We're building a sub-mm polarimeter (Clover)to go to Dome-C (Dome-C is the best site in the world for sub-mm, being high, dry, cold and calm) starting now.
The total budget is 4.3M GBP, including new detector development, and the telescope will be collecting data from Austral winter 2007 onwards. This telescope will have better results on CMB B-mode polarisation than the Planck satelite mission, before Planck reports results, for about a tenth to hundredth of the cost. The Planck project has a 15 year head start. Admittedly Planck isn't designed to only make the measurements we are trying to make.
When something goes wrong, we'll be able to send someone out to fix it, and if someone invents better detectors, we can send some out to be installed.
Hubble is limited to the resolution of its 2m mirror, while optical telescopes on the ground are now reaching 10m (Keck), with sub-mm telescopes reaching 50-100m (LMT and GBT).
Hershcel/First will be the sub-mm equivalent to Hubble, and is limited to a single 3m mirror, while ground based sub-mm telescopes are using 64 15m mirrors spread across 60 km of the Atacama desert, simulating the resolution of a 60 km mirror.
I take the "extraordinary..." quote to mean that if you want to jump beyond Occam's razor, you need to provide more evidence than is normal for a theoretically well founded experimental test, or for something that can be seen to be plausible in hindsight (CMB discovery is a good example of the first case, and pulsar discovery is a good example of the second)
D2O production takes a reasonably large amount of electrical power and a lot of water to produce.
Pd is used all over the place as a catalyst (in car exhausts for one) so isn't particularly hard to get hold of. It's also believed to be a catalyst in the alleged reaction, so it isn't used up.
JET gets the electron temperature to about 10 billion K and the nucleus temperature to about 7 billion K, and that doesn't break even yet. The plasma in the Sun is a lot denser than can be acheived in a fusion reactor, so you have to go for a higher temperature to compensate.
What, "entropy tends to increase in a closed system"? I think you mean first law of thermodynamics. "When _all_ energy forms are taken into account, energy is neither created or destroyed in a closed system".
This isn't about creating energy from nothing, it's about finding a suitable high entropy form of energy to convert to lower entropy kinds, thus allowing physical processes to occur. Physics cannot prove anything impossible by the way, but it can measure how unlikely something is.
Ones good for what ails you, the other prefers a good ale
(in this particular case. General appreciation of ale amoung physicists is not guaranteed. If you do not keep up repayments on you mortgage we will come round and eat your pets)
In this case, the only chemicals present are the Pd electrode and the D2O liquid. D2O has almost exactly the same chemical properties as ordinary water (the vibration and rotational spectra are slightly different, but the average bond lengths and energies are the same as H2O) so either this new reaction would work with ordinary water, or something non-chemical is happening.
Also, the Pd electrodes were not observed to be used up, so if any Pd atoms were involved in a chemical formation, the bond energies must have been much much higher than almost any other bond. The chemical formation (forming bonds releases energy, breaking them requries energy. Energy is released when the energy of the bonds broken is lower than the energy of the bonds formed) theory was rejected because no reaction had ever been observed between the reactants that could release the amount of energy seen.
Unfortunately they weren't that good at PR to their main audience, other scientists. As a group we tend to frown own people who take their results (especially groundbreaking or unexpected ones) to the mass media before submitting papers for peer review. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof etc. Scientists are a naturally conservative, but open-minded bunch, if that isn't a contradiction.
Admittedly, I only just remember the cold-fusion press conferences, being 8 at the time.
There are plenty of ways to generate neutrons without fusion, particularly if you then accelerate whatever neutrons are around. Neutrons are therefore not an utterly sure sign of fusion.
ITER will have a toriodal vacuum vessel 150 m^3 in volume, plus superconducting magnets and the associated cryogens. JET and its support buildings are about the size of a sports stadium, and that's smaller than ITER will be. See the latest(?) issue of Scientific American's (apparently they do exist) article on big science machines for an idea of the scale.
The best bet for powering a car is H/O fuel cells, but you still need to supply power to produce H and O first. For that you use big power plants and a grid, or decentralised power generation systems like solar cells.
