Various articles point out that the lensing structures bending the light have to be smaller than the light's wavelength. That means for visible light spectrum, which is around 400-700nm, your meta-material structures have to be molecular-sized. This is much smaller than what's required for radio or microwaves, which are centimeters to meters in length.
So either you'll have to nano-engineer your cloaking shell from the molecular level, or else you'd have to find a way to convert the light that strikes it into a lower frequency (higher wavelength) that you can handle more easily. If you had some super-efficient down-converter/up-converter material coating the surface of your cloak, this might then enable you to bend the light without having to go all the way down to nanometer size for your meta-material lensing structures in the cloaking material itself.
I can imagine the color green would be particularly useful to cloak against, because that would allow you to be invisible in front of vegetation/greenery.
Nah, Dr Zee will first go back in time to fight the Nazis, like any hero seeking rite of passage must do. Caprica comes much later. He may bring along Wolfman Jack.
As an Indian, I'm quite sure that India is running up against a labour supply wall in the next few years, just like China is starting to. That is to say, current Indian IT professionals taking outsourced jobs represent a cream of the Indian crop -- a small tiny fraction of the population who are running out. The wider Indian educational system beyond the elite institutions is so dilapidated and woefully inadequate in comparison to the elite institutions, that there is no way that it can churn out a comparable level of quality and quantity in skilled personnel. This means that India is running out of skilled people to help satisfy the developed world's hunger for cheap skilled labour. There is currently a ferocious spiral of wage inflation in India right now among skilled sectors. All you have to do is wait for demand to catch upto the dwindling supply, and the path will be unclogged for you once again, as it previously was.
So if gravity is construed as a curvature of spacetime, then haven't these scientists, on a miniscule scale, made some kind of spatial anomaly relative to the mass of the object in question?
Using the Faraday analogy, we talk about electric field potentials measured in volts, and magnetic fields measured in Tesla. So what are the units for gravitomagnetism, and electrogravitic effects? Any proposed nomenclature?
Of course you can create anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
Haven't you heard about noise-cancelling headphones? That's your anti-sound for you.
Creating a wave that is exactly opposite and out of phase is basically your anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
But here they're talking about gravity as a force, not as a wave. To cancel that force, simply create an equal and opposite force - we've known that for a long time. The problem is that we've not known how to do it with gravity, as we have with electromagnetism.
This search for 'habstars' (habitable star systems) is really fascinating, and perhaps even practical in an offhanded way. What better way to inspire future astronomers and astrophysicists than to find some beautiful blue-green jewel like ours out there, even if we can't detect signs of intelligent life.
This would be a lot more motivating and captivating than scanning the heavens for shapes of creatures from mythology, which is no better than looking for pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich.
Once we find something out there worth travelling to, then it would automatically spur thoughts of developing means to get there. Even if such dreams aren't possible due to the limits of known physics, it's still a noble and instinctive goal, like our grazing ancestors had in seeking greener pastures. Who knows where such thoughts might ultimatley lead?
You wrote: "Big business does whatever gives big business the biggest buck fast (within the next quarter)."
Uhh, that's exactly what I said; you merely paraphrased it.
As far as recognizing flaws in the Free Market system -- people named Marx and Lenin have already pointed out these things over a century ago, in case you're not aware. They then decided to come up with solutions for this, and that gave us much of the history of the 20th century.
If you want to go back in that direction, go ahead and try, but their solutions have already been discredited.
If you don't like their solutions and feel you have better ones, please don't keep the rest of us in the dark. Do tell us what your better solutions are.
Look, big business interests are tired of waiting for politicians and public to slog through the debate morass about education reform, privatization, vouchers, "no child left behind", blahblahblah.
While Western politicians and activists babble about all that, big business is just going to cut to the chase and hire from whichever countries have actually managed to come up with educational systems that churn out needed skills, rather than waiting for this reform business to work itself out.
So dear politicians and activists, please by all means continue to wrangle in endless debate over the issues, because meanwhile your societies are the ones who may be left behind wholesale, while the fluid business interests bypass you altogether.
I want to ask if the type of storage ring used in the G-2 muon wobble experiment might be used to test the Felber antigravity theory.
