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pluto wrote: Undergraduate and graduate school fall into the same trap, the trap of “KNOWING”

I followed the link you provided, but there were just abstracts of papers? Not really sure what you’re saying to read.

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain

Pluto maybe it’s just me but I have no clue what message you’re trying to convey (except for the above quote).

-Dave

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pluto wrote: G’day

It has nothing to do with Time.

Time is only a measure of motion.

Have a look at the properties of ultra dense matter or condensed matter and trapping horizons. Search in arXiv or what ever.

Interesting that you mention time in this way. Some months ago it occured to me that the concept of time is imaginary. For example describing the motion of a car’s position as X = v * t where ‘t’ is an independent variable. It’s an illusion. It’s just a mathematical trick, introducing this imaginary independent variable ‘t’ into equations. Because in the universe there is no clock like that.

Anyway it’s obvious you want to get something off your chest — there is some point you want to make. OK, I’ll play straight man and ask you questions. What are you getting at as regards ultradense matter? I’m not especially interested in digging into it elsewhere, after all it’s your interest, not mine, but if you care to talk about it I will read what you write. Note I like your lead in in an earlier post, how you indicate that some mistruth or innacurate picture is taught in undergraduate physics, you have to go to graduate school to get the real story.

-Dave

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pluto wrote: G’day

Well what do you think of the so called black holes with and without singularities or with and without trapping horizons?

Personally I don’t believe in the singularity inside black holes, nor do I believe black holes can actually form an event horizion. The rate of time advancing will slow down to zero, so the matter will stop compressing.

http://www.xdr.com/dash/essays/blackholes.html

Eggheads who work the math (Einstein’s equations) argue that it takes a finite time to fall into the black hole, in the reference frame of the falling matter. Great — but outside the black hole an infinite time must pass for that to occur. So it never happens. No singularity. But that’s just my opinion.

-Dave

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Tasmodevil44 wrote: In fact, the only certainty in life is uncertainty itself (Well, maybe death and taxes ). 🙂

You had a really nice theme going, then you just had to go and ruin the ride with that, “Death and taxes” tired song.

As Ford said, “Whether you believe you can, or you believe you can’t, you’re right.” If people are taught to accept that both death and taxes are inescapable, what then?

And repeating that tired “truism” is not helping anyone now, is it?

So many people see a piece of the pie, then get poisoned by the piece they don”t.

Anyway along the lines of your post, just today as I was jogging the thought ocurred to me that there is no difference between the religously faithful and the militantly skeptic.

The faithful believe in spite of the absence of evidence.

The skeptics disbelieve in spite of the presence of evidence.

Then there are the other two — those who believe when shown evidence, and those who disbelieve when there is no evidence. Often they’re right.

Your post was mostly refreshing.

-Dave

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Rematog wrote: I’d invest in air conditioning, lighting, pump manufactures, water treatment equipment companies (esp. reverse osmosis), battery companies (for all those electric cars), electrical equipment manufactures (transformers, transmission, solid state power controls, etc).

Things that people will want more of if the the cost of electric power is lower AND availability is nearly unlimited (in the long run). Electric power would no longer be a limiting resoure…it would be a manufactured good! What will be the market growth in Africa for air conditioning when there is cheap power available………

A major and exponentially growing power requirement is computation. Google’s distributed data centers, the internet, remote computing, all these 24/7 power hungry servers…they just suck up the juice.

The cost of the internet is mostly the electrical power required to run the infrastructure. With cheap/free power you can expect all sorts of interesting things in the computational arena.

There is an endless demand for supercomputing. I expect the future will have desktop computers being essentially dumb terminals, and computational resources will be delivered as a service. Bandwidth will be essentially free, what you’ll pay for is how much computation you used.

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Rezwan wrote: “I’ll stick with my beliefs” – Are you saying that it’s “My belief/faith vs. your belief/faith?” Never mind. Tedious question, tedious topic.

That’s all science really is when the subject is not testable. And if the topic is tedious, why did you post?

Here are examples of pseudo-science:
1) Cosmology
2) Economics
3) Astrophysics
4) SETI
5) Why is the earth’s core molten?

They’re not subject to experimental verification. Therefore it’s my beliefs VS yours.

