Slashdot Mirror
First Plasma on the Levitated Dipole Experiment
deglr6328 writes "In light of recent, somewhat disappointing news in the world of nuclear fusion research, it is worth noting that there are still reasons to keep up hope that some breakthroughs are yet to be made. At 12:53 pm on the 13th. of this month the Levitated Dipole Experiment achieved its first plasma. The Levitated Dipole Experiment(LDX), built at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a joint project of Columbia University and MIT, is a magnetic confinement fusion research device, that unlike all previous stellarator, reverse-field pinch and tokamak like experiments, uses a superconducting levitated torus to confine its plasma. The LDX's achievement of first plasma is, in a way, about 17 years in the making even though it has only been in construction since 1999. The concept for LDX was first considered by Akira Hasegawa as he was studying the data coming in from the Voyager missions which flew through the (dipole) magnetospheres of the outer planets. He noticed that unlike laboratory confined fusion plasmas which tended to be unstable, difficult to control, and which lost energy quickly, the plasma of a magnetosphere is intrinsically more quiescent, stable and actually reacts favorably (increases its density/temperature) to outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm. A highly informative and interesting video of operations on the day of first shot can be found here. Congratulations to the scientists and engineers who have worked very hard on getting the project to this point and here's looking forward to the possibility that LDX will reveal fundamentally new physics in the arduous quest for clean fusion energy."
now that's a gay nigger
The plasma fusion guys seem to have sucked down billions of dollars to build their huge ungainly and ultimately unworkable Rube Goldberg devices.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now. The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
And remember kids: in Soviet Russia dipols levitate YOU!
So can we now make a flux capacitor?
Researchers were stunned on Saturday as they discovered that the key component of the new fusion bottle has gone missing. A late-night janitor reported hearing someone say "Mmmmmmm...levitating superconductive plasma donut" shortly before the crucial torus disappeared.
Now when can I get one in my DeLorean?
Now we can all keenly anticipate the first episode of Enterprise to mention the almighty superconducting levitated torus that has powered Federation impulse drives all long.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work. Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Your priorities appear to be based on media exposure.
Funds, on the other hand, are assigned proportionally to the expected benefit (probability of success times benefit of success).
They throw the big money cause they had big results.
.. cut & paste it. If this effect is real can't you put up the designs for a cold fusion device on a file sharing network or a website and let us download it and build 'em ?
..somehow P2P has pr0n and mp3 yet.
Show us the proof on cold fusion. Right here on slashdot
I mean CF whackos talk as if they have these super cheap working almost free energy devices
Reason I said P2P for this is because the CF nuts say big oil companies may try to shut down any websites.
is it just me, or does anyone else get a tad nervous when they see 'nuclear fusion' and 'akira' in the same context of an article discussing real world scientific research?
If that did happen, would you live through it?
I are winner
Wow was he also able to see into the future? Feynman died in '88, the cold fusion nonsense didn't start until '89.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
No matter how well it will work. No matter how safe they can make it. No matter how efficient it will be. No matter how clean the process is.
Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse.
Just as they do with nuclear power. Such a horror. Clean energy replacing coal/oil plants spewing hundreds of metric tons of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere each and every year? Surely it must be evil.
It's not cold but...
it's nothing like the cool sun like plasma ball they showed in the spiderman 2. No indestructable antimagnetic hands with AI attached to some guy's back and head. I just watched the video and all they showed was some blue light through a looking glass in some ridiculous cylinder. They should take some pointers from the Hollywood producers and start making plasma balls in open space and have people with gigantic robot arms controlling it. Then maybe the will get more funding.
You can't handle the truth.
Yum, video! They should have asked the /. crowd for help. If we can just get a few more people, their molten server would become plasma!
Why wouldn't you live through it, the better question is. What would happen if all the atoms in my entire body phasesd out of existance at the same time? Oh course they would all eventually phase back in, and retain they're states, so, no one would be any wiser....
WOOO I'M THE INVISIBLE MAN (on certain time scales)
Did he happen to mention how exactly you can overcome the huge Coulomb barrier (ballpark: millions of electron volts) that ordinarily keeps separate nuclei separate? Especially using only "cold" (i.e., few eV or less) collisions?
Gawd why is this being modded up?? .. with no results. I mean NO results .. as in nothing.
.. no interesting results whatsoever .. then too bad it gets no funding .. there is no other way to weed out the insane ideas.
.. a good idea gets swept under the rug, but if it's really true it will be discovered eventually as theories are developed to explain experimental anomalies.
Millions ARE being spent on cold fusion
"Hot" fusion does have meaningful steps towards realization.
If I said that chanting a voodoo spell will create limitless energy do I deserve 1% of the money spent on energy R&D ??
If there is no proof
True
Too afraid to RTFA with a summary that long. Brain hurts, must go lie down now.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
Depends. If they all maintained their positions relative to one another, and you didn't hit anything unfortunate, I don't see why not.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Reminds me of the Retro-Encabulator...
The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbline was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-0-delta type placed in panendermic semiboiloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremie pipe to the differential gridlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.
ILL Clinton
Live Machinima Comedy Performance-August 28th-NYC
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
I are winner
We already have a working fusion reactor in our solarsystem - why don't we just start using that?
IMO there are 2 major drawbacks with this type of artificial fusion reactor:
1) The sun transforms 600 million tonnes of Hydrogen into Helium and energy every second. Why do we have to add to that number? If it is free hydrogen left in the inner solar system - lets save that for something else - like fuel for a future fusion reactor used in interplanetary travels, expeditions to the outer parts of our solarsystem (ie places far away from a natural fusion reactor). Or maybe we can use the nearby hydrogen to transform the carbondioxide in Venus atmosphere into water and graphite using the Bosh reaction.
It seemes too me as a waste to use the hydrogen here on earth as a powersource - where we already have the ability to use the nearby fusion reactor.
2) We go from depending on oil, which we have limited amounts of, into being dependant on tritium that is also rare. What is the gain for humanity?? - However I do see the gain for energy corporations - non-commodity stuff rocks, wee.
(please enlighten me if I have misunderstood something)
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Columbia University and MIT have decided to join organizations to now be known as UAC ......
[alk]
Yes. But that arrangement is important.
Anyone involved in computer science should understand the importance of arrangement.
No, you'd spend the rest of your life with your soul one foot to the right of your body. Maybe that would be handy, I don't know.
I see little reason to think otherwise.
