Saying it has "the potential" to wipe out half of humanity is mindless fear-mongering. The US has more guns that people, and therefore it is true to say that guns in the US have "the potential" to kill everyone, but I don't see anyone panicking about it, just arguing whether 30,000 deaths per year is an acceptable loss. To use "potential" in the sense you are is almost completely meaningless.
You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:
1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion
2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this
3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria
4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq
I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administration didn't put any of this together to make a case for the invasion and occupation after it was all discovered?
So what's your guess as to why the Bush Administration kept all this quiet?
Were they completely incompetent and let the military cover things up? If that's the case, why did the military cover things up?
Did Administration officials know all this--including the stockpiles etc being moved to Syria--and cover it up for their own reasons? If so, what were they? "A momentary lapse of reason" won't cover it. What is the plausible strategic, tactical, diplomatic or political reason for an Administration that made the invasion of Iraq a signature policy based on a pretext that was widely believed to be false to cover up evidence that would have proven that pretext substantially true?
This is the question that has to be answered.
Finally: if all the WMDs were moved to Syria, why are these WMDs still all over Iraq? (they were presumably in a lot better shape in 2002 than they are today, twelve years later.)
Third, fission leaves behind nuclear waste materials with a half-life in tens of thousands of years--this is nasty stuff and is around basically forever. Fusion produces no long-lived waste (there is probably some component of some alloy that will prove to make tiny amounts of bad waste, but nothing significant compared to fuel rods from fission reactors).
The critical thing to understanding this is that fission reactors are (necessarily) full of heavy elements, which is where the long-lived stuff comes from. Fusion reactors are full of light elements.
There are very fundamental physical reasons why radioactive light elements almost always have much shorter lifetimes than radioactive heavy elements. If you've only got a few nucleons to play with, turning a proton into a neutron is a major change in configuration, so the energy gap between the radioactive isotope and the adjacent stable isotope is large, and in general the lifetime against beta decay scales inversely with the fifth power of the endpoint energy. In heavy elements, which have so many nucleons they can be adequately modelled as liquid drops in some cases, changing one neutron to a proton doesn't change the configuration very much so the energy difference is small and the lifetime can be very large. Unfortunately, although the energy of the beta particle emitted is small, the energies of the other particles in the decay chain (gammas and more betas in most cases) can be pretty much anything.
So: heavy elements (fission) bad; light elements (fusion) good. Fusion reactors are designed with this in mind. They will produce a lot of nasty stuff, but almost all of it will decay rapidly, so given that the engineering issues of fission waste are pretty much under control (the political issues are not) we can be confident that fusion power will be OK in that regard.
It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is.
It also doesn't say what the energy density is, and there is a comment that something called the "power density" needs improvement.
Searching around a bit, it looks like this is a bit of incremental improvement on Lithium Titanate to facilitate faster charging. The theoretical energy density is 175 mAhr/g at 1.5V or about 1 MJ/kg (petrol is ~40 MG/kg): http://www.the-cryosphere.net/...
This is at the top end of current Li-Ion batteries, so faster charging makes sense. I see also that there are "power densities" in W/kg reported for some battery types, so I guess that's a term of art in the battery business (it has been my experience that applied physicists routinely blind themselves to what they are doing by adopting such terminology, as it typically pertains quite restrictively to the state-of-the-art at the time the terminology was thunk up.)
Their measurements indicate more power is output than was input.
These measurements indicate the researchers have created an almost cartoonishly bad "open calorimeter" that they do not calibrate at anywhere near the operating temperature despite their estimate of heat balance being acutely dependent on making multiple temperature-dependent corrections accurately.
If a fourth year engineering student handed this experimental setup in as a design project, and included the low-temperature "calibration" as part of the design, I would fail them.
If they are making consistent measurements, however, it could be very tricky to fake data which shows consistent rates of consumption for nickel-58 and nickel-60 given the starting abundance.
They were not making continuous measurements. They were not allowed to look inside the device. Rossi was present during the "fueling" of the device.
So: ideal conditions for fraud. I wonder why that is?
If it was me doing it, I'd pre-load the device with isotopically enriched nickle when I constructed it. This would be mixed with and come out with the added "fuel". There are various ways of ensuring the mass balance is right (making sure some of the added "fuel" stays in the device) so the device would weigh the same before and after, but the extracted "fuel" would have an excess of 62Ni.
You absolutely need to know what's in the black box before validating any claims of the owner.
In this case, the claimed energy density is far outside the realm of anything achievable by chemistry, so if it was real it would be prima-facie evidence of something non-chemical going on.
That said, this this work is so obviously of poor quality--to the extent that I wonder if it was designed that way--I don't think it matters if anyone can look inside the box.
