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Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

LynahFan said:
My wife was working at CERN when that all went down - she was even working on the actual accelerator (the PS2) that provided the proton beam to the OPERA experiment. According to her, the "announcement" was actually supposed to just be an internal plea for help - the scientists on the experiment couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, so they sent around a memo asking if there were anyone with expertise who could help explain the anomaly. They never thought for a second that the particles had actually gone faster than light. Unfortunately, the memo was widely distributed enough, and described the anomaly in enough detail that when someone leaked it to the press, the rest was history.
Click to expand...

That is a really cool story and I feel there are a lot of "leaks" that are really along those same lines. Media coverage invariably misreports the scientific process.

Thanks for sharing :)
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

And what are these batteries made of? I think it's a great idea but some of these materials are becoming more and more expensive and more damaging to mine. Now we're going to power homes with these batteries?

I wish him success since he's going in the right direction. I'm just concerned about materials at this point. Hopefully they are easily recycled (which I'm sure they are to some extent).
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Also, you have to remember just how impactful Edison was. He invented so many things and perfected so many more.

Musk is certainly a visionary, but is he up there with Edison? Time will tell. I think he's more of a Steve Jobs.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
And what are these batteries made of? I think it's a great idea but some of these materials are becoming more and more expensive and more damaging to mine. Now we're going to power homes with these batteries?

I wish him success since he's going in the right direction. I'm just concerned about materials at this point. Hopefully they are easily recycled (which I'm sure they are to some extent).
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I assume they're lithium, which technically can be recycled, but it's 5x more expensive than mining new.

10 kwh for $3000? Utility power is $0.20 per kwh, so you'll have to go through 1500 charge-discharge cycles (i.e. 1500 days = 4 years) just to break even on the battery - and that's assuming that you use the full cycle every day. Oh, and then there's the small matter of the PV panels. And maintenance. Only way it makes sense is if there are big subsidies - and then only to the individual who's getting his power system paid for by the public. No way it makes economic sense when considering the whole country.

I think Steve Jobs is more appropriate - Look, a watch that does what Samsung was doing 2 years ago! OMG, just have to have it!
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

WisconsinWildcard said:
I heard rumblings about this a few months back. If I were a betting man (which I am), I would think it is a victim of a difficult to detect methodological flaw like the faster than light neutrino. Otherwise, sounds pretty cool and should be an interesting development as it is further investigated.
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another hypothetical alternative is that somewhere mass is converted to energy or energy is converted to mass. Technically, the conservation law is that the total of mass + energy is conserved. Most of the time, mass remains mass and energy remains energy but every now and then one changes over to the other, mostly in one direction (mass to energy).
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

FreshFish said:
another hypothetical alternative is that somewhere mass is converted to energy or energy is converted to mass. Technically, the conservation law is that the total of mass + energy is conserved. Most of the time, mass remains mass and energy remains energy but every now and then one changes over to the other, mostly in one direction (mass to energy).
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Technically, the law of conservation that is under consideration here is actually the conservation of momentum, not mass/energy. The question is: how can something accelerate to the left (i.e. increase its leftward momentum) without some other object/particle simultaneously accelerating to the right? They're basically claiming to have created a "momentum mono-pole."

Very, very skeptical on this one, I am...
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

GrinCDXX said:
Given the name of his company, I'm sure Edison is the last person Musk would want to be compared to.
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Heh - could either be prophetic or, well, what's the word for something that most people would call "ironic" which is not actually irony at all?

Edison = great at taking good ideas and figuring out how to turn them into real products that consumers wanted and would pay for
Tesla = great at generating (no pun intended) new ideas, but not an ounce of business sense in him

I'm thinking even Musk would still rather be Edison. His "tech" ventures are *significantly* closer to Edison's model - he does relatively little fundamental research, just figures out better/faster/cheaper ways to turn existing technology into products. He didn't invent (nor even really improve) lithium ion batteries - he's just building on the billions of dollars of research that others already put into that technology for consumer electronics, etc. If he were Tesla, he'd be off in a lab somewhere doing groundbreaking physics research and everybody would be wondering, "hey - whatever happened to that guy who started PayPal?"
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

LynahFan said:
Heh - could either be prophetic or, well, what's the word for something that most people would call "ironic" which is not actually irony at all?

Edison = great at taking good ideas and figuring out how to turn them into real products that consumers wanted and would pay for
Tesla = great at generating (no pun intended) new ideas, but not an ounce of business sense in him

I'm thinking even Musk would still rather be Edison. His "tech" ventures are *significantly* closer to Edison's model - he does relatively little fundamental research, just figures out better/faster/cheaper ways to turn existing technology into products. He didn't invent (nor even really improve) lithium ion batteries - he's just building on the billions of dollars of research that others already put into that technology for consumer electronics, etc. If he were Tesla, he'd be off in a lab somewhere doing groundbreaking physics research and everybody would be wondering, "hey - whatever happened to that guy who started PayPal?"
Click to expand...

