Re:can someone explain to me
on
E ~ mc^2
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· Score: 1
The answer is, in effect, relative to everything! That's the point of special relativity--no matter what you choose as your frame of reference, light has a speed of "c".
Since no reference frame is any more "important" than any other, the concept of an aether becomes superfluous.
Well. Not exactly. You see, the laser causes the explosive to detonate, all right. But it's a low-order detonation. It makes a pot hole instead of a crater the size of a frickin' volkswagen. This makes a _big_ difference if you're trying to get your airstrip back in use. The former can be patched or even covered with a little mat-like thing they can roll out. Not so much for the latter.
How do I know this? I was an engineer on the first version (the one mounted on an armored personnel carrier) and helped run the live-munition field testing (disclaimer: I left the company 7 years ago to go to grad school). Trust me, there's a _world_ of difference between setting a mine off with this thing and having one go off for real.
Oh, and the first laser at least was pretty much a standard welding/cutting laser, nothing too special--although it _was_ one of the more powerful versions available. And from reading the article, it sounds like the new version also has that parentage.
As for whether it's worth the money or not, I can't really say. I guess that depends on how much you care about what the mines are sitting on, and what kind of a time limit you're under to get rid of them. If you don't care about where they are, you can blow them up much more easily, but it's messy. If you've got time to spare, send people out to handle each one (risky, though!). But if you've got to clear a place fast, and you can't afford big craters, then there is at least an argument to be made that this is a reasonable way to go.
As several other posters have pointed out, a material with this property has been invented for EM radiation in the microwave region. The "material" however, is a collection of rings and rods that are macroscopic in size. To imagine applying a similar approach to EM radiation in the visible (or for lithography, the even smaller UV or x-ray regime) certainly does not seem to be a straightforward extension.
Oh yeah, a slight correction--the orginial post claimed visible light was in the millionths of a meter range. Roughly speaking, visible light is about 200 to 800 nanometers--a fraction of a micron, not several microns.
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The answer is, in effect, relative to everything! That's the point of special relativity--no matter what you choose as your frame of reference, light has a speed of "c".
Since no reference frame is any more "important" than any other, the concept of an aether becomes superfluous.
-M
Well. Not exactly. You see, the laser causes the explosive to detonate, all right. But it's a low-order detonation. It makes a pot hole instead of a crater the size of a frickin' volkswagen. This makes a _big_ difference if you're trying to get your airstrip back in use. The former can be patched or even covered with a little mat-like thing they can roll out. Not so much for the latter.
How do I know this? I was an engineer on the first version (the one mounted on an armored personnel carrier) and helped run the live-munition field testing (disclaimer: I left the company 7 years ago to go to grad school). Trust me, there's a _world_ of difference between setting a mine off with this thing and having one go off for real.
Oh, and the first laser at least was pretty much a standard welding/cutting laser, nothing too special--although it _was_ one of the more powerful versions available. And from reading the article, it sounds like the new version also has that parentage.
As for whether it's worth the money or not, I can't really say. I guess that depends on how much you care about what the mines are sitting on, and what kind of a time limit you're under to get rid of them. If you don't care about where they are, you can blow them up much more easily, but it's messy. If you've got time to spare, send people out to handle each one (risky, though!). But if you've got to clear a place fast, and you can't afford big craters, then there is at least an argument to be made that this is a reasonable way to go.
-M
Oh yeah, a slight correction--the orginial post claimed visible light was in the millionths of a meter range. Roughly speaking, visible light is about 200 to 800 nanometers--a fraction of a micron, not several microns.