There is more to it and what defines it as life, obviously, but assuming you could directly replicate every atom in a living thing the duplicate would theoretically be an identical living thing, would it not? Since you could construct a living thing atom by atom in that way it stands that life is, therefore, fundementally a complex arrangement of atoms although that does not mean it is 'nothing more' since that arrangement has many further properties.
as rocks have shown...
From your wiki link:
"The term "cold fusion" was coined by Dr Paul Palmer of Brigham Young University in 1986 in an investigation of "geo-fusion", or the possible existence of fusion in a planetary core."
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
So we don't turn the server into plasma, here's a mirror of the video:
http://razor.csbnet.se/First_LDX_Plasma2.mov
... Doesn't Mean that It actually Won't Be.
... but who is to say there won't be horrible, unwanted side-effects from this, somewhere down the road, when someone else invents a technology that allows us to connect the dots together in ways we don't, currently?
Sure, it may be 'safe' by our standards now, just like asbestos was safe enough to make underwear out of, and people used to get their toes x-ray'ed 'for the perfect fit'
The problem with Science is the same as the problem with Religion. Absolutes are un-attainable.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Yeah, the term was invented in an obscure paper where very few people noticed or used it until the fiasco of Stanley / Pons in '89 it was virtually unknown.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Absolutely arrangement is important. If it wasn't, nobody would ever die. But it being important doesn't mean it's the sole distinction between living and non living matter.
I are winner
And you've just got to see the incredible exoskeletal arms that the lead scientist uses to control the experiment!
I'm sure that he's taken ample precautions to keep them from taking him over....
Wow, that thing puts my blue LEDs to shame!
All rites reversed 2010
Well.... I dunno about that. Don't forget about the recent CONSTRUCTION of a simple cell in the lab. Now, that was nothing but arrangement of the pieces to an existing and not-wholly-understood pattern. But as far as I'm concerned, it demonstrates that all that matters is the arrangement...
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
Later experiments proved successful as Akira Hasegawa brought Japanese know-how to bear in constructing two pairs of robotic tentacles to control the fusion reaction directly. No word yet as to whether the experiment has foreshadowed the appearance of mutated spider people; "Spider-men" so to speak.
Instead of it being diespearsed throughout the atmosphere all of the nuclear waste is concentrated. Now you have to spend money to dispose of it somewhere, for at least 150+ years. Don't forget to heavily guard it because it can be used for weapons. But first you transport it to that place. This is an important point, look up the percentage of accidents per 1,000,000 truck miles/rail miles driven. Now figure out many total miles it will take to transport the waste from every nuclear power plant to these disposal sites. Do you think that there wont be any accidents? I dont't.
The only clear way to do this is via Focus Fusion, which means one is working with the natural instabilities of Plasma rather than attempting to straightjacket them with massive Magnetic Fields. Nothing more really needs to be said about Focus Fusion from me so I'll just paste what they're saying here:
Focus fusion is the only known method that can achieve hydrogen-boron fusion. It also has other advantages over tokamak based deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. Focus fusion reactors will be much less expensive for the same amount of power. Tokamak reactors generate electricity by boiling water for a steam powered generator (high energy neutrons provide the heat.) This is the same method that coal power plants use. The only difference is the heat source. In a coal power plant the steam generator is the most expensive part of the plant so replacing the heat source will not result in a lot of savings. Also, this method of generating electricity is limited by the fundamental efficiency limits of heat engines. Focus fusion reactors do not require a heat engine. They generate electricity directly. After all, electricity is just moving charged particles. The particle decelerators in a focus fusion reactor merely transfer the electricity of charged particle beams into a wire. This process does not face the efficiency limits of heat engines.
A focus fusion reactor should be able to economically generate power in quantities as small as 20MW from a power plant the size of a two car garage. This means they will be useful for powering individual villages in the third world where regional electricity grids are not as well developed. And in developed nations focus fusion power can be generated near where it will be used to reduce transmission losses and can be owned by the communities it serves to reduce dependence on speculative energy markets.
If there are any financiers out there who have the backbone to do what is right in this world and do what is right for mankind, I urge you to fund this research to banish forever the specter of Fossil Fuel shortages and associated ecological damage and begin a new era in Human History.
We don't have to buy out tritium from people
who hate us. That's a benefit right there.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
And the great physicist Einstein objected to quantum mechanics on the basis that "God does not play dice". He was wrong. Being a great scientist does not preclude being completely wrong about something.
One can do cold fusion right now - muon catalysed. The problem is getting it to output more energy than one puts in (excluding the "frozen" energy of the mass that I'm trying to liberate in the first place...) - muon catalysed fusion will probably never reach break even.
Good farnsworth-hirsch fusors spray out loads of neutrons, and while they're not exactly "cold", they are "tabletop" and "buildable by smart high-school students". But they'll probably never reach break-even either. On the other hand, they are pretty amazing in their own right.
"classic" cold fusion i.e. Sitting a block of palladium (or whatever the hell the hydrogen-soaking-up metal was...) in a hydrogen atmosphere, passing a current through it, and sorta hoping... has never demonstrated fusion repeatably.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.
No we wouldn't. Nobody is going to throw money at trying to do in practice something which doesn't work in theory. There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
Paper and pencils don't cost much. Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible, and you can bet they'll get money.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
Do you have a source for that? Besides which, that isn't relevant. There is a huge difference between showing something is possible and showing that it is not impossible.
Feynman himself also made a lot of good statements about pseudoscience. Perhaps you should read them? Unlike you, I provide a reference.
That is if atoms are real. Has anyone ever seen an atom?
Science has tested theories that there are atoms, and everytime they've tested that I've heard of they've come out positive - but similar things could be said about "the earth is flat" argument several hundred years ago. We may not have the technology yet to really understand these things, even though we have "laws" and "theories" that describe them very well in most cases.
Let's not lose site of this otherwise we are not being open minded about our surroundings (I think science already discourages alot of research that may contradict currently accepted theories, but should it?).
Hawking has never been wrong. . .
Any QP will tell yoy that we know very little about QM.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am curious why anyone thinks having a infinite supply of energy would be a good thing?
Then maybe they'd get more money?
If cold fusion is feasible, then the scientists that claimed they achieved it did the field a disservice by lying about it. No one has been able to replicate the experiment, and it turned out to be just a bunch of lies to get media attention.
Bag of electronc parts, worthles.
Same electronic parts arranged into a radio, priceless.
Something can be more then the sum of its parts.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is a huge difference between showing something is possible and showing that it is not impossible.
