Ravi and Alex,
It's true that the idea itself is not unreasonable. What is amazing is that it's about some of the most common things in everybody's life: sun, water, and clouds. But nobody noticed.
Note the last line of the paragraph labeled "significance": "Such a photomolecular evaporation process could be happening widely in nature. It may significantly impact the earth’s water cycle, climate change, and has potential clean water and energy technology applications."
Alex: The effect itself is most likely insignificant, otherwise it would have been discovered earlier.
No. The effects are well known and very important. Scientists at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) have been using the fastest available computers to study clouds and evaporation since the 1950s. And at every stage, they bought the fastest available computers to do the simulations. Since then, many different groups around the world are computing the world weather on a daily basis. Those computations take those effects into account.
The fact that evaporation rates in clouds are faster than predicted by heat transfer alone is significant and had been unexplained. This study is the first discovery of a mechanism that may explain the discrepancy..
Note that the authors call it a "hypothesis". The implications are extremely important, and I'm sure that scientists around the world are making plans to replicate the results with a wide variety of methods for bouncing photons off liquid water.
Importance for ontology: A detailed ontology of everything would be extremely fragile. Even something as common as sun, water, and clouds can interact in unknown ways that may be revised at any time The top level is most useful for classification, not detailed reasoning or computation.
Summary: A TLO is most useful for common terminology that is widely shared for communication among independent working groups. Different groups that share info may interpret the details and define them by very different specialized ontologies.
The most complex reasoning is done at the detailed levels, not the upper levels. For the TLO, a simple hierarchy is sufficient. That is why OWL can be widely used -- the hierarchy is the most important part, The details may be computed by many different methods. Decidability is irrelevant.
John
From: "Ravi Sharma" <drravisharma@gmail.com>
Alex
This Physics demonstration is not in that class of path breaking discovery, yes its applications may turn out to be pathbreaking especially if this could also become a massive source of Hydrogen on which i have been working for past 20 years (for energy generated by H2).
One more parameter in the last mail from me which is very important is the intensity of light or number of photons at the frequency found to be effective.
Regards
John,
The discovery of a new phenomenon (if it is confirmed) is a holiday for all physicists, but especially for theorists, because they need to explain it. As Landau said, “Theorists are bored without experimenters.”
Here's their work: "Solar-driven evaporation rates using porous absorbers have been reported to exceed the theoretical thermal evaporation limit, but the mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear." https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2312751120
This is how Physics lives.
A new theorem (description of the phenomenon) will appear in the framework of the theory, and then a proof (based on physical laws).
Well, for now we have a hypothesis.
The effect itself is most likely insignificant, otherwise it would have been discovered earlier.
The very phenomenon of photons separating water molecules does not seem revolutionary. After all, photons are energy. I think Ravi writes about this.
Appendix [1] provides an example of the theorem (in the last line) and its proof from the framework of the theory of undirected graphs. Next will be the framework of the theory of Statics.
Let me point out that in the last column we name mental actions with knowledge: a-priory, union, summation. In addition to abduction, deduction and induction.
Alex
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374265191_Theory_framework_-_knowledge_hub_message_1