If the designed a closed calorimeter that they put the entire apparatus into, including an inverter, ran DC power into it, and measured the subsequent temperature rise, I could be convinced that something interesting was going on even without knowing what was inside.
Although I do agree that the claims being made are so extraordinary that even then it would be difficult to credit it as a real phenomenon.
I'm not saying this is real... but when they really do figure out how he tricked them it's going to be really clever I bet.
The data on isotopic abundances were a result of tampering with the "fuel" at some point in the process, which is pretty simple to do. The fact that the "inventor" was present during "fueling" is a huge red flag.
For the rest: the work is of extremely low quality. The excess heat production is huge, and any simple closed calorimeter would have shown it in a matter of minutes. They instead built this bizarre "open calorimeter" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and didn't even calibrate it at the operating temperature! This is particularly important when you consider the functional form of the Stephan-Boltzmann law: radiated power goes as T^4, so at half power they were "calibrating" at a temperature far below the one they operated at. And yet their energy-balance calculations require a whole raft of temperature-dependent corrections.
The experimental design is so bad--and I am saying this as an experimental and computational physicist--that I can't help wondering if it was deliberately designed to gull the gullible.
They measured the system with a known electrical input and no fuel, calibrated the measurement process showing they were measuring accurately to within a percent or so and then measured again with the fuel in place.
They did nothing of the kind, and if you read the paper you'd know it.
Their "calibration run" was at half-power (which given Stephan-Boltzmann and all is likely about 1/5th temperature) and their "calorimetry" depends on a number of complex temperature-sensitive estimates, so their "calibration" is meaningless.
They excuse themselves from doing a proper full-temperature calibration because they worried the iconel heater wires might melt in the absence of "fuel" which is a bogus and contrived claim.
and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
There were preprints of both the P&F paper and Steve Jones' papers circulating the day after the press conference. They were sufficiently detailed to reproduce what P&F had done (the Jones paper was much sparser) and there was no clear statement of any "loading" requirement. There were a few cases reported where "loading" seemed to have occurred, but there was nothing like an unequivocal two month loading period.
Your comment implies that P&F ever described "the experimental protocol" but of course they never did any such thing. They described a whole range of things, and then claimed anyone who didn't get their results hadn't done it right.
Furthermore, as we dug into the work, it became more an more obvious that phenomenologically for the P&F result to be correct then both a) all of chemistry had to be wrong and b) all of nuclear physics had to be wrong. The work as reported was full of contradictions.
Koonin is on the right side of history with this "crime". P&F were wrong. They were wrong then. They remain wrong today. There have been no reproducible excess heat production experiments that have withstood ordinary academic scrutiny. The intriguing possibility of solid-state fusion has not been realized (more's the pity).
You can't measure quantitative thermal output of anything with a thermal camera suspended in a room
The whole thing is terrible. If you designed a system to produce incorrect energy balance results it would be hard to improve on this set-up.
Resting the device under test on metal rails?
Your input power is some weird three-phase thing with additional pulses? Why not DC, since the primary purpose of the input appears to be heating the thing up?
Your "unfueled" test runs at half the input power of your fueled test, and your "calorimetry" depends on some theoretical estimation of temperature-dependent convection losses?
Then there's the temperature-dependent emissivity.
And there's the running for 32 days when you claim to be producing kilo-watts of "excess power"! If that was the case, the world's simplest bomb calorimeter would demonstrate the effect in seconds. So why didn't they build one?
The list goes on.
If a student at a science fair did a project like this as an attempt to create an "open" calorimeter set-up for some legitimate experimental reason I'd give them great credit. If they claimed they used the system and it demonstrated that energy was not conserved... not so much.
In other words they aren't even remotely close to a meaningful breakthrough. Nothing to see here, move along...
Progress is progress and "breakthrough"s only exist in the minds of the people who weren't paying attention to all the incremental steps that created them.
A factor of a hundred here, a factor of a hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about orders of magnitude.
I'm over 50 and used to be a boy scout. I don't smoke, drink very moderately, help little old ladies across the street, recently came to the assistance of a young woman who was in a physical altercation with her boyfriend (which turned out to be her attacking him, but I didn't know that 'til I got involved) and just today used my pocket knife (which I carry because I was a boy scout) to help an elderly man deflate a beach ball he and his grandson had been playing with (by prying out the extremely stuck plug, not stabbing it.)
And I illegally downloaded a movie last night (there were extenuating circumstances, but still...)
So I'd say the FBI is going to be restricted to Amish who were too wasted during their rumspringa to download anything.
If you have a bone to pick with an organisation target that organisation. Going for non related entities because they make a softer target is wrong. The end does not justify the means. Where I work we have had death threats directed at us because some of our clients are in the mining and oil & gas space. There is nothing that can justify that type of action.
