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Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas
starexplorer2001 writes "LiveScience is reporting how scientists at Sandia's Z laboratory have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit (2 billion kelvins). That's hotter than the interior of our sun, which is only 15 million degrees F. And they don't know how they did it. Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"
no
According to the summary, the Sun's interior is 15 million degrees Fahrenheit. According to the article, it's 15 million degrees Kelvin which makes the Sun's interior actually 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
... I got 3.6 Billion Degree Gas just by eating at Taco Bell last week.
Bruce
Bwah? That's the most interesting part, to me. I mean, they MUST have had that sucker plugged into a surge protector. From where did the energy appear?
and I RTFA.
[all generalizations are untrue except this one]
It says that the record was set for the hottest temperature ever on earth. Unfortunately, the value they list is not the highest value I can obtain for a really hot temperture. The hottest temperature I found occurs at RHIC and that is a trillion degress kelvin not fifteen million. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/heavy_ion.htm Could it be a record temperture for a certain type of reaction? Also to answer the question about is this safe. Yes it's safe. The temperatures only occur for such a small tiny tiny tiny fraction of a second that it really doesn't affect anything.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Let's see. The experiment released more energy than it expended....
Let me think a minute.
Yes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
That's hot
They have no idea how, but they found all that thermal energy. "[T]he high temperature was achieved after the plasma's ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in."
Sounds like magic to me!
All they've done is re=discover blacklight power, this obviously bears the signs of a hyrino reaction.
\.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy#Power_p lant_design
Also plasma is not a gas. The article points this out, but the title gets it mixed up. It is a 4th phase of matter associated with high conductivity and separation of ionic components
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
They don't know how they did it? Then can we trust this report? Are we sure their measuring tools aren't messed up? Are we sure someone misheard something? How can SCIENTISTS not know how they achieved a result in an EXPERIMENT that they - as implied in the article - managed to reproduce?? Again, I repeat, they don't know HOW they did it?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say their tools are not calibrated correctly or a computer glitch is crossing an i when it should be dotting it.
My work involved doing quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations to extract equation of state (EOS) data for the tungsten wires used in the z-pinches. The highest temperatures I remember the simulations reaching, however, were only about 40,000 Kelvin.
I don't care what anyone says, these new pentiums just plain run too warm.
Can anyone calculate and post how far you have to put your hand from that to not get burned?
In late breaking news, it was revealed that a software bug cause this faulty reading. The correct value should have read: 150 degress.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'd be interested to know what kind of container they used to hold the gas.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
"Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down."
It must have been that bean I had for dinner
I'd say it was from Intel or AMD developing and testing new processors. ;)
That's hotter than the interior of our sun, which is only 15 million degrees F By 133 times hotter - jeez, atleast put "way hotter" somewhere in there.
... since at that "temperature" the particles aren't "hot", it's just a measure of how much energy they have...
...exist to protect humankind from destruction. Experiments where output >> input with no explanation have an amazing potential to result in new Arizona beachfront property and still no explanation. I for one hope the next step into this effect is not too successful.
The laws of the universe have finally come out of hiding and revealed to us that energy is an illusion and the abundance thereof is merely the lack of any continents at rest.
Just out of curiosity, what does that temperature imply about the velocity of the atoms in order to have that kind of average KE? is it fast enough to have relativistic significance?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
By the time it got to /. it had cooled down quite a bit. Should be ready to eat soon.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Crappy models have been used in good faith and produced bad results many times before, articularly those used to calculate the time since Big Bang etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Who writes this stuff anyway? Everyone knows that the P4 has the highest temp record.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Some of the greatest discoveries and inventions are accidental.
None of you have any idea what's going on! What really happened is these scientists have stumbled upon a gateway to hell, and this abnormally high temperature eminating from it is just the beginning of what can come out! We need to stop the scientists NOW before it's too late!
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Google: 15 million degrees fahrenheit in kelvin
15 million degrees Fahrenheit = 8 333 588.71 kelvin
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
Hohlraum. Now Google will give you decent results.
Rather than reading a digest from a science news site (not that it's a bad writeup) here is the press release from Sandia themselves.
Personally, I think the picture of the Z-machine is one of the coolest looking things I've seen. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not like it's a weather report or anything! Keep it scientific!
When you light a campfire with a match, you get more energy out than you put in.
Sorry, this is not a recipe for perpetual motion. For a new energy source, maybe, but not perpetual motion.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
For the curious, here's the actual abstract from the research paper, as published in Physical Review Letters:
Ion Viscous Heating in a Magnetohydrodynamically Unstable Z Pinch at Over 2×109 Kelvin
Pulsed power driven metallic wire-array Z pinches are the most powerful and efficient laboratory x-ray sources. Furthermore, under certain conditions the soft x-ray energy radiated in a 5 ns pulse at stagnation can exceed the estimated kinetic energy of the radial implosion phase by a factor of 3 to 4. A theoretical model is developed here to explain this, allowing the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion temperature plasma through the generation of fine scale, fast-growing m=0 interchange MHD instabilities at stagnation. These saturate nonlinearly and provide associated ion viscous heating. Next the ion energy is transferred by equipartition to the electrons and thus to soft x-ray radiation. Recent time-resolved iron spectra at Sandia confirm an ion temperature Ti of over 200 keV (2×109 degrees), as predicted by theory. These are believed to be record temperatures for a magnetically confined plasma.
Also, there's a press release from Sandia National Labs.
you just described the plotline of iD's original Doom.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Because the temperature differential of 1 Kelvin is the same differential as 1 degree Celcius, not 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Therefore, the sun is 15,000,523.67 degrees Celcius, which is 27 or so odd million degrees Fahrenheit.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
And they don't know how they did it.
Beans prob'ly
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Can't they tell ?
