More than the mishaps and explosions, the exciting thing about it all to me was the wide variety of people there. There were realtors selling land near the soon-to-be New Mexico Spaceport, and the Up Aerospace people who're going to inaugurate it. Carmack, Peter Diamandis, Rick Tumlinson and that bunch were all hanging out amongst everybod. There were many kids, many local residents at the event.
And though they've done it before for air-show crowds, this was the first time I'd seen the XCOR EZ-Rocket in action; truly awe-inspiring to see how easily it could maneuver. The loud rocket engines as it buzzed the crowd a few times didn't hurt the experience!
Anyway, not as exciting as if there'd been some real suborbital flights, but it looks like in just a couple of years that'll be a reality. Exciting times!
they were concerned the government did not fully appreciate that science in peace was as vital as science in war.
I think this is a key point. And not just public support for science and government funding, but the motivation of young people going into the field is critically important to whether or not scientific effort actually makes a difference in the real world. Are there real world problems (like the problems that led to development of radar and computing in WWII, or the needs of cold war espionage and besting the Soviets post-Sputnik) that captivate people's attention? If the critical needs are there, that ensures both public support, government funding, and highly motivated researchers bringing real advances.
And we do have critical needs for R&D work right now - renewable energy probably most critical. Developing things further in space is a challenge that needs our best efforts now too. But our government and media, and even places reflective of geek opinion like slashdot, spend a lot of effort downplaying the seriousness of problems like oil depletion and global warming. People can't be motivated to do anything about it if most of the country thinks it's not really a problem at all.
Sometimes technology development is harder than we think it ought to be, sometimes it's easier. The harder stuff is just naturally going to be slower; the easy stuff (like electronics has been the past couple of decades) makes us impatient in other areas. Science fiction's generally rosy portraits of future advances are probably also part of the problem.
On the other hand, maybe Huebner is right - we're about to enter an inevitable period of slowdown and even loss, similar to the dark ages after the Greeks and Romans. The parallels between the US and the Roman empire are pretty interesting...
Luckily we do have some competition in space that might revive things again...
In addition to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points (in geometric relation to the Moon's orbit), there are similar Earth-Sun Lagrange points. The Earth-Sun L-4 and L-5 points are pretty far away of course - 60 degrees ahead of and behind Earth's orbit around the sun. So probably not terribly useful. But Earth-Sun L1 and L2 are definitely useful - only a couple of million miles away.
Also, while at any instant there are points that geometrically correspond to the Lagrange criteria, in practice a body near one of these points would follow a stable "halo" orbit near the point (with minor adjustments to maintain that orbit near the unstable L-1 and L-2 points). These stable halos can occupy a lot of space - 20-30% of the otherwise smallest dimensions involved (Moon-L1/L2 or Earth-L1/L2 distances for L1/L2).
The "quantum mind" idea was definitely the theme in his books of a decade or so ago, but this one is really more an argument for re-thinking the direction the majority of physicists seem to be going in trying to come up with a "theory of everything".
The "quantum mind" idea had, at its base, the concept of some new kind of physics that links quantum mechanics and general relativity together, in a way very different from the supersymmetry/string theory take of recent years: Penrose thinks gravity is more fundamental, and quantum mechanics really just an approximation. And he has some strong arguments in this book on why there is something fundamentally wrong with quantum mechanics - particularly the time-symmetry fundamental to the theory. Except for those messy reduction processes embodied in the Schrodinger cat, which few physicists other than Penrose treat as any sort of serious problem.
The other aspect of it is more a philosophical thing (though related to the Godel argument) that somehow our minds have a relationship with the platonic world of logic and mathematics that cannot be explained by ordinary physical processes. But this is book is a very serious one, and he doesn't get into that stuff at all.
Here. A bit more substantive than the slashdot one, if I do say so myself.
Penrose's take on the universe is a pretty amazing one, but a very difficult one to grasp. The main point is: we just don't know enough about the world yet. Not enough mathematics, and our experiments are nowhere near adequate to get final answers.
Right but the scales are different. A large university may purchase 10 times as many journals as a small place, but its faculty likely publish 100 times as much. It's a matter of where the major research funding goes; right now it's concentrated in a relatively small number of research-intensive institutions.
