it than our own John Richards master of chaos over in the UK.  We'll do this. And I love to get your thoughts on the comments, not a direct question, but it is a affirmative statement of the idea that you can choose your beliefs. So come as you are says over the last episode which was can you choose your beliefs. Yes, you can choose your beliefs within the constraints of the program what do I mean by that. Well, it's like an open world game where you can go anywhere you want, but only within certain constraints, those being physical thought processes and the environment and how you perceive reality. Or have you been told that, etc.  Beyond that, you can choose them. What do you think about that John Richards. Well, as I said before, I don't think we can choose our first belief, because that's thrust upon us when we're learning what it is to be a human you know we're right right right. We're born without any beliefs is my view, because beliefs is something that have to be conveyed by language, and we're born without language. So in the same way that you're never born Democrat or Republican you are also never born Muslim or Christian or whatever. Once you've been through the family induction and whatever, whatever belief your whatever faith system your local society your community and imposes upon you, then you're in a hole, you've got to dig your way out. Right. Of course, some people never do. Right, a lot of famous people have succeeded in doing that and I could name Cassius clay or Muhammad Ali as a as a prime example of someone who changed his belief later in life. Sure. My opinion went from one hole to another hole, right. Well agreed, but at least you can do it. He demonstrated choice. I would be the first to say though that he probably was a Christian before he switched his matrix of belief in a God in other words he had belief in a God as an adult, and then he switched to Islam. Apparently because he liked the teachings of this on better. But if you if you study Christianity and Islam is the same God. You know, so did he really change his, his, did he choose to change his belief in a God or just the matrix supports it.  Right. And so what Cassius Clay may have done was like, man, white Jesus is really annoying. Anything. What about the the brown prophet. The same God that might be more on part with what I'm talking about because I think why Jesus is evil which he is. And like, he's got some probably good points and that's what fills his new God hole a better shaped. I don't I don't know how brown the brown prophet is because of course there's a lot of Arabs in it and they're not very brown. They're pretty brown. I'm just saying they're browner than white Jesus all I'm saying have you seen that chest you open it up he's like a newborn baby just like no UV protection in the Mediterranean. Sorry guys for that. Sweetest Steve, I love to get your idea on whether or not you can choose your beliefs. What do you think about that. Yeah, I was talking about Cassius Clay and all that I was thinking around use of Islam cat Stevens. He went from 80s to Islam. Cassius Clay was an atheist. No, cat Stevens. Stevens was an atheist. Yeah. Okay. And then and then became Joseph Islam. The thing about that, the way I would address that is that he was convinced that a God exists and it was the God of Islam. The thing about is, I don't believe that you can choose to believe. I believe that you are convinced to believe something. Right. Now once you become convinced. It's not a choice. If I if I could convince you that I had a dragon in my garage through evidence. You know what rational argument whatever, then you would then believe it. Right. You would be you would be convinced of it, but you didn't just choose to believe in a dragon in my garage any more than you could choose to believe in Santa Claus or a tooth fairy. January. Let's flip this on its head then. Can you choose to disbelieve. No, I don't think you can. Can you take a person who firmly believes in their God, you know, and, and worships them with all his heart and then just say I'm going to choose not to believe in him. Yeah. No, I think that he's thoroughly convinced that. What about all the increasing number of nuns in the US then what's happening to them. Again, they are becoming convinced by the evidence and logical arguments that God don't exist. John, here's here's Larry's model in and I have the same model as well. It's just three steps. It's one you have a standard of evidence. If it meets your standard and then to if it meets your standard of evidence, you're convinced of it. And then belief comes as a function of you being convinced that it's like a three step model. Same thing with disbelief. If it doesn't meet your standard of evidence, you don't believe it or you just lack belief in it. But if you become unconvinced, you become unconvinced and then as a result you you don't believe it. And you can become you can result in a state of disbelief if it's something you did believe in. If it doesn't meet your standard of evidence anymore, but that takes work and that's what we I know it's a bit more nuanced than just you believe or do you not believe. It's more of like in the capacity where you have a bucket of things that you can't tell if they're true or not true, you have to apply a standard of evidence to it. And it's a question of how good your standard of evidence is, whether or not you're convinced it's true or not whether it's completely false or not. And then as a result, you'll believe in it or or not believe in it. What do you think, John? Well, it's certainly not the case for your first belief, is it because you don't have any idea what criteria to apply. Actually, it does apply to because you have no standard of evidence. That's why you have babies born in Egypt who are Egyptians or Roman babies born believing in the Roman patheon, or guys in China believing, you know, in Confucianism tell that's less supernatural. But like, that's why there's so many people who are carrying over their parents' belief because they got to a point where they didn't have a meaningful standard of evidence. And so they believe or they were convinced of everything that they were told because it satisfied their very limited, very ignorant standard of evidence. And when