Next time use some wires that have dueterium and tritium in it.
While this is part of Sandia's fusion research, fusion does not occur anywhere in the plasma. It would be like saying that water boils in a microwave because the microwave is boiling.
Didn't Bush state a couple weeks ago that scientists in this country were on the verge of a fantastic energy breakthrough? Could this be it? If we are indeed tapping an unknown energy source, perhaps from another verse or dimension, the possibilities could be near endless.
2 .html
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/20/D8FT3GH0
Come on you know the white house right now is going....hmmm a new energy huh?
My prediction? We find a way to make it into a bomb....just like you know everything else we have....stone, fire, nuclear explosions? That's great but can we blow people up with it?
...I'm more impressed that someone made a thermometer that could measure it!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Why does steel and iron react so well to magnetic fields? Is that because of the Fe ions?
I believe steel is not particularly magnetic, and that soft iron is much more so. And the reason has more to to do with the structure of the material (how the crystals interact) than the atoms involved.
And would this still be effective once the wires had been transformed into plasma and being contained by the magnetic fields of the experiment? If so, would the energy of the magnetic field(s) be contributing?
No. First, the crystal structure would be gone, and second, the plasma would exclude the magnetic field (plasmas are very conductive). And third, the magnetic field strength are tiny compared to the other forces involved.
--MarkusQ
... you finally get to see the glory of the Z Machine. Too bad this vision will be your last ...
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Bush: U.S. on Verge of Energy Breakthrough
6 35046,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5
The fact that the writer doesn't know this makes me suspect the validity of the rest of the article.
Google is gonna buy that lab next week. For the new Z-oogle Heat (Beta) of course.
//WR
I am pretty sure they did not realize a politician was in the lab. Politician? Hot air? Get it?
wake up and hold your nose
There is a ginormous difference in 15M degrees F and 15M Kelvin. It's Kelvin and Celcius that are 273.xx something apart. Kelvin starts at absolute zero whereas Celcius starts at the freezing point of water, otherwise they're on the same scale.
"degrees" Kelvin...
Kelvins would be the correct term.
Sorry it had to be said......;-)
Although if this did turn out to be a micro-singularity it might not be so funny.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Keep us from driving too fast?
Who cares about 3.6 billion Fahrenheit. No scientific worth its salt uses that unit.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
"So they could have discovered a process that produces a lot of whatever the instruments measure...something other than temperature that causes strong emissions."
That didn't really make any sense...
Of course you put in energy in form of solid fuel, and that's mostly gone after the fire is burnt.
...
I assume they carefully checked for other sources their extra energy could come from, found none yet, so called it "unknown source". They'll find it eventually. Nothing new to see here, please move on
I didn't think Intel could make a processor that ran hotter than the Prescott series.
This isn't related to their new Intel-based compute farm, is it?
Gee, that's not big or anything. Makes sense to put that as an afterthought 4 paragraphs down...
All's true that is mistrusted
Yes but what I want to know is did the scientists drop it like it's hot?
...and no.
You are not going to have a gas at that temperature
What?!?!
So the composition of said "campfire" being made of a pile of wood and possibly some flammable compound don't count as energy put in?
E=mc^2 all matter can be converted to energy.
Sounds like someone flunked basic physics.
The energy from a campfire doesn't come solely from the match.
Hell, I'd say you flunked basic common sense if you think that.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
This is not fusion. No fusion is involved in the plasma. While this is part of their research, no fusion occurs within the plasma. The hot plasma is used to heat a capsule containing fuel for fusion, but that's as close as you'll get to the word "fusion".
damn, where do you get one of those? hope they don't come in rectal versions. yow
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a pretty amazing claim. The writer of the article clearly fucked up in a few places, but still, the bottom line is that the scientists conducting this experiment are claiming that more energy was released than what was put in. If they're correct, and if they can reproduce these results and figure out what exactly is going on here, we could really be on to something. I've heard hydrino theory and fusion be brought up a couple times. Maybe it's one or the other, or even both? Or some other form of crazydoom at work? I'm certainly curious about it, myself.
And just who gave them my chili burger recipe?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I think it is about time they calibrate their instruments.
Chris: Or, 6 to the 23rd joules per liter.
Bodie: That's hotter than the sun!
All's true that is mistrusted
>>If the ions involved are Fe ions, then you wouldn't expect to get any energy from fusion from them.
:-)
>>
If they got fusion from Fe ions, I'd be capering around the room
IIRC, Fe has the highest binding energy per nucleon of any element.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Are you talking about relativity or chemical energy? From what I can try to decipher from your ambiguous post is that you no "Speaky the Englie".
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Honesty, how can you even record temperatures that extreme? I mean, do we get a lot of practice doing it? How can you be so sure the readings are accurate? Wouldn't that kind of heat melt anything that would be used to measure it?
I know "there's no such thing as a stupid ??", doesn't apply at /., but I'll ask anyway. I was under the impression that one of the main sticking points in creating a sustained, controlled fusion reaction was that we are incapable of generating the temps necessary to start the reaction.
Regardless of whether or not they understand how it came to be, is this truly a breakthrough in the fusion world, or have I misunderstood?
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
You're adding energy in the form of the high potential energy found in the compounds in wood (cellulose is a good example); meanwhile, excess energy is being continuously added in the even higher-potential of a common diatom: oxygen.
Of course, you have to add energy to liberate the atoms in the first place, that being a match and the flame off your starter fluid and kindling.
Hey, campfires are complex.
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that's the hottest place on earth!
Free energy? When did the scientific community start buying equipment on ebay?
The Earths atmosphere ignites from some freak experiment gone astray.
Global warming?
http://www.hollowdepth.com
Somehow this doesn't seem to be very credible....The lab reports degrees kelvin, when anybody in the scientific community knows that the units are Kelvins and not degrees kelvin.