In the G-2 experiment, the muon storage ring was able to extend the lifespan of the ordinarily short-lived muons relativistically by accelerating them to extremely high speeds.
I'm wondering if such high speed acceleration can be used to similarly study any possible "antigravity beam" phenomena, to see if it's real.
Well, my belief is that "time" is actually a universal index of Entropy. The reason why we percieve "motion" of time in a particular direction as we do, is because our own thought processes inside our brains (our basic means of perception) work through electro-chemical reactions which can only take place through increase in entropy. Therefore the ultimate observer (ourselves) is the one who gives time its direction and meaning.
Forget LSD -- even that relies on plain old chemistry, which again imposes the entropy constraint.
Can quantum systems defy the laws of entropy, because they operate under different laws? If so, then perhaps harnessing quantum processes may be the key to breaking the existing constraints of spacetime.
Comments?
Why is T percieved differently by us than X,Y, and Z? Why is T the ordinal axis, rather than X,Y, and Z?
If spacetime is this collection of dimensions, then why is time experienced differently by us than the way we experience length, width, and height?
If T is mathematically identical to X,Y,Z then how is it that we physically observe T in a completely different way than X,Y,Z?
What's the reason for this? What's going on? Is it because of the fact that our own brains are based on electro-chemical mechanisms which are somehow sequentially organized along the T-dimension?
What I'd really like is something that would be a combination of Microwave and Toaster-Oven. I'd once read that Panasonic was coming out with something like that, but never heard anything further about it.
Can anyone recommend something like this, that they might know of?
Uhh, the tokamaks still use up more energy than they put out. And the scientists have been promising to deliver fusion power for decades, but patience has been used up. Congressional hearings have even wondered aloud about barrier laws that even fusion researchers have been slow to admit to.
Well, it's a sign that market leader Intel has over the decades drifted more towards marketing machine mentality, while challenger AMD has stayed somewhat truer to its engineering roots.
Intel went for Itanium, while AMD went for 64-bit x86. Intel went for Rambus, while AMD went for DDR and HyperTransport. If you look at the multicore technology AMD is researching, it looks better than Intel's multicore.
I'll acknowledge that Intel recognized the value of wireless ahead of AMD, although dedicated wireless chipsets are obviously better than Centrino anyway.
I'm just glad that healthy competition is there, to make us consumers the ultimate winners.
I dunno man, the National Hurricane Center may sue for infringement if we do that. Maybe if we all voluntarily cutback on Overclocking it will reduce the pace of Warming, so that we'll need fewer letters in the future years. But it will take some time before we see any visible results.
I've heard this point before, but consider a 2-stage system where the chemical first-stage gives the main escape velocity, and the ion-thrusting second stage functions like the SMART-1 probe.
Perhaps we'll have to see if any exotic energy technology pans out, like fusion, quantum nucleonics, or some such. I wouldn't hold my breath over it, but you never know. Even SMART-1 was solar-powered despite its terribly low power density, and yet solar continues to improve in efficiency.
Heh, who do you think gave Pakistan their nukes? Wasn't the People's Republic of Japan. So much for indifference. The Chinese are like the Romulans. They prefer to stay in the shadows and have others do their fighting for them.
Thank you Kanye West of Asia. My whole family happens to come from the rural part - shacks, huts, and all. I'll tell you that the stifling oppression of socialism has kept far more people in poverty than has space program spending.
But hey, since charity begins at home, why not start with yourself, and ask your own president to send more bucks to urban ghettoes where the murder rate is higher than in any 3rd world country, rather than sending poor youth to die over in Baghdad.
Bah, India always comes out with these hare-brained ideas that it never delivers on. There was that Avatar scram-craft, and all the other ideas that have sprung forth from ISRO, DRDO, etc. Talking the talk is a lot different than walking the walk.
The only thing I can see that might have prompted this announcement, is due to India's successful testing of a scramjet on the ground -- in a wind tunnel. The US had done that nearly a half-century ago.
One scramjet windtunnel test, and already people are conjuring up castles in the sky. Silly.