Greenpeace and other anti-science groups like the Republican Party all take this stone-age "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" approach to human relations.
Roy Baumeister, in this truly excellent book Evil discusses idealism as a cause of evil, and Greenpeace are a pretty good representation of the logic he describes: if you believe yourself to be purely and ideally good, then anyone opposing you and anyone who helps them in any way must be purely evil. And what lies, threats and violence aren't justified in the name of fighting pure evil?
Baumeister uses actual cases (and lots of them) to show how false-to-fact this kind of thinking always is, and how much moral thinking is actually about delusions of evil rather than evil as it is done. Anyone even mildly interested in making the world actually better, rather than just feeling good about themselves while helping to make things worse, would do well to read this book. It does more for the study of good and evil than three thousand years of fact-free philosophical imaginings.
Furthermore, the statement by the bioethicist in the article is false:
"It's the destruction of an individual unique human life for the sole purpose of helping other persons."
I'm not sure why anyone would put it that way, since no one is out there having abortions for the purpose of supplying stem cells, and it is very nearly criminally irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
And if a pregnant woman elects to end her fetus's life wouldn't it be unethical not to use that tragedy to do some good for someone?
A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time.
Another comparable case is the awarding of the 1998 prize to Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the discovery of the muon neutrino when Reines had not been award the prize for the discovery of the electron neutrino. In that case, thankfully, Reines was finally given the prize in 1995.
Probably the biggest concern is the possibility of a mutation occurring that would allow the virus to go airborne.
I wrote a long vitriolic rant in response to this, and then rechecked your post and realized you were criticizing this position, not promoting it.
Which is at least a bit of a cautionary tale, that lazy people (hi) may well take you to be actually spreading the fear you are trying to prevent. Although since as near as I can tell people never actually listen to or read the words in any communication, but react purely to a few random emotional cues, there's probably nothing to be done about that.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.
You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.
You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:
Pfusion Pcontainment
That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.
Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.
Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.
Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?
You are correct to label your question naive:-)
The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, so the depth being looked at here (just under 2000 m) isn't typically in contact with rock at all. That is, if you demarcated the 2000 m depth line it would intersect very little ocean floor, and that just off the edges of continental shelves. These are pretty much the "mid-depths" we are talking about.
Furthermore, rock is both a) insulating (compared to water) and b) of relatively low heat capacity (compared to water).
Water has a heat capacity of about 4 kJ/kg*K, which is to day it takes 4 kJ to raise 1 kg of water 1 K in temperature. A typical rock (granite, say, although most others are similar) has a heat capacity of 0.8 kJ/kg*K, so rock is both less able to transport heat and less able to absorb heat than water.
Oceans are far more important to the heat balance of the Earth than the air is. Consider the scales. Earth has 5E18 kg of air, and 1.4E21 kg water, and water has 4 times the heat capacity of air, so the thermal mass of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than that of the air (I'm actually surprised it's not more than that, but I've confirmed the numbers from a couple of different sources.)
Given that AGW is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget, consider a typical square metre of ocean surface, below which is a water column 4000 m deep with a mass of 4E6 kg. That 1.6E-3 kJ/s*m**2 has the capacity to raise the temperature of that water column by 1.6E-3/4*4E6 = 1E-9 K/s. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize there are 3.14E7 s/year, so ocean warming, all else being equal, could be as much as 0.03 K/year, or 0.3 K/decade, or 3 K/century.
These are pretty appreciable numbers, and give a sense of the utility of precise ocean measurements as a way of getting at AGW, because we should be able to see a characteristic depth profile of temperature developing over time that would allow us to infer the additional radiative forcing very directly.
Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.
The calculation is simple: take the number of people your department graduated last year and subtract the number of faculty they hired. This is the number of graduates who won't get jobs.
Sure it's a first-order estimator, but first-order estimators are robust has hell and give results that are generally accurate enough for going on with. This one makes a few pretty good assumptions, particularly "Your department is typical" (this will typically be the case) and "Last year was typical" (also typically the case.)
The situation is made worse because the degree of specialization in academia is absurd. Departments are looking for people with experience in Left-handed Galambosian Transformation studies and if you've focused on Abidextrous Galambosian Transformation studies it simply isn't worth applying for the position, because there will be a dozen candidates with precisely the right qualifications. You won't even make the short list (I did a few times, but thankfully was never hired.)
So unless you happen by pure chance to graduate into a hyper-specialization that is enjoying a year or so of high demand at the moment of your graduation, you are out of luck. Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.
this research is not what it purports to be...it's not like a "transporter" in Star Trek at all
TFS was actually doing pretty well until the last few sentences. What is being "telepored" are "quantum properties", which are nothing at all like classical properties and which are certainly unrelated to "objects".