Most subscriptions for scientific journals go to smaller institutions or commercial organizations that don't publish much. If you put the burden of payment on authors, then that shifts the distribution of payments from small institutions and commercial organizations to the big research universities and labs. The big guys are suddenly realizing that the small places have been subsidizing the publication of their scientific work, and they don't want to give that up.
I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.
the cost of energy from nuclear is only slightly higher than from coal, taking into account all capital, repair, and fuel costs.
That depends on what you assume for the effective cost of capital, and the estimates for capital cost itself - nuclear advocates paint pictures as low as $1500/kW, but it's not clear that's really achievable in a modern western nation. All the nuclear plants in the US were built at least 30 years ago, so we don't really have good numbers for the modern cost of building a plant.
And what people are talking about now are completely new designs, so you have to factor in prorated R&D costs as well, for proper comparison.
In any case, if you really want nuclear to replace fossil fuels (not just for electric production, but for transportation as well) we're not just doubling or tripling the number of plants in the world - we'd have to go to a world with tens of thousands of power-plant-scale fission reactors. Why do you suppose nuclear advocates never mention that actual scale that would be needed?
I was in touch with Ted Nelson back in 1993 - we were working at a little start-up company on a proposal for electronic publishing over the internet, and Xanadu seemed like it could work - then we heard about the World Wide Web:-) Unfortunately the place we were doing the proposal for hired me instead of taking up the company's proposal, so I was too busy to get rich...
We actually talked on the phone at one point. Nelson's smart, but somehow never quite caught that the power of the internet was in its openness. As Tim Berners-Lee always says - if he'd tried to make money off the world wide web, it would never have happened.
So far I haven't seen a single comment relating to the actual content.
The article isn't about how wonderful the hydrogen economy will be etc. etc. Nor is it about the Hindenburg. It's about the immense basic science challenges that will likely prevent any commercial viability for decades...
Given that the article was directed at research physicists (readers of Physics Today), the intent was probably to motivate people to look into these challenges as basic science research areas for their labs.
A host of fundamental performance problems remain to be solved before hydrogen in fuel cells can compete with gasoline.
The main reason they think there's any point at all is because of the energy conversion efficiency of fuel cells, and the natural link between fuel cell use and hydrogen. But as the original post implies, one of the best ways to store hydrogen is in the form of hydrocarbons:
Figure 4 shows the volume density of hydrogen stored in several compounds and in some liquid hydrocarbons.7 All of those compounds store hydrogen at higher density than the liquid or the compressed gas at 10 000 psi (700 bar), shown as points on the righthand vertical axis for comparison. The most effective storage media are located in the upperright quadrant of the figure, where hydrogen is combined with light elements like lithium, nitrogen, and carbon. The materials in that part of the plot have the highest mass fraction and volume density of hydrogen. Hydrocarbons like methanol and octane are notable as highvolumedensity hydrogen storage compounds as well as highenergy density fuels, and cycles that allow the fossil fuels to release and recapture their hydrogen are already in use in stationary chemical processing plants.
I'm suggesting he's doing something far more interesting, and has been since he helped found Wikipedia - a kind of social experiment with the human minds spread across the internet. And build a bit of an encyclopedia while he's at it.
You're right that the freedom Wikipedia enables is important. And I'm not surprised you think the key question is one of building tools on top of it. Tools can be transformative - wikipedia itself is mainly just a tool that brings ordinary people in to contribute to it.
The interesting thing to me, though, working for an academic publisher with very tightly controlled review processes, are two other things the wikipedia project has proven:
#1 - complete freedom, lack of control, trust in the general average person out there, can accomplish amazing things. There is much less reason to fear that sort of freedom than we might have thought, and I think wikipedia's success has cross-fed the Open Access movement in science publishing, which on balance is a very good thing.
#2 - But... if you really need reliable information, it needs a stable, reliable review process - no such process will be perfect, but review does far more than we sometimes give it credit for. In particular, a reliably reviewed source rarely if ever has difficulties with "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers".
Yes, that's the point. The purpose of these revolutionary forms of encyclopedia never seems to be just the encyclopedia itself, but something beyond that. Others here are saying Wikipedia was just an experiment. Maybe so, but if that, at least a very interesting and productive experiment.
