I may be missing how this works, but it looks like they are driving a bunch of antennas to cancel the scattered radiation from an object in one direction. While this works, the trick is to know exactly what the input signal is and the react in time to cancel - something that can only work for very narrowband sources or sources where you know the input field (including its phase) in advance.
I don't see how this could work for radar or light.
At the 10B level it would be difficult to specify a machine that really did what you want: energy, luminosity, backgrounds, energy spectrum etc. Many real machines end up different from design - better in some parameters, worse in others.
There would also be very few organizations who could invest $10B and 20 years to try to win a prize. The prize would need to be big - this is R&D and there is a significant chance that it might not work.
There is a lot of reason to think that there is physics at the TeV scale: supersymmetry, extra dimensions, something. (I'm an accelerator guy, not a theorist so I can't support this very well).
Whether its worth $10B to explore that energy range is not a all a simple question. There are lots of worse things we spend money on, but in my opinion there are some better ones as well.
What I'd most like is some sort of agreement that we will or will not build a machine like this. I hate seeing lots of brilliant people working on projects that may never be built.
Agreed,but a mars mission is a LOT more expensive than a high energy physics machine. $100s of billions the last I hear. (and I'm all for it even at that cost)
There is a lot of discussion about this and the proposed machines are aimed at our best guesses of where there is new physics (for example super-symmetry).
It difficult to predict the benefits of machines that were not built. From past machines, work on linear electron colliders like the SLAC SLC and the never built but lots of R&D TESLA, and NLC led to high brightness electron linacs. Those are now being used to drive X-ray free electron lasers (DESY:FLASH, SLAC:LCLS, Spring-8 SCCS, Trieste , etc).
Those X-ray lasers are now being used extensively for practical research: protein structure measurement, femtosecond chemistry, superconductivity research, magnetic materials research, etc. Much of this has practical application in a 10 year timescale. The existing machines have so many users lined up ( we need to turn down 3/4 or our proposals at LCLS), that a bunch of new machines are being built or proposed around the world. (these are ~1B$ machines).
Then of course there are the spinoffs in low latency networks and distributed ffeedback, precision machining, etc.
Whether the basic physics will have practical applications is always difficult to tell. In the past, overall basic science has been a great investment, but it is difficult to tell if any particular investment will pay off.
But of course there is always a demand for bigger science.
These days the major ideas are: ILC: A superconducting electron linac based collider. Significant chance the Japanese will host this - we'll know more in a year or so.
CLIC: A CERN design normal conducting 2-beam electron linac (x-band). Sort of a hybrid of the old SLAC X-band NLC concept and the old CLIC 30GHz 2-beam machine. Technically challenging (very tight alignment tolerances), but possible.
Muon collider: Fermilab and others. Very ambitious, completely new type of machine, very difficult.
Plasma accelerators - beam or laser driven. They can get huge gradients >10GV/M in experiments, but very far from ready for a real machine.
Then there will likely be LHC luminosity and energy upgrades.
VLHC has been discussed for decades. Its the obvious next step for proton machines - but when and if we will take that step isn't clear.
Muon colliders are a great concept - but they are difficult REALLY difficult. There is a significant ongoing effort to work on the technologies but they are far from ready now.
Personally I love the idea of high gradient RF cavities fabricated from Beryllium, filled with high pressure hydrogen, with megawatt high energy muon beams. There are however some possible....failure modes. Then there are the problems with neutrino radiation (I'm not kidding - it can exceed allowable dose limits).
A potentially more serious issue is that while the muon collisions themselves are very clean, the decaying muons create a huge amount of background noise in the detectors.
I think its a great project and work should continue - but like laser acceleration we can't build a machine like this yet.
If the project is hosted in the US, then labs at some level compete to be hosts. I'm only familiar with this for $1B projects, $10B may be very different.
Yes, the SSC was a combination of several things. There were techncial cost increase (not too big), increases due to delays in funding (dragging a project out costs more), and changes in what was accounted: The original number the press heard was for the machine, not the site, or the detectors, and without escalation, contingency etc. The huge numbers later on included all those things.
