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Force Field. No, Really
tqft points out news of "a working force field, using plasma. Now to scale the sucker up." Here's the
Brookhaven press release.
I can think of so many uses for this.
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Finally, a solution to the "Dad, he keeps touching me!" dilemma.
There was a guy down the street from me who was in a force field. Can't remember his name but he had a black and white striped shirt, white face paint and he didn't speak that much.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
are some borg implants so I can walk through the force field unaffected.
I can think of so many uses for this.
;)
Like keeping PHBs out of the server room?
My journal has hot
or is all its blocking at the moment air? then again 14k kelvin might keep us out.
Finally a decent way to protect your *nix server
from physical contact!
Yipee!
*snicker*
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I asked the guy how he did it, but he won't tell me.
Hasn't anyone explained to him the wonders of open force?
-JDF
Just read here
They use the word plasma so many times in the last sentence of the first link, that for some strange reason (closely related to my sense of humor, I'm sure), I'm reminded of Monty Python and Spam:
A much faster, more complex version of a previously introduced "spam window" (see New Scientist, 12 April 2003), the spam valve is the latest example of novel uses of spam for particle-beam applications; other recent ones include spam acceleration of antimatter (Update 634), a spam lens (Update 508), and spam deflection of high-energy beams (Update 540).
Niiieeeeeeeeeeeeee!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Room temperature is around 290 Kelvin (about 25 degrees Celsius, or 77 Fahrenheit). Remember, 0 Kelvin is absolute zero - -273.something degrees C.
15,000 / 50 = 300 kelvin
300 kelvin = 26.85 C = 80.33 F
[Temperature Conversion Page]
So, about 50 times room temp.
SPAM
15,000 over 50 is 300.
300 Kelvin is about 26 Celcius, 80 Fahrenheit.
Does that help?
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I love the idea, and the science around it, but the article sucks! No pics, diagrams or any actual detail on the way the thing works. I'm sick of this kind of 'it works because of herbs!' reporting; it's way too simple for any inquiring mind and because of that it's non-informative.
:)
A shame, 'cause I'd be interested in the practical implementation of this valve system. And I want pretty movies and/or pictures, of course
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
To keep all of the vampires and blood drive workers* from getting too anxious, the plasma this article refers to is not a component of blood (medical jargon). This other plasma (physics jargon) is matter that has been charged with so much energy it begins exhibiting characteristics of a liquid rather than a gas.
*After seeing some of the workers running our corporate guilt-a-thon, I suspect this may be redundant.
2) The plasma valve is INSIDE a copper container.
If you think this is a "force field" then you might also be interested in the "ray gun" in your television tube.
An interesting story nonetheless, spoiled only by the fatuous ignorance of the submitter and editor.
Because I brought my DINOSAUR! Who EATS force field dogs!
i know you are trying to be funny, but realistically, the amount of energy a high-temperature "thing" contains can be a lot less than you think.
for example, some ions trapped by the earth's magnetic field goes up to some 14 MILLION kelvins (notice it's hotter than anywhere on, around, or inside the sun). However, as there are maybe one or two such high-temperature particles per cubic centimeter, you will still freeze to death standing (erm, floating) in the middle of it.
just a pedantic monday morning, i guess. I'll stop now.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This thing is for use in sci-tech research only, for creating air tight vacums. It can't be used to protect / encase eevryday objects. For example, I quote:
At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin. This intense heat makes the ionized atoms and molecules move around and collide with air molecules so rapidly that the ions block any air molecules that might pass through the plasma valve.
In short, don't expect this force field to be in use at your neighborhood brig / jail anytime soon :) A really cool advancement though.
It's supposed to be short. That's the whole point of the online AIP: short summaries of articles.
Why the poster linked to it instead of to a full published article, I don't know. Perhaps a full published writeup hasn't been made yet. Perhaps the poster thought that short sound bites are all that the /. crowd has attention for.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Umm...already done?
Untima® 150 Plasma Welding System.
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
Now, the high voltage shock might give you pause before touching it again though...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I suppose next we'll be hearing about a new sort of sci-fi device called a "laser". Perhaps this "laser" can be used with the "force field" to sculpt pictures of world leaders onto the face of the moon...
