" I would swirl it around and show everyone how liquid it was. Without warning, I would then move the bowl quickly, like I was going to completely douche someone with it. The solution would thicken, and stay in the bowl
Wow, these demonstrations sound very up close and intimate.
wow what a clever mature response. Why do I picture you selfrighteously patting yourself on the back right now? My point remains valid. If you are going to send humans to Mars obviously they will have to use sterilized space suits. The lander will be huge in comparison to previous landers sent to Mars, everything humans touch necessarily becomes contaminated with millions of bacteria, it will be orders of magnitude more difficult to sterilize such an object. Without any real knowledge on the chances of viability for organisms from Earth in a Martian environment, taking a gamble on ruining the scientific value of such a pristine laboratory merely for means of national pride would be crime.
Am I the only one who dosen't think this is really great and in fact hopes that it won't happen?
You can't sterilize humans without killing them and you can't resonably expect their suits and equipment to remain sterile after the first use. If astro/cosmonauts were sent to mars now it would be a total disaster. All results of any subsequent experiments looking for current life on the surface of Mars would be thrown into doubt.
At least do a few sample return missions before we send a dirty infectious human.
Re:Why? What is the point?
on
Listen to the Sky
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
And why wait?? Listen now, live. (not all at once now!!) If that site goes down, and I presume it will within seconds of posting this, this site has pre-recorded sounds of Earth's natural EM radiation.
Millions of people watched the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals and humans on a massive scale liveas entertainment for centuries. Barbaric as that may have been, this is only disturbing insomuch as it reveals an aspect of human nature(a curiosity about death) which frightens and disturbs us but which is none the less still very real.
Only on Slashdot would the comment "These people obviously aren't *that* removed from the outside world, even if they are filthy, filthy Italians." be modded as "interesting". Hello!? He's joking! It's funny, laugh!
"It doesn't help that scientists aren't always all that scientific when presented with observations thay cannot explain. Too often, important phrases like "this is just a guess, but" get replaced with "I'm absolutely certain that" whenever coincidence is about to be invoked. The correct pronouncement would be "I have no idea whatsoever", but scientists don't like to say that either."
This is absolutely not true and it seems like you've just made it up to suit your argument that scientists are 'mystical' and dogmatic.
I work around scientists all the time and I hear the phrase "I don't know" ALL THE TIME. Scientists as a whole have no problem admitting they do not fully understand a phenomenon, partly because the activity of scientufic inquiry is itself a humbling one.
"Add on top of that all of the 'scientific' pronouncements like 'eggs are bad for you', 'any wine is bad for you', 'oops, no, some wine is good for you, and so are eggs, but avoid fat at all costs', 'oops, people are getting fatter on low fat diets',....."
One caveat, dieticians are NOT scientists!
"I call it pseudoscience because collectively they have a habit of stating working theory (complete with conflicting evidence) as if it were fact and flatly denying the existance of plainly observable phenomena when the correct answer is clearly "We don't know"."
This is total strawman cunstructing nonsense. Please cite one instance where this has occured among experts in the hard sciences.
Scientists are the most non-superstitious and non-dogmatic group of people in society.
Of course none of this actually matters. Let's keep focused here people, the only important thing we should be concerned with is if it will be as much fun to put a strong magnet next to the drive as it is with my monitor. Somehow I doubt it...:(
"thats funny because you CANT simulate such an explosion since the fusion in a thermonuclear bomb uses plutonium for its destructive force"
Uhhh...no actually a thermonuclear bomb uses a fission device to fill what's called a hohlraum with intense x-rays that compress a source of hydrogen fuel to very high densities and temperatures. This is simulated very closely with a miniature equivalent hohlraum used with high power lasers.
"so...in short...shut up you stupid uneducated "I hate everything that has the word nuclear in it" person"
Inever said anything of the sort, nor would I ever say something so stupid. I was merely pointing out that it's unfortunate that something great like the NIF has to have its justification for being built be nuclear weapons design instead of fundamental physics.
IANAP just a technician on Omega so I'm not exactly sure of the intricate details of the problems with computer simulations etc. but from what I gather the computer simulations of ICF targets are notoriously difficult to match with experiments due to the incredibly complex problem of modeling hydrodynamic instabilities in the implosion.
