Tag: physics

Roger Penrose’s Book

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I’m reading a book called “Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe” by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.  Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on black holes so he’s a pretty big brain.  But so far, the whole book has been a sort of no mathematics discussion of entropy and how the existence of the second law of thermodynamics relates to the Big Bang theory.  We spent a whole chapter talking about mixing blue and red paint in a bucket becoming purple and then how an egg falling off a counter on the floor is basically an irreversible process.  So far, I guess I follow him on time being a one-way affair.  As far as the red shift of very distant galaxies proving the Big Bang theory, I’m waiting to see if he has something a little less mundane to say.

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos with Penrose as one of the speakers and I will say he comes across as a very lucid speaker (at least as far as Nobel laureates go).  I just hope by the end of this book it will live up to the title.  But already he said something that I found interesting.  He said that the estimates of the age of the universe are based on taking the expansion rate of the universe and back calculating how long it took to get to where we are now from an initial condition where the size of the universe was a single point.  At the same time, I see how that seems like a straight forward idea and also a ridiculous one.  So, the whole universe is a single point.  What in the hell does that mean?  I’ve read that the conception of the conditions at slightly after the Big Bang has a universe that is almost infinitely hot and at the same time completely devoid of matter.  So, everything is photons?  But somehow this spawned the universe we see around us today.  None of that makes any sense to me.

I’ll admit I have a tiny brain compared to these mathematical geniuses but I have to wonder if they know what the hell they’re talking about.  I can sort of believe in black holes and neutron stars and gravity waves.  The predictions that have been made in the past seemed to have been confirmed with instruments that have measured gravity waves associated with merging neutron stars.  The measurements and behaviors seem to match exactly the theoretical modeling.  But when it comes to the cosmological models and how they correlate with observations of the universe we see very large deviations and no convincing evidence for the patchwork fixes like dark energy and dark matter.  I think we’re waiting for a new generation of physicists that won’t just sit around spinning unprovable theories and instead actually figure out ways of getting additional data.

So come on Roger, give me something in the second half of this book that I can point to and say, “That’s an Extraordinary New View of the Universe!”

Sabine Excoriates Fake Physics, Again!

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I know it’s a weakness of mine.  I do enjoy listening to this intelligent, honest woman with a wonderful German accent lambast these fake scientists for wasting time, money and lives in a racket that must be shut down.  And not just in physics.  All of the academic disciplines that produce nothing useful but are subsidized by our money to the tune of billions and billions of dollars must be defunded.

Kudos to Sabine for saying it out loud.

One Small Cup for a Man. One Giant Carafe for All Mankind

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The Future Circular Collider (FCC) or as I call it “The Really, Really, Really Large Hadron Collider (TRRRLHC) is proposed to be 91 kilometers in circumference and estimated to cost $30-40 billion.  Now granted, this is chump change when US military projects are considered.  But when it is taken into account the fact that it is very, very, very unlikely to provide any useful information at all to scientists it does seem somewhat uncareful with the public’s money.

I was just watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video where she explains why the community of high-energy particle physicists despise her.  You see she was a high energy particle physicist herself but she discovered that the whole field had become a racket.  All of these highly intelligent scientists are basically engaged in fraud.  Instead of doing actual research in physics they are employed at fabricating theories for which not a shred of evidence exists but for which tests can be devised to justify building larger and larger colliders.

I give Hossenfelder credit for her integrity.  She describes the personal vitriol that her colleagues heap on her for calling out their fraud.  She is right.  American and European governments fund these outrageously expensive instruments and also foot the bill for all of the research grants that fund the half-century long careers of all the thousands of particle physicists that subsist on this government gravy train.

Well, at least in the United States a lot of this will probably be going away very soon.  DOGE is tallying up the costs for and analyzing the alleged benefits of all these research grants.  I think that the great majority of these research grants will be denied funding starting next year.

Now, before being accused of being a Luddite, let me state that a case can be made for some scientific research being facilitated by federal money.  I can see how research on nuclear weapons, laser systems to knock down drones and lots of other military adjacent categories could justify the government underwriting some part of the work.  And there is probably biological research that the various government agencies on health could decide deserve government funding.  But anything with dark energy, dark matter, worm hole, black hole, multiverse or string theory in the title should definitely be denied funding automatically.  Likewise, any social science grants with the words diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, intersectional, BiPOC, Latinx, gender, transgender, gender fluid, pansexual, LGBTQ, pronouns, feminist, white nationalism, white supremacy, whiteness, white privilege, white fragility, resistance, sanctuary or Trump in the title should be denied and the authors put in a database for rejection from that point forward.

Look, industry will foot the bill for any scientific research for which applications in the real world exist.  And the government can make a case for expanding knowledge in certain limited academic categories where knowledge can improve the lives of Americans.  Predicting weather and solar storms are easy examples.  But as fascinating as black holes and multiverses are let’s leave these subjects to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to imagine and let scientists try using reality and experiments involving reality as their province.