Even though they don't like to own up to it, the EU has informally turned the US into its bogeyman to shore up its own unity. This was an inevitable consequence of creating the EU, as its myriad of contradictions cannot be bound together without invoking a common threat against which to unite.
What's amazed me is that the US continues to subsidize its vilifier the EU, through support for NATO. If the Euros want to bash the hand that protects them, let them do it on their own dime. NATO is obsolete, and needs to be dismantled. Its enemy doesn't exist more, and it's really just a militarized White Man's Club. And within those kinds of clubs, the less gentrified Americans tend to be looked down upon.
The US needs to pull the plug on NATO. Then let's how the Europeans use their Galileo or their 3-day workweek to bail themselves out of the trouble that history knows they like to get themselves into.
Since when does cheap energy allow globalization? Cheap LABOR allows globalization. And when you're spending more bucks on energy, then you've got to scrimp on the labor costs, meaning that you're going to go globalized even faster!
IT/telecom has made globalization more possible than ever, and IT/telecom are the least energy-consuming industries (besides the booming industry of sitting on your fat ass and whining at others for working harder than you.)
I realize these ion engines have a low thrust/acceleration as a tradeoff against their better fuel economy, which means they're really meant for the long-duration missions such as to the outer planets, etc. Yet I wonder if this new ion thruster design, and also the Double Layer Helicon Thruster that was also recently tested, will result in ion engines that could take man to Mars?
It would be nice if upcoming unmanned space missions could put these new ion engines through their paces, to see how much performance we can squeeze out of this technology. Let's see how high they can make the thrust go. I read on the newsgroups that ion engines could one day emulate the VASIMR concept which can achieve a wide variety of thrust characteristics.
Or what about a 2-stage rocket design? Just have a regular chemical rocket first-stage with high thrust to escape the earth's gravity, and then from there use ion engines to power the 2nd-stage.
Slashdot Mirror
Various articles point out that the lensing structures bending the light have to be smaller than the light's wavelength. That means for visible light spectrum, which is around 400-700nm, your meta-material structures have to be molecular-sized. This is much smaller than what's required for radio or microwaves, which are centimeters to meters in length.
So either you'll have to nano-engineer your cloaking shell from the molecular level, or else you'd have to find a way to convert the light that strikes it into a lower frequency (higher wavelength) that you can handle more easily. If you had some super-efficient down-converter/up-converter material coating the surface of your cloak, this might then enable you to bend the light without having to go all the way down to nanometer size for your meta-material lensing structures in the cloaking material itself.
I can imagine the color green would be particularly useful to cloak against, because that would allow you to be invisible in front of vegetation/greenery.
Nah, Dr Zee will first go back in time to fight the Nazis, like any hero seeking rite of passage must do. Caprica comes much later. He may bring along Wolfman Jack.
As an Indian, I'm quite sure that India is running up against a labour supply wall in the next few years, just like China is starting to. That is to say, current Indian IT professionals taking outsourced jobs represent a cream of the Indian crop -- a small tiny fraction of the population who are running out. The wider Indian educational system beyond the elite institutions is so dilapidated and woefully inadequate in comparison to the elite institutions, that there is no way that it can churn out a comparable level of quality and quantity in skilled personnel. This means that India is running out of skilled people to help satisfy the developed world's hunger for cheap skilled labour. There is currently a ferocious spiral of wage inflation in India right now among skilled sectors. All you have to do is wait for demand to catch upto the dwindling supply, and the path will be unclogged for you once again, as it previously was.
So if gravity is construed as a curvature of spacetime, then haven't these scientists, on a miniscule scale, made some kind of spatial anomaly relative to the mass of the object in question?
Using the Faraday analogy, we talk about electric field potentials measured in volts, and magnetic fields measured in Tesla. So what are the units for gravitomagnetism, and electrogravitic effects? Any proposed nomenclature?
Of course you can create anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
Haven't you heard about noise-cancelling headphones? That's your anti-sound for you.
Creating a wave that is exactly opposite and out of phase is basically your anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
But here they're talking about gravity as a force, not as a wave. To cancel that force, simply create an equal and opposite force - we've known that for a long time. The problem is that we've not known how to do it with gravity, as we have with electromagnetism.