Wouldn't one be the proof of the other? I mean, how can you conclusively show that something is not impossible without demonstrating that it is possible?
You can purchase a radio at Walmart for about $4.98
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Has anyone ever seen an atom?
Not a single atom directly (large collections, sure...) - They're too small... but... with the aid of a tunnelling microscope, these days people regularly probe individual atoms. And even sculpt corporate logos out of small groups of them...
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html
Is that like "first post!" for levitated dipoles?
Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion does not and never has worked -- the excess heat the observed was an artifact from their calorimetery equipment caused by the fact that neither of them knew how to properly use it....and the pseudoscientists have been running with the idea since.
Show me an independantly verifiable cold fusion experiment that gives a positive result, and _then_ it might be worth funding. Until then, so-called "hot" fusion is the way to go.
Got mead?
Life is just a definition anyway. It doesn't exist outside of our concept of it. It's something we invented.
>We have no reason to believe otherwise.
We?
To some there is every reason to believe that humans are more than just a complex arrangement of atoms.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
For those unfortunate slashdot readers of lesser ISP fortitude, slashdot is proud to offer the following descriptive video summery.
...
Brought to you by The Undergraduate Research Assistants Pool - a statistically significant proportion of particle physicists agree, only Undergraduate Research Assistants can stand up to the kind of abuse a particle physicist demands.
[TITLE SEQUENCE]
[lively tour of facility]
[8 minutes of reality-show-finally like filler including:
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with female research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with Physicist]
[clip montage of scientific equipment]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
]
[nasa tv style clip of scientists congratulating each other over inscrutable data on distant CRT's during and after triumphant success]
[replay of triumphant success, this time with wholly satisfying video of glowing blue science goodness]
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We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
Yes there is. It's called entropy.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
You know, those cheat models where the body is off centre....
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Kaneda!!
And Doc Ock was unavailable for comment...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Makes one wonder if his thesis will be invoked at some point in this new endeavor.
Meanwhile I was working on chronological developments in Biblical Hebrews and their applicability to dating disputed texts in the Pentateuch. Reeeeeeeal useful stuff.
I mean, how can you conclusively show that something is not impossible without demonstrating that it is possible?
In logic, you can't. But I didn't intend the terms in a strict logical sense, where "impossible" is the logical complement to "possible".
For the sake of clarification: By "impossible" I meant the strict sense. That Which Does Not Occur.
By "possible" I meant a looser sense than "not impossible", e.g. "humanly possible", or perhaps even "likely".
That's how most people use these words. We say that it's "impossible" for something to happen when we mean, "not likely at all", and we say "possible" when we mean "likely".
"Possible" and "impossible" in the popular usage are not quite the terms they are in logic, and so one shouldn't really jump on a sentence in a popular context like that and assume it refers to a strict logical one.
not sure why, but this reminds me of that book by Asimov, "even the gods themselves". anyone read that?
- Is there some substance in the universe we should be using OTHER than hydrogen? I mean, it is the most abundant element in the universe.
- Solar power is a good point, but not workable any time in the forseeable future to meet humanity's energy needs. You could cover entire deserts with modern solar stuff, at astronomical cost, and not come near to meeting our current energy demand.
- We, as humans, want to be able to go place that are inhospitable to us.. place where the sun don't shine. The bottom of the ocean, deep space, the polar regions. Solar power won't help there.
Why don't you actually READ a peer reviewed journal. A little thing called muon catalyzed fusion has been around for 50 years. Oh yes, it fits within the description of Cold Fusion. As a sparrow can fly so can a 747. In nature, there is muon catalyzed fusion hence it is likely possible to construct a man made structure which can confine deuterium and tritium and use a Coulomb force to produce a situation where the atomic nuclei are close enough together to allow quantum tunneling to occur at a rate fast enough to produce energy. Unfortunately, there is currently no research in this area because of the negative stigma attached the the words Cold Fusion. Incidentally, it is morons like yourself who propagate such unfounded stupidity.
"Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse."
The bile spewed by supposedly intelligent people when it comes to atomic energy is simply staggering. Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste. Take away that problem (as future fusion reactors could do, correct?) and I'm all for it.
Enjoy your karma, whore.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Many people fail to realise that the 'laws of entropy' aren't laws, they're statements of statistical likelihoods. Entryopy can spontaneously decrease, its just incredibly incredibly incredibly unlikely to do so by any statistically significant amount. ... jump one foot to the left.
But in this case entropy isnt realy relevent.
If you want every partical in your body to simultaneously 'jump' one foot to the left. All you have to do is
Sigs are for wimps. I am proud to be one.
Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Oh yeah? Sure there is! Everyone knows that subatomic particles use the metric system not English measurements, and a displacment of of 3.048 E14 just isn't a round enough number to be likely.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?"
Don't be silly. The phenomenon of life is merely the VERY complex arragngement of atoms, and nothing more.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
-- Alastair
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Just like all the other fusion work scientists have been prediciting for more than 20 years now.....
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Well then you're going to have to explain to me why you don't think the laws of physics "as we know it" is a sufficient model for fusion. It certainly has provided us with relatively good models of the Sun, as well as predicted the Hydrogen bomb, and it also has shown to work with tokomak fusion.
Newtonian physics did not correctly predict the orbit of Mercury. There was no real reason to assume it should.
However, Newtonian physics did correctly predict,for instance, the motion of billard balls.
Now say someone walks along and says billard balls don't work at all in the way Newtonian physics says they do. Yet noone is able to make the billard balls act that way. Would that grounds for abandoning Newtonian physics as a model of billard balls? Abandon for what?
There is no alternative theory which allows cold fusion. If there was, people would be testing it.
In the same way that physics "as we know it" 150 years ago provided an accurate model for billiard balls, we have every reason to believe physics "as we know it" today provides an accurate model for fusion.
It is not the final model and it is probably not an accurate model for say, the inside of black holes and for sub-subatomic particles and the large-scale forces in the universe.
The energy required to fuse two hydrogen nucleii is much smaller than the typical plasma physicst will tell you, because they think of things in terms of random thermal collisions, which are terribly inefficient. If the nucleii are lined up "on-center" they can be pushed together with orders of magnitude less energy than if they are collided at a glancing angle.
The scenario proposed to Feynman was that a solid crystal of deuterium atoms was collided with another one at close to absolute zero temperature, so that vibrations of the atoms was damped. If the two crystals collided with the nucleii aligned from both crystals, you would get massive fusion using energies that could potentially be generated by kinetic propulsion, such as a shockwave.