For my part I am willing to do my part and fund research on coffee that doesn’t turn bitter after fifteen minutes on the stove.  You see I believe in following the science.

Cold Fusion, Again

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07245v2

Cold nuclear fusion is real!  But it’s also extremely lame.  Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (²H + ²H → ⁴He).

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.  And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.  As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”

But all is not yet lost.  The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.

Forty orders of magnitude.   Hmm.  That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.  That’s 1040.  That’s a really, really big number.  If I had 1040 pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.  It’s a lot.

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?  Hmm.

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.  The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.  It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.  It’s amazingly exciting.  But  1040 anything is a lot.  So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.  You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.  And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.  It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.  So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.  After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.  Who knows what else they’ll find.  Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.  Maybe not 1040 times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.  But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.

But it is something cool to think about.  Or even write into an sf story!  But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.  It’s just cooler.

Turtles All the Way Down

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Over the last few months, I have been reading and listening to a bunch of physics.  Particle physics and cosmology.  The micro and the macro of the attempt to understand the universe.  Limitless vistas of space with super clusters of galaxies and more exotic objects that stretch back to the alleged Big Bang.  And inside the proton are the ephemeral quarks and gluons flashing in and out of existence in (I kid you not) a yoctosecond.

And all of this hyperactivity of nothingness just to make it possible for me to push on the keys of my laptop to write this post.  All of those electrons and quarks following all these conflicting forces at various distances; the strong force, weak force, electro-magnetic force and gravity just so that reality can be felt and tasted.  All of these incredibly complex concepts and the mathematics that tries to describe it.  And the weirdness of quantum mechanics and its inherent and explicit ruling out of determinism.  All of this and how far we’ve come from Galileo and Newton.  And all we’ve achieved in technology.

And yet…

What are quarks made of?  What are gluons made of?  What happened five minutes before the Big Bang?  What happens five minutes after the End of the Universe?

There is no bottom.  There is no top.  There is no start.  There is no finish.

The human mind cannot encompass the infinite.  If we find something beneath quarks, I am sure there will be something under that.  And when the successor to the James Webb Space Telescope is put into service in twenty years at a cost of $100 billion or so I’m sure it will show us even further wonders that defy our ability to explain.  And so will the telescope after that.

And as the man said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  But that’s the part you have to wrap your head around.  Thinking that scientists have the ultimate truth is a misnomer.  All they have is the latest and greatest explanation as to how things work.

But they’ll never be able to tell you why you’re here or why you should care.  Each of us has to do that all by ourselves.

It’s remarkable.  Five hundred years after the Renaissance put us on the trajectory of man is the measure of all things and God is dead, we come right back to the same place.  The universe isn’t a big windup toy that means nothing and will return to nothing.  And after science tried to convince us that Earth is nowhere and humans are less than nothing it turns out that life is really the only thing with inherent value.  And human life is the miracle that we started out with before we killed God.

The more we study life the more in awe we are of its complexity and miraculous properties.  The more we study humans the more we discover about their potential.

I do not mean to disparage science.  Wresting the secrets of the universe from Nature is a noble endeavor.  And done with proper humility it is one of the finest works that can be achieved by the human mind.  But surely by now all the best minds in the world must be aware that an infinite universe cannot be defined by finite beings.  God built this nursery for us and it’s built to hold us while we grow up.  I can’t imagine we’ll find the door to the nursery unlocked.  At least not on this side of reality.

Getting Rid of Dark Energy and Dark Matter

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A theory has been proposed that allagedly explains the missing cosmological dark energy and dark matter by instead invoking the non-conservation of energy associated with the so-called expanision of the universe.  Some physicist in Russia named H. R. Fazlollahi has written a paper that outlines his idea on how this non-conservation would account for the missing energy.

Now, my tensor calculus is more than a little bit rusty (in point of fact, it’s extinct) so I won’t pretend to know what the details of his math show.  Instead I’ll fall back on my contempt for scientists that invent a universe where 90% of the mass and energy are invisible and indetectable in order to explain the data they observe.

So two cheers for Fazlollahi and here’s hoping that some of the brighter lights in the physics community start to look a these discrepancies with a more discerning eye.  Either that or let them go find jobs in something they’re more qualified to do like delivering the mail.

G-Block Superactinide Bling

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Since Valentine’s Day is coming up I told Camera Girl to be on the lookout for any man jewelry she could get for me made of unbihexium

Unbihexium is a hypothetical stable super heavy element with an atomic number of 126.  Now granted it’s never been detected anywhere either naturally or at CERN but a good wife should always use her shopping acumen to assist all of her husband’s purchasing goals.  So I’ve told her to be on the lookout for a star sapphire mounted in a pinky ring of unbihexium.  And I told her it wouldn’t hurt if there was a spiral galaxy at the center of the star.  Hey we all can dream right?