-Dave

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texaslabrat wrote: Well, I’m glad you are ok with being wrong…it must come with practice.

This is funny. You resort to character assassination when you are unable to convince someone of your beliefs.

You are a shining example of all that is wrong in science today. It doesn’t tolerate alternative viewpoints. It is absolutely certain of its knowledge without even the ability to question its truth.

I’ve stated already I don’t care what people on this forum think of me. Yet you seem to keep coming back to that. My reputation here is irrelevant. This is a backwater forum with essentially no visitors or traffic. You need to maintain a bit of perspective.

You are missing an opportunity to comprehend a very deep philosophical truth. And you assert I’m the one incapable of learning. Your assertion that these things are MEASUREMENTS is just your opinion.

I think you’ve answered what you hope to accomplish. But you didn’t answer this question:

Specifically why is it so disturbing to you if 100% of all people don’t happen to agree on this one issue?

Note to jamesr: You yourself have an opportunity for a learning experience. You are clearly a joiner. As a result of this back and forth with texasb you chime in, knowing you have an ally. This is the croud mentality. Be an individual. In the end if you get addicted to joining groups, you invariably must deny your own opinion in order to “belong”. This feeling of belonging can be addictive.

One more objection to the nuclear decay theory of why the earth’s core is molten: Not so long ago the energy released by this mechanism would have been double what it is today, then the same period before that double again, and double again. For uranium-235 the half life is 704 million years, so taking the earth’s age as 4.5 billion years that’s over 6 doublings. The energy release due to U235 decay 4.5 billion years ago had to be 64 times what it is now. As early as 2.1 billion years ago it would have been 8 times what it is now.

Yet life as been around for 3.7 billion years. U235 has one of the longer half lifes. Other radioactive material would have even more striking energy releases in ages past. Under your scenario would this amazing amount of heat released even have allowed the earth to cool enough to support life?

At some point you might come to the understanding that it is all just an educated guess. It’s all just theories. What is understood to be truth today can be recognized as being false tomorrow. The earlier you understand this the more effective you can be, as you’ll then tend to question popular beliefs more.

Get a copy of Eric’s book The Big Bang Never Happened. Know that Eric is in the minority on this issue. Yet you’re hanging out on his forum, presumably you’re a fan of Focus Fusion. From the mainstream scientific community’s point of view Focus Fusion is a waste of effort and the plasma theory of cosmology is a fantasy. So perhaps I should be asking you: Are you going to be pushing the theory of a flat earth next?

It’s all just opinion, son.

-Dave
ETA: I just love this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWj75wF29aU
It helps put things in perspective.

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texaslabrat wrote: I know I said I wouldn’t teach the unwilling..but seeing such misguided scientific lack of knowledge on this board bothers me for some reason.

I don’t think we’re communicating here.

You can cite as many pretty documents as you want, filled with equations, math. It is not proof. One must still take these “proofs” on faith. Don’t you see? They are just theories.

Whether they are right or wrong is a matter of fact. It is not a matter of voting. If 99.99% of all scientifically minded people believe these documents you link to are correct, that still does not “prove” them true.

Have you heard the story of how some guy determined the length of the emperor’s nose? He just asked a whole bunch of people how long they thought the emperor’s nose is. Then he averaged the result. And that’s what the length of the emperor’s nose is.

These theories you’re presenting are not subject to experimental verification. Just like cosmology and astrophysics. It’s all theory. Prevailing popular theory is more a fad combined with politics and self interest than true scientific fact.

You seem to take it on faith that the majority is right. Fine, that’s your privilege. I’ll stick with my beliefs, and I don’t mind being wrong. In this case it doesn’t matter if I’m wrong. But in other cases, if I happen to buck the majority and I happen to be right, there can be huge rewards — for me.

What exactly do you hope to accomplish anyway here with your efforts on this subject? Specifically why is it so disturbing to you if 100% of all people don’t happen to agree on this one issue?

-Dave

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jamesr wrote: The total rate of heat loss currently by the earth is given as 4.2-4.4*10^13W. ie. we are loosing twice as much heat as is is now being made – hence the earth is cooling. In the past the radioactive heating component would have been much larger, exponenitally so, given the nature of radioactivity. Whereas the tidal heating would have been roughly the same. Hence over the age of the earth the proportion of the stored heat due to radioactivity will be much higher than the current heat generation ratio.