The parent is absolutely correct (at least in the content :-P). It's a volume of very hot gas enclosed in an electromagnetic field. Nothing spectacular about this, and still requires an enclosing apparatus (rather than, say, generating a forcefield around the apparatus).
This is an advance in technology, for sure - it's a very fast valve. But there's no physics breakthrough involved. It's just an application of an old theory to an old problem, made possible by advances in technological expertise and practice. It's a clever hack but it's not a force field.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Maxwell's Demon is a physics problem the is the basis of quantum mechanics. Simply, suppose you had a tank of air that was divided in 2 by a tiny split, with a gate. At the gate is a "demon" who lets high energy particle in on side, and low-energy particles in the other.
Theoretically, by expending no energy save that to open and close the gate (plus whatever overhead the Demon requires) you could thwart the laws of physics. Soon one side of the tank would be "cold" and the other "hot" even if they both started off at the same temperature.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
... does it make that cool "Bzzzzt" sound when you walk into it?
Miko O'Sullivan
Well, considering the air molecules are still colliding with *something*, namely the force field, the air friction would still be there...
Blasters possibly, I really have no opinion on that, but lightsabers are still a bit off. Lightsabres are cohesive, that is, if you move the handle, the blade moves as though it were completly solid. It is unaffected by, or at least overcomes, the inertial forces that would cause it to bend (think of swinging a rubber lightsaber). It is not clear that a force field would allow this to happen. (Although it is possible) The biger problem with lightsabers, is that they are completly powered at the base of the beam, while the "force fields" span a gap between two (or more) points. We have, at this time, no way to terminate the lightsaber blade.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Except this wall has a very small, negligable mass.
Thus, you could also make a balloon with extra lifting capasity just by vacuuming out the inside of a field. It could also fly closer to space than any other balloon, since it has a vacuume(essentially 0 density).
Or you could have containment for mass-sensitive matter (antimatter, etc.)
How about a see-through wall with zero heat transfer by contact?
How about a wall that cannot melt, because there is nothing there to melt? We may finally have something we can melt diamond/carbon in
Sometimes you have to think outside the ridgid plasma cube
- Sig
Or how about we don't convert away from an absolute temperature scale before dividing things all over the place?
If you convert to C first, you've just assigned an arbitrary zero to the scale and cut off about 90% of room temp, but only about 2% of the force field temp, so of course when you then go dividing by 50 it doesn't work out.
Remember kiddies: arbitrary scales are all well and good for addition and subtraction, but don't go messing around with multiplication and division; you'll end up a pregnant murderer who supports terrorists.
And it IS Awesome!
I worked on the pre-cursor to the plasma valve at BNL, the Vaunted "Plasma Window" (ooooh, ahhh)
The thing really is incredible, and yes, I accepted the project because I read the description, and went..."Holy C*ap! That is just like the shuttle bay!" And it is, well...if the shuttle bay were ~4-6mm in diameter =)
And about the 15K Kelvin thing, yes plasmas do get that hot, but lets get real here, the thing is tiny...I bet the lights above your head get just as hot in the middle of their plasmas.
Anyway, the project I worked on was very robust and partially scaleable, just would require a boatload of power. It was very "loud" but not "noisy" as we could put very sensitive equipment right next to it and there would be no interference (you physics types should get this) and when you take a collimated beam of light...in one case a green laser, it will shine clear through it with next to no loss, which is a huge improvement over any other method of separating Atmosphere from Vacuum.
Mind you, this would be only the first stage in a series of differential pumping to get down to UHVacuum.
Gratz to Ady, he is one helluv a guy!
-Chris
Let me get this right.. you want a picture of a vacuum surrounded by air. Now that sounds like a nice picture.
I've got a good picture of it here.
I had found this to be an interesting read, but I would need to see it to beleive it. ...David Swenson of 3M Corporation describes an anomaly where workers encountered a strange "invisible wall" in the area under a fast-moving sheet of electrically charged polypropelene film in a factory. ...
h tml
rest of arcticle can be found here
http://www.amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.