The process is "quantum" in the sense that the information is hidden behind the quantum veil of the carrier wave. There is more to quantum phenomena than non-locality, although non-locality is one of the more spectacular ways it manifests.
Quantum "teleportation" happens to properties. Imagine you have a house of indeterminate colour, and a "colour teleporter" that consists of a beam of light between your house and another house a few miles away that will carry that colour of that house to your house. You turn the "teleporter" on, wait for the beam of light to establish itself, your confederate at the other end aims the "teleporter" at the first house, and your house becomes the colour of the first house at a time L/c later, where L is the distance the light has to travel and c is a well known constant.
This is a pretty close analogy to what is happening during "quantum teleportation"--and remember, if you stick you hand in the space the information is being "teleported" through you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary laser beam that is used to carrying the information.
To leap from this "colour teleoportation" to the claim that "scientists teleported a house from one neighbourhood to the next" would be clearly and egregiously false, yet that is what discussions of quantum "teleportation" always end up with: people talking as if photons, atoms, molecules and viruses are being carried through space and reconstructed at the other end.
To see how wrong this is, consider a case where there is actual teleportation vs quantum "teleportation" of an electron to the Moon. In the case of actual teleportation, an important quantum number changes: the count of electrons on the Moon. In the case of quantum "teleportation" the Moon's electron number stays exactly the same. So the two final quantum states are completely different in these two cases. The processes have nothing to do with each other and it is misleading and wrong to talk about them as if they do.
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
But weather is not climate, as we get reminded by Warmists every time there is a cold snap (they are mysteriously silent on this issue when there's a heat wave.)
Furthermore, predicting "the weather will be the same tomorrow as today" gets you about 70% accuracy (http://www.weatheranalytics.com/wa/weather-report-forecasts-improving-climate-gets-wilder/) so the increment to a shade over 80% at a cost of millions in hardware and enormous computational complexity is nothing to write home about.
Furthermore, this new report, if it withstands the test of time, is one more demonstration that anyone who says "the science is settled" is a political shill (likely for the far left: http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...)
Every few months we get an announcement of a new way in which climate models are wrong. For purely political reasons this is usually couched in terms of "worse" or "better" (usually worse, because that's what sells eyeballs) but to a scientist what matters is "correct" or "incorrect". The sign of the error is relatively uninteresting when evaluating the quality of the science.
And don't get me wrong: anthropogenic climate change is real and significant, and we should be aggressively pursuing changes. Carbon taxes, in particular, are an proven-effective policy that both reduce CO2 emissions and reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, so anyone who opposes them must be in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes.
And anyone who says both "ACC could result in the end of civilization" and "We should not be building new nuclear plants" is beyond evil. Nuclear power is a significant component of the climate change solution because it is the only generally-available, proven-effective replacement for base-load coal, and coal is a huge contributor to GHG emissions.
It's interesting to people interested in such things
Those would be nerds, to whom this news matters.
The problem is not with the article, but the headline, which I agree is very misleading, although not as bad as those idiotic "Man does X using only HIS BRAIN"(and a few million dollars of heavy electronics that replace his arms and the keyboard.)
Quasi-particles are real particles. They are just composite particles that exist only inside atomic lattices instead of elementary particles that exist in free space. That someone has created a quasi-particle that is described by Majorana's equation is extremely interesting.
As well as the potential impact on climate change... no, wait, this discovery got "quantum computing" in the buzzword lottery... as well as the potential impact on quantum computing, this sort of discovery is interesting because it allows us to investigate the dynamics of Majorana particles empirically, and that can lead to unexpected and novel insights. Good science, that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it really doesn't. It's too hard to transmit, and almost certainly will remain so.
Saying it has "the potential" to wipe out half of humanity is mindless fear-mongering. The US has more guns that people, and therefore it is true to say that guns in the US have "the potential" to kill everyone, but I don't see anyone panicking about it, just arguing whether 30,000 deaths per year is an acceptable loss. To use "potential" in the sense you are is almost completely meaningless.
As to why, I can only guess.
You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:
1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion
2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this
3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria
4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq
I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administration didn't put any of this together to make a case for the invasion and occupation after it was all discovered?
So what's your guess as to why the Bush Administration kept all this quiet?
Were they completely incompetent and let the military cover things up? If that's the case, why did the military cover things up?
Did Administration officials know all this--including the stockpiles etc being moved to Syria--and cover it up for their own reasons? If so, what were they? "A momentary lapse of reason" won't cover it. What is the plausible strategic, tactical, diplomatic or political reason for an Administration that made the invasion of Iraq a signature policy based on a pretext that was widely believed to be false to cover up evidence that would have proven that pretext substantially true?
This is the question that has to be answered.
Finally: if all the WMDs were moved to Syria, why are these WMDs still all over Iraq? (they were presumably in a lot better shape in 2002 than they are today, twelve years later.)