OK, my interpretation of what you claim this fellow said is he has computed the theoretical amount of heat generated by radioactive decay in the crust of the earth. He has evidently put some nice equations together and has some numbers.

And you come along and accept it as fact without question. Moreover you accept his assertion that the earth must be cooling.

Dude, it’s just a theory. It may be right. It may be wrong. But it’s not proof. You behave as if it is proof. And you get offensive when other people (such as myself) don’t accept it as fact.

Personally I’d have been more persuaded by an argument related to the thermal conductivity of 100 miles of rock (as in the crust of the earth). We know how well rock conducts heat.

As far as I know there are two bodies in the solar system with volcanic activity — the earth and Io. Both have large tidal forces acting on them. Venus has no volcanic activity, and presumably has the same radioactive makeup as the earth, and is about the same size, yet has no large tidal forces acting on it.

“Science is the belief in the fallability of experts” — Richard Feynman

-Dave

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texaslabrat wrote: The net total of the tidal forces across the entire structure of the earth are a factor of roughly 10 less than the heat being observed being generated from the core alone.

What is your source for this “fact”?

You cite an analysis for the heat generated by the tides on the core, but you claim that is 1/10th the heat observed on the surface of the earth.

This is a proof?

-Dave
PS Thanks for your concern about the impression I’m trying to convey, but the truth is I don’t care what you or anyone else on these forums think of me. And your snotty attitude probably isn’t helping your reputation either, may I say.

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jamesr wrote: Accelerator experiments under carefully controlled conditions, like you describe, are useful to determine the precise collision cross sections (reaction probabilities), but useless as a way of getting energy out.

I’m not necessarily convinced of this. First off, you want the target cold because you want to eliminate the thermal heat velocity noise. Maybe there is an exact energy the ions need to fuse.

Now as regards energy coming out, you’d charge up the target to a high or low voltage, whatever is correct to get the right speed ions hitting it. When an ion hits and fuses, does it change the net charge on the target? Maybe the charge stays the same.

Keeping it all cool instead of a general hot plasma seems easier to control. Hot plasma is difficult to contain, as everyone knows.

Just tossing out ideas. Thanks for your response.

-Dave

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I just had an idea in the shower, maybe this could be a workable approach?

Take a target of fuel and cool it to very low temperature so its thermal velocity is low. Keep it cold.

Then direct a stream of fuel ions of precise velocity at the target in a vaccum. Some will fuse, releasing heat and X rays.

The heat is waste, it heats up your target and must be eliminated. However the X-ray is your energy you capture, using Eric’s metal foil concentric spheres approach to get an electric current directly. This powers the cooling and ion gun and the pumps needed to recycle the gas that doesn’t fuse.

The whole thing is very stable and completely controllable. Nothing to wear out.

-Dave

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Speaking of density of energy production, there is a table in Big Bang Never Happened where he shows that living organisms consume far more energy per unit volume of space than a star. And animals are just doing chemical activity, a million times less dense than fission, which is itself less energetic than fusion.

I couldn’t grasp this concept. Lfe is higher energy density than the sun? Seems ridiculous.

I think the energy density release of the sun averaged to something like 100 watts per cubic meter. That’s nothing! But then I realized the sun is really big. I imagined a 3d lattice of 100 watt bulbs stretching thousands of miles in every direction. The sun is a million miles across. You’ve got low density energy release coming out of a huge volume. The overall energy release is pretty big then.

A fellow named Alexander Franklin Mayer came up with some alternative theories of the underlying physics of stuff. One thing he asserted was that the energy of particles that one wants to fuse has to be just exactly right for the particles to fuse and release energy. And his theory predicted the level of energy was very precise, and possibly different from standard theories. As such he said there might be a possibility of initiating fusion very easily, if you can just get the particle energy just right in collisions.

Bussard makes this point. In a plasma of a specific temperature there is a distribution of velocities. His polywell fusion approach depended on ions of random temperatures being confined in the center by electric charge, so the ions are bouncing in and out for a certain minimum period of time. By that time they’ll have fused.