I find it immensely ironic that the reliability of wikipedia is being attacked by as unreliable a source as TCS! Funded by Exxon-Mobil, if anybody needs reminding of that...
I hadn't realized Sanger's background was in the theory of knowledge. I'm wondering now if what he's actually up to is something much more subtle than seems evident on the surface. Of course Google is into the "sum of all human knowledge" business too, but they're going for bulk and automated quality selection methods, rather than Wikipedia's human touch. Having been around myself since the Interpedia days, I know there's a long history here...
The first encyclopedists had at least ulterior motives. Anybody have any other ideas what this is really all about? Then there's always the parallels to the world of Asimov's Foundation series, which started off as an Encyclopedia project!
Why are we so obsessed with Earth-centered calendaring? Once we've settled half a dozen planets in the next couple of centuries, the UNIX time definition (well, actually TAI to take care of leap seconds properly) is the only one that makes sense independent of local planetary conditions. Yeah, sure, we'll have local calendars too, but the universal standard will be seconds since 1970 or 1955...
Obviously the whole argument applies at larger and larger scales (over longer and longer times) too. Does it matter if we survive a few tens of thousands of years or a few tens of billions of years, if it always just comes to an end?
I think the real argument here should be, given the vastness of the universe, we as a species are doing enormously less than is our potential. If the "more" we could do, as some strong environmentalists argue, is bad, then so be it. But if your philosophy says that more life, humanity, art, culture, more science is good, then restricting ourselves to just this planet is wrong, for the long term.
As with any thermal power plant, nuclear power is limited by the fundamentals of thermodynamics. In any case, efficiency isn't the central issue, except to people who are number-obsessed. The real issue is capital cost per average kW, and resulting end-user cost per kW-hr (depends on financing rate etc.) Solar's a factor of 10 or so too expensive still - but nuclear is also a factor of 2-3 too expensive relative to other options. It's pretty arguable which has more room to improve cost-wise (there's at least a couple of orders of magnitude less installed base and therefore less net manufacturing experience with solar panels, so far, compared to nuclear).
And nuclear fission is further limited by the availability of fuel - supplying the entire world's capacity for more than a hundred years or so either requires extraction of uranium from ultra-dilute sources like granite or sea-water (which may take more energy than is returned) or else requires breeder reactors. Which might be a good idea, except for the extreme proliferation dangers they introduce, with all that processed plutonium.
Slashdot Mirror
More than the mishaps and explosions, the exciting thing about it all to me was the wide variety of people there. There were realtors selling land near the soon-to-be New Mexico Spaceport, and the Up Aerospace people who're going to inaugurate it. Carmack, Peter Diamandis, Rick Tumlinson and that bunch were all hanging out amongst everybod. There were many kids, many local residents at the event.
And though they've done it before for air-show crowds, this was the first time I'd seen the XCOR EZ-Rocket in action; truly awe-inspiring to see how easily it could maneuver. The loud rocket engines as it buzzed the crowd a few times didn't hurt the experience!
Anyway, not as exciting as if there'd been some real suborbital flights, but it looks like in just a couple of years that'll be a reality. Exciting times!
See
this site for numbers of Nobel Prizes, 1902-2002:
UK - 100
Germany - 77
France - 49
Sweden - 30
Switzerland - 22
all more than Stanford's 17.
I think this is a key point. And not just public support for science and government funding, but the motivation of young people going into the field is critically important to whether or not scientific effort actually makes a difference in the real world. Are there real world problems (like the problems that led to development of
radar and computing in WWII, or the needs of cold war espionage and besting the Soviets post-Sputnik) that captivate people's attention? If the critical needs are there, that ensures both public support, government funding, and highly motivated researchers bringing real advances.
And we do have critical needs for R&D work right now - renewable energy probably most critical. Developing things further in space is a challenge that needs our best efforts now too. But our government and media, and even places reflective of geek opinion like slashdot, spend a lot of effort downplaying the seriousness of problems like oil depletion and
global warming. People can't be motivated to do anything about it if most of the country thinks it's not really a problem at all.
Sometimes technology development is harder than we think it ought to be, sometimes it's easier. The harder stuff is just naturally going to be slower; the easy stuff (like electronics has been the past couple of decades) makes us impatient in other areas. Science fiction's generally rosy portraits of future advances are probably also part of the problem.