To some there is every reason to believe that humans are more than just a complex arrangement of atoms.
Could you give me a physical reason?
First time I've seen a post on /. without an icon.
Forget something?
- Agilo
Marvin Minsky, my dad, was a good friend of Feynman's. The two discussed a wide range of scientific ideas over the course of their association. This was one of them, well before the "cold fusion" thing.
One of the problems with physicists is that they are basically chemists. They are trained to think of things in thermodynamic terms, of bulk and statistical effects, rather than engineered interactions. The nano-technology proponents have experienced savage and unsound criticism from these type of people, even though there are obvious working examples of nanotechnology in nature (human cells, for example).
Physicsts are by their nature not trained or inclined to think about what you can do with molar quantities of materials engineered at the atomic scale. We will have to wait until a couple generations of them die off before the engineering approaches to atomic-scale materials and energy systems will not be dismissed so smugly.
That said, I wouldn't feel too badly about the whole thing. After all, people who don't read the article as its posted will likely check in tomorrow when they wake up, and while they probably won't contribute to an already saturated post, it's not as if they won't check out the links to LDX itself.
But yeah, the cold fusion twinkies are mildly annoying to the LDX crew too, and the people who think fusion is useless because we have the sun are, and I quote from someone who knows, 'stupid'. :-)
Hey, nice one!
hmm.. energy is quantized by the Plank constant but i don't think position is.
"Against the odds" doesn't really cover it (figure them out, they whizz right past "insane" before you're really even started adding factors). If that structure turns out to be built right into the basic properties of the universe anyway, that represents a far greater miracle than anything conventionally religious.
You need an organising principle of some kind, even if it's one of the bizarre "Gaia"-style hypotheses. Materialism excludes itself; that is, if you start with materialist axioms, you quickly discover that you're many kinds of impossible.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
~~~
Clean, safe, efficient. Pick two.
I don't think the hostility is directed at science in general, just the plasma physicists who exagerate the importance of their research in order to ensure the continuing supply of funds.
All what you mention about thermodynamic terms is OK, but one must remember that the nucleus is thousands of times smaller than the atom itself. Using nanotechnology to get nuclear fusion has been compared to welding grains of sand together using boxing gloves.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/shk val.htm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Speaking of fusion. Here's an article in popular mechanics about cold fusion's rebirth as a cheap way to make nuclear weapons. Link.
Kind of sad and ironic that, according to this article, that Cold Fusion means plentiful energy but also plentiful nukes.
Just about every power plant uses steam to power turbines, thus this accident could have happened at any of them.
Only types that don't use steam that I can think of off the top of my head is wind and hydroelectric. Most solar plants use mirrors to direct the light to a central point, using the collected light to make steam...
A better link would be Don't Mix Uranium in a Bucket
This was not a power plant accident, but a processing accident where the workers were, in my opinion, darwin award candidates. "Let's bypass safety procedures and rather than using the machine provided and doing it in small batches (to keep the uranium from going critical), we'll hurry it up by dumping it in a bucket and stirring it!"
It should be noted that more people die each year in coal mining/transportation accidents. But since these deaths happen so regularly, they're not reported in the news. It's like the fact that flying is safer than driving, but people pay lots of attention to plane crashes, because they're unusual.
I should be noted that the BBC makes some scary statements, like more than 300,000 people in the surrounding area were placed in danger. Other articles point out "Hundreds evacuated", which makes me think that the BBC is exagerating in their statement. Like most industrial accidents, the dilution needed to reach that many people would render it mostly harmless. The workers were harmed because they were right there.
Anytime industry gets big enough, accidents will happen occasionally. Especially with the universe conspiring to come up with bigger fools...
I don't read AC A human right
Stop trolling.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
IANANP, BIWARPFMEAC*. I'd like to elaborate a little bit on this point:
Fission occurs when a heavy radioactive nucleus (in the control rods) absorbs a neutron and splits into two smaller nuclei and a few extra neutrons. These new neutrons can be absorbed by other heavy nucli, and more fission occurs.
Now most of the neutrons released move too fast to be absorbed by a nucleus; instead, they just bounce off. In order for a sustainable reaction to take place, a material - called the moderator - is required to slow down the neutrons so that they can be absorbed.
Most modern** nuclear reactors are pressure-water reactors. This means that they use water as both a coolant and as a moderator. If the water excapes, then the reaction fissles out.
However, Chernobyl was initially designed with a solid moderator built into the reactor vessel. (I think it was graphite, if I remember correctly.) It used water purely as a coolant. So when the coolant leaked, the reactor kept on fissing atoms and the reaction got out of control (although not fast enough for a thermonuclear reaction).
That wasn't the only problem. The reactor's personal paniced and tried to send the control rods in too quickly. While the control rods were halfway in, neutrons bounced into the bottom of the reactor and formed a critical amount for a chain reaction. At the same time, the heat of the reaction and loss of pressure from the origional malfunction turned the leftover water into steam pockets also in the bottom of the reactor. Soon after, an explosion ruptured the reaction vessel.
Perhaps the primary cause of the accident (and of TMI) was the confusing interface to the equipment! Some devices used red lights to signify emergency conditions, while others used green or another color. Instruments were hard to read and slow to respond. An ergonomical failure contributed to the accident.
Today, most control rooms have learned from the mistakes at TMI and Chernobyl. They are easier and more consistant to use. However, even more improvements are possible with new designs. It is a pity that nobody will allow the old workhorses ot be retired.
* I am not a nuclear physicist, but I wrote a research paper for my Engineering Analysis class.
** "Modern Nuclear Reactor" is somewhat of an oxymoron. Due to NIMBY feelings among the general public, most commercial nuclear reactors are old (60s-70s era) and modern designs are never given a chance despite the improvements in efficiency, safety, and (less) waste production. :-(
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
The difference is that in the toy plasma ball the plasma is allowed to touch the glass it is encased in. In this LDX device there is a superconducting magnet(very powerfull) floating in the center of the vacuum chamber. Since a plasma consists of free charged particles floating around it is affected by this magentic field and is confined to the field lines of the magnet which allows it to exist in an extremely HOT state without touching the walls of the vacuum chamber and loosing all its energy. If a fusing plasma were to be contained merely in a glass bulb it would soon melt and vaporize due to the tremendous heat deposited by fast moving ions and electrons in the plasma(actually it would cool and "quench" the plasma fusion reaction long before this happened but supposing you could sustain its energy and temperature...then it would destroy its container).