they were raised the earliest years. But it wasn't until like you grow up and you improve your standard of evidence that you're like, wait a second, why do I still believe this? I can't believe in it anymore. I'm convinced that it's true. I want to believe in it, but I can't believe in it. That's a problem. And it causes a lot of stress inside people. So what you're telling me is that the bar for adopting a belief is zero. When you're absolutely fresh born. I think when you come out of the womb, it's that zero. And then as you begin to make patterns without language, you might make some patterns of like, hey, if I try to think about my hand, maybe I can make my hand move. This is my parent. She's taking care of me. If I cry, I get milk. Okay, if I knock this over the table, it falls. There's patterns here that I'm observing. People are making sounds and they're pointing at me and looking at me when they say certain sounds. Maybe I'll recognize that as like my name and I can start calling other things names too. Oh, okay. Words have meanings. And now I'm going to keep using this pattern. And now I understand words. And now people are telling me with words that I understand about God and how to be kind to people. And that there's a person who's always looking at me and I'm believing them because I've always trust them. They're the people who've always taken care of me. But at a certain point like that doesn't cut it anymore. And you're like, wait a second, I'm in school now. I understand how things work. This is magic. Like I'm having a problem believing in these magical stories that have very limited ways of reinforcing that they're true. It's just ancillary stories of people saying that it's true.  And that's not enough for me to be convinced that it's true, even though I want to believe in it. Who wants to be an atheist in America? It's a really disadvantaged point of position to be in. Like, you're almost a danger if you're in, if you're, you know, we'll go ahead by going in. Well, if a lot of people that they want to believe, they will seek out the people who will tell them stories and anecdotes and show them stories in their holy books that will then eventually convince them.  So you are. Can you choose to believe the practices of the Catholicism right over baptism, which you've lived all your life. No, but you will say you do. You will practice those beliefs, but you know, will they actually come maybe in 20 years, only because you've moved into that society. And the stories are reinforcing all the other stories that you hear in that society. And maybe that new religion can hopefully beat down your standard of evidence so low that you do genuinely become a believer. Like there's people who do that too. I've seen atheists, we've had them even on the show, who were very good with their standard and then fall into a position where they're fairly lonely.  And they, they swage them and they're like all these questions you have you don't even ask them you just need faith. It's all about not critically thinking you reduce that standard to the point where it's like maybe this guy guy does exist somewhere. Well, we've seen that happen to here. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, praying on the bone rule is one of their tactics. Absolutely. I know, I know several people who, because they're their parents, the parental family fell apart. They found comfort in the society of a church. But this is false pretenses. And I love the way that you you described what how did it go these people who start out, not Catholic but because they marry a Catholic. They might sort of be grudgingly adopted. It sounds like hypocrisy to me. It is. It is. Listen, this isn't a good thing. We're not advocating that this is a good system. Like it's a terrible, it's a terrible, terrible thing to be like, Hey, I love you, but your most core belief to who you are to change if we're going to have babies. It's like so bizarre. It's like maybe we don't like each other. How about that? You know, I always think of belief as like being wet or not wet, right? And your standard of evidence is like a dam, right? And you could have high dam, which is great. Or you could have a very, very low dam. But if you have a low enough dam, water is getting over it. That's like being convinced that something's the case. And you're going to get wet, but it's a function of the water coming over the dam. It's not the choice that you're making. It's not like the dam breaks down and water's flying over. You're like, I choose to get wet today. It's like the function of the water. It's a low standard of evidence. A low standard of evidence. That's what we mean. Larry and I typically when we say belief. And it's just a question of whether or not we're convinced or not. I still, I don't agree with that, but I can't really explain in a better way that that that I'm sure that people just everything is so hard. I just want to see some light. Yeah. I become a Christian. Yeah, I can say that. Hey, that's just a low dam. You know, like I wish we'll thank you like we were talking about that's where it starts. Yeah. Yeah, but they can have a pretty big dam in other ways of life. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yes. The irrational dichotomy of boys. Yes, cognitive bias. Yeah. Religious cognitive dissonance. Absolutely. And that frustrates me really badly because it's like watching a guy build a giant wall dam. I have guys who are in our lab scientists, very smart guys who have very, very high dams for every scientific principle for all the experience we do, but are religious. And I've asked them questions like, so you, you understand that this scientific principle is X, Y, Z. It's like, yep, and evolution's real and tectonic plates. I believe all that, but you still believe in a God. Well, you see this one time my, my pastor made my leg grow, like two inches for one of the guys who are in there. I'm like, you have this giant dam for everything. And then you have this one section where it's like a foot high. And then there goes right back to a 10 story dam again. You've, you have this weird standard double standard. And yes, yes, not really bothers me. I see that. But that, that's really a fake evidence. Oh yeah. He has been shown. Yes. I'm, I mean more, a