"X-ray are a form of electromagnetic energy, and as such don't have a temperature. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic motion of atoms or molecules. X-rays aren't atoms or molecules. "
Yes, but your forgetting black body radiation. As an object, heats up it will emit electromagnetic energy (light). For room temperature objects, this EM radiation is in the inferred region, but for higher temperature, the EM radiation energy increases to higher energy levels. Since there is a relation ship between an objects heat and the EM radiation it releases, it is possible to find out what the temperature of the object is by the radiation given off. The actual equation involves quantum mechanics and my physics classes have only just started on it.
Next up, global warming is at an all-time high and ice caps are melting. We won't tell you which until the news at 6!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Who decides this is some sort of record??
3.6x10^9 F is about 2x10^9Celsius or 17keV (kilo electron Volt)
My Sony 32" color TV produces 25keV electrons in the tube. (Not as many particles or as high pressure as Sandia, but certainly hotter.
Most particle accelerator are more powerful than a TV and procduces particles from 100 GeV to over 1 TeV=10^12eV.
This is 10 million times warmer.
"Fix it"
I can explain it entirely with three words.
"Flying Spaghetti Monster"
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
in other news ... Satan steels Z-machine after reading /.
The most spectacular accidents occur after the phrases "Watch this" or "Hold my beer" are uttered. You are in for a real treat when someone says "Hold my beer and watch this!"
Is it because of its high melting point? What would happen if they used wires made of a denser metal, such as osmium or gold or even uranium?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
There's always Penelope Cruz's ass!
For thermal radiation from a blackbody, the wavelength at which the radiation is brightest is inversely proportional to the temperature. This is known as Wien's law. So the temperature of the x-ray source can be inferred from the intensity, as a function of frrequency, or the emitted x-rays.
They measure more energy in than out, indicating of course nuclear reactions. Fusion, I presume. They bend over backwards not to use the "F" word, which would immediately label them as crackpots.
Fusion of iron or nickel or carbon or whatever would seem quite the trick. They need to look for fusion products.
Be heard || Be herd
looked at the article, then the link in the article to another about the device that produced the temperatures, which basically sounds like either a rail-gun or a gauss-gun/coil-gun - so maybe the temperatures were caused by air friction? (the second article said when it launched whatever it shoots, the projectile accelerated at like 10 Gs
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
is it the endothermic part?
is it the oxidation part?
is it the (god forbid) the reaction part?
Granted.. I did sleep through a great many of my graduate physics courses but this one strikes me as odd
Please do correct my mis-understanding.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
n/t.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This is potentially a very, very big deal. The temperature is NOT the most important thing... that's the headline for dummies.
The important part: they're getting out more energy than they're putting in, and they don't understand why.
There is a ginormous difference in 15M degrees F and 15M Kelvin.
Both are too hot for me to grasp. Even with hot pads.
Look at this
"Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled - raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently."
If you ask me that sounds like the Z-Machine did that eight years before ago.
If it's billions, we don't care if the unit is Kelvin, Fjfhskjdhheit or Celsius...
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
Here comes another wave of UFO's to see what we are up to now. adsfsa adfad **** afasfa htyeey? dfadsfas ****ek gfa gdghg yuhjhj? Loose translation-What the **** are those humans up to now? How ****ing hot did you say?
You're slipping!
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
It's a matter of applicability. The equation E=MC^2 only comes in to play when the reactions involved are nuclear. Oxidation reactions are chemical; the energy you're releasing (in the case of endothermic oxidations) is stored in the molecular bonds, not the nuclear bonds.
(Disclaimer: IANAP; this may be slightly inaccurate and/or an oversimplification.)
Actually, I was talking about the lack of any mass-to-energy conversion whatsoever, to which E=MC^2 is applicable. If you burn a kilo of wood with a kilo of oxygen, you end up with a 2 kilos of ash and smoke. No mass lost, no E=MC^2 here.
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So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
Christ, man. He didn't say relativistic principles break down, he said they're superfluous. It's overkill for the example. You're liberating energy in the form of chemical bonds, so the loss of mass as energy is pretty much negligible in chemical reactions, 'cause the mass-energy of the reactants utterly overwhelms the amount of energy released. Mass is, for all practical purposes, conserved.
I think chemists and physicists understood combustion pretty well before Einstein came along. There was this guy, you know, Lavoisier, he had a few things to say about stuff sticking around.
But come the hell on. If you have a graduate degree in physics you know this. You're just being a jerk to save some face.
They should try lithium wires instead of iron. The lower atomic weight may allow a fusion reaction to start and convert the Li into heavier elements until significant amounts of Fe are produced by the reaction. After that, the whole thing blows up ... or something like that.
Actually EMC holds for chemical energy - it's just that the difference in mass is minute. It even holds for hot things vs cold things. If you take a brick, and heat it up by 1MJ (perhaps heating it to to 800C) the brick will weigh:
You have: MJ/light^2
You want: g
* 1.1126501e-08
(i.e. not very much more)
How many libraries of congress/football fields do you have to burn to get that temperature?
3.6 Billion Degree superheated liquid, rushing out under extreme pressure and speed-- a truly exotic state of matter.
Since 1954 the Celcius scale sets 0.01 degree Celcius (273.160 Kelvin) to be at the triple point of water.
No, I think you got that wrong. You merely subtract 273 to get K. Celcius, Farenheit and Kelvin are all still linear scales, so X million degrees F ~= X million degrees C ~= X million degrees K (give or take).
I scanned the article. The article does not say that total energy observed was greater than the total input energy.
