You've just run into one of the classic problems of people just learning relativity. Specifically, you're assuming that the light has a rest frame. In the strictest sense, it doesn't, at least not a useful one. If you tried the basic equations, from which velocity transformations are derived, and assumed they held for photons, you would find that time does not pass for a photon.
Obviously, this would be weird. You don't run into the problem until you get to something travelling at the speed of light, though, and you know the physics of what happens to that photon as long as you're in a normal rest frame, so the basic answer is that you simply don't try to go into the photon's rest frame, because that is meaningless.
So, if two photons are going in opposite directions, you may see them going faster than the speed of light relative to each other, but that's never been what relativity was about. Relativistic velocities are only meaningful relative to your reference frame, and your reference frame can only ever be a safe non-speed-of-light one.
The main problem is that physics research is being more and more geared towards being appealing to people who don't know physics, hence all the BS taking advantage of phase/group velocity confusion, wanking about various string theories, etc. Sure, it's nice to let people know what's going on in physics, but in the end if they get the impression that most physicists are excited or even remotely interested by simple tricks like this, I don't think it bodes well.
From the article: "What we have done is nowhere near the efficiency needed to use it as an energy source. What we have done is produce highly compact neutron generators which could conceivably be useful for handheld cameras or tiny X-ray sources that could be put into the body to deliver X-rays locally to destroy tumours." Tabletop fusion has been demonstrated before. The problem has always been getting it to give you more energy than you put into it.
Admittedly, I'm a high-energy physicist as opposed to a condensed matter physicist, but to me it looks like a bunch of BS. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's completely wrong, but there is at least one very large hole - I didn't read much more after I realized this one. Its section on Coulomb forces never truly explains how the Coulomb barrier is overcome. It uses a bunch of words to state, as far as I can tell, that because deuterons are bosons they can ignore the traditional Coulomb pressure. It is true that, as bosons, they aren't affected by Fermi pressure, but the parallel they draw to superconductivity is backwards. Namely, in a superconductor, it is an arractive force overcoming the Coulomb force that makes electrons pair, not the other way around. They can make all sorts of approximations of many-body physics, but when it comes down to it they don't explain how a deuteron-deuteron Coulomb force can be overcome. (There is, of course, always the possibility that one deuteron will quantum-tunnel through the barrier, but the probability of that happening is so low that it can't really be useful as any kind of energy source.) Without that, their theory is up the creek without a paddle. I wouldn't mind seeing cold fusion, and I'll happily admit there are a number of things about physics that aren't understood, but that explanation doesn't work.
Really, I'm glad they passed the buck. There are some things the Supreme Court just shouldn't be deciding, and this is one of them. Supreme Court decisions in this kind of case have a tendancy of making everybody unhappy in the long run, regardless of how reasonable they are, simply because even the best decision will just create a specific point for people to be left or right of. Let it go, with occasional smackdowns for extreme abuses of power, and there's a good chance that in thirty years people will be laughing at how stupid people were for trying to define obscenity on a federal level.
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You've just run into one of the classic problems of people just learning relativity. Specifically, you're assuming that the light has a rest frame. In the strictest sense, it doesn't, at least not a useful one. If you tried the basic equations, from which velocity transformations are derived, and assumed they held for photons, you would find that time does not pass for a photon. Obviously, this would be weird. You don't run into the problem until you get to something travelling at the speed of light, though, and you know the physics of what happens to that photon as long as you're in a normal rest frame, so the basic answer is that you simply don't try to go into the photon's rest frame, because that is meaningless. So, if two photons are going in opposite directions, you may see them going faster than the speed of light relative to each other, but that's never been what relativity was about. Relativistic velocities are only meaningful relative to your reference frame, and your reference frame can only ever be a safe non-speed-of-light one.
The main problem is that physics research is being more and more geared towards being appealing to people who don't know physics, hence all the BS taking advantage of phase/group velocity confusion, wanking about various string theories, etc. Sure, it's nice to let people know what's going on in physics, but in the end if they get the impression that most physicists are excited or even remotely interested by simple tricks like this, I don't think it bodes well.
From the article:
"What we have done is nowhere near the efficiency needed to use it as an energy source. What we have done is produce highly compact neutron generators which could conceivably be useful for handheld cameras or tiny X-ray sources that could be put into the body to deliver X-rays locally to destroy tumours."
Tabletop fusion has been demonstrated before. The problem has always been getting it to give you more energy than you put into it.
Admittedly, I'm a high-energy physicist as opposed to a condensed matter physicist, but to me it looks like a bunch of BS. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's completely wrong, but there is at least one very large hole - I didn't read much more after I realized this one. Its section on Coulomb forces never truly explains how the Coulomb barrier is overcome. It uses a bunch of words to state, as far as I can tell, that because deuterons are bosons they can ignore the traditional Coulomb pressure. It is true that, as bosons, they aren't affected by Fermi pressure, but the parallel they draw to superconductivity is backwards. Namely, in a superconductor, it is an arractive force overcoming the Coulomb force that makes electrons pair, not the other way around. They can make all sorts of approximations of many-body physics, but when it comes down to it they don't explain how a deuteron-deuteron Coulomb force can be overcome. (There is, of course, always the possibility that one deuteron will quantum-tunnel through the barrier, but the probability of that happening is so low that it can't really be useful as any kind of energy source.)
Without that, their theory is up the creek without a paddle. I wouldn't mind seeing cold fusion, and I'll happily admit there are a number of things about physics that aren't understood, but that explanation doesn't work.
Really, I'm glad they passed the buck. There are some things the Supreme Court just shouldn't be deciding, and this is one of them. Supreme Court decisions in this kind of case have a tendancy of making everybody unhappy in the long run, regardless of how reasonable they are, simply because even the best decision will just create a specific point for people to be left or right of. Let it go, with occasional smackdowns for extreme abuses of power, and there's a good chance that in thirty years people will be laughing at how stupid people were for trying to define obscenity on a federal level.