Third, fission leaves behind nuclear waste materials with a half-life in tens of thousands of years--this is nasty stuff and is around basically forever. Fusion produces no long-lived waste (there is probably some component of some alloy that will prove to make tiny amounts of bad waste, but nothing significant compared to fuel rods from fission reactors).
The critical thing to understanding this is that fission reactors are (necessarily) full of heavy elements, which is where the long-lived stuff comes from. Fusion reactors are full of light elements.
There are very fundamental physical reasons why radioactive light elements almost always have much shorter lifetimes than radioactive heavy elements. If you've only got a few nucleons to play with, turning a proton into a neutron is a major change in configuration, so the energy gap between the radioactive isotope and the adjacent stable isotope is large, and in general the lifetime against beta decay scales inversely with the fifth power of the endpoint energy. In heavy elements, which have so many nucleons they can be adequately modelled as liquid drops in some cases, changing one neutron to a proton doesn't change the configuration very much so the energy difference is small and the lifetime can be very large. Unfortunately, although the energy of the beta particle emitted is small, the energies of the other particles in the decay chain (gammas and more betas in most cases) can be pretty much anything.
So: heavy elements (fission) bad; light elements (fusion) good. Fusion reactors are designed with this in mind. They will produce a lot of nasty stuff, but almost all of it will decay rapidly, so given that the engineering issues of fission waste are pretty much under control (the political issues are not) we can be confident that fusion power will be OK in that regard.
Petrol is ~40 MJ/kg, obviously, not whatever "MG/kg" might mean.
It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is.
It also doesn't say what the energy density is, and there is a comment that something called the "power density" needs improvement.
Searching around a bit, it looks like this is a bit of incremental improvement on Lithium Titanate to facilitate faster charging. The theoretical energy density is 175 mAhr/g at 1.5V or about 1 MJ/kg (petrol is ~40 MG/kg): http://www.the-cryosphere.net/...
This is at the top end of current Li-Ion batteries, so faster charging makes sense. I see also that there are "power densities" in W/kg reported for some battery types, so I guess that's a term of art in the battery business (it has been my experience that applied physicists routinely blind themselves to what they are doing by adopting such terminology, as it typically pertains quite restrictively to the state-of-the-art at the time the terminology was thunk up.)
Their measurements indicate more power is output than was input.
These measurements indicate the researchers have created an almost cartoonishly bad "open calorimeter" that they do not calibrate at anywhere near the operating temperature despite their estimate of heat balance being acutely dependent on making multiple temperature-dependent corrections accurately.
If a fourth year engineering student handed this experimental setup in as a design project, and included the low-temperature "calibration" as part of the design, I would fail them.
If they are making consistent measurements, however, it could be very tricky to fake data which shows consistent rates of consumption for nickel-58 and nickel-60 given the starting abundance.
They were not making continuous measurements. They were not allowed to look inside the device. Rossi was present during the "fueling" of the device.
So: ideal conditions for fraud. I wonder why that is?
If it was me doing it, I'd pre-load the device with isotopically enriched nickle when I constructed it. This would be mixed with and come out with the added "fuel". There are various ways of ensuring the mass balance is right (making sure some of the added "fuel" stays in the device) so the device would weigh the same before and after, but the extracted "fuel" would have an excess of 62Ni.
You absolutely need to know what's in the black box before validating any claims of the owner.
In this case, the claimed energy density is far outside the realm of anything achievable by chemistry, so if it was real it would be prima-facie evidence of something non-chemical going on.
That said, this this work is so obviously of poor quality--to the extent that I wonder if it was designed that way--I don't think it matters if anyone can look inside the box.
If the designed a closed calorimeter that they put the entire apparatus into, including an inverter, ran DC power into it, and measured the subsequent temperature rise, I could be convinced that something interesting was going on even without knowing what was inside.
Although I do agree that the claims being made are so extraordinary that even then it would be difficult to credit it as a real phenomenon.
I'm not saying this is real... but when they really do figure out how he tricked them it's going to be really clever I bet.
The data on isotopic abundances were a result of tampering with the "fuel" at some point in the process, which is pretty simple to do. The fact that the "inventor" was present during "fueling" is a huge red flag.
For the rest: the work is of extremely low quality. The excess heat production is huge, and any simple closed calorimeter would have shown it in a matter of minutes. They instead built this bizarre "open calorimeter" (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and didn't even calibrate it at the operating temperature! This is particularly important when you consider the functional form of the Stephan-Boltzmann law: radiated power goes as T^4, so at half power they were "calibrating" at a temperature far below the one they operated at. And yet their energy-balance calculations require a whole raft of temperature-dependent corrections.