What the article says, and it's easy to be confused by this, is that the observed energy was greater than the kinetic energy of the implosion. However, one has to realize that the kinetic energy isn't the only significant source of energy in the system. There is also the energy in the magnetic field. The article goes on to elucidate a mechanism by which magnetic field energy is converted to thermal energy ions, which is then transferred to electrons to produce soft X-Rays.
Thus, the bottom line here is, unfortunately, that what happened in this experiment was that one component of the total energy input, magnetic energy, which normally is not converted into heat, was converted into heat by a new mechanism. This is what the authors meant by a new energy source. In other words:
NO FUSION.
Okay, time to move along folks, nothing to see here other than some really really really really hot plasma, which probably don't have the density to achieve sustained fusion...yet. =)
I do have a degree in physics and saving face is something I'm not really interested in (on /.)
The poster said...
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
I contend that statement is wrong! And as I stated.. correct me.
The basic statement "E=MC^2 has nothing to do with X" is always incorrect.
b.t.w. The poster did explain his comment. I found it quite useful
I guess it's that peer-review mentality in me... I review a lot of papers, most of which I understand the lingo, and therefore let it slide because the audience will also understand the lingo and can therefore brush over an incorrect statement because "we knew what he meant"
For instance.. You may understand the words:
nongyrotropic
gradient
anisotropies
but if I put them all together in a complete sentence:
I want to investigate the nongyroropic gradient anisotropies of the phase space distribution upstream of the Jovian bow shock, you may find that confusing.
There is nothing wrong with that statement, it's a factual "abstract if you will", although some may not understand the context.
The post in question contained a flaw, perhaps I did not understand the context "fine", I thought I made my lack of knowledge clear.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
When I said that I read the article, what I meant was that I scanned the original PRL article.
10^9 degrees Celsius.
Err, that's just what they did. Obviously reading is a challenge for you as just a few paragraphs in they say
"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."
Obviously no need for divine relevation there then.
As for the thermometer, well duh, obviousky they're measuring the temperature (i.e. energy) of radiation.
The "Scientific Method" is not about recording everything -- although I'm sure that helps. The scientific method is: Observe, Hypothesize, Predict and Verify. From reading the article, it's clear that they've done or attempted all those things and hence are following the method. As for measuring temperature (even at 3.6 E9 K) you'd have to have one long thermometer, or you could measure the spectrum of radiation emitted by the reaction and determine the temperature using Planck's law of blackbody radiation. Or something to that effect ...
Actually, if you pull the original article from Physical Review Letters, there is not a single word about that anything does not perfectly meet theoretical expectations. Not a single word about an "unknown energy source is involved".
Nice tRoLL...
No, it doesn't. Mass is lost, it's just that since the energies involved in burning wood are so low, that the mass equivalence is almost nonexistant. The mass itself comes from the chemical bonds in the wood breaking to reform with oxygen producing fire. There's ever so tiny an amount of mass converted to energy, and that's what matters. The numbers get much better when you're converting protons and neutrons (well, really gluons) to energy, as they've much higher mass than chemical bonds.
Sorry, I am going to apologize for claiming you were trying to save face. I mistakenly thought were the same person as the original poster who first mentioned E=mc^2 and campfires in the same post. You are not. You're not being a jerk trying to save face. You're just being a pedant, of undetermined jerkiness. We'll assume none.
But if you're playing pedant, you should have called him out on his more egregious flaw which was to call combustion an endothermic oxidative process, when it's pretty fundamental that it's exothermic. Fire is hot.
And I humbly concur that, speaking pedantically, E=mc^2 has to do with (literally) everything in the universe.
Not sure where your studies of the physics of solar wind affecting stuff flying past Jupiter fit in with all this, but thank you for dropping some suitably irrelevant technical jargon on us. Your physics "cred" is intact.
Umm, basic high school physics, law of conservation of energy said that energy/matter is neither gain or loss.
In this case, fuel/matter is not considered. Otherwise input/output energy would always be equal .
You can't even spell your obsolete measurements any more. Sheesh! America is pioneering a new illiteracy.
Look up the "Kelvin" temperature scale. Then use it.
Of course there is no fusion. The z-pinch would never produce fusion. It produces x-rays, which are used to implode capsules containing fusion fuel. The z-pinch plasma will never one day reach fusion because that is not its purpose. This is a simply a case of mass confusion on slashdot, something common in science articles.
You're right it's not fusion, it's the first step to the development of the Zed PM.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
How did they get a thermometer inside Tom Delay's head during his indictment hearings?
Not quite. The SI unit for mass is the kilogram. It's unfortunate that the SI unit has the "kilo" prefix, but we're sruck with it now.
When you light a campfire with a match, you get more energy out than you put in.
Sorry, this is not a recipe for perpetual motion. For a new energy source, maybe, but not
perrpetual motion.
Well, we certainly don't need another one of those... "back to the drawing board, guys!".
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Where do you get that number from. The temperature in Celcius i always a smaller number than that in Kelvin. 15000000 kelvin = 14999726.8 C . You even got the difference wrong (~273).
E
Error in link 14999726.8 C
E
This is only 3 x 10^5 eV/particle (or 300 keV). while LHC next year will achieve energy of 5 x 10^12 eV/particle (proton) or 5 TeV.
LHC will be able to produce quark-gluon plasma, thing much hotter than 3.6 billion degrees celsius.
It's either Cold Fusion or Zero-Point Energy !
*goes back to watching sci-fi tv*
Maybe we deserve this world ?
MASS IS NOT CONVERTED TO ENERGY
Doesn't happen. A very common misconception, and an easy one to imply from Einsteins' famous equation.
Energy has mass. Which is why you see a transfer of mass in a given energy-transfer process. As the parent points out, since the energy transfer in chemical reactions is relatively low, the mass transfer is infititesimal.