Essentially that's true, I suppose. NOVA was around 100 Terawatts per shot (I've heard it was capable of 100 Kilojoules per shot but I suspect it was actually less). NOVA only had 10 beams though and this ended up creating huge problems. When a pellet was imploded on NOVA the beam/beam instabilities and nonuniformity of the irradiation on target caused very large hydrodynamic instabilities as it imploded (Rayleigh-Taylor instability mostly) which spoiled the fusion reaction before it could really start.
The Omega laser with its 60 beams produces much higher irradiation uniformity and even though it's lower power than NOVA(which was decomissioned in '99) it holds the record for neutron production in a shot at something like 5X10^13 neutrons, indicating a much 'cleaner' convergence and fusion burn. There were several lasers at LLNL before the NOVA laser with various names like Janus, Argus and Shiva, which all used the fundamental frequency of Nd:glass lasers at 1064 nanometers(infrared) and the great contribution in the early '80s to ICF laser fusion by the Omega guys was the idea to convert this IR to its third harmonic at ~351 nanometers in the UV. This greatly increased laser absorption efficiency on target and consequently increased target compression pressures/temperatures accordingly. Allmost all high power Nd:glass lasers use this technique today.
Keep in mind the thinking of the guys who funded the NIF was NOT
"hey guys I bet if we just build this multi billion dollar gigantic laser facility we just might be able to make fusion a viable power source 30 years in the future"
Instead it was more like "hey guys I bet if we build this multi billion dollar gigantic laser facility we'll be able to simulate thermonuclear bomb tests really really well on a small scale and not have to worry about breaking a test ban treaty"....
Oops I misspoke, I meant to say the Omega laser is actually the most ENERGETIC UV laser in the world at ~30Kilojoules/shot, Not the most powerfull, as there are a few other chirped pulse lasers with higher powers out there but not higher energies(most can only do a few hundred J per shot though this is still enough to do direct laser induced nuclear reactions).
I can't speak directly for the efficiency of the NIF but the Omega laser which is also a Neodymium glass laser is abysmally inefficient. An energy input of many hundreds of Megajoules into the flashlamps that charge up the laser glass only produces ~30 Kilojoules of actual laser output (most of which is absorbed by the target. I suspect the NIF will have Gigajoule scale capacitor banks to fire their flashlamps in order to produce the ~2Megajoules of laser energy on target it is expected to produce.
It's interesting that the NIF first full light is now pushed back to 2014. There's a small chance we may just beat them to ignigion.
I work at the Omega Laser(still the most powerfull in the world at 60 Terawatts! ya!) and there is currently construction going on here to complete what is called Omega EP(extended performance) by ~2007. Omega EP will produce an astounding 2.6 PETAWATTS(million billion watts!!) of power for a around a picosecond (so about 2-3 Kilojoules per shot which is much less than the NIF's megajoule scale shots) making it, by far the worlds most powerfull laser when complete. The new laser will use what's called chirped pulse amplification to produce its incredibly high petawatt scale power.
Using the current 60 beam 60 Terawatt (~30Kj) laser to compress a pellet of hydrogen fuel and then just before the moment of maximum inward compression and then stagnation; the EP petawatt beam will fire, producing an instant injection of Mev scale electrons directly into the center of the collapsing target and hopefully producing high fusion yeilds and perhaps even approaching ignition. The Gekko XII laser in Japan with its 500 terawatt scale CPA lser has validated this scheme, which is called "fast ignition", reporting that with the CPA laser used at maximum compression with their 12 beam 40 terrawat laser they've achieve an increase in neutron output(fusion yield) by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude...Can't wait till we can fire ours up!
CANDU reactors are far from a panacea. Everything is a tradeoff here and CANDU reactors produce massive amounts of radioactive tritium waste in the heavy water coolant which is usually just dumped into the environment, unlike light water reactors. We'll always have these tradeoffs and compromises to deal with until we're able to do away with fission entirely and do some kind of sustained 'clean' fusion reaction like deuterium helium 3 which produces little neutron radiation. Don't hold your breath waiting for that though.
there's no way that testimony is real. either that person was senile or the whole thing was made up with the intent of duping a gullible readership. That site is full of idiotic misinformation and scare tactics. TMI only released about 20 curies of Iodine 131 to the environment, a completely negligible amount, and a few million curies of noble gas emissions (which produce only very small exposures) resulting in a total exposure of ~2millirem of additional exposure per person in the surrounding 2 million person population. compare this with the many millions of curies of I-131 released from the Chernobyl explosion.
Interesting you should mention this. I had a few of the same thoughts after reading the last/. article and I initially thought it was Cerenkov in air they saw too.
