All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
I like this one a lot. He goes from optical microscopy to electron microscopy and gets down to ridiculous scale at the end.
zooming in on a blue morpho butterfly wing pic.twitter.com/5ahRs99iLP
— microscopic images. (@microscopicture) February 18, 2023
It looks like the modern special effects representation of the landing from Destination: Moon or some other Heinlein story. Forget about battery cars Elon. Do more of this.
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship pic.twitter.com/CPoMMzPDgS
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 17, 2023
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
(from “The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in 8 Fits” by Lewis Carroll)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German woman with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a YouTube channel full of videos that discuss all manner of scientific and engineering subjects. Her area of research is “analog models of gravity.” So, she’s trying to visualize things like black holes and think up tests to add to our understanding of these outlandish phenomena. And she’s an obvious girl nerd.
What I like about her popular work (YouTube videos) is that she has no fear of exposing just how dysfunctional modern day physics has become. From dark matter and dark energy to string theory, to futile attempts by particle physicists to invent extraneous particles and then waste untold millions of dollars proving they don’t exist, she exposes the transparent mediocrity and obvious academic make-work that these pseudoscientists are engaging in. They are the hunters of the that altogether mythical snark.
And that brings me to this video. Sabine chronicles the last fifty years of mythical particles that have been proposed and have failed to appear. She describes how the creators of these unicorn particles keep them alive by moving the goal posts whenever the experiments fail to confirm their existence. And finally, she shows how this form of “science” is basically worthless because it has no chance of asking the right questions needed to extend our knowledge. She uses a couple of graphs with data and then the extrapolations associated with these junk science predictions to show how truly worthless this half century of make-work particle physics has been.
It is my belief that the only way to bring rigor back to theoretical physics is to use corporal punishment for failures in achieving successful experimental results. I’m not talking about executions or amputations. Nothing barbaric. I’m talking about caning, possibly flogging. No cat o’nine tails, nothing over five lashes. Barely enough to draw blood. All very civilized and calibrated to bring about the desired results. And I’ll be fair. The physicists can decide whether he’d prefer losing his tenure or being publicly lashed. What could be fairer than that?
All kidding aside, scientific research, not only in this country but throughout the western world, has been stagnating and falling into disrepute. In the social sciences it has degenerated into gobbledygook with the results of the majority of research papers being unreproducible. Doctorates in sociology and psychology are now essentially worthless. Even in the “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry but especially in pharmaceutical research progress at answering fundamental problems has ground to a halt.
So, it’s very refreshing for someone in the academic world to be out there declaring that the emperor has no clothes. Now that’s not to say I agree with every one of her videos. She had a presentation about hydrogen as a fuel, the conclusions of which I completely disagreed with. But she at least lays out a lot of the facts and that allows an informed viewer to judge her opinion based on them. Kudos to Sabine.
On the more general front of scientific research today, all of this confirms something that has become clear. Government money, especially in the United States has turned academia into a racket. Research is a bottomless pit of money that funds unqualified “scientists” to waste resources without any hope of finding the results they are supposedly pursuing. All they accomplish is creating a bureaucracy of people defending their paychecks via government grants.
Other than weapons research the United States government needs to get out of the research business. If they want to incentivize scientific progress let them offer large monetary prizes for successful solutions to practical problems in the engineering and science realms, like the fabulous “cure for cancer” we’re always hearing is right around the corner. Even if the results are more incremental than this at least we would stop incentivizing fraud. Until then we will continue to hear about the latest search for the particle equivalent of the snark.
I feel it’s time for another physics rant.
Somebody named Paul Sutter wrote an article in Ars Technica called “ Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything. String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?”
I have some excerpts from the article that indicate the thrust of the problem with string theory.
“Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered.”
“A group of physicists took a mathematical technique developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion, they found the first strings—mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime. Unfortunately, this proto-string theory made incorrect predictions about the nature of the strong force and also had a variety of troublesome artifacts (like the existence of tachyons, particles that only traveled faster than light). Once another theory was developed to explain the strong force—the one we use today, based on quarks and gluons—string theory faded from the scene.”
So, look at this. They borrow a technique from someone who was extremely smart. But it was a technique that was discarded because it doesn’t work. They ignore the fact that it produces crazy answers and they try to nurse it along by expanding it into more dimensions and other complications. Shades of Ptolemy’s epicycles!
“Unlike its quantum cousins, when it comes to string theory, we have no fundamental theory—we have only a set of approximation and perturbation methods. We’re not exactly sure if our approximations are good ones or if we’re way off the mark. We have perturbation techniques, but we’re not sure what we’re perturbing from. In other words, there’s no such thing as string theory, just approximations of what we hope string theory could be.”
Wow. It’s useless and wrong and yet it lives on decade after decade.
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
They’re paying these people! No one’s forcing them to pay them but they keep on paying them.