Einsteins' equation tells us the mass that energy posesses. The mass difference you see in nuclear reactions is the mass of the energy released. All the matter is preserved intact ; it is merely shuffled into a new configuration. Some parts of that configuration have a lower resting energy. The energy is redistributed amongst the products of the reaction, maybe as kinetic energy of the products, maybe as the binding energies in the products, maybe as photons (photons possess no intrinsic mass, their mass is entirely due to the mass of their energy). No matter is lost. No energy is lost. It just gets shuffled around some.
"Do we really want anything that hot on our planet?"
I don't really know- depends whether you want Intel to keep testing their next generation processors. They're gonna take more than water cooling, I can tell you.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
This is real hot.
not really, they're still less than an order of magnitude apart... who's quibbling about such a small difference... of course to you and me, 1.9 times a ridiculously high temperature is still a ridiculously high temperature...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Please! Somebody ask them to stop! I have a decent enough life. I live in Canada. I have a place to live. I have enough food to survive. I have a few friends and occasionally I have sex (with somebody else, that is).
So you see, my life is fine. I don't fancy being incinerated alive. And while you're at it, please also ask them to stop making black holes. I don't want to get sucked into one. Besides, who will be left to pay the taxes?
Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"
Indeed. I love science, and in general I have tremendous faith in most scientists and physiscists. But science has progressed to a state where we are starting to venture into areas where there are huge swaths of unknowns, in physics, genetics, and nanotechnology.
I mean, this quote sums it up for me......some unknown energy source is involved.... Wow, so basically, they did this experiment, which resulted in a breaking of one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, and resulted in a gas billions of degrees higher than expected?
GMO crops, artifical black holes, supercolliding particles ( of which sometimes we don't even know what will happen until we do it)... I mean, I am beginning to think man is not going to be obliterated through war, or disease, or a nuclear holocost, but just in an instant flash of some experiment gone wrong.
We need to be very careful, the forces we are starting to toy with are both potent and dangerous, as well as increasingly misunderstood.
They think their 'unknown energy source' is magnetism - this would make sense, given that it's a z-pinch implosion - the changing flux due to the rapid movement of a high-temperature array of magnetic particles must be phenomenal. Essentially they've not violated CofE, but they have found a clever way of getting things very hot with minimal effort.
Intel demonstrate their new processor line, named Conroe...
That would be Wein's Law, not Planck's Law.
For a given temperature T, the peak wavelength of emitted radiation is at 0.0029/T nm. For example, our sun's surface temp is what, about 5800 K? So the peak is around 500nm, which is in the green spectrum. Betcha didn't know that...
I take it testing is continuing on the Conroe?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I can produce that temperature of gas on $5 worth of Taco Bell!
And Intel just released a new processor... I think they overclocked a little too much.
Dont talk to me about life!
Probably still cooler than some AMD processors
"The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests."
(http://www.physorg.com/news11538.html)
How did they create a simulation if they don't know how it works ??
I spent three summers working in a trailer less than 50 meters from this machine. It always creeped me out a little. Several times a day, the sirens and flashy lights would go off outside the building, then about a minute later, we'd hear this huge "WUMPH". Our whole trailer would shake and the monitors vibrate. Despite understanding what was going on, I couldn't help but wonder about the safety of sitting next to an array of giant capacitors which get rapidly discharged all at once.
However, I must admit it does make cool pictures. The bright lines you see on most pictures are supposedly spare charge arcing across the giant pool in which they have to keep the whole thing submerged.
Do we want anything that hot on our planet?
If it'll power a laptop for more than 4 hours, probably yes.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
You need the Ove-Glove!!
There is a big difference between screwing around with electricity and mechanics, and messing with the fundamental sub-atomic structure of the universe, and genetically enginerring super-organisms and releasing them into the wild.
Also, because of the "irrational fear" you describe, back then people trated this stuff with kid gloves. Nowadays we are so full of ourselves that we never seem to think of the potential ramifications of what we are doing before we do it.
Do we want anything that hot on our planet?
/ 06/181222
Yes, Toronto! http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03
Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Crazy energy expirements, bizarre results? I wonder if Gordon Freeman works there...
From wiki
In physics and chemistry, a plasma is an ionized gas
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Isn't this exactly what the scientists studying large-scale fusion (not coldfusion) have been waiting for? No more of that messy plasma being superheated...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Global warming my ass.... someone just let a fart out too near a burner, and we're still paying for it!
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Have you guys ever heard of False Precision?
pull my finger...
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Sounds like a cool band name...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Perhaps with the additional funding they'll finally be able to confirm the extra-dimensional physics described here, and we can finally make the FTL drive a reality. That's what I thought of when I read about the Z Machine.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
From the Sandia website:0 06/physics-astron/hottest-z-output.html
http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/2
"First, the radiated x-ray output was as much as four times the expected kinetic energy input.
Ordinarily, in non-nuclear reactions, output energies are less -- not greater -- than the total input energies. More energy had to be getting in to balance the books, but from where could it come?"
The above line doesn't make sense if total output energies weren't greater than total input energies. Nor could they have put in this zinger at the beginning:
"The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants."
God did it.
How would one go about calibrating the equipment used to measure such temperatures? Is it possible that after 30 or 40 million degrees their equipment's accuracy starts to degrade?
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" also makes for an interesting order of priorities
I prefer this to "in god we trust"
what do you mean they don't know how they did it? I thought scientists use the so-called Scientific Method they taught us all about in school. And I thought that in this Scientific Method, you're supposed to record everything you do, so that the experiment can be reproduced by other scientists.
So you create a hypothesis and design an experiment to test it out. You expect the results to be A if it works, and B if it doesn't work. But funnily enough, your result was C. Does this suddenly cast doubt on science and the scientific method in general? No. It just means that the original hypothesis is incorrect and nature doesn't work as expected. Now you just have to scratch your head and figure out how the hell "C" happens.