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
>Could you give me a physical reason?
Not everything is physical.
Look at mathematics. Just because some concepts there don't relate to physical, "I can touch this" equivence doesn't mean that we can discount it.
Look at some stuff quantum physics says is possble. Should we discount some of its wacky things it says just because it has yet to be shown in something physical, "I can see its effects"?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
What people need to realizing is that you learn a lot more by being wrong than you do by being right, but I suppose if somebody put the science propaganda back on TV (Kennedy, Sputnik, Cold War, et cetera) people would be much more (sheepishly) excited. It really doesn't help that instead of being at "war" with a scientific rival, we're fighting cavemen with US-made automatic weapons. Instead of being excited about a scientific arms race, we're excited about an eminent police state, and all I have to say is "God help the US, I'm moving to Japan."
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
After producing two rings at the opposite end of a vacuum tube, they were guided by a magnetic field until they collided. At collision they repelled each other, and then were compressed. The rings heated up and stayed stable for 30 microseconds under compression ( which by plasma standards is a long time). The funding was cut off in 1978 because the concept was too far from the mainstream.
In 1999 John Brandenburg received a grant from NASA to move the experiment from Miami to Lanham MD (near NASA Goddard). He moved it and reassembled it, but never received an money to operate it. It stands gathering dust.
Right now, Paul Koloc is doing something similar in his garage, producing ball lightning ( a stable plasma structure that has been documented since Roman times). His project, Plasmak, has received some sbir funding. For more details on the Plasmak, look here.
From reading the white paper, I do not think the Trisops plasma is the same configuration as in the levitated dipole experiment. I do not have a clear idea of the structure of the Plasmak.
I list the Trisops papers below for anyone who wants to follow up.
Daniel R. Wells, Paul Edward Ziajka, and Jack L. Tunstall. Hydrodynamic confinement of thermonuclear plasmas TRISOPS VIII (plasma liner confinement). Fusion Tech., 9:83, 1986.
Winston H. Bostick and Daniel R. Wells. Azimuthal magnetic field in the conical theta pinch. Phys. Fluids, 6(9):1325, 1963.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
years until the surrounding areas become habitable
I have news for you, chemical pollution is just as bad if not worse. Chemicals are often stable. Meaning they'll stay dangerous forever, at least until they get diluted or are broken down through chemical means. Many poisons can remain deadly for thousands of years in a contained enviroment.
Air pollution from coal-fired power plants accounts for about 30,000 premature deaths in the USA each year
Times Beach became a superfund site, relocated 2,000 people, and 265 kilotons of soil incinerated
Don't forget oil spills!
Polluted Sand isn't going anywhere
200 homes rendered uninhabitable due to wood preservative
I don't read AC A human right
Here's a choice quote from the page you pointed to:
The plasma stream is so dense, in fact, that by touching the bulb with a grounded wire, you can actually melt through the glass in a few seconds! A real plasma torch!
Plasma will eat through any material it touches. So, confine the plasma to a region surrounding a floating ring, and the equimpent will (hopefully) survive long enough to achieve fusion temperatures. Presto, you see a glowy blue ring around a non-melting floating superconductiong electromagnet.
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
So yeah, I think fusion is important.
The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily. You're using the behavior of an electron encountering a step potential right now to read this post. If that doesn't satisfy, then just take a look at any image from an STM taken around atomic resolution.
Corral See all the waves?
The call for physical proof is significant:
mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe. Just because mathematics says that I can take any solid and rearrange it into any other solid using rigid motions, even if they don't have the same volume (Banach-Tarski Paradox) doesn't mean that I should expect to actually accomplish this on any physical object.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Extraterrestrials exist.
Their ship has been found.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I want to help Humanity. I want others to help Humanity. I want to help OTHERS to help to help Humanity. That is what Slashdot is for, supposedly, and I think we have stated most clearly this tonight.
I suggest you read Slashdot
> The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily.
Not all of quantum physics can/has been seen. For example tachyon particles.
>mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe.
Yet do we discount what mathematics is saying just because we can't experiment it in some lab?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I'd heard about plasma fusion existing as ... "like, something they think we can do" ... a few years ago. (It was after some going through library books at the local community college, incidentally. It sounded like a marvelous possibility - producing fuel from seawater, even, perhaps by extracting any tritium and/or deuterium from it.)
More recently, I'd heard something - if I recall, correctly - about US agencies pulling out of the joint fusion reactor project in Europe. It sounded like an unfortunate decision - vaguely put, yeah.
I'd not know that MIT or Columbia had still been working about sustainable-fusion research, and that they are trying new "angles" with it.
I'm glad to hear, now, that research, about sustainable fusion, is continuing - and a bit saddened, if the quaint Tokamak has really been outmoded, but pardon my sentimentality.
and so, I'm grateful to have been able to read a report about this.
Thank you.
Don't feel too bad. Most Slashdotters are out on the town on a Saturday night; it's just the losers who are still posting. As for the moderators - no-one understands how it ends up being what it is, but the leading theory is that most moderators are under the influence of some pretty serious drugs while moderating.
Seriously though, congratulations on first plasma. I visited LDX about 8 months ago and you've certainly made much progress since then. However, you might want to make it clear that this doesn't mean that fusion is just around the corner. As far as I understand, the LDX concept is a bit of a dark horse; keeping the superconducting magnet cold in the presence of the plasma is challenging, no? I know they talk about a refrigerator, but that has never been demonstrated...
Anyway, I look forward to hearing about the plasma properties and confinement...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I'd say its more that mathematics is just mathematics until it touches on some other field. It'd be meaningless to take some random branch of mathematics and say 'this corresponds to our universe'. Rather, mathematics is a set of tools such that given something that does follow some particular rule, we can figure out what that rule implies in a rigorous manner. The Banach-Tarski paradox, for instance, fails to occur physically because no particle can actually be a geometric point, so the size of the cut object is significant, whereas in the abstract geometry of solids and surfaces, that limit does not exist. Without reference to some measurable phenomenon, mathematics just tells us what could be, not what is.
As for tachyons, I believe thats more of a relativistic 'missing object', and one where you basically say 'hey, what does it imply if I pick a mass/energy as having this strange value...' as opposed to something demanded by the theory which simply hasn't been observed. The 'search for the Higgs boson' thing might be a better case, but then, if we don't find it even though we're looking where it should be found, we have to conclude that the theory that implies it is wrong, not that it exists but we're just unable to measure it.