On the other hand, maybe Huebner is right - we're about to enter an inevitable period of slowdown and even loss, similar to the dark ages after the Greeks and Romans. The parallels between the US and the Roman empire are pretty interesting...
Luckily we do have some competition in space that might revive things again...
In addition to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points (in geometric relation to the Moon's orbit), there are similar Earth-Sun Lagrange points. The Earth-Sun L-4 and L-5 points are pretty far away of course - 60 degrees ahead of and behind Earth's orbit around the sun. So probably not terribly useful. But Earth-Sun L1 and L2 are definitely useful - only a couple of million miles away.
Also, while at any instant there are points that geometrically correspond to the Lagrange criteria, in practice a body near one of these points would follow a stable "halo" orbit near the point (with minor adjustments to maintain that orbit near the unstable L-1 and L-2 points). These stable halos can occupy a lot of space - 20-30% of the otherwise smallest dimensions involved (Moon-L1/L2 or Earth-L1/L2 distances for L1/L2).
Also note the old L5 society turned into the National Space Society some time ago.
You should read Ad Astra more often :-)
The "quantum mind" idea was definitely the theme in his books of a decade or so ago, but this one is really more an argument for re-thinking the direction the majority of physicists seem to be going in trying to come up with a "theory of everything".
The "quantum mind" idea had, at its base, the concept of some new kind of physics that links quantum mechanics and general relativity together, in a way very different from the supersymmetry/string theory take of recent years: Penrose thinks gravity is more fundamental, and quantum mechanics really just an approximation. And he has some strong arguments in this book on why there is something fundamentally wrong with quantum mechanics - particularly the time-symmetry fundamental to the theory. Except for those messy reduction processes embodied in the Schrodinger cat, which few physicists other than Penrose treat as any sort of serious problem.
The other aspect of it is more a philosophical thing (though related to the Godel argument) that somehow our minds have a relationship with the platonic world of logic and mathematics that cannot be explained by ordinary physical processes. But this is book is a very serious one, and he doesn't get into that stuff at all.
Penrose's take on the universe is a pretty amazing one, but a very difficult one to grasp. The main point is: we just don't know enough about the world yet. Not enough mathematics, and our experiments are nowhere near adequate to get final answers.
Right but the scales are different. A large university may purchase 10 times as many journals as a small place, but its faculty likely publish 100 times as much. It's a matter of where the major research funding goes; right now it's concentrated in a relatively small number of research-intensive institutions.
Most subscriptions for scientific journals go to smaller institutions or commercial organizations that don't publish much. If you put the burden of payment on authors, then that shifts the distribution of payments from small institutions and commercial organizations to the big research universities and labs. The big guys are suddenly realizing that the small places have been subsidizing the publication of their scientific work, and they don't want to give that up.
for the entire scientific literature. For IEEE it's probably on the order of $100 million/year.
I tend to agree with you on that one - electric powered vehicles, especially if they can be somehow grid-connected while in motion (trains do it!) would be far better than any hydrogen vehicle proposed yet. The biodiesel or other biomass suggestions of others on the board are also pretty feasible. Some analysis of all this is over at the Alternative Energy Action Network - see the articles by David Doty on projections for hydrogen cost and future fuels.
the cost of energy from nuclear is only slightly higher than from coal, taking into account all capital, repair, and fuel costs.
That depends on what you assume for the effective cost of capital, and the estimates for capital cost itself - nuclear advocates paint pictures as low as $1500/kW, but it's not clear that's really achievable in a modern western nation. All the nuclear plants in the US were built at least 30 years ago, so we don't really have good numbers for the modern cost of building a plant.
And what people are talking about now are completely new designs, so you have to factor in prorated R&D costs as well, for proper comparison.
In any case, if you really want nuclear to replace fossil fuels (not just for electric production, but for transportation as well) we're not just doubling or tripling the number of plants in the world - we'd have to go to a world with tens of thousands of power-plant-scale fission reactors. Why do you suppose nuclear advocates never mention that actual scale that would be needed?
We actually talked on the phone at one point. Nelson's smart, but somehow never quite caught that the power of the internet was in its openness. As Tim Berners-Lee always says - if he'd tried to make money off the world wide web, it would never have happened.