And I think there are these things called “fusors” that maybe the guy who invented TV (Farnsworth) was using. Like an electron gun in a CRT. Accelerate ions to just the right velocity at a target and they’ll fuse. Seems straightforward. Set the voltage just right and stream ions and you’ll get fusion. But I guess the problem is break even and getting rid of the waste heat. Your target would need to be chilled to absolute zero I guess so its heat velocity would be eliminated.

Sorry I’m just rambling.

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Speaking of magnetic confinement, recently I bought an old copy of Physics Volume 2 by Halliday + Resnick to review physics which I haven’t really used since college.

I had remembered a proof that the magnetic field is just a manifestation of the electric field when special relativity is taken into account. It explained why two wires near each other carrying current in the same direction are drawn to each other. The moving electrons in each wire, when looking at the other, see stationary moving electrons in the other wire, but from their point of view the positive ions in the metal conductor are moving in the opposite direction. As such there is a lorenz contraction on the positive ion lattice, but not on the negatives. There being this contraction, there are more positive ions per unit length than negative electrons, so there is a net positive charge. So the electron is attracted to the other wire.

The math worked out such that it varied only on the current — which is number of electrons times velocity. So the speed of the electrons cancelled out. So I thought it was cool, there not being this magnetic field at all, just the single electric field. I couldn’t find that derivation in the H&R;book. So maybe it was a different book.

My actual point in commenting was this: I had had the feeling that in a magnetic field an electron moving across it would move in a circle of constant radius, regardless of velocity. My understanding was that the forces on the electron are proportional to its velocity, so that it would move in a fixed circle depending only on the strength of the magnetic field.

What I discovered in the H&R;physics book is that the electron would actually complete a circle in constant time. So the radius of the circle would go up linearly with velocity. Slow electrons, small radius. Fast electrons, bigger radius.

So that makes me think the standard torus tokomak fusion approach where big magnetic fields confine a plasma in a donut is hopeless, utterly utterly hopeless.. Because the ions in the plasma, naturally having a distribution of velocities, would be dispursed by any magnetic field. So the goal must be to have a stream of ions at exactly the same temperature all moving along in lockstep. But this isn’t what heat is. Heat is randomized movement. A stream of ions moving all along at exactly the same temperature would be matter at absolute zero temperature moving along.

As such to counter the fellow who dismissed Bussard’s spherically symmetric magnetic field (polywell fusion) out of hand, I can dismess Tokamak fusion out of hand also! Yet that approach gets all the billions of research dollars. Go figure.

-Dave

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jamesr wrote: …

neutrinos are defintinely real – the spread in electron energy in beta decay means there must be a third particle shareing the energy – unless you want to throw out conepts like the conservation of momentum.

….

The role of earths magnetic field is one aspect that is still little understood – how does the dynamo maintain itself?

The Standard Model is just the Standard Party Line. Taught as truth in schools. Hairy math not conducive to simulation. It’s useful in explaining experimental results, but does not yield insight into why things are like that. What the underyling causes are. Neutrinos, like the strong force, like dark matter, like the cosmological constant, are concepts dreamed up on whim that happen to make someone’s theory work better. Last I heard the sun was deficient in the expected amount of neutrinos.

By no means are any of these theories to be taken as the absolute truth. Professors teach the stuff, believe it as if it’s truth, devote their entire careers to pushing forward a bit more tissue paper and spit nuances, but the truth is the whole hodge podge is a mess. Eric goes into this a lot with his Big Bang Never Happened, have you not read it? I love that book.

As to how the dynamo maintains itself, since the earth’s magnetic field lines come out of the north and south poles, you need an electric current running along in a circle about the earth’s axis of rotation. Imagine the liquid core of the earth spinning at a slightly different rate as the surface, due to tidal effects from the moon. This relative motion could give rise to a magnetic field, if the liquid core is ionized somewhat. Venus has a weak magnetic field.

Who knows? I don’t have all the answers. I merely have formed the habit of not believing the standard scientific party line automatically. My interest is in machine intelligence, artificial intelligence. I’m much more knowledgeable in that arena. And the corruption of this field is ridiculous. They’ll never figure it out! So I project outward to most other human understanding.

Most science nowadays is just a scam to attract government research money. Conveniently no real useful results are required or expected. Just another form of entitlement. Good ‘ol boy network crap. From the peer review journal process all the way to tenure in universities, the system itself is corrupted.

Oh well.

-Dave

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