The experimental design is so bad--and I am saying this as an experimental and computational physicist--that I can't help wondering if it was deliberately designed to gull the gullible.
They measured the system with a known electrical input and no fuel, calibrated the measurement process showing they were measuring accurately to within a percent or so and then measured again with the fuel in place.
They did nothing of the kind, and if you read the paper you'd know it.
Their "calibration run" was at half-power (which given Stephan-Boltzmann and all is likely about 1/5th temperature) and their "calorimetry" depends on a number of complex temperature-sensitive estimates, so their "calibration" is meaningless.
They excuse themselves from doing a proper full-temperature calibration because they worried the iconel heater wires might melt in the absence of "fuel" which is a bogus and contrived claim.
and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
There were preprints of both the P&F paper and Steve Jones' papers circulating the day after the press conference. They were sufficiently detailed to reproduce what P&F had done (the Jones paper was much sparser) and there was no clear statement of any "loading" requirement. There were a few cases reported where "loading" seemed to have occurred, but there was nothing like an unequivocal two month loading period.
Your comment implies that P&F ever described "the experimental protocol" but of course they never did any such thing. They described a whole range of things, and then claimed anyone who didn't get their results hadn't done it right.
Furthermore, as we dug into the work, it became more an more obvious that phenomenologically for the P&F result to be correct then both a) all of chemistry had to be wrong and b) all of nuclear physics had to be wrong. The work as reported was full of contradictions.
Koonin is on the right side of history with this "crime". P&F were wrong. They were wrong then. They remain wrong today. There have been no reproducible excess heat production experiments that have withstood ordinary academic scrutiny. The intriguing possibility of solid-state fusion has not been realized (more's the pity).
if these confirmers are reputable,
They aren't any more.
Seriously, the number of things they do wrong is huge, starting with the oxymoron of an "open calorimeter", which is what they have tried to build.
The odds of this result being experimental error are far, far higher than the odds that any new physics are involved.
You can't measure quantitative thermal output of anything with a thermal camera suspended in a room
The whole thing is terrible. If you designed a system to produce incorrect energy balance results it would be hard to improve on this set-up.
Resting the device under test on metal rails?
Your input power is some weird three-phase thing with additional pulses? Why not DC, since the primary purpose of the input appears to be heating the thing up?
Your "unfueled" test runs at half the input power of your fueled test, and your "calorimetry" depends on some theoretical estimation of temperature-dependent convection losses?
Then there's the temperature-dependent emissivity.
And there's the running for 32 days when you claim to be producing kilo-watts of "excess power"! If that was the case, the world's simplest bomb calorimeter would demonstrate the effect in seconds. So why didn't they build one?
The list goes on.
If a student at a science fair did a project like this as an attempt to create an "open" calorimeter set-up for some legitimate experimental reason I'd give them great credit. If they claimed they used the system and it demonstrated that energy was not conserved... not so much.
In other words they aren't even remotely close to a meaningful breakthrough. Nothing to see here, move along...
Progress is progress and "breakthrough"s only exist in the minds of the people who weren't paying attention to all the incremental steps that created them.
A factor of a hundred here, a factor of a hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about orders of magnitude.
Over 50 and straight edged boy scout
I'm over 50 and used to be a boy scout. I don't smoke, drink very moderately, help little old ladies across the street, recently came to the assistance of a young woman who was in a physical altercation with her boyfriend (which turned out to be her attacking him, but I didn't know that 'til I got involved) and just today used my pocket knife (which I carry because I was a boy scout) to help an elderly man deflate a beach ball he and his grandson had been playing with (by prying out the extremely stuck plug, not stabbing it.)
And I illegally downloaded a movie last night (there were extenuating circumstances, but still...)
So I'd say the FBI is going to be restricted to Amish who were too wasted during their rumspringa to download anything.
If you have a bone to pick with an organisation target that organisation. Going for non related entities because they make a softer target is wrong. The end does not justify the means. Where I work we have had death threats directed at us because some of our clients are in the mining and oil & gas space. There is nothing that can justify that type of action.
Greenpeace and other anti-science groups like the Republican Party all take this stone-age "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "the friend of my enemy is my enemy" approach to human relations.
Roy Baumeister, in this truly excellent book Evil discusses idealism as a cause of evil, and Greenpeace are a pretty good representation of the logic he describes: if you believe yourself to be purely and ideally good, then anyone opposing you and anyone who helps them in any way must be purely evil. And what lies, threats and violence aren't justified in the name of fighting pure evil?
Baumeister uses actual cases (and lots of them) to show how false-to-fact this kind of thinking always is, and how much moral thinking is actually about delusions of evil rather than evil as it is done. Anyone even mildly interested in making the world actually better, rather than just feeling good about themselves while helping to make things worse, would do well to read this book. It does more for the study of good and evil than three thousand years of fact-free philosophical imaginings.