I've read that they're either filming or have filmed a zombie movie in Chernobyl. Must be getting safer. Heck, they were even having tours of the area.
I don't read AC A human right
Not everyone does think it would be good. Amory Lovins once said what he would think if a truly cheap, abundant and clean source of power was discovered. He said it would be a disaster.
His problem was not with the energy source itself, but with what he thought it would be put to use doing. His preference was to limit what mankind could do with it by going for only relatively limited sources of power.
I strongly disagree with him, as you could make the same point about advanced medicine leading to biowar agents. Giving up what we've learned about antibiotics and containing epidemics because that information can be (and has been) misused seems misguided to me.
But, there certainly are people who feel that way.
There are larger numbers who are willing to accept the existing level of technology, but are very nervous about further discoveries.
Again, I personally feel this is misguided. We've largely made our Faustian bargain with technology, and going back or stagnating now would lead to truly massive suffering when the current pyramid game of our fuel sources run out.
I see more advanced power sources as a possible way for the masses of the third world to raise their standard of living greatly without the massive environmental impact that more primitive power sources would bring. We can argue about what sources to use (any of several might work), but trying to bring China and India to even a fraction of the per capita energy availability of the west with coal, for example, will have a huge impact.
btw, in "outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm.," you probably wanted "eg." (can be read "for example")
"ie." (can be read "that is") makes no sense there.
Unless michael changed it to that, the editors here are about as ineffective as us readers.
Also note that there is no entrance exam here. Anyone can start an account, all that's required is intelligence enough to fill out a web form.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Keep in mind that this is actually a very unusual "science" article for /.. The first thing I thought when I brought it up was "good golly, this is the LONGEST blurb I've EVER read here." Most of the time there's just a link to an article and a comment from the editors, sometimes cute, sometimes snide. This is something far too hard to make an informed comment on.
/. "pet favorite" technologies. Hydrogen gets coverage. Solar gets coverage. Energy-reducing technologies(PRT, LEDs) do not get coverage except where related to computers. Fusion is very borderline, because it seems naively related to fission, which is Evil to half the posters and Good to the other half.
Then, from there, I realized that it did not cover one of the
In short, this is the wrong market. When people can be anonymous, they'll go ahead and sneeringly push away things they're not really interested in. The same thing happens if an article on game design is posted in the games section; the replies are by well-meaning, but uninterested gamers, who post a few silly or ill-informed comments.
The gazillions of dollars ploughed into fusion research would be better put into something that has been **PROVEN** to work. Check out the following site - http://www.whispertech.co.nz/ WhisperTech is a Christchurch (New Zealand) company that has just clinched a ***$300 MILLION *** dollar contract to supply their mega-hotted-up (and now *economically viable** ) Stirling engines to the UK market. They (WhisperTech) have been around for a while, and no-one gets a $300 million contract for something that doesn't work! I'm a supporter of both fuel cells and Sturling engines. Both are proven technologies that (with a fraction of the wasted money put into fusion research) could supply us with a large percentage of our energy needs.
there have been numerous advancements in transport which have made the relocation of nuclear waste less dangerous than the floating ecological disasters in wait we call oil tankers. a quick google search reveals as much, i invite you to do some research.
that said, there are granite statues littering washington, dc which emit more radiation than the yucca mountain storage facility's (where the US puts all their nuclear waste) radiation levels or that it is even allowed to come close to. in addition to this, as has already been pointed out, current coal burning spews radiation into the atmosphere an order of magnitude greater than the combined effect of any and all nuclear mishaps.
it was only a few months ago when James Lovelock, patron saint of the greenies, jumped ship with the backwards logic of greenpeace et al and himself stated that nuclear energy is the only real and present solution available to us to save ourselves from the eco-disaster to come from our current and past energy production means. it is greenies who cling tightly to the far off dreams of pure energy production that are now the greatest danger. the energy industry wants to move to nuclear, we *need* to move to nuclear. antiqueted and baseless fears that halt implementation of modern, safe, and more effecient nuclear technology are holding the human race back from making real progress towards keeping us and the environment productive to our survival stable enough to have the time to develop the fabled pure energy technologies of green dreams.
Congradulations, you're a moron.
Actually, he's only a robot.
This just in: Cold fusion was a fraud.
There are several reasons all of the subatomic particles in your body might simultaneously jump one foot to the left--for example, *you* might actually endeaver to jump one foot to the left. Never-the-less, the statistical probability of that occuring without any impeding force is absolutely negligible. If Feynman did propose such a thought then I'd readily defer to Feynman and assume that he believed the statistical probablity to be somewhat closer to probable than negligable. Then again, Feynman could have been joking.
Now if I have a choice, I'll take nuke plant on my back yard over a coal plant 5 times out of 5.
At least with a nuke plant there's something like 99,97% chance nothing too serious will ever happen. Or whatever the current ratio of reactors to serious accidents affecting environment is.
With a coal plant I'd probably kiss goodbye to good 5 years of my life due to all the coal dust. Plus having asthma and other fun stuff earlier.
I'm trying to think how his logic went but I can't remember it.
I can't think. Does that mean I am not?
retain they're states
"their".
Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste.
Oh, that's just something they say to sound more rational. Now if you compare risks and accidents with conventional fossile fuel transportation such as oil tankers and gas pipes.. Suddenly carting around rather modest amounts of nuclear fuel/waste isn't such a big problem.
Don't forget that the amount of uranium required to produce equivalent energy as coal is less than 1/1000.
As for storage. those "rational" fears are that the containers buried into bedrock (done here in Europe) may be damaged by geological activity sometime in far future. And the waste might come into contact with water supply or return to surface.
All I can say to that is: Radon.
Somehow we can deal with naturally occurring radiation..
"English measurements" care to explain yourself (Need I add - 'You insensitive clod!')
We English have laws requiring metric measurements to be used in shops. It's up to the shop to provide Imperial ones.
Last I heard it was the US that didn't use the metric system - correct me if I'm wrong?
im in ur
"there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left"
There's something called probability too seeing to that i.e. what is the probability of that happenining? Although I cannot prove it, the probability of it happenning is VERY low - getting statistical data to prove that should be a no-brainer task.
Fact is, the FORECASTED probability of a project's success and the amount of funding it receives are proportional.
The problem with this is the forecasting. In economy everybody knows how crucial forecasts are, however, in scientific research forecasts have no value except maybe for formulating theories... and as long as something remains purely theoretical it has no economic value.