person knows full heart of that this can't be true by all logical means, but I choose to say that it really, yeah. There's a difference there. That's the difference. I don't think there has to be different. It can be different, but I believe, or I think that people can choose just to brighten up their day or something to start believing. Yeah, I wouldn't see much of a difference between that and wishful thinking, but if you want to use that term belief, I'm also fine with it too. I don't, I'm not an ardent believer that words only have one meeting. No, no, no. It's probably a language barrier in this case. Yeah, well it seems to me that if you're born at zero belief, and it seems that this dam is more of a sinkhole. Yes, and just fill it in with whatever which is why people can not be on religious beliefs people can be indoctrinated with misogynist thinking bigotry racial prejudices. It's just nationalism. Like, when why do they talk. Can you imagine going to work as an adult and starting every day with a pledge to the flag. Oh, you don't know about this, guys, but in America they do a pledge of allegiance. We know. Oh, you know about that. Do you guys do anything close to that, or is it like no. Nothing like that. I think it's interesting to us when we see pictures or visit America, and we see all these gardens with flags in them. You don't find that in the UK. You don't find that in the UK. I don't know of any garden that has a Union Jack flagpole. Right. But still, you have stopped with the Balamy salute. And that's a great evolution. Yeah, yeah. The Nazi thing. No, right. No, right. The reason why they target kids is because they're impressionable they're targetable their standard of evidence is low enough that you can indoctrinate a nationalism in them it's why advertisers repeat the same model even when they know it's not true it's like four out of five doctors agree that you know they didn't say that, but if you say enough times they will. If you say America is the best country in the world enough times people in America. When they start out young will continue to believe it and carry that message to their adults, it's support the troops like for what what what are they doing or doing something terrible. Support them support them support them. So like it's the same message make America great again like all these catchphrases that like permeate culture in the US are targeting people of low standards, so that they maintain it even into their voting age and carry over with that and it makes them speak out to other people like Christian hey I am a blah blah blah because when they make themselves publicly known that there are certain thing. There's that that ego momentum that keeps them from having to say oh actually I changed my mind and now I'm something else. No one wants to go through that effort so sorry, sorry, sorry. This was originally a topic on what we're talking about. I have no idea. Guys, that is trading room has a counter comment on the idea of belief. This was targeted at John Richards, John Richards don't take this the wrong way he says, John Richards has a nonsensical belief on belief. They don't, he doesn't understand what it means what it means to believe if one is aware that something is nonsensical. They don't believe this thing exists in reality. So how can they logically say that they believe in that I'm trying to understand the sense. Does that make sense to you, John. No. No. All right, let me try reading it one last time Dallas. All right. Or, John Richards statement that you can believe in nonsensical beings is nonsensical or they don't believe what to believe means they don't understand what the word means. If one is aware that something is nonsensical, they don't believe this thing exists in reality. So how can they logically say that they believe in that. I get it so it's sort of like saying hey if you believe that Santa Claus doesn't exist, how can you choose to believe if you know that Santa Claus doesn't exist how can you choose to believe in Santa Claus. If you know that's that's what he's saying he's saying if you know something isn't true how can you choose to believe in it. That's what he's asking you. Do you understand. Well, yeah, yeah, this is this is the difference between belief and knowledge here, isn't it because a belief is an attitude.  It's a, you know, a belief in something or a negative attitude, if it's a disbelief towards some proposition, but knowledge, I would contend that knowledge is something different it doesn't matter what your brain, what attitude your brain has towards it. It's out there. And it's unaffected by who believes in how many people believe in it. It's information that anybody with the right equipment can gather. Okay, it's not vulnerable to belief. So, sweetest Steve you also support that belief is an attitude. Yeah, whole hearted. Okay, okay, okay. Like I said, I'm aware that there's different usages of words, especially in English, especially across so many different cultures. I would say like just make sure we understand what we say when we say belief because I think, John riches you understand what you mean when you say belief but other people may not when you say it because more different people just have different usages in that word. It is a word. It is a word that lots of words like this but this is a particularly pertinent one. There's more than one meaning. Right, right. It can be used. And I wouldn't use it for this purpose myself. It can be used for mere acceptance of known information, like, I believe in the force of gravity where you don't need to. Right. You're wasting your time there's nothing to consider there. It is a fact don't jump out the window. It doesn't change your way right. But there is another way of using belief, which is a preference for a dubious proposition, like, I believe my horse will win this race. Go on, but he's not going to make a difference. Right, like I believe my sports team will win the championship. Exactly. You don't have a way of testing that until you actually see it. Afterwards, your belief or disbelief is irrelevant, because it's happened and is now a piece of knowledge. And I also believe that you can have unwarranted beliefs, like you can believe that things that are absolutely not true. And