The article isn't about how wonderful the hydrogen economy will be etc. etc. Nor is it about the Hindenburg. It's about the immense basic science challenges that will likely prevent any commercial viability for decades...
Given that the article was directed at research physicists (readers of Physics Today), the intent was probably to motivate people to look into these challenges as basic science research areas for their labs.
The main reason they think there's any point at all is because of the energy conversion efficiency of fuel cells, and the natural link between fuel cell use and hydrogen. But as the original post implies, one of the best ways to store hydrogen is in the form of hydrocarbons:
I'm suggesting he's doing something far more interesting, and has been since he helped found Wikipedia - a kind of social experiment with the human minds spread across the internet. And build a bit of an encyclopedia while he's at it.
You're right that the freedom Wikipedia enables is important. And I'm not surprised you think the key question is one of building tools on top of it. Tools can be transformative - wikipedia itself is mainly just a tool that brings ordinary people in to contribute to it.
... if you really need reliable information, it needs a stable, reliable review process - no such process will be perfect, but review does far more than we sometimes give it credit for. In particular, a reliably reviewed source rarely if ever has difficulties with "difficult people, trolls, and their enablers".
The interesting thing to me, though, working for an academic publisher with very tightly controlled review processes, are two other things the wikipedia project has proven:
#1 - complete freedom, lack of control, trust in the general average person out there, can accomplish amazing things. There is much less reason to fear that sort of freedom than we might have thought, and I think wikipedia's success has cross-fed the Open Access movement in science publishing, which on balance is a very good thing.
#2 - But
Yes, that's the point. The purpose of these revolutionary forms of encyclopedia never seems to be just the encyclopedia itself, but something beyond that. Others here are saying Wikipedia was just an experiment. Maybe so, but if that, at least a very interesting and productive experiment.
I find it immensely ironic that the reliability of wikipedia is being attacked by as unreliable a source as TCS! Funded by Exxon-Mobil, if anybody needs reminding of that...
I hadn't realized Sanger's background was in the theory of knowledge. I'm wondering now if what he's actually up to is something much more subtle than seems evident on the surface. Of course Google is into the "sum of all human knowledge" business too, but they're going for bulk and automated quality selection methods, rather than Wikipedia's human touch. Having been around myself since the Interpedia days, I know there's a long history here...
The first encyclopedists had at least ulterior motives. Anybody have any other ideas what this is really all about? Then there's always the parallels to the world of Asimov's Foundation series, which started off as an Encyclopedia project!
We attempted to elucidate Einstein's miracle year last week, but I have to admit the Economist did a nice job on this article.
Why are we so obsessed with Earth-centered calendaring? Once we've settled half a dozen planets in the next couple of centuries, the UNIX time definition (well, actually TAI to take care of leap seconds properly) is the only one that makes sense independent of local planetary conditions. Yeah, sure, we'll have local calendars too, but the universal standard will be seconds since 1970 or 1955...
I think the real argument here should be, given the vastness of the universe, we as a species are doing enormously less than is our potential. If the "more" we could do, as some strong environmentalists argue, is bad, then so be it. But if your philosophy says that more life, humanity, art, culture, more science is good, then restricting ourselves to just this planet is wrong, for the long term.
But the point of the quote is of course still appropriate, as anybody who's worked with redundancy in any field would be aware.
As with any thermal power plant, nuclear power is limited by the fundamentals of thermodynamics. In any case, efficiency isn't the central issue, except to people who are number-obsessed. The real issue is capital cost per average kW, and resulting end-user cost per kW-hr (depends on financing rate etc.) Solar's a factor of 10 or so too expensive still - but nuclear is also a factor of 2-3 too expensive relative to other options. It's pretty arguable which has more room to improve cost-wise (there's at least a couple of orders of magnitude less installed base and therefore less net manufacturing experience with solar panels, so far, compared to nuclear).
And nuclear fission is further limited by the availability of fuel - supplying the entire world's capacity for more than a hundred years or so either requires extraction of uranium from ultra-dilute sources like granite or sea-water (which may take more energy than is returned) or else requires breeder reactors. Which might be a good idea, except for the extreme proliferation dangers they introduce, with all that processed plutonium.