Furthermore, the statement by the bioethicist in the article is false:
"It's the destruction of an individual unique human life for the sole purpose of helping other persons."
I'm not sure why anyone would put it that way, since no one is out there having abortions for the purpose of supplying stem cells, and it is very nearly criminally irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
And if a pregnant woman elects to end her fetus's life wouldn't it be unethical not to use that tragedy to do some good for someone?
A few years ago they awarded the prize to Kobayashi and Maskawa for the 3x3 quark mixing matrix and yet ignored Cabibbo who did the groundbreaking work to show that quarks mixed for the first time.
Another comparable case is the awarding of the 1998 prize to Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the discovery of the muon neutrino when Reines had not been award the prize for the discovery of the electron neutrino. In that case, thankfully, Reines was finally given the prize in 1995.
Probably the biggest concern is the possibility of a mutation occurring that would allow the virus to go airborne.
I wrote a long vitriolic rant in response to this, and then rechecked your post and realized you were criticizing this position, not promoting it.
Which is at least a bit of a cautionary tale, that lazy people (hi) may well take you to be actually spreading the fear you are trying to prevent. Although since as near as I can tell people never actually listen to or read the words in any communication, but react purely to a few random emotional cues, there's probably nothing to be done about that.
This subject makes me wish I had the math background, because I sure don't see it.
This comment makes me wish you had a math background too.
You are actually doing math when you make the assertion that fusion "will always take more power to contain than it creates". You're doing lots of things, including physics and probably chemistry. Unfortunately, you seem to be doing all of them based on what your imagination tells you, and as we know from 300 years of science and 3000 years of pre-science, what "just makes sense" in our imaginations has nothing much to do with what is real.
You are correct to say that containment in stars is free. You have no basis for saying that it is impossible to produce an artificial containment that uses substantially less power than is produced by the fusion processes within it. That is a mathematical assertion about the physics of fusion:
Pfusion Pcontainment
That is the math you are doing, without any attempt to make it physically plausible.
Nor is the lack of non-stellar containment in nature much of an argument. Want to know what else doesn't exist in nature? Reciprocating steam engines. Repeating rifles. Spaceships. Digital computers. Yet mysteriously we have all those things, and more. It's almost as if humans, informed by physics, are capable of making machines that instantiate processes that otherwise do not exist.
Whether fusion is one of those processes remains to be seen. It is clearly a hard problem, but the jury is still well out on its ultimate feasibility.
Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?
You are correct to label your question naive :-)
The average ocean depth is about 4000 m, so the depth being looked at here (just under 2000 m) isn't typically in contact with rock at all. That is, if you demarcated the 2000 m depth line it would intersect very little ocean floor, and that just off the edges of continental shelves. These are pretty much the "mid-depths" we are talking about.
Furthermore, rock is both a) insulating (compared to water) and b) of relatively low heat capacity (compared to water).
Water has a heat capacity of about 4 kJ/kg*K, which is to day it takes 4 kJ to raise 1 kg of water 1 K in temperature. A typical rock (granite, say, although most others are similar) has a heat capacity of 0.8 kJ/kg*K, so rock is both less able to transport heat and less able to absorb heat than water.
Oceans are far more important to the heat balance of the Earth than the air is. Consider the scales. Earth has 5E18 kg of air, and 1.4E21 kg water, and water has 4 times the heat capacity of air, so the thermal mass of the oceans is about 1000 times greater than that of the air (I'm actually surprised it's not more than that, but I've confirmed the numbers from a couple of different sources.)
Given that AGW is adding about 1.6 W/m**2 to the Earth's heat budget, consider a typical square metre of ocean surface, below which is a water column 4000 m deep with a mass of 4E6 kg. That 1.6E-3 kJ/s*m**2 has the capacity to raise the temperature of that water column by 1.6E-3/4*4E6 = 1E-9 K/s. Which doesn't sound like much until you realize there are 3.14E7 s/year, so ocean warming, all else being equal, could be as much as 0.03 K/year, or 0.3 K/decade, or 3 K/century.
These are pretty appreciable numbers, and give a sense of the utility of precise ocean measurements as a way of getting at AGW, because we should be able to see a characteristic depth profile of temperature developing over time that would allow us to infer the additional radiative forcing very directly.
Am I alone in finding any of this news? I dropped out of academia almost 20 years ago (best decision I ever made, also one of the more difficult ones) and it was clear then to anyone who could do simple arithmetic that most of us (post-docs) wouldn't get faculty positions.
The calculation is simple: take the number of people your department graduated last year and subtract the number of faculty they hired. This is the number of graduates who won't get jobs.