Bah, the buyer can exercise their power of choice if they don't like the situation. Buy elsewhere.
Maybe the Russians have a better aircraft to sell? (note... sarcasm...)
This search for 'habstars' (habitable star systems) is really fascinating, and perhaps even practical in an offhanded way. What better way to inspire future astronomers and astrophysicists than to find some beautiful blue-green jewel like ours out there, even if we can't detect signs of intelligent life.
This would be a lot more motivating and captivating than scanning the heavens for shapes of creatures from mythology, which is no better than looking for pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich.
Once we find something out there worth travelling to, then it would automatically spur thoughts of developing means to get there. Even if such dreams aren't possible due to the limits of known physics, it's still a noble and instinctive goal, like our grazing ancestors had in seeking greener pastures. Who knows where such thoughts might ultimatley lead?
You wrote: "Big business does whatever gives big business the biggest buck fast (within the next quarter)."
Uhh, that's exactly what I said; you merely paraphrased it.
As far as recognizing flaws in the Free Market system -- people named Marx and Lenin have already pointed out these things over a century ago, in case you're not aware. They then decided to come up with solutions for this, and that gave us much of the history of the 20th century.
If you want to go back in that direction, go ahead and try, but their solutions have already been discredited.
If you don't like their solutions and feel you have better ones, please don't keep the rest of us in the dark. Do tell us what your better solutions are.
Look, big business interests are tired of waiting for politicians and public to slog through the debate morass about education reform, privatization, vouchers, "no child left behind", blahblahblah.
While Western politicians and activists babble about all that, big business is just going to cut to the chase and hire from whichever countries have actually managed to come up with educational systems that churn out needed skills, rather than waiting for this reform business to work itself out.
So dear politicians and activists, please by all means continue to wrangle in endless debate over the issues, because meanwhile your societies are the ones who may be left behind wholesale, while the fluid business interests bypass you altogether.
I want to ask if the type of storage ring used in the G-2 muon wobble experiment might be used to test the Felber antigravity theory.
In the G-2 experiment, the muon storage ring was able to extend the lifespan of the ordinarily short-lived muons relativistically by accelerating them to extremely high speeds.
I'm wondering if such high speed acceleration can be used to similarly study any possible "antigravity beam" phenomena, to see if it's real.
Comments?
Well, my belief is that "time" is actually a universal index of Entropy. The reason why we percieve "motion" of time in a particular direction as we do, is because our own thought processes inside our brains (our basic means of perception) work through electro-chemical reactions which can only take place through increase in entropy. Therefore the ultimate observer (ourselves) is the one who gives time its direction and meaning. Forget LSD -- even that relies on plain old chemistry, which again imposes the entropy constraint. Can quantum systems defy the laws of entropy, because they operate under different laws? If so, then perhaps harnessing quantum processes may be the key to breaking the existing constraints of spacetime. Comments?
Why is T percieved differently by us than X,Y, and Z?
Why is T the ordinal axis, rather than X,Y, and Z?
If spacetime is this collection of dimensions, then why is time experienced differently by us than the way we experience length, width, and height?
If T is mathematically identical to X,Y,Z then how is it that we physically observe T in a completely different way than X,Y,Z?
What's the reason for this? What's going on? Is it because of the fact that our own brains are based on electro-chemical mechanisms which are somehow sequentially organized along the T-dimension?
Can someone please explain?
What I'd really like is something that would be a combination of Microwave and Toaster-Oven. I'd once read that Panasonic was coming out with something like that, but never heard anything further about it.
Can anyone recommend something like this, that they might know of?
Isn't that the one where they all board a NASA rocket, and Superman heaves them all up into space? Or, as Ted Baxter would say, "Syupahmahn"
Uhh, the tokamaks still use up more energy than they put out. And the scientists have been promising to deliver fusion power for decades, but patience has been used up. Congressional hearings have even wondered aloud about barrier laws that even fusion researchers have been slow to admit to.
Getting payola for science can be very addictive.
Well, it's a sign that market leader Intel has over the decades drifted more towards marketing machine mentality, while challenger AMD has stayed somewhat truer to its engineering roots.