Sadly cutting basic science doesn't hurt for a long time, so its an easy target. OTOH - we are never going to built a Plank-energy accelerator so we need to stop sometime.
Sadly its not that simple. Imagine lab "A" says they have a design they can build for 10B and lab "B" says it will cost $11B - and assume both labs have similar good reputations for building large projects. "A" gets the project and that means they get funded for the next ~15 years. Lab B gets downsized or even shut down because the high energy physics money is going to lab A. If the project works -great. But if not, and Lab A has put in an unreasonably low estimate at least they still exist, and after 15 years many of the managers responsible have retired.
Now say 15 years later the $10B has been spent, but its not quite done, another $2B would let you finish the project. Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B? There is no fraud, just a mis-estimation of the costs of building a beyond state-of-the-art machine and slightly larger technical problems than were expected.
What happens is that you create a very strong motivation for under-estimates because that at least keeps the lab alive. Combine that with the difficulty of estimating the cost of something that hasn't been done yet, and a long enough project timescale that changing economic conditions can substantially change labor and construction costs. This is why many projects like this go over budget.
I don't think this is unique to government. I suspect that Boeing doesn't do a good job of estimating the development cost of a new airliner either - and that is much less of a technological extrapolation than the high energy physics machines.
I remember Los Angeles in 1980 and recently, The difference in pollution levels is stunning. I've also been to big Chinese cities and seen the pollution there. I don't know about each rule separately, but overall the emissions restrictions from the EPA have made a huge difference.
It might be useful in a few cases, but for most applications the quick turn pcb houses like expresspcb can turn a file into a circuit that is express mailed back in a couple of days for $100 with no human intervention. Since those are standard PCB materials they are reasonable prototypes for real systems.
If these circuits could be soldered it would be a lot more interesting. Too many modern components are in tiny packages that couldn't really be connected with tape or conductiv glue.
At least it seems that >90% of slashdot readers recognized immediately just how stupid the original article was.
Also, these were STUDENTS. Its actually a nice student project to try to make a RF power receiver. Its quite possible that the students DID use the right units and the person doing the press release didn't understand. (and is currently being crucified by his / her management).
One could even imagine applications for micro-power devices used in an environment where there is some RF background but it isn't practical to install your own transmitter. - NSA bugs embedded in building materials for example (thought the power density might be too low even for that). This was supported by the army research office.
I'm not sure that hypersonic is a win over sub-orbital ballistic. Using the air for oxidizer is a big win, but the energy loss from drag may more than make up for it. I haven't seen a good side by side comparison of the fuel requirements for the two modes for say a 6000 mile trip.
I would love to believe that the US could still pull off cutting edge aerospace project, but I'm really skeptical. After 50 years we've lost our manned space program, hard to believe we are building a project that will push the limits beyond existing technology. This looks like NASP (X30), Constellation, manned mars missions and various other ambitious programs that provided some nice pictures and fancy design studies, but never really went anywhere.
I hope I'm wrong and we are still doing cool aerospace stuff.
I think that one reason that IT fields don't get enough respect is that we lump a very wide range of jobs together. People with minimal training who are doing dull repetitive coding call themselves "computer scientists", or "software engineers". There is nothing to distinguish them in the public mind from the truly exceptional people who are creating real innovations. To people outside of the field they all look the same - they sit in front of a computer typing obscure instructions.
In an attempt at egalitarianism we may have degraded the whole field. In other fields an "engineer" is someone who has a 2 year graduate degree beyond a BS, and then spent several years as a "junior" engineer. A "scientist" has typically 5-10 years of graduate study, and usually a couple years post doctoral work. There are real "computer scientists", and "software engineers" who have a great deal of training and skill, and are capable of doing original work. If we aren't careful about titles though, they are lumped in with a bunch of minimally skilled workers.
To answer the inevitable comment that education isn't important for this - is should be. Would you want to fly in an airplane designed by someone without an engineering degree?
Yes, it depends on how you value time spent in your car vs time doing other things. OTOH a lot of people seem to want to get out of their cars quickly based on the number of people who exceed the posted speed limit when traffic conditions permit.
