Third most potent benzo I’m aware of. Flunitrazolam and flubromazolam seem to be a bit more potent, but clonazolam was much more popular because flunitrazolam only lasts like two hours and flubromazolam was way too hypnotic for normal use.

Etizolam got banned in a few places because it’s more well-known. The tough part about figuring out what’s banned and what isn’t is that we’re often dealing with multiple country’s lists of substances; even if a substance is legal here, it may have been banned in the country it’s coming from and vice versa.

A lot of the more popular ones got banned either in the NL or the US recently, I believe, but there’s always another obscure one popping up. Seems like a lot more etizolam analogues than straight up benzo analogues lately.

Anyone not familiar with them would be absolutely shocked how cheap and available RC benzos are. I love them and even I think it’s pretty scary.

I must say I’m terrified of the thoughts that must reside within the heads of the most successful carpenters, and pray their talent keeps them well-compensated and pacified.

Beloved ex-carpenter that spent his life dedicated to preaching a message of love and acceptance? Real original, Bob.

I do my best! I spend all my time obsessively reading up on such topics because, frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything more important than understanding how the world around us works. I do have a few other hobbies, but all roads circle back to quantum mechanics. And understandably, nobody else really wants to talk about it because it doesn’t interest them and they find it complicated (which I suspect is only because they find it boring; people say I’m “so smart” but I think most of the credit lies with me happening to find the topic truly fascinating) so I spend a lot of time trying to think of accessible explanations in the off chance someone is willing to listen to me ramble.

I think our understanding is mostly just observational at this point. Color charge “must” be conserved because we’ve never observed any phenomenon in which it wasn’t. It’s like the conservation of mass and energy, except it’s really the conservation of symmetry. High energy collisions of photons can create matter, but it’s always in matter-antimatter pairs. Anti-particles carry equal but opposite charges of their particle counterparts in order to maintain symmetry. We can’t just create charges out of nowhere. For example, neutrons (net neutral) can decay into protons (net positive) by emitting an electron which carries away the negative charge. So when quarks change their color charge, they must emit a gluon with a color-anticolor charge to carry it away.

We’re still working on the why, but all we know is that we haven’t observed anything that contradicts these observations. Or at least as far as I can recall off the top of my head; I vaguely recall something about weak interactions violating symmetry, but I don’t have that bit quite as well researched as the basics.

Thanks, it’s the autism.

Edit: To be more clear, I just meant the grass is always greener. Some people can intuitively grasp scientific principles, some people can intuitively carry a conversation. One is flashy, one is necessary for mental health.

You’re welcome!

In the same way that atoms are bound states between electrons and protons having an equal amount of positive and negative charge to have a net neutral charge, quarks are bound within nucleons by having a combination of color charges that result in a net neutral charge. However, there is always an imbalance; as a quark emits a gluon to change its color charge in order to balance out with the other quarks, color charge is conserved with that gluon, which alters the color charge of the quark that absorbs it, knocking the quarks back out of balance and forcing another quark to emit another gluon to change its color charge, which repeats the cycle. Here’s a helpful visual: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quarks.gif

It’s also helpful to mention I was inaccurate in my initial comment; there are six color charges, not three. RGB and anti-RGB. Quarks only have RGB charges, whereas gluons are any of 9 combinations of color-anticolor charges. So a quark emits a gluon to change its color charge, the gluon has a color-anticolor charge to conserve color charge, and then must change the color of another quark when it is absorbed as the anticolor charge of the gluon and color charge of the quark cancel out, leaving the initial color charge the emitting quark gave off.

It can be thought of as potential energy being converted into the virtual particles. Since the negative charge of electrons repel each other more powerfully the closer they get together, at a certain distance it becomes more energetically favorable for virtual particles to be spontaneously emitted than it is for the electrons to exist that closely together. They can exchange the particles indefinitely, but the energy still comes from an outside force shoving them into one another, otherwise they would just redirect and never collide again.

They’re suspected to be excitations in the underlying quantum field corresponding to that particle. I.e. There are no electrons, just excitations in the electron field. Are the ripples on the surface of a pond physical structures distinct from the pond itself?

Subatomic particles experience “collisions” very analogous to objects at macroscopic scales, but they’re not tiny solid objects crashing into each other. As has been mentioned, particles are really probability waves; imagining them as marbles is visually accurate in that the distribution of probability of where the particle exists has a point where it’s highest (the center of the marble) and falls off gradually in all directions radiating from that point. The surface of the marble is roughly where that probability is basically zero (although it’s technically non-zero at all points in space), and it can be treated as a strict barrier for our purposes because we are so large relative to these distances.

Protons and neutrons maintain their size because of the exchange of gluons between the quarks in their nucleus. Different color charges attract each other in order to cancel out in a similar way to positive and negative charges in the electromagnetic force, except there are three instead of two. Gluons carry color charge between quarks, and since color charge must be conserved, gluons are constantly being exchanged. The strong force is also different from the electromagnetic force in that it doesn’t scale the same way over distance; it actually increases with distance and decreases as quarks get closer together. So if a quark gets too close to another, the attraction weakens and it gets tugged away by other quarks, so they remain locked into a singular formation.

As for electromagnetic forces resulting in collisions; as any two particles approach each other, their probability distribution fields start to overlap, and since no two particles can occupy an identical energy state, they begin repelling each other with greater and greater force. It’s not a collision of solid objects, but rather they begin emitting virtual particles at each other, the creation and destruction of which impart momentum from one particle to another and cause them to alter their course. There’s no solid boundary, rather it simply becomes more and more likely for the emission of virtual particles to occur the closer they get.

ETA: For another helpful visual, imagine the electrons in a given object as balloons, where the electron is most likely to exist at the center of each balloon, and the surface of the balloon is an arbitrary marker along the probability curve. Balloons bounce off each other nicely, but they deform ever so slightly before doing so, and the more they deform, the harder they will be repelled from one another as the rubber bounces back into place. You can get the centers of the balloons pretty close together, but it requires more and more energy the closer together they get.

It’s hard to be accurate within an amount of text that most people will find digestible, at least for me. Replicating positive results is a good thing and I wouldn’t consider that redundant. But if it’s something like “We’ve poured chicken broth on dryer lint and it didn’t produce gold”, we only need a couple studies (again, as long as the data and methods used were solid) before more start becoming redundant.

If we do something and nothing happens, it’s good to try a couple times and be sure that technique doesn’t do anything. More than that is redundant. If we try something and it does work, then I’ll welcome far more trials confirming it does work before I start tossing around the word “redundant”, especially if those trials are by other people in other places.

Semantics get annoying, as well. But I see what you’re saying.

The only worthless research is poor quality or redundant research. As long as the data is reliable and new, it’s valuable.

Seems like they’re proposing that they’re one and the same. Consciousness is just the byproduct of that remembrance.