If your that sure, you've obviously never worked in academia. An absolute minimum of half of all proposals for funding of experiments get rejected in entirely noncontentious fields. In fields that suffered all the hype and disappointment of cold-fusion (I can't actually think of an example that faired quite so badly in the press) I can't imagine any government research organisation funding research, and they control most of the academic funding. There's not a lot of opportunity for publishing papers either, which is the key factor in securing research funding.
Only a few companies have a large enough R&D budget to do basic research in areas directly related to their core businesses, and the power companies have much more plausible, if less groundbreaking research to do, as well as hot-fusion research.
Well, maybe you decide you understand what's going on, and therefore that particular variable can't possibly be important, or you overlook it, or the variable isn't reported correctly etc.
Scientific papers and experiments are just as susceptible to bugs as software. Generally peer review and repetition and further work on the subject of the papers catches these eventually, but it can take time. The claims of cold-fusion were so startling (and hyped), there wasn't an awful lot of attempts to sort mistakes and understanding out before it was declared unscientific.
Best analogy I can think of is a software project that launches, claiming it will revolutionise user interface or something, but that only works on the developers own system, as they've hacked up much of their OS and hardware. It could be years before the software would work on a general computer, but if nothing works to start with, then most people won't be interested in developing and improving it.
Look how long it took to get the linux kernel reasonably mainstream supporting common hardware, and compare to Hurd...
IMNSHO (see profile for why I don't have a humble opinion on this) fusion may or may not be happening, but energy might be released by some mechanism, so it's certainly worth funding proper research into it as a possible energy storage or generation mechanism.
Slashdot Mirror
Magdelena Ridge Observatory, New Mexico will be 14 1.4 m telescopes in a 400m baseline array. MRO has pretty good seeing in the optical.
We're building a sub-mm polarimeter (Clover)to go to Dome-C (Dome-C is the best site in the world for sub-mm, being high, dry, cold and calm) starting now.
The total budget is 4.3M GBP, including new detector development, and the telescope will be collecting data from Austral winter 2007 onwards. This telescope will have better results on CMB B-mode polarisation than the Planck satelite mission, before Planck reports results, for about a tenth to hundredth of the cost. The Planck project has a 15 year head start. Admittedly Planck isn't designed to only make the measurements we are trying to make.
When something goes wrong, we'll be able to send someone out to fix it, and if someone invents better detectors, we can send some out to be installed.
Hubble is limited to the resolution of its 2m mirror, while optical telescopes on the ground are now reaching 10m (Keck), with sub-mm telescopes reaching 50-100m (LMT and GBT).
Hershcel/First will be the sub-mm equivalent to Hubble, and is limited to a single 3m mirror, while ground based sub-mm telescopes are using 64 15m mirrors spread across 60 km of the Atacama desert, simulating the resolution of a 60 km mirror.
Scintillation, particularly of gamma-ray burst afterglows, refers to intensity variations caused by the interstellar medium, so it's taken.
A wine glass has three distinguishable stable states (upright, upside down and on its side), and a plate only has two (upright and upside down).
It takes a lot more effort to get an upside down plate the right way up, than it does to get a wine glass on its side the right way up.
Does this mean it's much easier to get a titsup linux box up and working again than a titsup Solaris box?
Including it his sig means that he's broken the terms and conditions, so he's already not eligible for one.
Aah, the genious of rave lyrics. And now for something completely different.
Excuse me, where is the bass drum?
I take the "extraordinary..." quote to mean that if you want to jump beyond Occam's razor, you need to provide more evidence than is normal for a theoretically well founded experimental test, or for something that can be seen to be plausible in hindsight (CMB discovery is a good example of the first case, and pulsar discovery is a good example of the second)
Maybe cold fusion works better with tin foil instead of palladium?
D2O production takes a reasonably large amount of electrical power and a lot of water to produce.
Pd is used all over the place as a catalyst (in car exhausts for one) so isn't particularly hard to get hold of. It's also believed to be a catalyst in the alleged reaction, so it isn't used up.
JET gets the electron temperature to about 10 billion K and the nucleus temperature to about 7 billion K, and that doesn't break even yet. The plasma in the Sun is a lot denser than can be acheived in a fusion reactor, so you have to go for a higher temperature to compensate.