“The beams of the LHC began their first test operations in 2008 with two main science goals in mind: finding the elusive Higgs boson and finding evidence of supersymmetry. Four years later, the Higgs was found. Supersymmetry was not. It’s now 15 years later, and there are still no signs of supersymmetry.”
Can we get our money back?
“The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.””
You sure have! And our billions in funding for this clap-trap!
“Most string theorists of the modern era don’t work on string theory directly but instead mostly on the AdS/CFT correspondence and its implications, hoping that continuing to probe that mathematical relationship will unlock some hidden insight into the workings of a theory of everything. I wish them luck.”
I don’t!
We really need to restrict the funds available to really smart people such that only the one really smartest guy in the field is allowed to waste his whole life doing this kind of mental masturbation. This is not physics. It has the same relation to physics as rhythmic gymnastics has to power-lifting. I mean should I get tenure for coming up with the new variant called string cheese theory? Does my background in mozzarella qualify me to expound my theory that the universe is really a large amorphous blob of Italian dairy product? I think not!
The rest of them should be forced to do this crap in their spare time if they want to when no one can see them and during working hours force them to do something that pays the electric bill. Maybe they can get an engineering degree on the side and design quantum screw drivers or something.
Look at this quote again:
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
These guys have been futzin’ around with this thing for fifty years and they still haven’t got a theory to justify their paychecks. In China they would have been taken out behind the building and shot and their families would be forced to pay for the bullets they were shot with. Here they should have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Princeton on a rail.
Camera Girl has often told me off for being, in her words, “scholastic-asstic.” By this she means too smart for my own good or more precisely an educated dope. And often she is exactly right. I wouldn’t dare tell her about this outrage to common sense because she would hit me for trying to waste her time listening to this nonsense. She would equate it with ecclesiastical scholars attempting to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. That is if she had ever heard of that concept before, which I’m fairly certain she has not.
So instead, I’m bringing this here for the larger audience to hear. Albert Einstein figured out relativity while working as a patent clerk. That should be the model. When someone figures out anti-gravity or faster than light pizza delivery then we can talk about a cushy office in the physics department at Cal Tech and maybe tenure. But if they’re going to spend forty years of academic salary and perks for this drivel, we need to break out the Chinese model. Who knows, maybe we can throw in the cost of the bullets for free. After all we are reasonable people.
https://orionscoldfire.com/index.php/2020/02/14/behold-arrokoth-the-jeb-bush-of-the-solar-system/
Good golly Miss Molly! I was reading an article about the highest possible energies that a particle accelerator could accelerate a proton to and the author started throwing around terms like the Planck energy and the Planck distance and pretty soon it was Planck this and Planck that and Planck the other thing. Now I dimly remembered that expressing a physical measurement in terms of its Planck equivalent was a way of normalizing the units so that the fundamental constants like the speed of light; c and the gravitational constant; G were rendered as unity in these measurements and thus the Planck units were the fundamental expressions for these concepts. But I never remembered what sizes these Planck versions came out to.
So, I looked them up in Wikipedia (of course):
| Table 1: Modern values for Planck’s original choice of quantities | |||
| Name | Dimension | Value (SI units) | |
| Planck length | length (L) | 1.616255(18)×10−35 m | |
| Planck mass | mass (M) | 2.176434(24)×10−8 kg | |
| Planck time | time (T) | 5.391247(60)×10−44 s | |
| Planck temperature | temperature (Θ) | 1.416784(16)×1032 K | |
Now the Planck mass is a perfectly ordinary number. 10−8 kg is quite a large number compared to the mass of a proton or a neutron. But look at the Planck time; 10−44 s or Planck temperature; 1032 K. What exactly does 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees K even mean? What would the velocity of the atoms at that temperature be? Would they be traveling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999999 of the speed of light?
So, I shake off this feeling that I’ve entered the silly season and read on. Apparently at these Planck conditions the gravitational force becomes equivalent to the stronger forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear strong force and that allows for “interesting” effects. Reading on into this miasma of confusing ideas I gathered that these Planck units were considered the limits of these measurements. In other words, trying to define a time period less than 10−44 seconds was meaningless in our quantum system. And possibly temperatures above the Planck temperature would just create micro-black holes.
Pretty soon they were talking about how evaporating black holes run into problems with these “trans-Planckian” conditions and pretty soon I was experiencing full blown transphobia. After all, when I had first read about evaporating black holes back before fake news it had sounded kind of bogus to me. Stephen Hawking was one of those characters from the world of science that seems to approach the edges of science fiction. A man with a super genius intellect trapped in an almost completely disabled body who can only move a couple of his fingers and can only communicate with the world via the most painfully slow interface imaginable. If it turns out Hawking is mistaken about evaporating blackholes I’m sure the world will cut him some slack. Other than a few physics PhD’s that might get yanked, I’m pretty sure that the practical damages from evaporating black holes getting blown out of the water will be pretty close to 10−44 dollars.