Unbihexium is supposed to exist at the magic number for stable super heavy elements.  Apparently some astrophysicists are theorizing that the existence of very heavy elements in second generation stars points to the existence of super heavy elements being produced in some kind of ultra-ultra super duper supernova events that would be needed to produce these elements.

I know, I know I should be talking about Iowa or Joe Biden but as you know I’m trying to put off suicide for the foreseeable future.  So, unbihexium!

 

 

What Are the Odds?

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According to quantum mechanics (or is Stan Lee?) every time a subatomic particle has a choice of moving in one direction or another it spawns two separate realities.  And taking all such choices together, it produces an infinity of separate realities (or universes) associated with these different futures that exist side by side.  Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe has documented this highly scientific quantum behavior with a panoply of Spidermen in the multiverse.  And for all I know they have added a few Spider-transmen to round things out.  And because of the Kathleen Kennedy imperative (“PUT A CHICK IN IT AND MAKE HER LAME AND GAY”} there will need to be some Spiderwomen, spiderlesbians and hopefully BIPoC spidertrans-women but most especially Latinx spidertrans-lesbians.  Maybe not in that order.  After all one cannot constrain the artistic endeavor.

But thinking about all this quantum physics was incredibly stimulating.  I started to imagine the multiverse of 2024 election outcomes and the futures it will spawn.  For instance, in one universe Joe Biden is struck by lightning and it resets his brain so that he can speak English and walk down stairs without tumbling.  But it also forces him to only speak the truth and so he’s assassinated by the FBI for disseminating the document that lists the FBI agents and assets and the scripts and roles they played in the January 6th frame-up.

In another universe Donald Trump declares himself a dictator for one day and has all the data files that the intelligence agencies have collected on Americans erased, reveals who killed Kennedy and forces MSNBC to broadcast Obama’s gay sex tapes during Black History Month.

In yet another universe the most unlikely set of outcomes all occur simultaneously and the American voters come to their senses in numbers so overwhelming that they elect huge majorities of Republicans to the House and Senate.  And Trump wins 45 states and re-enters the White House with an ironclad mandate.  And with that combination they undo the last fifty years of unconstitutional skullduggery and make the United States a free country for the first time in generations.  They fire seventy percent of the federal employees.  They cancel the Patriot Act.  They eject tens of millions of illegal aliens.  They balance the budget.  And they impeach all the judges that were appointed by Clinton, Obama and Biden and replace them with the guys who were imprisoned during the January 6th witch hunt.  And then they appoint Rudy Giuliani special prosecutor to clean up all the dirt that’s gone on since Obama came into office and have the trials located in Oklahoma.  Crazy, right?

Of course, I expect the most likely outcome in this multiverse is the one we expect.  That’s the one where crooked judges and prosecutors hand-pick leftist jurors and convict Donald Trump of bogus crimes in their kangaroo courts and then use millions of fraudulent ballots to win the 2024 presidential election and use that outcome to finish off what’s left of this once great nation.  Of course.

But even in this most likely of all universes, there is still room for all of this to be the trigger for a cosmic backlash.  You could imagine that all of this negative karma building on itself could warp the very fabric of space-time and spawn a reaction.  I could imagine that the day after the “winners” of the fake elections are declared, the disgusted Republican voters stage a complete work stoppage across the whole country.  Truckers stop delivering food to the cities and oil and gas isn’t delivered.  And all the cops go out on strike.  In fact, we all go out on strike.  And after a couple of weeks when the LGBTQ national guard units admit they can’t drive trucks, Washington might fold and sues for mercy.

And that’s my favorite super hero ending.  Sorry Deadpool.

Isn’t physics wonderful?

Fifteen Years to Proxima Centauri

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How’s that for a cool title!

H/T to Hans G. Schantz for the retweet on this that brought it to my attention.

This guy is researching a propulsion system based on “quatised inertia” that he says would allow a probe to reach the Oort Cloud in a year and Proxima Centauri in 15 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement.  Watch his video if you’re interested.  He says he was given a million dollar grant from DARPA  to study it.

I wonder if they’ll give me ten million to do my research on cold fusion.  My data looks pretty good.

Seriously, he says there’s company putting an experiment into space to test this thing out.  I guess we’ll know if it works.

 

Do You Just Put Quantum in Front of Everything?

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H/T to Hans G. Schantz.

Is the Universe really all just one thing?  Huh?

“If we do find evidence to support this idea, it would dramatically alter the way we conceive of the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this might sound like just a different way of going about physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we are on the way to a completely new understanding of how the universe is put together.”

What will this do to Ant Man?