Time vs cost is always a tradeoff. Most cars get better mileage if they travel more slowly, and certainly would if they were optimized for lower speed. We could reduce maximum speeds to 45mph and save a lot of gas / cost.
Well the typical american drives something like 300 hours / year. My guess is that the typical american drives ~10% over the speed limit. (60 in a 55 zone, 28 in a 25 zone etc) - it might be more like 20% but take 10% for now. That's 30 hours / year saved by speeding. With say 150 million drivers, we are talking around 5 billion hours / year:
Call it $50B/year in lost productivity. 500,000 man-years / year, corresponding to 5000 man-lives/year.
Lots of assumptions and estimates here of course,but this gives a sense of the scale.
not sure why this was listed as "funny". Its completely correct - considering the amount of energy stored, hydrogen is pretty safe. OTOH, hydrogen fuel cells do not seem like a good idea to me - no clear advantages over batteries.
No mod points but I have to agree. For all that people (rightly) make fun of the "bad" acting in the original, the actors were by absolute standards not that bad. The fan remakes I've seen have acting that seems really amateur. Are they hiring professional actors for these?
Like lots of skilled jobs, professional acting is a lot harder than it looks.
The reason I need to agree is that in supporting a candidate who wants less TSA surveillance, I may find that I'm supporting one who supports something else that I strongly oppose - like extra-judicial killings of american citizens.
Not kidding about the space program - different things matter to different people. To *me*, the long term goal of the human race is expansion into the universe and I'm willing to accept some broken eggs to get that omelet. I don't expect many people to agree with me on that specific goal, but I want people to think if freedom really is the most important thing to them. People care about a lot of things: peace, happiness, equality (which is NOT the same as freedom!), art, the environment, religion - I think that sometimes they just pay lip-service to freedom rather than thinking about how important is is relative to other important things.
It is a prisoner's dilemma writ large. As an individual you can choose not to fly, use a cell phone, email etc and avoid being watched. It is perfectly legal to do so, but massively inconvenient and NO ONE WILL CARE. Somewhere there will be a statistic that 97% of americans use cell phones, and 3% don't (completely made-up number). You will have increased that 3% to 3.000001 %. You don't fly - and will be lumped in with the other people who don't fly because they are frighted that aerodynamics might stop working, or who can't afford to fly.
You can of course vote - but there are so many important issues out there, and with a 2 party system, you need to choose a bundle of policies which almost certainly contain something you don't agree with.
You can engage in legal civil disobedience and be lumped in with the large number of people who are protesting a variety of things. Surveilance, TSA checks, wealth disparity, lack of job opportunities, GMO food, foreign policy, abortion rights, etc etc - again you are just noise because there are so many issues.
Or you can engage in illegal actions to make your point - blow up a TSA office or something - and then you actions will be used to justify even more security.
I simply don't see a winning strategy. Donate money to the ACLU seems like the best bet - but I don't agree with everything that they do.
Maybe in the end "freedom" is overrated. We have been brainwashed in early school to believe that freedom is the most important thing in the world - but is it? Personally I'd take a dictatorship with a successful space program over a free country without one (everything else being equal) .
Its a lot easier to get the gunpoweder. I think that if someone actually started putting together the system required to store tons to liquid oxygen they would find that there are a lot of laws for that as well. Kerosene and other common fuels get of easy on the law because thy are used so commonly, but again I expect that if you put them to some unusual use there are regulations to follow.
Basically though, anything that stores enough energy to get a significant payload into orbit has enough energy to do a LOT of damage, and regardless of the laws a responsible person would take all sorts of precautions, including doing their work far from populated areas.
Anyone who is able to make any significant contribution to rocket technology will need to have the resources to deal with the physical and legal issues.
But you can drive to the local airport. Get in your standard plane, Fly to LA. Pick up a rental car at the arrival airport. I do it frequently. The majority of small airports in the US have rental cars available, usually it is very quick to pick them up, minimal paperwork. Many will drive the rental care out to your plane, and refuel the plane while you are away.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be missing how this works, but it looks like they are driving a bunch of antennas to cancel the scattered radiation from an object in one direction. While this works, the trick is to know exactly what the input signal is and the react in time to cancel - something that can only work for very narrowband sources or sources where you know the input field (including its phase) in advance.
