Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
keiths,
This reminds me of a calculation I did (or got Grok to do) relating to PCR. At 100% efficiency, product doubles every cycle. Typical maximal cycles are in the 30s – that’s enough to detect a single molecule in most systems. Covid deniers (hi J-Mac!) insist that cycles kept running until the machine detected something, to create a false pandemic – but you can’t detect less than 1 molecule. So once you get to c40 cycles, you aren’t going to detect, if you haven’t already. Yet the deniers often quoted machines running to ‘1000 cycles’.
40 cycles is easily contained within the tiny wells of a PCR machine. But 1,000 cycles would require a mass of reagents equivalent to 10^225 universes. So the real issue with 1,000 cycles is not that you would get false positives, but that you would be squashed by the gravity of the reagents, and/or be vapourised by the nuclear fusion ignited, well before the 1000th cycle.