- "They misunderestimated me."
FYI, the most complete reference for my research paper was the Ph.D. Thesis for Dr. Alexander Roman Sich when at MIT:
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
He was only wrong if there is a God. Otherwise, he was quite right. There is no evidence there is a God (or gods), so I suspect he was right on the money. No God = no God playing dice. :)
You do know that Einstein understood quantum mechanics pretty well, right? He just didn't like the idea.
He was the one who came up with light manifesting as packets and waves, after all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Fucking awesome!
No-longer-rich solar power enthusiast after installation of solar power system:
Fucking clouds.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Check out the phenomena known as emergence. For example, ants find the shortest route to a food source through clever use of their pheromones. Clever in the sense that the system is ingenious, however the ants do not consciously do anything except mark their trails as they randomly run about and follow other pheromone trails. The pheromone path-creation is not programmed into the ants. They just follow a couple of simple rules.
The result is very ingenious: the shortest route will eventually have the strongest pheromones. As the pheromones vaporize over time, the less used paths die away, and the most used paths (which are also shorter as distance equals time spent in this case) will rule.
That's the organizing principle (or at least one of them). Emergence through synergy. Great complexity comes from the interaction of very small agents (particles, molecules, whatever). Check out the authors Holland, Wolfram and Flake, to name just some from the top of my head.
It's like putting a bunch of threads into a bag and rolling them around with your hands in the bags. You end up with knots.
We didn't become humans at once. What happens in micro level also exhibits emergence upwards up to the macro level. Eventually there's a clump called a human. Humans then form societies, come up with culture and build houses which are emergent properties of humans. Houses clump together into cities, and cities into a metropolis, everytime giving birth to new kind of complexity and new kind of things. And so on. We don't have to consciously "build a city". All it takes is for many people to build houses next to a nice river where lots of fish can be found. In time, there will be a city there, although nobody "built the city" per se.
Also, if the "organizing principle" was broken somehow, there would have appeared no intelligent life, and we would not be observing all this, thus we would not know that the organizing principle was broken!
I do not moderate.
Too much networking for you? I'm assuming that you mean "particles and waves" instead of packets and waves.
Although it gave me a good laugh!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Just because you can get funding doesn't mean that your research is legitimate!
I'm with Einstein on this. :)
I accept that QM is currently the most accurate model of the very small, I just don't like it.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
In logic, you can't. But I didn't intend the terms in a strict logical sense, where "impossible" is the logical complement to "possible".
What a load of crap.
Possible means it can happen.
Impossible means it can't.
That's how most people use these words. We say that it's "impossible" for something to happen when we mean, "not likely at all", and we say "possible" when we mean "likely".
If I say "possible" or "impossible" that is exactly what I mean. If I mean "likely" or "unlikely" I will bloody well say so.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
For some reason I've been getting mod points a lot recently. After a while you are struggling to find something worth modding up that hasn't already been modded, and you start dishing them out as funny, or giving poits to posts that barely qualify. The other thing is simultaneous mods. You see a post at 0 or 1 that you think deserves maybe 1 or 2 mod points, mod it, and on refresh it's +5.
0)Archimedes Plutonium says, 'you can't break even!'
2 /1000mpg .php
c oldfusion _pr.html
0 4w.htm l
e ad69682/pg 1
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/
1)It's Bush's fault.
http://www.padrak.com/ine/WACF.html
2)Big oil greed put out a hit on the inventor of the 1000mpg carburator and the secret is locked in a vault in Dallas.
Now the Japanese have it and will be cleaning the USA's economic clock.
http://www.nissanperformancemag.com/june0
The litttle guys are doing the same with cold fusion.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/
3)If only the US would let the UN handle it.
http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_ma29.htm
4)Money should go to the poor and the schools.
(primary school parking lot bumper stickers)
5)The world hates the USA because of until someone outside the USA makes some progress there is scant funding but NOW!
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-
6)If the cold fusion guys would focus on the weapons aspects of their research, then they'd get some funding.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thr
7)Archimedes Plutonium says, 'you can't break even!' He really is quite serious about this.
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/
Nicola Tesla proclaiming free energy for all as he excites the earths confined plasma with radio waves.
We see self-replication happening in several ways. We have no real idea how it could start.
We do know that the Miller experiments showed that even in the most structured and artificial of circumstances, organic chemicals tend to turn to poisonous brown goo rather than self-replicating molecules. Miller also began with a reducing atmosphere, and everything geology has turned up points to an oxidising atmosphere. All of the other work (clays and stuff) is more or less based on that red herring.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you work the odds out, there are at least several hundred orders of magnitude too few planets (and/or too few seconds) for abiogenesis to get a pseudopod in the door.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...what kind of emergence explains the transition from water and bare rock to self-contained, self-replicating organic assemblies?
Miller added a generous helping of structure and presumed initial conditions which geology says never happened, and still didn't get anything better than some of the amino acids - and those swimming in poisons. It turns out that you will never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way. How can emergence counter this?
It sounds far too much like "...then a miracle occurs..." to me.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
birds make nests
ants live in colonies
lions hunt
dogs hang out in packs
etc.
humans are superstitious
For those who want to mention Bokonon, I'll save you the trouble:
Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Isn't the main problem with the plasmak(tm) concept that it's (tm)?
The trademarking really makes it look like questionable science.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
What a great idea! A toroid, superconducting, suspension ring.
It makes one say: "Why didn't I think of that."
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Cold Fusion is a commercial failure. The process may be workable but the most important fact has been overlooked for years.
Cold Fusion requires a another catalyst metal, eg Palladium. When fusion occurs, this metal is used up in a nuclear reaction. Hydrogen is certainly limitless in the ocenas. However, Cold Fusion is commercially limited by the limeted resource, Palladium.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
But if your brain is reconstructed atom by atom wouldn't it be identical and therefore think identically?
No, I meant packet in the classic sense of the word. Discrete packets of energy, as contrasted with a wave field effect. I was handwaving, but I meant what I said. I'm glad you were amused, though. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Holy shit! Your father is Marvin Minsky!
The least intuitive thing about QM for me is the ability of observation at a distance to affect results.
I keep hoping that particular issue has a more classic cause in physics. I just have more trouble even imagining what it would be. :(
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
NIMBY syndrome also scuttled the Shoreham plant on Long Island.
The end result is that LI's power grid is currently running within a few percent of capacity, and is severely dependent on large underwater cables crossing the Sound. Enough that in addition to articles on the generic sorry state of the power grid, I've seen at least one IEEE Spectrum article focusing on Long Island alone.