I don't see how this could work for radar or light.
At the 10B level it would be difficult to specify a machine that really did what you want: energy, luminosity, backgrounds, energy spectrum etc. Many real machines end up different from design - better in some parameters, worse in others.
There would also be very few organizations who could invest $10B and 20 years to try to win a prize. The prize would need to be big - this is R&D and there is a significant chance that it might not work.
There is a lot of reason to think that there is physics at the TeV scale: supersymmetry, extra dimensions, something. (I'm an accelerator guy, not a theorist so I can't support this very well).
Whether its worth $10B to explore that energy range is not a all a simple question. There are lots of worse things we spend money on, but in my opinion there are some better ones as well.
What I'd most like is some sort of agreement that we will or will not build a machine like this. I hate seeing lots of brilliant people working on projects that may never be built.
Agreed,but a mars mission is a LOT more expensive than a high energy physics machine. $100s of billions the last I hear. (and I'm all for it even at that cost)
There is a lot of discussion about this and the proposed machines are aimed at our best guesses of where there is new physics (for example super-symmetry).
It difficult to predict the benefits of machines that were not built. From past machines, work on linear electron colliders like the SLAC SLC and the never built but lots of R&D TESLA, and NLC led to high brightness electron linacs. Those are now being used to drive X-ray free electron lasers (DESY:FLASH, SLAC:LCLS, Spring-8 SCCS, Trieste , etc).
Those X-ray lasers are now being used extensively for practical research: protein structure measurement, femtosecond chemistry, superconductivity research, magnetic materials research, etc. Much of this has practical application in a 10 year timescale. The existing machines have so many users lined up ( we need to turn down 3/4 or our proposals at LCLS), that a bunch of new machines are being built or proposed around the world. (these are ~1B$ machines).
Then of course there are the spinoffs in low latency networks and distributed ffeedback, precision machining, etc.
Whether the basic physics will have practical applications is always difficult to tell. In the past, overall basic science has been a great investment, but it is difficult to tell if any particular investment will pay off.
But of course there is always a demand for bigger science.
These days the major ideas are:
ILC: A superconducting electron linac based collider. Significant chance the Japanese will host this - we'll know more in a year or so.
CLIC: A CERN design normal conducting 2-beam electron linac (x-band). Sort of a hybrid of the old SLAC X-band NLC concept and the old CLIC 30GHz 2-beam machine. Technically challenging (very tight alignment tolerances), but possible.
Muon collider: Fermilab and others. Very ambitious, completely new type of machine, very difficult.
Plasma accelerators - beam or laser driven. They can get huge gradients >10GV/M in experiments, but very far from ready for a real machine.
Then there will likely be LHC luminosity and energy upgrades.
VLHC has been discussed for decades. Its the obvious next step for proton machines - but when and if we will take that step isn't clear.
Muon colliders are a great concept - but they are difficult REALLY difficult. There is a significant ongoing effort to work on the technologies but they are far from ready now.
Personally I love the idea of high gradient RF cavities fabricated from Beryllium, filled with high pressure hydrogen, with megawatt high energy muon beams. There are however some possible....failure modes. Then there are the problems with neutrino radiation (I'm not kidding - it can exceed allowable dose limits).
A potentially more serious issue is that while the muon collisions themselves are very clean, the decaying muons create a huge amount of background noise in the detectors.
I think its a great project and work should continue - but like laser acceleration we can't build a machine like this yet.
If the project is hosted in the US, then labs at some level compete to be hosts. I'm only familiar with this for $1B projects, $10B may be very different.
Yes, the SSC was a combination of several things. There were techncial cost increase (not too big), increases due to delays in funding (dragging a project out costs more), and changes in what was accounted: The original number the press heard was for the machine, not the site, or the detectors, and without escalation, contingency etc. The huge numbers later on included all those things.