What did those people see exactly, what color was it, did it move with the wind, how bright was it, and were they frightened? After having a back and forth with someone in the last posting we came to the conclusion (I think...) that what they were probably seeing was in fact not Cerenkov radiation but actually the direct ionization (then fluorescence as electrons fell from their excited states back to ground states) of the air by mostly beta and gamma radiation.(I believe you mistakenly attribute the effect of Cerenkov radiation to Neutrons though, as Neutrons are chargeless and Cerenkov is an effect of CHARGED particles moving faster than the speed of light through a substance as an above response to your post notes)
This ionization of the air would also produce a blue glow and while it may be plauseable, as you note, to consider a small amount of Cerenkov radiation being produced in the steam cloud (tiny water droplets) of the explosion, I think the direct ionization of air is much more likely an explanation, though no less horrifying.
You can immediately disregard the possibility of the people who saw this accident actually having seen Cerenkov in the vitreous humor of the eye though, as they were far too distant from the radiation of the Chernobyl blast to have this effect (though this IS a real effect, well documented by astronauts traveling through the high radiation Van Allen belts on thier way to the moon). Also they clearly saw the "radiation glow" DIRECTIONALLY, meaning it absolutely was not Cerenkov in the eye which would have appeared to come from everywhere at once since it was happening inside your eye. I think that witnesses of criticality accidents (Slotin, the Tokaimura accident, etc.) also for the most part were seeing the effects of ionization in air for the same reasons.
A particularly enlightening usenet thread from a few years ago deals with this very topic.
"Out of the 14 people who have been killed inflight in Spacecraft, all 14 died in Shuttle accidents"
Sorry, wrong. In 1971 a Soyuz crew was lost when it depressurized too early, asphyxiating the astronauts inside. Soyuz 1 also killed it's occupant when it's main and reserve parachutes failed.
here here! On top of that, she spelled the first place winner's name incorrectly!! It's supposed to be Herbert Mason Hedberg. Her perseveration on issues of name pronounceability and it's supposed correlation with project title comprehensibility(idiotic) seemed to border on being almost racist. And the section where she says "It had blank pages at the back, labeled "Notes," and I scribbled, though not very scientifically: "nice pants suit," "acne," "looks like she's got a real stage mother," "storytelling champion!!!!"" is an absolute joke and completely discredits her as a journalist. Those kinds of comments about kids coming from a supposed adult are juvenile, irrelevant and insulting, as you note. This woman is supposed to be an expert on raising kids? ha!
"Tell him he might have to wind up running human emotions under emulation if necessary.
Not knowing what the hell is wrong with him will stress him a lot more than having something, anything, he can deal with."
Maybe this is an improper or even crass question, but when exactly did it become popular for everyone to have a pet disorder? It's really quite pathetic. No one is a bit shy anymore, they have Asperger's syndrome, no one feels under the weather for a time, they have chronic fatigue syndrome, no one dreads going to work in a drab boring office tower, they suffer from sick building syndrome etc. If you want to teach him about Asperger's syndrome, do him a bigger favor and also teach him about how certain psychoanalytical trends have all the earmarks of fad diagnoses.
I submit that what you have proposed here is possibly the worst solution to a kids problem of shyness (even if it's to the point of 'painful' shyness). Telling him: you have X syndrome, you better learn to deal with it now so you can start spending the rest of your life "running human emotions under emulation" is downright depressing and gives him an excuse to throw his hands up and essentially absolve himself of any personal responsibility to remedy his situation.
Would it not be better to provide guidance on how to have REAL relationships with people, find friends of his own interest and maybe gradually introduce him to participation in fun activities with his own peer group??
"The new properties were created by opening a gap that allows the structure to resonate at higher frequencies. By mimicking the magnetic effect at a much smaller scale, the researchers were able to create magnetic activity at nearly optical frequencies using common non-magnetic materials such as copper.
The split ring resonators that make up the periodic array were fabricated using a unique self-aligned microfabrication technique called photo-proliferate-process. "
I think I speak for everyone here when I say.... oh.
"Slotin died from X-ray + neutron radiation. Like Slotin's co-worker and student Daghlian less than year before him. Yes, there was blue flash and wave of heat. It was from air ionisation, not Cherenkov. This is a common misconception about Cherenkov in air.
hmmm.... where would the x-rays come from? (bremsstrahlung from the betas going through the Pu??...maybe?)
anyway, bed time for me, great talking with you though!:o)
I'm not so sure....IANAP but like to contemplate these things anyway:) if there is a physicist here and I'm wrong please correct me (us?).