Sounds to me like this story is a bunch of hogwash, now that I think of it. How would you even measure the temperature in order to come to the conclusion that it was 3.6 billion degrees? There's not a thermometer on the planet that can measure something that hot.
I find it disturbing that something is "hogwash" just because you don't understand it. Perhaps if you educated yourself a little more on the subject then you'd understand how it's done.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For all of you scientists out there, that know a bit more than the average Joe, what would happen if the plasma was dense enough to sustain fusion? Could the burn grow, sucking in what is around it? What about the materials that this is contained in? Last time I checked, the temperatures achieved in this experiment were just a touch higher than the boiling point of most materials known to man. Also, could that kind of heat catch our own atmosphere on fire, so to speak? I am all for research, but couldn't there be a pretty wicked accident here?
Does anybody know a sensible answer as to why the US doesnt just adopt the SI system. Can it really be they dislike the french that much? (SI = Système International)
I know that most of the people in the country will probably still want to use our (British Imperial) system but I am surprised the american scientific comunity hasnt adopted SI at the very least.
When I was studying Physics it would forever puzzle me why they stuck to a system which nobody else used. The result for me was that if I needed to reference background research I would always avoid american reports for fear of the extra maths neccessary (Physics contains more than enough already).
Personally I was educated after this country went metric so I have no idea exactly how the Imperial system works, and I have no great desire to learn now when most of the world has abandoned it.
I dont read
Though, I imagine this might cause some problems for accident scene investigators.
"We're fairly certain a vehicle collision of some kind occurred, as evidenced from this satellite photograph showing the center of the blast zone to be somewhere in the middle of the intersection at 103rd and 9th."
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I said the temperature differential of 1 Kelvin is the same as 1 degree Celcius.
As in, the difference between 200 degrees C and 201 degrees C is the same as the difference between 200 K and 201 K.
Reread my original post, and you'll see that is in fact what I said.
Now, as far as getting the difference wrong....guilty as charged. As soon as I read your 273, I realized I'd screwed it up, as that number is very familiar to me. I made the mistake of using the number from the previous poster, without verifying it. (Maybe I am a dumbass, after all?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I can do that after a visit to Taco Bell.
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
On a physics discussion board I read, a poster once described how he knew someone who refused to use microwave ovens because she thought they were tools of Satan. She literally thought they were metaphysical portals to hell: how else could something be heated without an open flame?
The paper that proposes a model to explain the results says that the final plasma was pinched down to 3.6mm. If a glass tube containing fusable material (D+T ?) were at the center of the hohlraum, it would also get crushed from the inrushing plasma.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Why is it 2 billion K? Why not 1.67, 1.74, 1,85?
It's strangely round.
Broken temperature gauge. :)
Is it hurting you? No? Then, DON'T BE A FUCKING DICK ABOUT IT. Just continue consuming whatever it is you consume (reading material, listening material, eating material, religion, etc) and leave the rest of us curious apes alone.
Nathan's blog
Soviet Russia moves to YOU!
They ran their Pentium IV EE at 100% for a few hours...
Visit www.doc2pdf.net for a free, no need to register,
Probably the same place that you got the energy to move a perfectly-positioned preposition all the way to the front of the sentence, rendering your comment ABSOLUTE FREAKAZOID ENGLISH, as in the weird-ass sentence From where did the energy appear. Up with this I will not put!
:)
As an eXtreeeeme example, try to apply that logic to this one. A dad tells his kid he has to go to bed without any bedtime story, but then goes upstairs with book in hand. The kid says: Dad, what did you bring the book you wouldn't read to me out of up for? See if your brain doesn't asplode trying to "correct" that
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
This is showing up so often now (I've noticed it twice) that it's time to officially define its usage as: YONH.
Not to be confused with a somewhat similarly spelled Intel processor designation.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
2400x1586 JPEG of Z
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Lab produces 3.6 billion degree gas
what do you feed your Labrador? when my dog farts it's only maybe 90 degrees...
The biggest reason that the general population still uses legacy units, of course, is path dependency and an unwelcome attitude toward government intervention in this area.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
...scientists will be able to create Uma Thurman in no time.
And you though greenhouse gasses were the big contributor to global warming!
Here we are producing temperatures exceeding the sun's, and we think the sun is cooking the planet from 1 AU away!
We need to stop trying to ignite the atmosphere!
(This was a joke, and I couldn't find a decent post to reply to.)
"Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"
I like mine well done.
You gotta remember to shake the thermometer before sticking it back into the gas... it could be Ferris put hot water on it to fake a sick day.
Does this article means I should stop worrying about the incoming peak oil problem?
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
Comes in the second-last paragraph...
"unknown form of energy"
I thought you only encounter that phrase in Star Trek episodes.
(2 billion kelvins). That's hotter than the interior of our sun
2 TK, huh? So, what's that in MJ/L (megajoules per liter)?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I flattened the threshold and did a search. I am quite disappointed. Not a single chuck norris joke....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
NO FUSION.
Why wouldn't there be fusion at such high temperatures? Aren't we talking about temperatures well in excess of those needed to make nuclear fusion more likely?
They had previously been using just tungsten, assuming some level of purity, but now using "steel" they could be seeing fusion on any of these atoms: Fe, C, Mn, Si, Cr, Ni, V, W, Mo, or Co which can make up different alloys of steel. Maybe if they can accurately measure what they start with and what they end up with, then we can see if there was any fusion going on, and what was fusing with what.
From reading the article, seems they don't think fusion was responsible for the anomoly, but why wouldn't it be a possibility that the high temperature there migth be some fusion?
How can we turn this into some sort of weapon?
Proverbs 21:19
Maybe this has something to do with Burkhard Heim's theory of magnetically induced anti-gravitation. On the related articles, it was stated that only the 'Z' machine had the capabilities to achieve this.