Sadly cutting basic science doesn't hurt for a long time, so its an easy target. OTOH - we are never going to built a Plank-energy accelerator so we need to stop sometime.
Sadly its not that simple. Imagine lab "A" says they have a design they can build for 10B and lab "B" says it will cost $11B - and assume both labs have similar good reputations for building large projects. "A" gets the project and that means they get funded for the next ~15 years. Lab B gets downsized or even shut down because the high energy physics money is going to lab A. If the project works -great. But if not, and Lab A has put in an unreasonably low estimate at least they still exist, and after 15 years many of the managers responsible have retired.
Now say 15 years later the $10B has been spent, but its not quite done, another $2B would let you finish the project. Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B? There is no fraud, just a mis-estimation of the costs of building a beyond state-of-the-art machine and slightly larger technical problems than were expected.
What happens is that you create a very strong motivation for under-estimates because that at least keeps the lab alive. Combine that with the difficulty of estimating the cost of something that hasn't been done yet, and a long enough project timescale that changing economic conditions can substantially change labor and construction costs. This is why many projects like this go over budget.
I don't think this is unique to government. I suspect that Boeing doesn't do a good job of estimating the development cost of a new airliner either - and that is much less of a technological extrapolation than the high energy physics machines.
I remember Los Angeles in 1980 and recently, The difference in pollution levels is stunning. I've also been to big Chinese cities and seen the pollution there. I don't know about each rule separately, but overall the emissions restrictions from the EPA have made a huge difference.
It might be useful in a few cases, but for most applications the quick turn pcb houses like expresspcb can turn a file into a circuit that is express mailed back in a couple of days for $100 with no human intervention. Since those are standard PCB materials they are reasonable prototypes for real systems.
If these circuits could be soldered it would be a lot more interesting. Too many modern components are in tiny packages that couldn't really be connected with tape or conductiv glue.
At least it seems that >90% of slashdot readers recognized immediately just how stupid the original article was.
Also, these were STUDENTS. Its actually a nice student project to try to make a RF power receiver. Its quite possible that the students DID use the right units and the person doing the press release didn't understand. (and is currently being crucified by his / her management).
One could even imagine applications for micro-power devices used in an environment where there is some RF background but it isn't practical to install your own transmitter. - NSA bugs embedded in building materials for example (thought the power density might be too low even for that). This was supported by the army research office.
I'd certainly like faster international travel!
I'm not sure that hypersonic is a win over sub-orbital ballistic. Using the air for oxidizer is a big win, but the energy loss from drag may more than make up for it. I haven't seen a good side by side comparison of the fuel requirements for the two modes for say a 6000 mile trip.
I would love to believe that the US could still pull off cutting edge aerospace project, but I'm really skeptical. After 50 years we've lost our manned space program, hard to believe we are building a project that will push the limits beyond existing technology. This looks like NASP (X30), Constellation, manned mars missions and various other ambitious programs that provided some nice pictures and fancy design studies, but never really went anywhere.
I hope I'm wrong and we are still doing cool aerospace stuff.
I think that one reason that IT fields don't get enough respect is that we lump a very wide range of jobs together. People with minimal training who are doing dull repetitive coding call themselves "computer scientists", or "software engineers". There is nothing to distinguish them in the public mind from the truly exceptional people who are creating real innovations. To people outside of the field they all look the same - they sit in front of a computer typing obscure instructions.
In an attempt at egalitarianism we may have degraded the whole field. In other fields an "engineer" is someone who has a 2 year graduate degree beyond a BS, and then spent several years as a "junior" engineer. A "scientist" has typically 5-10 years of graduate study, and usually a couple years post doctoral work. There are real "computer scientists", and "software engineers" who have a great deal of training and skill, and are capable of doing original work. If we aren't careful about titles though, they are lumped in with a bunch of minimally skilled workers.
To answer the inevitable comment that education isn't important for this - is should be. Would you want to fly in an airplane designed by someone without an engineering degree?
Yes, it depends on how you value time spent in your car vs time doing other things. OTOH a lot of people seem to want to get out of their cars quickly based on the number of people who exceed the posted speed limit when traffic conditions permit.