Firstly, the citizens viewing the catastrophe from the roof apparently noted that "it was shining of radiation". I wish I could talk to a few of them to determine exactly what they meant by this but I would tend to think they wouldn't have made that bizzare characterization of what they saw if it was merely burning graphite on the ground.
Cherenkov radiation is not observed in air (you need particles with mass traveling with speed higher than the speed of light in given medium , and the optical density of air is low (close to vacuum), the particles would have to travel at speeds near to c - which are difficult to obtain because of relativistic effects. (You can get that from accelerators, but not from fission)
The beta particles coming from the aerosolized radioactive isotopes should be at least Mev scale which I would think is enough....no? Also the reactor was an RBMK design which when it exploded should have released a huge amount of steam (small water droplets) likely intensifying any cerenkov effect...
There is similar-looking bluish shine/flash around extremely strong sources, like criticality accident with Pu, U, or in nuclear explosion (the mushroom has bluish envelope). This shine is caused by intense ionisation of air molecules by radiation, mostly X-ray.
In the accounts I've read of the observed "purple glow" from a nuclear blast, it is usually attributed to the mushroom cloud, which after a couple of seconds must not emit much at all in the way of x-rays(I think x-rays are only emitted when the initial fission/explosion plasma is still extremely hot[blackbody radiation]). So if the blue glow is there during the mushroom cloud it is either Cerenkov or ionization by particle radiation coming from fast (intense) decaying isotopes in the air.
In the '40's there was a scientist at LosAlamos, Louis Slotin, who was doing a very foolish experiment to measure the criticality of a sphere of plutonium called "tickling the dragons tale" where beryllium hemispheres are slowly closed around a small core of Plutonium. Slotin slipped and the assembly went immediately critical releasing a large flux of beta particles. Slotin died, but not before noting a "blue flash" at the moment of criticality which may have been either Cerenkov radiation in the air or.. more likely in the jelly inside his eye which would have made it look like it was filling the room. So I still think the Cerenkov explanation is possible.....
Slashdot Mirror
" I would swirl it around and show everyone how liquid it was. Without warning, I would then move the bowl quickly, like I was going to completely douche someone with it. The solution would thicken, and stay in the bowl
Wow, these demonstrations sound very up close and intimate.
wow what a clever mature response. Why do I picture you selfrighteously patting yourself on the back right now? My point remains valid. If you are going to send humans to Mars obviously they will have to use sterilized space suits. The lander will be huge in comparison to previous landers sent to Mars, everything humans touch necessarily becomes contaminated with millions of bacteria, it will be orders of magnitude more difficult to sterilize such an object. Without any real knowledge on the chances of viability for organisms from Earth in a Martian environment, taking a gamble on ruining the scientific value of such a pristine laboratory merely for means of national pride would be crime.
Am I the only one who dosen't think this is really great and in fact hopes that it won't happen?
You can't sterilize humans without killing them and you can't resonably expect their suits and equipment to remain sterile after the first use. If astro/cosmonauts were sent to mars now it would be a total disaster. All results of any subsequent experiments looking for current life on the surface of Mars would be thrown into doubt.
At least do a few sample return missions before we send a dirty infectious human.
And why wait?? Listen now, live. (not all at once now!!) If that site goes down, and I presume it will within seconds of posting this, this site has pre-recorded sounds of Earth's natural EM radiation.
Wow, how ironic. This post has so many stupid spelling errors it makes me want to blow MY head off.
Millions of people watched the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals and humans on a massive scale live as entertainment for centuries. Barbaric as that may have been, this is only disturbing insomuch as it reveals an aspect of human nature(a curiosity about death) which frightens and disturbs us but which is none the less still very real.
Only on Slashdot would the comment "These people obviously aren't *that* removed from the outside world, even if they are filthy, filthy Italians."
be modded as "interesting".
Hello!? He's joking! It's funny, laugh!
"It doesn't help that scientists aren't always all that scientific when presented with observations thay cannot explain. Too often, important phrases like "this is just a guess, but" get replaced with "I'm absolutely certain that" whenever coincidence is about to be invoked. The correct pronouncement would be "I have no idea whatsoever", but scientists don't like to say that either."
This is absolutely not true and it seems like you've just made it up to suit your argument that scientists are 'mystical' and dogmatic.
