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The Year In Ideas
popo writes "The New York Times Magazine has a review of the year's most original and interesting ideas. They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things") and David Stevenson's real-life proposal to dig to the center of the Earth. by sinking heavy iron through the Earth's mantle."
Let's start melting holes in it!
And why? So somebody can get an 'A'!
Which reminds me of that great scene in Star Trek TNG Evolution where Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her 10-forward, and after mumbling something about Dr. Frankenstein, asks him about the grades he's getting.
He replies that he always gets an 'A'.
And she replies, "So did Dr. Frankenstein."
(and lest anybody think my using the word fuck in the subject is out of line, I refer you to none other than the FCC who says it isn't such a bad word afterall.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Discover Magazine has the "top 100 scientific achievements of '03". It also has the most convuluted index possible for said achievements!
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
...on the tornado in a can
On the moon and call it a "Death Star." Then we hold the world ransom for....one million dollars!
Plus, even if the laser heats the earth, it doesn't exert any force on it; the molten iron heats and then presses down on the crust to allow it to break through.
I'm also not sure what a laser would accomplish once you break through the crust. Since at that point the temperature is already really hot, and the earth is, if I remember right, molten, the issue is presumably the pressure to get your probes down farther (which the iron accomplishes), not the ability to break through the earth itself.
But I think the farmer (with his Tornado in a Can idea) has been watching too many Roadrunner cartoons.
Here is a more helpful link to the table of contents, not to the introduction.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Wow, it's a device that violates conservation of mass!
The one thing i did not understand about the journey to the center of the earth proposal is how would you attach a sensor package with telemetry to a pile of goo at several thousands of degrees f.
Seems like a rather minor snag.
One thing I did not see in the comments on the original Tornado in a Can story is this:
A garbage-processing plant in Pennsylvania will go online with its Windhexe next month; the machine can turn two tons of trash into one ton of sterile powder.
Guess what. That other ton of material isn't getting destroyed. That doesn't happen. It's probably going into the air as (very tiny) solid particles. Now, since these particles are created from the very beginning of the process, are they also sterile? I would think not. I'm not saying this process is environmentally bad. I'm only saying that waste disposal never has a simple, clean solution.
That article you posted says that fuck can only be used as an adjective, which u clearly did not do. I fail to see why you would bother citing evidence that doesnt even support your position.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things")
In other news, I have just concluded a study that has found that a glass of water, it turns out, is very useful for quenching thirst.
Come one now, if they can clear trailer parks in 30 seconds, isn't this just a progression of logic?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.
It's sort of neat to see a story like this, because Dr. Stevenson was one of my advisors at Caltech. He's a great guy with a cool New Zealand accent and a wide assortment of knowledge about almost everything. But I can shed a little light on this, both because I know him and because I have a geology background.
First, for the credulous, he's semi-joking. The physics of the iron sinking into the core is actually plausible, but his tone when talking about "generating a crack in the crust" is tongue-in-cheek. This would require a much larger nuclear detonation, say, than has ever been tested by anybody. The seismic consequences would be... bad. What's more, we aren't anywhere even close to being able to design probes that could survive such an environment and send messages back.
To dispel a common misconception, the interior of the earth is NOT molten. Omitting some interesting boundary layers, the Earth is composed of the following chunks from the inside out: the inner core (solid iron alloy), the outer core (molten iron alloy), the mantle (solid rock), and the crust (we live on it). If you're curious as to how we know, it's because liquids and solids have dramatically different properties as far as transmitting seismic waves. I just found a decent site at JPL here that illustrates the earth's structure nicely, although it appears to have been written for grade schoolers.
The idea that the mantle is liquid is one of the most widely held misconceptions about major geological concepts. It exhibits ductile deformation, so it flows something like a liquid, with a speed of centimeters or meters per year. Magma, however, results when rock is pushed up into the crust from the mantle - the decrease in pressure lowers the melting temperature. It can also be generated when water seeps into hot rocks - wet rock has a lower melting temperature. It is NOT evidence that the mantle itself is liquid.
So why would this work? A large body of iron would be much denser than mantle rock, and at a hundred million kilograms, the net downward force would be considerable enough to force mantle rock out of the way. I'm too lazy to figure out the physics for this post, but I would imagine this is the content of the Nature article. The interesting question would be, "would ductile deformation occur quickly enough to get the iron down in a reasonable amount of time?" The answer, apparently, is 'yes'.