Maybe that's why the scientists "don't know" why they did it.
That Z machine looks exactly like the thing in the begining of Half Life. Good thing I own at CS, this should be easy as long as I get a couple of lives....
This is showing up so often now (I've noticed it twice) that it's time to officially define its usage as: YONH.
Not to be confused with a somewhat similarly spelled Intel processor designation.
Or the pronunciation of a new age musical artist that looks frighteningly like Doug Henning.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
Rats - no fusion. Instead, all we got is a previously unknown energy conversion that could possibly be useful in future creations. What's the point in getting a new energy conversion mechanism if it's not fusion?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Growing up in Albuquerque, I got a chance to tour the machine they are using. Almost 20 years ago! One of the coolest aspects, besides the famous light show, is that they built the original machine for something like $10 mil and keep finding new uses for it. It's just a giant capacitor, so scientists keep thinking of new uses. I forget the orginal use. Light ion fusion reactor or something. Then it was converted to a heavy ion reactor. Now the Z-pinch configuration. It might have had a few incarnations in between. But it's great to see such a useful tool being resused for great science and that doesn't cost a billion dollars.
Oh, and Trekkies: the control room is, or was, has connections to the bridge of the Enterprise, including a places for Kirk et al with nameplates.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
i don't believe this off hand. i want independent confirmation.
but, if this is true...
it sounds to me like this could yield a major shift in the military paradigm.
the race to cmilitarize and control this process will cost our great, great grandkids even more of their money than we are spending right now!
the world is getting to be a very scary place.
weapons keep advancing, but morality doesn't.
that's a bad trend. very bad.
Actually, "degrees Kelvin" has been replaced by "kelvins" (note the lower case "k"), while the abbreviation remains an upper case "K". That makes "degrees Celsius" the only SI unit of measure with an upper case letter in its English name. Also, centigrade and the modern Celsius scale aren't just different names for the same thing; whereas the centigrade scale was based on the freezing and boiling points of water, 0.01 degrees Celsius is, by definition, the triple point of water, and one Celsius degree is 1/273.16 of the difference between the triple point and absolute zero.
(Facts shamefully stolen from the Wikipedia article.)
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
No, you put the chemical energy in when you stacked the wood and tinder. The pedantic will say the same for the Z machine (since whatever the process that released the energy, it MUST have been there in some form initially). However, in this case, it is just a shorthand from we got more energy release than we expected based on the expected (lack of) a process to release the energy bound as matter and/or chemical energy.
Einstein's equation E=MC^2 is the universal equation you'd use to determine how much energy you will get out of something with a specific mass.
When scientists started investigating Gamma Ray Bursts they were puzzled. One researcher suggested they were coming from all over the sky. They ridiculed him as a quack because that would have violated E=MC^2. They said they were within our solar system. When an investigation was done with an orbital gama ray observator they found the bursts didn't like up with the galactic plane but were uniform over the entire sky. This violated E=MC^2 because the bursts were coming from so far away and were so powerful that at their point of origin they were titanic explosions larger than anything ever known in the universe. One researcher suggested we were seeing gama ray streams coming from rotating neutron stars and black holes in other galaxies. Its a convenient way to make Einstein's theory fit the situation, which in my mind is suspect. Science treats Einstein's equations as rock-hard fact rather than as the theory it is. Even Einstein himself said that the laws of his equations change when dealing the infinitely small and the immensely large. Just because you can do an experiment and get the same results using his equations over and over again means very little. We are already beginning to discover that the laws of gravity work different over infinitely vast distances, new discovers where are making the idea of "dark matter" less and less plausable.
Now, we see this experiment. The temperature is pretty high, but then you got to understand that the Sun is an average star. There really isn't anything special about it. There are hotter stars out there, stars as hot or hotter than the temperatures achieved in this experiment. 3.6 billion degrees is only 3 1/2 times hotter than our sun, but there are stars 100 times hotter than our sun out there. Blue Giants are among the largest and hottest stars in the sky, and many burn in excess of a trillion degress. These are the same kinds of stars that either go out with a bang or collapse into black holes.
If this experiment can be done by others then its confirmed true. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we generate power, and so help our understanding of the natural forces within stars or even how primeordia matter behaved just after the Big Bang which was theoretically 100,000,000 times hotter than our sun.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
In the physical sense, not the cultural sense.
Temperature is a statistical measure of the average energy per particle in a system of particles at thermal equilibrium. The system won't feel "hot" to you unless there are lots and lots of the particles hitting your skin.
To look at it another way, a spacecraft in earth orbit often passes through plasmas that have temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees. Yet the spacecraft doesn't melt, because the plasma density is so low that the actual power flux delivered to the spacecraft surface by the plasma is very small.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Think of all those cold fish dates everyone has had at one time or another. 2 billion Kelvins will help to offset those chilli dates. By the way... since temperature is a statistical measure of velocity has anyone calculated what the maximum temperature is based on the speed of light ;-D
is it over or under 2 billion Kelvins?
Unless, of course, I missed something in my scan of the paper. And yes, I realise what they are saying about the expected and actual energy output.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Shooting the lawyer.
Yeah, well just wait till aliens discover 3/4 or will it be more like 7/8 of our solar system missing...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I'm not really up on science stuff (as an Arts undergraduate) but one thing bothers me - how could they contain something, however small, that was as hot as the sun? Surely it would melt anything nearby? Or do I have a completely off-base idea of what it is they achieved?
There is a ginormous difference in 15M degrees F and 15M Kelvin.