And speaking of which have we finally found the limits of US federal spending? If Dopey Joe Biden tries to print more than 1 Planck dollars will Washington DC be ripped right out of space time and returned to Cthulhu’s dimension where the Democrats came from? Boy I hope so.
I’m a Civil Engineer specializing in structural for most of my career. For almost all in-ground concrete installations, the nature and strength of the subgrade is more important than the strength of the concrete. Subgrade means whatever the concrete is sitting on. In other words, no matter how strong the concrete or asphalt, it isn’t any stronger than what it is bearing on.
I’ve never been associated with residential work but in commercial, government,, etc. work, testing the subgrade is very important. It should be to you too. If you’re spending a lot of money on asphalt or concrete in a non-controlled environment, for your own sake. please call a local geotech outftit, explain your circumstance, and get a proposal.
If you’re spending couple to several 10’s of thousands, please spend a couple of hundred ensuring it doesn’t fail in a year or two.
If you’ve ever seen the concrete in your house’s foundation or on your sidewalks start to crack and crumble after a few years then you might be interested to know that the answer to this sad situation exists in the 2,000 year old Roman Pantheon. Apparently the Romans were better engineers than we are, at least as far as concrete goes.
Researchers at MIT have been studying the phenomenal longevity of Roman concrete edifices and they’ve discovered that using quick lime instead of slaked lime provides for the more reactive inclusions in the material to actually “self-heal” incipient cracks.
“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”
Near the end of the article it’s stated that the researchers plan to commercialize the ancient technique. Well, as a descendant of the Romans, I declare this cultural (or technical) appropriation. And I demand reparations. I’ve estimated my cut as approximately one billion denarii (silver of course). If enough denarii can’t be found I will settle for gold doubloons.
My dad worked for North American Aviaton/ Rockwell/rRocketdyne in the 50s and 60s. He worked on the X15, A5, XB70 and the space program until it went kablooey after Appllo. He also worked on ICBMs. They had some exotic alloys, naturally, as well as some surprising non metal shields, nose cones and the like. ICBM warheads have to endure extreme temperatures and pressures on reentry
Rocketdyne made all the head men and their wives simple, shiny alloy rings. The metal, whatever it was, had to be sized at the plant. Only a diamond can cut it and darned slowly at that. Engraving their names on the ring took a week per ring and costs one diamond bit per ring. Mom and Dad both were buried with them
Dad once said it was a tungsten-carballoy-titanium-beryllium alloy with some other exotic metals added in. It had been through a launch, orbit and reentry cycle which really toughened it. Before launch it had been cryo-treated, too. I wish I still had them but they were buried with my parents. They never had a scratch and looked like polished silver or stainless steel. They were also amazingly light.
When I was working for a design engineering firm, we often looked at exotic metals and alloys as solutions to chemical reactor material for highly corrosive compounds. Nickel, chromium and cobalt alloys such as the Hastelloy B and C metals were extremely attractive for their corrosion resistance and strength properties. Of course, they were difficult to work with because their hardness made them difficult to cut and mill.
Now research is coming out that alloys consisting of equal quantities of those three metals have extremely high strength and ductility.
“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 °Fahrenheit) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters. In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number,” said research co-leader Robert Ritchie, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the Chua Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley.”
If you notice this extreme toughness measure is recorded at -424 °F. This implies that the toughness number is not as high at normal temperatures. Now this is unusual. Most materials become brittle at cryogenic temperatures not more ductile. But I assume the toughness they’re measuring is still at very high levels for ambient conditions. A material that’s five times stronger than the strongest steels is remarkable. Even double or triple is unheard of.
These alloys are very expensive and would start out being used in the most critical applications such as space flight. But over the course of time these new materials will find other applications. Maybe one day this material might end up in the beams of a mile high building or an enormous bridge. And before you know it they’ll make golf clubs and tennis rackets out of it.
It’s gratifying to see that not all the physical sciences and engineering fields have completely ground to a halt during the Age of Biden. Possibly there is still hope of our civilization escaping another dark age.
There was a giant uproar, “On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion.”
Specifically, the breakthrough was,
“In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That’s the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.”
But, not so fast!!!!!
“As we noted above, the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.”
So, the real situation is that if we expend 300 MJ of electricity, we get 3 MJ of heat in return. Then we can take that heat and heat a hot water loop and extract some fraction of that energy as electricity. Woohoo!
“Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.”
Sixty years of R&D and they’re still two orders of magnitude away from breaking even! Calling this a breakthrough is beyond pathetic. But instead, the idiots in charge of our national energy policy ignore fission plants. Plants that produce gigawatts of electric power day in and out. Honestly, we’re led by idiots practicing to be imbeciles.
Well, what can I say? These people are completely predictable and completely clueless. But at least they keep Ph.D. candidates employed for decades on end. Well, the road to perdition is at least clearly paved. Send in the clowns.