I work around scientists all the time and I hear the phrase "I don't know" ALL THE TIME. Scientists as a whole have no problem admitting they do not fully understand a phenomenon, partly because the activity of scientufic inquiry is itself a humbling one.
"Add on top of that all of the 'scientific' pronouncements like 'eggs are bad for you', 'any wine is bad for you', 'oops, no, some wine is good for you, and so are eggs, but avoid fat at all costs', 'oops, people are getting fatter on low fat diets',....."
One caveat, dieticians are NOT scientists!
"I call it pseudoscience because collectively they have a habit of stating working theory (complete with conflicting evidence) as if it were fact and flatly denying the existance of plainly observable phenomena when the correct answer is clearly "We don't know"."
This is total strawman cunstructing nonsense. Please cite one instance where this has occured among experts in the hard sciences.
Scientists are the most non-superstitious and non-dogmatic group of people in society.
Of course none of this actually matters. Let's keep focused here people, the only important thing we should be concerned with is if it will be as much fun to put a strong magnet next to the drive as it is with my monitor. Somehow I doubt it...:(
"thats funny because you CANT simulate such an explosion since the fusion in a thermonuclear bomb uses plutonium for its destructive force"
Uhhh...no actually a thermonuclear bomb uses a fission device to fill what's called a hohlraum with intense x-rays that compress a source of hydrogen fuel to very high densities and temperatures. This is simulated very closely with a miniature equivalent hohlraum used with high power lasers.
"so...in short...shut up you stupid uneducated "I hate everything that has the word nuclear in it" person"
Inever said anything of the sort, nor would I ever say something so stupid. I was merely pointing out that it's unfortunate that something great like the NIF has to have its justification for being built be nuclear weapons design instead of fundamental physics.
IANAP just a technician on Omega so I'm not exactly sure of the intricate details of the problems with computer simulations etc. but from what I gather the computer simulations of ICF targets are notoriously difficult to match with experiments due to the incredibly complex problem of modeling hydrodynamic instabilities in the implosion.
Essentially that's true, I suppose. NOVA was around 100 Terawatts per shot (I've heard it was capable of 100 Kilojoules per shot but I suspect it was actually less). NOVA only had 10 beams though and this ended up creating huge problems. When a pellet was imploded on NOVA the beam/beam instabilities and nonuniformity of the irradiation on target caused very large hydrodynamic instabilities as it imploded (Rayleigh-Taylor instability mostly) which spoiled the fusion reaction before it could really start.
The Omega laser with its 60 beams produces much higher irradiation uniformity and even though it's lower power than NOVA(which was decomissioned in '99) it holds the record for neutron production in a shot at something like 5X10^13 neutrons, indicating a much 'cleaner' convergence and fusion burn. There were several lasers at LLNL before the NOVA laser with various names like Janus, Argus and Shiva, which all used the fundamental frequency of Nd:glass lasers at 1064 nanometers(infrared) and the great contribution in the early '80s to ICF laser fusion by the Omega guys was the idea to convert this IR to its third harmonic at ~351 nanometers in the UV. This greatly increased laser absorption efficiency on target and consequently increased target compression pressures/temperatures accordingly. Allmost all high power Nd:glass lasers use this technique today.
Keep in mind the thinking of the guys who funded the NIF was NOT
"hey guys I bet if we just build this multi billion dollar gigantic laser facility we just might be able to make fusion a viable power source 30 years in the future"
Instead it was more like "hey guys I bet if we build this multi billion dollar gigantic laser facility we'll be able to simulate thermonuclear bomb tests really really well on a small scale and not have to worry about breaking a test ban treaty"....
Oops I misspoke, I meant to say the Omega laser is actually the most ENERGETIC UV laser in the world at ~30Kilojoules/shot, Not the most powerfull, as there are a few other chirped pulse lasers with higher powers out there but not higher energies(most can only do a few hundred J per shot though this is still enough to do direct laser induced nuclear reactions).
I can't speak directly for the efficiency of the NIF but the Omega laser which is also a Neodymium glass laser is abysmally inefficient. An energy input of many hundreds of Megajoules into the flashlamps that charge up the laser glass only produces ~30 Kilojoules of actual laser output (most of which is absorbed by the target. I suspect the NIF will have Gigajoule scale capacitor banks to fire their flashlamps in order to produce the ~2Megajoules of laser energy on target it is expected to produce.