From where we're sitting (70 F, 294 K) the difference between 15M F and 15M Kelvins may seem ginormous, but from the perspective of the hot gases (3.6B Kelvins), not so much.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedis play/img_display.php?pic=060308_sandia_z_02.jpg&ca p=%3Ca%20href%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fgoat.cx%22%3EAddit ional%20Images%3C%2Fa%3E
I'm no expert on fusion, but I was once told that getting an extremely high temperature (to "kick the reaction off") was the reason fusion was not in practice, b/c the energy required too to get the temperature for starting the reaction was too high to achieve efficiently.
Depending on how they got that temperature, it is quite possible that the new breakthrough would enable them to get fusion working.
But if they cannot reproduce the effect then it's for nothing.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Temperature is average kinetic energy, not average speed. While speed (the magnitude of velocity, which also has a direction) is limited to c, kinetic energy increases without limit as speed approaches c (it's not ½ m v^2 anymore).
It was later discovered that the heat actually originated from a nearby rack of Dell Poweredge 6800s.
Brian
spell RELIEF? R-O-L-A-I-D-S?
I am sure Digel, tums and Rolaids won't do shit for this kind of gas.
Insta-Bake/EZ-Bake Oven of the Masses?
Oh, given the proximity of the of the topics in the main page... (terror financing) this would be the ULTIMATE terror weapon if it could be weaponized... you only need to be a government with the apparati (?, hehee -ti, or -tus?) and the WILLINGness to use it... Might instigate a new dictionary addition:
TERRORIZATION (n, v): (aka terror-forming) the result of the conversion process of or the action of conversion of otherwise innocuous substances and devices into weapons of mass destruction with a dose of terrorizing for the suppression of or obliteration of peoples and governments despised by the users of said weapon. (DAMN! A lot of "Ofs"...)
Who needs FAEs, nukes, knives and bunker busters when you've got PLASMA. Yeh, I guess the users could be called "The Plasmatics", or "Plasma Cabal" if they order the use of this on another nation.
But, imagine a chain of this stuff slitherin' around in sewers and canals...
OTOH, dropping a few buckets of these down the gullets of Pinatubo and St. Helens will be like Pepto-Bismol for volcanos.
KHAAAAn-KHAAAAN--KHAAAAAN- dahar, anyone....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
BTW, I juxtaposing the lab gas with nuke heat:
m l
. html
Nuclear Weapon Thermal Effects:
Special Weapons Primer; Weapons of Mass Destruction:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/thermal.htm
-----------
Temperature of a Nuclear Explosion:
The Physics Factbook
Edited by Glenn Elert -- Written by his students
An educational, Fair Use website
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/SimonFung.sht
----------
Nuclear Weapons Effects--An Overview
by Wm. Robert Johnston
last updated 8 March 2005
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/effectsum
Bon-therma-tit...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Tell an average us construction worker to place something 23.371 meters from something else and watch the blank stairs. Tell them its 76'-8 1/8" and they know exactly what to do. Inertia is a powerful force.
McCoy: Dear Lord.... What if this thing were used where life already EXISTS?
Spock: It would preclude such life in favor of its new MATRIX?
McCoy: (incredulous) It's "new MATRIX"?
heheheh...
Me: (dials feverishly)
Operator: (whiny) Ahh-per-a-tuhr....
Hello, Operator???? Git me da FUCK outta here!!! NOW!!!!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Sounds like a decimal point error to me. 35ooooo cary the one...
3600000000000000000 degrees.
Eh.. looks right.
Ken would you publish this for me?
And pick up my laundry from the cleaners would ya?
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I hadn't. Thanks for that :-)
my arse produces gas like that, and i'm fully aware of how it happens. get back to me when you have something to report.
http://xkcd.com/313/
I've been eating at Taco Bell all of my life.
And for the first time, I went into a Taco Bell here in downtown Nashville and saw ACTUAL Mexicans preparing the food. I guess the TB franchise is just trying to keep up its image of authentic Mexican cuisuine...
uhh...errr...wait a minute...
Libertas in infinitum
... but in essence it just looks like bad journalism. Lot's of great dicoveries start with WTF observations, but in this case no such thing actually seemed to have occured. If you look at the original science article here:
v let?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000096000007075003000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes
...
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
There is no mention of any "unexplained energy source". Not in the abstract and not in the full text (you need to be on a university network for full access). Not even a note or a possible speculation or anything. All results exactly as predicted by theoretical models.
So looks to me some science writer got the assignment to report a temperature record, which was too boring and got spruced up with some misquotes or out of context quotes, which was enought to get slashdotted. And not one in a million nerds checks out the source of this bull? Well, that's sad but easy to say as I'm just an anonymous coward
Cheers.
If you could convert magnetic energy into heat then you could turn gravity into heat.
That's even more absurd than a perpetual motion machine as it offers the possibility of gravity manipulation.
You could turn gravitational energy into heat. Take an object to a tall building. Drop it....
Kid: Dad, for what did you bring the book you wouldn't read to me out of up?
Dad: Son, it's nice that you tried not to end that question with a preposition, but the rest of your question was so abhorrant, I'm going to smack you with this book out of which I wouldn't read to you.
"Do we want anything that hot on our planet?" I don't know, it still doesn't touch Johnny Depp.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
> If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic
> oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
But it does. The total mass of the reactants before such a reaction exceeds the total mass of the reaction products by E/C^2 where E is the energy released.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
not really, they're still less than an order of magnitude apart... who's quibbling about such a small difference...
Inch, cm, what's the diff?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The .xx is .15 IIRC (A-level Physics >10yr ago)
Incorrect, over.
The mass is the same. Try the experiment again, except this time measure the masses of the gaseous ash that is produced in the reaction. Also, very carefully measure the oxygen input to ensure accuracy.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
It's 15 million kelvin, not 15 million Kelvin.
pedant
What a fabulous word! I had no idea that word existed, and that is exactly what I was doing.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"