Time vs cost is always a tradeoff. Most cars get better mileage if they travel more slowly, and certainly would if they were optimized for lower speed. We could reduce maximum speeds to 45mph and save a lot of gas / cost.
Well the typical american drives something like 300 hours / year. My guess is that the typical american drives ~10% over the speed limit. (60 in a 55 zone, 28 in a 25 zone etc) - it might be more like 20% but take 10% for now. That's 30 hours / year saved by speeding. With say 150 million drivers, we are talking around 5 billion hours / year:
Call it $50B/year in lost productivity.
500,000 man-years / year, corresponding to 5000 man-lives/year.
Lots of assumptions and estimates here of course,but this gives a sense of the scale.
not sure why this was listed as "funny". Its completely correct - considering the amount of energy stored, hydrogen is pretty safe. OTOH, hydrogen fuel cells do not seem like a good idea to me - no clear advantages over batteries.
No mod points but I have to agree. For all that people (rightly) make fun of the "bad" acting in the original, the actors were by absolute standards not that bad. The fan remakes I've seen have acting that seems really amateur. Are they hiring professional actors for these?
Like lots of skilled jobs, professional acting is a lot harder than it looks.
The reason I need to agree is that in supporting a candidate who wants less TSA surveillance, I may find that I'm supporting one who supports something else that I strongly oppose - like extra-judicial killings of american citizens.
Not kidding about the space program - different things matter to different people. To *me*, the long term goal of the human race is expansion into the universe and I'm willing to accept some broken eggs to get that omelet. I don't expect many people to agree with me on that specific goal, but I want people to think if freedom really is the most important thing to them. People care about a lot of things: peace, happiness, equality (which is NOT the same as freedom!), art, the environment, religion - I think that sometimes they just pay lip-service to freedom rather than thinking about how important is is relative to other important things.
It is a prisoner's dilemma writ large. As an individual you can choose not to fly, use a cell phone, email etc and avoid being watched. It is perfectly legal to do so, but massively inconvenient and NO ONE WILL CARE. Somewhere there will be a statistic that 97% of americans use cell phones, and 3% don't (completely made-up number). You will have increased that 3% to 3.000001 %. You don't fly - and will be lumped in with the other people who don't fly because they are frighted that aerodynamics might stop working, or who can't afford to fly.
You can of course vote - but there are so many important issues out there, and with a 2 party system, you need to choose a bundle of policies which almost certainly contain something you don't agree with.
You can engage in legal civil disobedience and be lumped in with the large number of people who are protesting a variety of things. Surveilance, TSA checks, wealth disparity, lack of job opportunities, GMO food, foreign policy, abortion rights, etc etc - again you are just noise because there are so many issues.
Or you can engage in illegal actions to make your point - blow up a TSA office or something - and then you actions will be used to justify even more security.
I simply don't see a winning strategy. Donate money to the ACLU seems like the best bet - but I don't agree with everything that they do.
Maybe in the end "freedom" is overrated. We have been brainwashed in early school to believe that freedom is the most important thing in the world - but is it? Personally I'd take a dictatorship with a successful space program over a free country without one (everything else being equal) .
Its a lot easier to get the gunpoweder. I think that if someone actually started putting together the system required to store tons to liquid oxygen they would find that there are a lot of laws for that as well. Kerosene and other common fuels get of easy on the law because thy are used so commonly, but again I expect that if you put them to some unusual use there are regulations to follow.
Basically though, anything that stores enough energy to get a significant payload into orbit has enough energy to do a LOT of damage, and regardless of the laws a responsible person would take all sorts of precautions, including doing their work far from populated areas.
Anyone who is able to make any significant contribution to rocket technology will need to have the resources to deal with the physical and legal issues.
a lot of small airports have rental cars, and the cost is small compared to the flight cost.
But you can drive to the local airport. Get in your standard plane, Fly to LA. Pick up a rental car at the arrival airport. I do it frequently. The majority of small airports in the US have rental cars available, usually it is very quick to pick them up, minimal paperwork. Many will drive the rental care out to your plane, and refuel the plane while you are away.