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Earthquake Invisibility Cloak
BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."
Having seen my share of rivers, I can pretty much say that the water pattern DOES change when it hits a rock.
And that the rock is more solid than the water.
With an earthquake, isn't the building less solid than than Earth?
And because it is done "smoothly", the top of the rock will never have water splashed upon it.
Maybe their technology does work, but their analogies do not.
An informal survey done my one of my coworkers at a party with his fiance's family and coworkers (a group largely composed of doctors and lawyers -- she's doing her residency) found that only 25% of the doctors would do it again (given the costs and stresses involved); many indicated they'd have stayed in medicine, but have gone for a cheaper job title (such as FNP). For the lawyers, the would-do-it-again ratio was closer to 50%.
I think we engineers have it good.
It should be perfectly safe to cloak all buildings. Buildings only absorb a tiny fraction of the shock of an earthquake; you don't need to have something man-made fall over just to keep the waves from going further. Now if you somehow made huge chunks of land cloaked to earthquakes, I would agree that the shaking may have to come out somewhere. But anyway at that point you're talking about making an isolated chunk of land whose borders crunch and stretch a lot more than everything else -- people wouldn't go for that. And I don't see how you'd do it anyway, you can't just seismically isolate a chunk of land.
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money.
And doctors going into it for the money is one of the big reasons why healthcare is so broken in America. Doctors aren't doing it in order to help people (though it is a secondary motive for some). Rather, they're mainly doing it to enrich themselves. Is it any surprise that healthcare is so expensive?
Would there potentially be constructive interference though? That could make it worse for neighbors.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
if there is such a difference of incentives between US doctors and, say, Canadian doctors, then i find it hard to believe that that is the root cause of the problem. rather, i think it's probably much more of a consequence.
weinersmith
IANAP but the basic idea I got from the design of the "Tsunami Cloak" was that there was simply a path of less resistance along the concentric corridors than along the radial ones, so that the wave tended to flow around the center rather than through it. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. Sometime later I was wondering if the same principal could be used to redirect strong winds around a vulnerable structure. I was thing along the lines of metal posts rather than concrete pillars, but then I started considering the "green" factor and wondered if a precisely planted grove of trees would have the desired effect. My assumption of course is that since air and water are both fluid, then they would have similar waves that can be manipulated, but since I'm also not a meteorologist, I could be wrong.
What do you think, would it be possible?