Yeah, you're probably right. Musk is more comparable to Edison, but I'm sure he'll want the history books to include the footnote: "Didn't market his products by torturing animals."
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

LynahFan said:
Technically, the law of conservation that is under consideration here is actually the conservation of momentum, not mass/energy. The question is: how can something accelerate to the left (i.e. increase its leftward momentum) without some other object/particle simultaneously accelerating to the right? They're basically claiming to have created a "momentum mono-pole."

Very, very skeptical on this one, I am...
Click to expand...

Isn't momentum just mass x velocity? Then you can have mass moving to the left and energy moving to the right?? that would be weird but conceivable, I suppose, and keep the conservation law intact....it also would suggest that there is some other factor going on that hasn't (yet) been captured in their measurement.



I am still amazed at the integrity of Michelson-Morley to announce their "impossible" null result, which led to the end of the "ether" and the beginning of special relativity....meanwhile, let's see how / if / when these current results are replicated.
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

FreshFish said:
Isn't momentum just mass x velocity? Then you can have mass moving to the left and energy moving to the right?? that would be weird but conceivable, I suppose, and keep the conservation law intact....it also would suggest that there is some other factor going on that hasn't (yet) been captured in their measurement.



I am still amazed at the integrity of Michelson-Morley to announce their "impossible" null result, which led to the end of the "ether" and the beginning of special relativity....meanwhile, let's see how / if / when these current results are replicated.
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Except that energy isn't a "thing." It's a property that objects *have.* "The train has 80 GJ of kinetic energy." "The photon has 50 eV of electrical energy." There would still have to be some particle (even if it's just a photon) carrying that energy to the right. Their whole claim is that nothing goes to the right - that the spacecraft is literally pushing against nothing(ness).
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

LynahFan said:
Except that energy isn't a "thing." It's a property that objects *have.* "The train has 80 GJ of kinetic energy." "The photon has 50 eV of electrical energy." There would still have to be some particle (even if it's just a photon) carrying that energy to the right. Their whole claim is that nothing goes to the right - that the spacecraft is literally pushing against nothing(ness).
Click to expand...

a photon is a so-called "massless particle" is it not? Maybe they merely discovered a new massless particle akin to photon or neutrino, or maybe they are emitting photons outside the visible spectrum (e.g., X-rays) or maybe they are emitting neutrinos somehow, or whatever.

Under current theory, all energy is mediated by a particle of some kind, except perhaps gravity, which is more a geometric property of spacetime and thus not "really" energy, sort of....

Anyway, you and I do seem to agree on the bigger picture, that there most likely is no violation of the law of conservation of mass/energy momentum, and is more likely something else going on for which they have not yet accounted.
 
FreshFish said:
a photon is a so-called "massless particle" is it not? Maybe they merely discovered a new massless particle akin to photon or neutrino, or maybe they are emitting photons outside the visible spectrum (e.g., X-rays) or maybe they are emitting neutrinos somehow, or whatever.

Under current theory, all energy is mediated by a particle of some kind, except perhaps gravity, which is more a geometric property of spacetime and thus not "really" energy, sort of....

Anyway, you and I do seem to agree on the bigger picture, that there most likely is no violation of the law of conservation of mass/energy momentum, and is more likely something else going on for which they have not yet accounted.
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However, I get the feeling that you think the "something else" will explain the thrust, while I think hat the "something else" will show that there is no thrust.

Also, read this: http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/09/q-how-can-photons-have-energy-and-momentum-but-no-mass/
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

LynahFan said:
you think [that, if there is thrust, then] "something else" will explain the thrust, while I think that the "something else" will show that there is no thrust. [and I look forward to the resolution one way or the other]

Also, read this: http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/09/q-how-can-photons-have-energy-and-momentum-but-no-mass/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, very interesting.



For some reason I am reminded of the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox. "Two" particles are emitted in opposite directions with opposite spin. After they travel far enough away so that the distance between them is greater than t/c, their spins are measured, and they are always opposite. How can this be, if no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light? since the axis of the spin is random, how can the particles always have opposite spin when there is no way for one to "know" the results of the measurement of the other particle?


The solution was so elegant and so simple.....there really are not "two" particles at all. It is more like a balloon expanding in a dark room with a laser shining through its center. All we can see are two dots moving away from each other at equal and opposite speeds. But they are not really two dots at all, they are two points on a surface but we can only see the two dots and must infer the surface (in a dimension beyond our senses and measuring devices).

I may have explained it poorly. I found a few links after a search but don't have time now to read through them, I was posting from memory. There is an 18 minute video that purports to explain it here but I have not watched it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x9AgZASQ4k
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

There was a small earthquake in Galesburg, MI, yesterday. Not enough to do significant damage, as it was only a 4.2.
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Solution to the California water crisis.

Death stills to reclaim the body's water. If it worked on Arrakis, why can't it work in California?
 
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