so, if it's ever a question of belief or knowledge, I'm always reliant on knowledge. Right. I'm always going to be reliant on knowledge. And in the place where I don't have knowledge to confirm a belief, I would choose not to have the belief, which doesn't necessarily that I disbelieve in the claim. Which means I'm lacking, I'm withdrawing my belief or I have no belief because I can't be convinced that it's true. Yeah, that's fine. Yes, you can you can sit in the middle. I'm sitting on the not believing side. There is no middle ground there is like either believe it or you don't believe it and I'm sitting on not believing which isn't the same as disbelief it positively disbelieving it's just hey I'm with the guys who aren't believing you. And you got to make a better claim or a better statement. That's an interesting thing, guys. Larry, how are we on time. We're getting pretty close you need to start winding down. Okay, okay, we can start one. I've got lots of things to say. Have a double are you and what stuff could we check out. Yeah, well, on Tuesday, the UK Atheism UK organization staged an event in London in the very famous Conway Hall which is the home of the ethical society. I think it was sponsored originally 100 years ago by the Bertrand Russell family. Anyway, we had we hired a room there. And we invited Professor AC Grayley to come and speak to us. We sold lots of tickets on Eventbrite to sadly he fell sick and was unable to attend its flu. And you know how that can make you feel horrible and we wish him a rapid recovery but I had to run around like a mad thing and provide an alternative because I didn't know until the lunchtime of the day that he was not going to be able to attend. And this is what I got. I got half an hour of visual contact with the following Lawrence Krause, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker. Excellent. And that's been videoed.  And we've decided that we will release that video in pieces each speaker had half an hour. And we will release it initially to our membership, make it available only to them. And then subsequently, at a later date, we will release it to the unwashed public. It's not compulsory to be unwashed by the way. No look forward to it. Yeah, and that's that's what I've been doing with my AUK hat on course I've also been busy with my free thought channel I say my free thought channel we're a team, including Steve. Hello Steve. Nice to see you here. And Steve is our producer. And so we've we've got new shows coming up there every. There's one later on today and I hope you'll be able to join us tie. Let's do it. Great. Excellent. Yeah. So we had a good meeting yesterday with psychiatrist Scott, why gold and anthropologist. David Orrinstein. We discussed this very issue, the difference between belief and knowledge and what what truth means. And you can see that it's already on free thought channel. And please go and take a look and set the notifications, subscribe, you know, do all the usual, like, share and subscribe. Yeah, I just want to like, you know, English is a part of culture culture evolves cultures going to change words will change as a result to and will adopt new messages. The main thing that we shouldn't do is say, the main thing we shouldn't do is say, hey, I'm going to believe in words meaning only this and crossing my arms and never being open to change or anything like that. That's too conservative. Just be aware of the new ways that people are using terms and also the old ways and be willing to be with it. That's how we can engage ourselves. Don't use words. But use them as a way to bridge gaps. That's it. Yeah, I would contend that the word belief had a great deal more important. So 150 years ago. All that time, previous 250 years, then it has an hour because it was deemed to be pretty much the only way that you could access information. Exactly.  Right. Then science got it. Science girded his loins. We have an alternative source of information which is much more reliable. Let's hope knowledge doesn't change over years. I know, I know religious people may try to count how words and be like, well, I know God exists because of life. It's like, do you know, can you demonstrate that? Please demonstrate it for me. It was like, well, knowledge doesn't mean you can demonstrate it. Knowledge just means that you have a lot of faith in it. It's like, oh, get away from me. I don't want that. It's no good you knowing. It's terrible.  That is if he speaks to you. My content can be found at digital free thought.com. If you go there be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel handle is at doubter five. And you can find my book atheism what's it all about on Amazon. Remember everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't worry about it.  We'll see you next Wednesday night at seven o'clock on that was a radio. Say goodbye everybody. Bye bye everybody. Great show.


And let's just track what we have done. If I go to the expenses area here, I can look at my vendors and I'm going to close this out. I'm going to say clear the filters and I want to look at all my vendors and just pick up vendor here. And you can see that we had a purchase order that was the start of the process. And so there is our purchase order. New music stuff was who we purchased it for the customer that we had here closing that back out. And then we bill, we entered the bill and then within the bill, notice I didn't check this off as being billable last time. I'm going to make that change. I'm going to say, okay, here's the new customer. I'm going to make it a billable item so that I can then turn around and create the invoice. Now you have to be careful with this, however, because like I say, the billable thing only generally pulls into the cost instead of using the item to pull in the sales price, but it can still help us to give us that link. So you might use this customer field just to show you that you can then make an invoice matching this or you can use this billable item, but you have to be careful to do that. So I'm going to say it's billable here. We can apply the tax to it. And then I'm going to say save it and close it. So now I've made that bill billable. The transaction you are editing is linked to others. I'm going to say that should be okay.