Think about it - if it really worked you have invented a perpetual motion machine, since you could just feed the fresh water through a little water wheel back into the ocean.
You don't need to do any maths at all to know that his maths has gone drastically wrong somewhere.
This isn’t a closed system. It’s not perpetual motion, there is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of energy added to the system by the sun.
Saying “maths” instead of just math sounds quite odd, why are you making it plural? Is solving one equation “a math” and solving multiple equations “maths”?
“Maths” is the contracted form (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/brand-style-guide/writing/grammar...) of MATHematicS. It had been in use in English-speaking countries since more than a century ago. As a matter of fact, it was also used in the US during the 19th century. Yet, for some curious reason, the Americans had stopped using contractions from some time onwards. So, “maths” became “math” and “PhD” became “Ph.D.”.
I think the justification is that because maths isn't plural in practice (I've never heard anyone say "mathematics are"), it's pointless to retain the s, and only leads to an awkward megasyllable like the end of "wasps."
The Anglo-American linguistic divide is always fun to examine. We don't always come out ahead, but now and then we get winner like "acclimate."
I think "mathematics are" is a normal construction. "We have a new widget that does this, but the mathematics of mass production are troubling."
If you don't like something coming between "mathematics" and "are", how about "I can prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but the mathematics are pretty high level." One could argue that many people would say "the math is pretty high level", but I think I've heard each before. It doesn't feel odd to write at all.
That's fair. I was only thinking of it in the context of how mathematics is/are referred to as a subject, not as an actual concept. But what you say is true.
Yet another example of how the American education system is falling behind the rest of the world. Students in the US only learn one kind of math, but apparently the rest of the English speaking world is taught multiple kinds of maths.
Fair, I was being trite. The idea that the ocean is a closed system that doesn’t include all the solar energy, currents, mixing and everything else added to it plus an osmotic membrane would represent a perpetual motion machine just sounded so laughably stupid I was just trying to be equally annoying and dumb.
Not an expert, but from what I understand looking at the paper, the sun is what drives ocean mixing. Without ocean mixing, this method would eventually fully extract all the water out of the ocean water resulting in fresh water oceans on top of a floor of precipitated salt. Once that happened, the osmotic pressure would be exhausted and the system would stop working.
In the absence of the sun (which is what ultimately drives ocean mixing), eventually this would lead to a layer of pure fresh water on top of a layer of salt. The energy is being driven by osmotic pressure of salt water. Once you have extracted the water out of the salt, that pressure is exhausted. Thus it is not perpetual.
Take a long tube with an osmotic filter on it. Put it in the sea with one end out. Pressure is going to fill the tube up, no, just like a snorkel? Probably back up to sea level, possibly minus whatever force reduction caused by the filter? Boom, water filtration with no expenditure of energy.
It may be wrong but it really isn't "obviously delusional."
Think about it - if it really worked you have invented a perpetual motion machine, since you could just feed the fresh water through a little water wheel back into the ocean.
You don't need to do any maths at all to know that his maths has gone drastically wrong somewhere.