It's interesting that the NIF first full light is now pushed back to 2014. There's a small chance we may just beat them to ignigion.
I work at the Omega Laser(still the most powerfull in the world at 60 Terawatts! ya!) and there is currently construction going on here to complete what is called Omega EP(extended performance) by ~2007. Omega EP will produce an astounding 2.6 PETAWATTS(million billion watts!!) of power for a around a picosecond (so about 2-3 Kilojoules per shot which is much less than the NIF's megajoule scale shots) making it, by far the worlds most powerfull laser when complete. The new laser will use what's called chirped pulse amplification to produce its incredibly high petawatt scale power.
Using the current 60 beam 60 Terawatt (~30Kj) laser to compress a pellet of hydrogen fuel and then just before the moment of maximum inward compression and then stagnation; the EP petawatt beam will fire, producing an instant injection of Mev scale electrons directly into the center of the collapsing target and hopefully producing high fusion yeilds and perhaps even approaching ignition. The Gekko XII laser in Japan with its 500 terawatt scale CPA lser has validated this scheme, which is called "fast ignition", reporting that with the CPA laser used at maximum compression with their 12 beam 40 terrawat laser they've achieve an increase in neutron output(fusion yield) by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude...Can't wait till we can fire ours up!
CANDU reactors are far from a panacea. Everything is a tradeoff here and CANDU reactors produce massive amounts of radioactive tritium waste in the heavy water coolant which is usually just dumped into the environment, unlike light water reactors. We'll always have these tradeoffs and compromises to deal with until we're able to do away with fission entirely and do some kind of sustained 'clean' fusion reaction like deuterium helium 3 which produces little neutron radiation. Don't hold your breath waiting for that though.
there's no way that testimony is real. either that person was senile or the whole thing was made up with the intent of duping a gullible readership. That site is full of idiotic misinformation and scare tactics. TMI only released about 20 curies of Iodine 131 to the environment, a completely negligible amount, and a few million curies of noble gas emissions (which produce only very small exposures) resulting in a total exposure of ~2millirem of additional exposure per person in the surrounding 2 million person population. compare this with the many millions of curies of I-131 released from the Chernobyl explosion.
Interesting you should mention this. I had a few of the same thoughts after reading the last /. article and I initially thought it was Cerenkov in air they saw too.
What did those people see exactly, what color was it, did it move with the wind, how bright was it, and were they frightened? After having a back and forth with someone in the last posting we came to the conclusion (I think...) that what they were probably seeing was in fact not Cerenkov radiation but actually the direct ionization (then fluorescence as electrons fell from their excited states back to ground states) of the air by mostly beta and gamma radiation.(I believe you mistakenly attribute the effect of Cerenkov radiation to Neutrons though, as Neutrons are chargeless and Cerenkov is an effect of CHARGED particles moving faster than the speed of light through a substance as an above response to your post notes)
This ionization of the air would also produce a blue glow and while it may be plauseable, as you note, to consider a small amount of Cerenkov radiation being produced in the steam cloud (tiny water droplets) of the explosion, I think the direct ionization of air is much more likely an explanation, though no less horrifying.
You can immediately disregard the possibility of the people who saw this accident actually having seen Cerenkov in the vitreous humor of the eye though, as they were far too distant from the radiation of the Chernobyl blast to have this effect (though this IS a real effect, well documented by astronauts traveling through the high radiation Van Allen belts on thier way to the moon). Also they clearly saw the "radiation glow" DIRECTIONALLY, meaning it absolutely was not Cerenkov in the eye which would have appeared to come from everywhere at once since it was happening inside your eye. I think that witnesses of criticality accidents (Slotin, the Tokaimura accident, etc.) also for the most part were seeing the effects of ionization in air for the same reasons.
A particularly enlightening usenet thread from a few years ago deals with this very topic.
"Out of the 14 people who have been killed inflight in Spacecraft, all 14 died in Shuttle accidents"
Sorry, wrong. In 1971 a Soyuz crew was lost when it depressurized too early, asphyxiating the astronauts inside. Soyuz 1 also killed it's occupant when it's main and reserve parachutes failed.
here here! On top of that, she spelled the first place winner's name incorrectly!! It's supposed to be Herbert Mason Hedberg. Her perseveration on issues of name pronounceability and it's supposed correlation with project title comprehensibility(idiotic) seemed to border on being almost racist. And the section where she says "It had blank pages at the back, labeled "Notes," and I scribbled, though not very scientifically: "nice pants suit," "acne," "looks like she's got a real stage mother," "storytelling champion!!!!"" is an absolute joke and completely discredits her as a journalist. Those kinds of comments about kids coming from a supposed adult are juvenile, irrelevant and insulting, as you note. This woman is supposed to be an expert on raising kids? ha!