Sure it's a first-order estimator, but first-order estimators are robust has hell and give results that are generally accurate enough for going on with. This one makes a few pretty good assumptions, particularly "Your department is typical" (this will typically be the case) and "Last year was typical" (also typically the case.)
The situation is made worse because the degree of specialization in academia is absurd. Departments are looking for people with experience in Left-handed Galambosian Transformation studies and if you've focused on Abidextrous Galambosian Transformation studies it simply isn't worth applying for the position, because there will be a dozen candidates with precisely the right qualifications. You won't even make the short list (I did a few times, but thankfully was never hired.)
So unless you happen by pure chance to graduate into a hyper-specialization that is enjoying a year or so of high demand at the moment of your graduation, you are out of luck. Nor can you predict what will be in demand when you graduate: academia is a fickle beast, and fields go in and out of fashion in less time than it takes for the typical PhD. So study what you love, because you love it. That way, and only that way, will you win.
this research is not what it purports to be...it's not like a "transporter" in Star Trek at all
TFS was actually doing pretty well until the last few sentences. What is being "telepored" are "quantum properties", which are nothing at all like classical properties and which are certainly unrelated to "objects".
The process is "quantum" in the sense that the information is hidden behind the quantum veil of the carrier wave. There is more to quantum phenomena than non-locality, although non-locality is one of the more spectacular ways it manifests.
Quantum "teleportation" happens to properties. Imagine you have a house of indeterminate colour, and a "colour teleporter" that consists of a beam of light between your house and another house a few miles away that will carry that colour of that house to your house. You turn the "teleporter" on, wait for the beam of light to establish itself, your confederate at the other end aims the "teleporter" at the first house, and your house becomes the colour of the first house at a time L/c later, where L is the distance the light has to travel and c is a well known constant.
This is a pretty close analogy to what is happening during "quantum teleportation"--and remember, if you stick you hand in the space the information is being "teleported" through you will get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary laser beam that is used to carrying the information.
To leap from this "colour teleoportation" to the claim that "scientists teleported a house from one neighbourhood to the next" would be clearly and egregiously false, yet that is what discussions of quantum "teleportation" always end up with: people talking as if photons, atoms, molecules and viruses are being carried through space and reconstructed at the other end.
To see how wrong this is, consider a case where there is actual teleportation vs quantum "teleportation" of an electron to the Moon. In the case of actual teleportation, an important quantum number changes: the count of electrons on the Moon. In the case of quantum "teleportation" the Moon's electron number stays exactly the same. So the two final quantum states are completely different in these two cases. The processes have nothing to do with each other and it is misleading and wrong to talk about them as if they do.
I heard that modern weather models have accuracy above 80%.
But weather is not climate, as we get reminded by Warmists every time there is a cold snap (they are mysteriously silent on this issue when there's a heat wave.)
Furthermore, predicting "the weather will be the same tomorrow as today" gets you about 70% accuracy (http://www.weatheranalytics.com/wa/weather-report-forecasts-improving-climate-gets-wilder/) so the increment to a shade over 80% at a cost of millions in hardware and enormous computational complexity is nothing to write home about.
Furthermore, this new report, if it withstands the test of time, is one more demonstration that anyone who says "the science is settled" is a political shill (likely for the far left: http://thebreakthrough.org/ind...)
Every few months we get an announcement of a new way in which climate models are wrong. For purely political reasons this is usually couched in terms of "worse" or "better" (usually worse, because that's what sells eyeballs) but to a scientist what matters is "correct" or "incorrect". The sign of the error is relatively uninteresting when evaluating the quality of the science.
And don't get me wrong: anthropogenic climate change is real and significant, and we should be aggressively pursuing changes. Carbon taxes, in particular, are an proven-effective policy that both reduce CO2 emissions and reduce income taxes and corporate taxes, so anyone who opposes them must be in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes.
And anyone who says both "ACC could result in the end of civilization" and "We should not be building new nuclear plants" is beyond evil. Nuclear power is a significant component of the climate change solution because it is the only generally-available, proven-effective replacement for base-load coal, and coal is a huge contributor to GHG emissions.
It's interesting to people interested in such things
Those would be nerds, to whom this news matters.
The problem is not with the article, but the headline, which I agree is very misleading, although not as bad as those idiotic "Man does X using only HIS BRAIN"(and a few million dollars of heavy electronics that replace his arms and the keyboard.)
Quasi-particles are real particles. They are just composite particles that exist only inside atomic lattices instead of elementary particles that exist in free space. That someone has created a quasi-particle that is described by Majorana's equation is extremely interesting.
As well as the potential impact on climate change... no, wait, this discovery got "quantum computing" in the buzzword lottery... as well as the potential impact on quantum computing, this sort of discovery is interesting because it allows us to investigate the dynamics of Majorana particles empirically, and that can lead to unexpected and novel insights. Good science, that.