What, "entropy tends to increase in a closed system"? I think you mean first law of thermodynamics. "When _all_ energy forms are taken into account, energy is neither created or destroyed in a closed system".
This isn't about creating energy from nothing, it's about finding a suitable high entropy form of energy to convert to lower entropy kinds, thus allowing physical processes to occur. Physics cannot prove anything impossible by the way, but it can measure how unlikely something is.
physicists, not physicians.
Ones good for what ails you, the other prefers a good ale
(in this particular case. General appreciation of ale amoung physicists is not guaranteed. If you do not keep up repayments on you mortgage we will come round and eat your pets)
The article doesn't say that no fusion end-products have been detected, it mentions some detections of helium.
MAybe that was it, there's too much junk on my group's coffee table.
In this case, the only chemicals present are the Pd electrode and the D2O liquid. D2O has almost exactly the same chemical properties as ordinary water (the vibration and rotational spectra are slightly different, but the average bond lengths and energies are the same as H2O) so either this new reaction would work with ordinary water, or something non-chemical is happening.
Also, the Pd electrodes were not observed to be used up, so if any Pd atoms were involved in a chemical formation, the bond energies must have been much much higher than almost any other bond. The chemical formation (forming bonds releases energy, breaking them requries energy. Energy is released when the energy of the bonds broken is lower than the energy of the bonds formed) theory was rejected because no reaction had ever been observed between the reactants that could release the amount of energy seen.
Unfortunately they weren't that good at PR to their main audience, other scientists. As a group we tend to frown own people who take their results (especially groundbreaking or unexpected ones) to the mass media before submitting papers for peer review. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof etc. Scientists are a naturally conservative, but open-minded bunch, if that isn't a contradiction.
Admittedly, I only just remember the cold-fusion press conferences, being 8 at the time.
There are plenty of ways to generate neutrons without fusion, particularly if you then accelerate whatever neutrons are around. Neutrons are therefore not an utterly sure sign of fusion.
ITER will have a toriodal vacuum vessel 150 m^3 in volume, plus superconducting magnets and the associated cryogens. JET and its support buildings are about the size of a sports stadium, and that's smaller than ITER will be. See the latest(?) issue of Scientific American's (apparently they do exist) article on big science machines for an idea of the scale.
The best bet for powering a car is H/O fuel cells, but you still need to supply power to produce H and O first. For that you use big power plants and a grid, or decentralised power generation systems like solar cells.
If your that sure, you've obviously never worked in academia. An absolute minimum of half of all proposals for funding of experiments get rejected in entirely noncontentious fields. In fields that suffered all the hype and disappointment of cold-fusion (I can't actually think of an example that faired quite so badly in the press) I can't imagine any government research organisation funding research, and they control most of the academic funding. There's not a lot of opportunity for publishing papers either, which is the key factor in securing research funding.
Only a few companies have a large enough R&D budget to do basic research in areas directly related to their core businesses, and the power companies have much more plausible, if less groundbreaking research to do, as well as hot-fusion research.
Bah, it was probably a knocked-off copy off of the celestial internet anyway.
Well, maybe you decide you understand what's going on, and therefore that particular variable can't possibly be important, or you overlook it, or the variable isn't reported correctly etc.
Scientific papers and experiments are just as susceptible to bugs as software. Generally peer review and repetition and further work on the subject of the papers catches these eventually, but it can take time. The claims of cold-fusion were so startling (and hyped), there wasn't an awful lot of attempts to sort mistakes and understanding out before it was declared unscientific.
Best analogy I can think of is a software project that launches, claiming it will revolutionise user interface or something, but that only works on the developers own system, as they've hacked up much of their OS and hardware. It could be years before the software would work on a general computer, but if nothing works to start with, then most people won't be interested in developing and improving it.
Look how long it took to get the linux kernel reasonably mainstream supporting common hardware, and compare to Hurd...
I think this is a good summary.
IMNSHO (see profile for why I don't have a humble opinion on this) fusion may or may not be happening, but energy might be released by some mechanism, so it's certainly worth funding proper research into it as a possible energy storage or generation mechanism.
Anybody got any Veras?
Congratulations on increasing the entropy of /. and thereby bringing the glorious heat death of the universe ever closer.
I use GNU/OpenWallHoles in my walls