"Tell him he might have to wind up running human emotions under emulation if necessary.
Not knowing what the hell is wrong with him will stress him a lot more than having something, anything, he can deal with."
Maybe this is an improper or even crass question, but when exactly did it become popular for everyone to have a pet disorder? It's really quite pathetic. No one is a bit shy anymore, they have Asperger's syndrome, no one feels under the weather for a time, they have chronic fatigue syndrome, no one dreads going to work in a drab boring office tower, they suffer from sick building syndrome etc. If you want to teach him about Asperger's syndrome, do him a bigger favor and also teach him about how certain psychoanalytical trends have all the earmarks of fad diagnoses.
I submit that what you have proposed here is possibly the worst solution to a kids problem of shyness (even if it's to the point of 'painful' shyness). Telling him: you have X syndrome, you better learn to deal with it now so you can start spending the rest of your life "running human emotions under emulation" is downright depressing and gives him an excuse to throw his hands up and essentially absolve himself of any personal responsibility to remedy his situation.
Would it not be better to provide guidance on how to have REAL relationships with people, find friends of his own interest and maybe gradually introduce him to participation in fun activities with his own peer group??
"The new properties were created by opening a gap that allows the structure to resonate at higher frequencies. By mimicking the magnetic effect at a much smaller scale, the researchers were able to create magnetic activity at nearly optical frequencies using common non-magnetic materials such as copper.
The split ring resonators that make up the periodic array were fabricated using a unique self-aligned microfabrication technique called photo-proliferate-process.
"
I think I speak for everyone here when I say.... oh.
"Slotin died from X-ray + neutron radiation. Like Slotin's co-worker and student Daghlian less than year before him. Yes, there was blue flash and wave of heat. It was from air ionisation, not Cherenkov. This is a common misconception about Cherenkov in air.
...maybe?)
:o)
hmmm.... where would the x-rays come from? (bremsstrahlung from the betas going through the Pu??
anyway, bed time for me, great talking with you though!
I'm not so sure....IANAP but like to contemplate these things anyway :) if there is a physicist here and I'm wrong please correct me (us?).
Firstly, the citizens viewing the catastrophe from the roof apparently noted that "it was shining of radiation". I wish I could talk to a few of them to determine exactly what they meant by this but I would tend to think they wouldn't have made that bizzare characterization of what they saw if it was merely burning graphite on the ground.
Cherenkov radiation is not observed in air (you need particles with mass traveling with speed higher than the speed of light in given medium , and the optical density of air is low (close to vacuum), the particles would have to travel at speeds near to c - which are difficult to obtain because of relativistic effects. (You can get that from accelerators, but not from fission)
The beta particles coming from the aerosolized radioactive isotopes should be at least Mev scale which I would think is enough....no? Also the reactor was an RBMK design which when it exploded should have released a huge amount of steam (small water droplets) likely intensifying any cerenkov effect...
There is similar-looking bluish shine/flash around extremely strong sources, like criticality accident with Pu, U, or in nuclear explosion (the mushroom has bluish envelope). This shine is caused by intense ionisation of air molecules by radiation, mostly X-ray.
In the accounts I've read of the observed "purple glow" from a nuclear blast, it is usually attributed to the mushroom cloud, which after a couple of seconds must not emit much at all in the way of x-rays(I think x-rays are only emitted when the initial fission/explosion plasma is still extremely hot[blackbody radiation]). So if the blue glow is there during the mushroom cloud it is either Cerenkov or ionization by particle radiation coming from fast (intense) decaying isotopes in the air.
In the '40's there was a scientist at LosAlamos, Louis Slotin, who was doing a very foolish experiment to measure the criticality of a sphere of plutonium called "tickling the dragons tale" where beryllium hemispheres are slowly closed around a small core of Plutonium. Slotin slipped and the assembly went immediately critical releasing a large flux of beta particles. Slotin died, but not before noting a "blue flash" at the moment of criticality which may have been either Cerenkov radiation in the air or.. more likely in the jelly inside his eye which would have made it look like it was filling the room. So I still think the Cerenkov explanation is possible.....