Intel went for Itanium, while AMD went for 64-bit x86.
Intel went for Rambus, while AMD went for DDR and HyperTransport.
If you look at the multicore technology AMD is researching, it looks better than Intel's multicore.
I'll acknowledge that Intel recognized the value of wireless ahead of AMD, although dedicated wireless chipsets are obviously better than Centrino anyway.
I'm just glad that healthy competition is there, to make us consumers the ultimate winners.
I dunno man, the National Hurricane Center may sue for infringement if we do that. Maybe if we all voluntarily cutback on Overclocking it will reduce the pace of Warming, so that we'll need fewer letters in the future years. But it will take some time before we see any visible results.
I've heard this point before, but consider a 2-stage system where the chemical first-stage gives the main escape velocity, and the ion-thrusting second stage functions like the SMART-1 probe. Perhaps we'll have to see if any exotic energy technology pans out, like fusion, quantum nucleonics, or some such. I wouldn't hold my breath over it, but you never know. Even SMART-1 was solar-powered despite its terribly low power density, and yet solar continues to improve in efficiency.
Heh, who do you think gave Pakistan their nukes? Wasn't the People's Republic of Japan. So much for indifference. The Chinese are like the Romulans. They prefer to stay in the shadows and have others do their fighting for them.
Thank you Kanye West of Asia. My whole family happens to come from the rural part - shacks, huts, and all. I'll tell you that the stifling oppression of socialism has kept far more people in poverty than has space program spending.
But hey, since charity begins at home, why not start with yourself, and ask your own president to send more bucks to urban ghettoes where the murder rate is higher than in any 3rd world country, rather than sending poor youth to die over in Baghdad.
Bah, India always comes out with these hare-brained ideas that it never delivers on. There was that Avatar scram-craft, and all the other ideas that have sprung forth from ISRO, DRDO, etc. Talking the talk is a lot different than walking the walk.
The only thing I can see that might have prompted this announcement, is due to India's successful testing of a scramjet on the ground -- in a wind tunnel. The US had done that nearly a half-century ago.
One scramjet windtunnel test, and already people are conjuring up castles in the sky. Silly.
Even though they don't like to own up to it, the EU has informally turned the US into its bogeyman to shore up its own unity. This was an inevitable consequence of creating the EU, as its myriad of contradictions cannot be bound together without invoking a common threat against which to unite.
What's amazed me is that the US continues to subsidize its vilifier the EU, through support for NATO. If the Euros want to bash the hand that protects them, let them do it on their own dime. NATO is obsolete, and needs to be dismantled. Its enemy doesn't exist more, and it's really just a militarized White Man's Club. And within those kinds of clubs, the less gentrified Americans tend to be looked down upon.
The US needs to pull the plug on NATO. Then let's how the Europeans use their Galileo or their 3-day workweek to bail themselves out of the trouble that history knows they like to get themselves into.
Since when does cheap energy allow globalization? Cheap LABOR allows globalization. And when you're spending more bucks on energy, then you've got to scrimp on the labor costs, meaning that you're going to go globalized even faster!
IT/telecom has made globalization more possible than ever, and IT/telecom are the least energy-consuming industries (besides the booming industry of sitting on your fat ass and whining at others for working harder than you.)
I realize these ion engines have a low thrust/acceleration as a tradeoff against their better fuel economy, which means they're really meant for the long-duration missions such as to the outer planets, etc. Yet I wonder if this new ion thruster design, and also the Double Layer Helicon Thruster that was also recently tested, will result in ion engines that could take man to Mars?
It would be nice if upcoming unmanned space missions could put these new ion engines through their paces, to see how much performance we can squeeze out of this technology. Let's see how high they can make the thrust go. I read on the newsgroups that ion engines could one day emulate the VASIMR concept which can achieve a wide variety of thrust characteristics.
Or what about a 2-stage rocket design? Just have a regular chemical rocket first-stage with high thrust to escape the earth's gravity, and then from there use ion engines to power the 2nd-stage.
I've read about AMD's planned multicore technology, and I've heard that it will be far better than Cell or even Intel's multicore plans.