So it's no surprise that LI got hit by the big blackout last year. In general, the blackout most likely wouldn't have happened if NIMBY syndrome hadn't caused multiple (nuclear AND non-nuclear) plants to have their plans for construction scrapped, resulting in the Northeastern power grid running dangerously close to maximum capacity with little to no margin.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The cold fusion researchers aren't saying that hot fusion models are wrong, any more than Planck et al said that billiard models were wrong. Current hot fusion models, however, say nothing about possible nuclear effects in the solid state.
Physics "as we know it" says that fusion works well in hot, dense plasmas, and that hot dense plasmas occur for long periods either by gravitational confinement (eg the sun) or for short periods (inertial confinement, H-bombs). Nobody is disputing that.
The hot fusion as power proponents are saying that they can make it work in a hot, low-density plasma -- and they've had very limited success. The cold fusion proponents are saying that they've observed some wierd phenomenon in the solid state, and it should be investigated.
Seems to me the former are selling far more expensive snake oil than the latter.
-- Alastair
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
Well we have no proof otherwise. However, many people have suggested that human level reasoning cannot be assembled from a purely deterministic system and that therefore we must be able to tap some sort of quantum mechanical effect in our logic processes.
If one believes the mutliple universes theory of quantum mechanics, then one could call this ability to tap quantum mechanical effects for reasoning, a soul.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
It was my understanding that the exact process involved in a transistor is still not completely predicted...
That is, that while we know pretty precisely WHAT happens, we still don't know WHY. This is from a college professor of Quantum mechanics giving a guest lecture at SAPC in 1994. The name of the gentleman escapes me but I remember his point (and slide) quite well... the slide BTW, depicted the P-material as blue with white holes and the n-material as white with red balls all through it.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
One can do cold fusion right now - muon catalysed. etc.
You only say that because you are being reasonable. The whole cold fusion "debate" has been polarized into a knee jerk flamefest, where you seemingly have to accept that either 1) cold fusion is impossible, or 2) cold fusion is trivially easy but big-money is supressing it.
There is a small cadre of reasonable people, who notice that fusion can and does take place under "low-temp/pressure" condition (where "low" is relative, just as it is for "high-temp" superconductors, etc.), but that does not mean anyone has the foggiest idea how to do anything usefull with it. So far as I can tell, these people are routinely shouted down/ignored by both sides.
-- MarkusQ
...many people have suggested that human level reasoning cannot be assembled from a purely deterministic system...
Of course, just because they suggested it does not mean it is correct. Proof requires some careful logic.
Nope? Didn't think so. All you've got is hear-say, slander, fairy tales, and group-think.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
I quote from the RFP "general reading" link:
"Research on Reversed Field Pinch (RFP) Devices
Like tokamaks, RFP devices are axisymmetric. The main difference lies in the spatial distribution of the toroidal magnetic field, which changes sign at the edge of the plasma.
And, correct me if I am wrong, but your comment essentially equates to "OMGWTF can't people realise the significance of this?!!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Short story is, multiply out the odds of forming any useful organics given all necessary amino acids in any required amounts versus all "natural" combinations (ie, only trialling arrangements known to be chemically possible in order to eliminate accusations of stretching the odds). Ignoring the constraints of distance (molecules getting to each other to interact) and gross structure, and contamination, you don't have anything like enough atoms or seconds in the known universe to even approach reasonable odds of a successful outcome.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's kind of like saying, "If you'll cede me the existence of unicorns, the evidence for elves looks quite good." (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There is indeed evidence of large-scale structure in the form of quantum redshifts for QSOs, but not of complexity. If there were high levels of complexity in the universe, we should be able to see precursors and aggregations of it at a scale perceptible to us. In short, if it's complex at one level, it is reasonable to expect complexity at all levels.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, because relationships and reactions between components in the brain take place on a subatomic level and involve not only matter but energy. In short, not only would you need to recreate all the atoms of the brain in the same positions, but also recreate the states(velocities, momentums, charges, etc.) of all the particles that make up those atoms and also any photons that happen to be milling about. Since we don't understand all the fine points of how the brain works, we would need a "snapshot" of a brain in action to recreate with our hyper-replicators, instead of a blueprint to create one a peice at t a time.
Sleep is futile.
No, theories aren't evidence. Evidence would be, e.g., if primitive carbon-based self-replication could be constructed in a laboratory, using condition that might have been present when the earth was young.
What we do know fairly certain is that primitive organic compounds (such as amino acid) can be created spontaneously in conditions which seems likely at the time. From there to self-replication is the "missing link", though there is no lack of theories to bridge this gap. They are all and one pure speculation, as far as I know.
And given unicorns, elves may be quite likely (though I fail to see the connection :) )
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
They haven't tried Naqueda yet. More alien technology!
I don't think smaller magnets would be able to contain fusion. The coil handles a tremendous 2000 Amps to produce a field with a strength of 6 Teslas, which is immensely powerful.
Compare this to a 12-inch cyclotron, which generates a peak field of one Tesla. This thing's magnet also weighs 4600 pounds compared to the LDX's 1300 because it is not superconducting.
The tests happen on this scale because we're looking toward fusion in the Real World. Power plants are likely to be big.
And perhaps more importantly, we're not talking about the relative dead-set certainty that million-to-one odds are when held up against odds which are hundreds of orders of magnitude short of the mark.
Many people have a problem with that.
The odds of being hit by lightning are roughly one in half a million, which means that roughly four people in this city (Perth, Western Australia) will be hit by lightning during the course of their lives. That's odds of better than one in 1E6.
Now say that four thousand of the denizens of Perth were struck by lightning at least once during the course of their lives. Would you call that a coincidence?
The odds of that happening are vanishingly small, probably about 1E37, but still only a very small fraction of a hundred orders of magnitude against.
The odds you face in combining enough of the right molecules the right way around to make a lifeform are considerably steeper than a "mere" hundred orders of magnitude - and that would only get you a lifeform not necessarily a living creature.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Miller apparently had a go at chasing up his aminos, and got nowhere. All I can find in the area is speculation, not research. If there are any chemical "back doors" leading straight through the energy barriers from a partial set of aminos to, say, a protein then nobody's knocked on them yet - at least, not publicly. Yet so much hangs on this (hangs as in cliff-hanger, hangs as in "hang fire").
If it didn't take ages to do the experiments, you could probably sell tickets. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing