Feynman demonstrated the O rings of the Challenger Shuttle could very well have been responsible for the disaster by dipping a rubber band in ice water. The Testimony by Thiokol engineers and NASA management in front of the Rogers Commission investigating the disaster is riveting, available on YouTube. See Feb 25, 1986, Presidential Commission on Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Hearing. Includes Feynman questions. Buckle your seat belts.
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Saw this today. A particle with an energy of 2.4 x 10^20 eV emanating from a blank patch of sky. Apparently, supernovae aren’t powerful enough to generate these particle.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/cosmic-rays-high-energy-particle/
😲
https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/cosmic-rays-high-energy-particle/
😲
They have no clue where they’re coming from. Are these bubbling up out of the ‘quantum vacuum energy’ foam purportedly 120 orders of magnitude greater than the observed intergalactic energy levels equivalent to 2-3 hydrogen atoms?
[definition of an eV here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt]
[definition of an eV here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt]
Yes indeed - in general, those and other episodes from around that time aren't on Youtube nor the PBS Nova website (or Roku app), and those are where I think of a video as "available." I've gone to archive.org innumerable times to (usually successfully!) find old copies of "dead" weblinks, but I don't tend to think of it as a source for old videos. I should certainly change my mind about that!
Then, there's the rare glitch in computer game Super Mario 64 that was caused by a high-energy particle from a cosmic ray in 2013.
It flipped a single bit in the memory from 1 to 0, leading to Mario jumping impossibly high and "warping" to a higher platform!
No computer is safe!
It flipped a single bit in the memory from 1 to 0, leading to Mario jumping impossibly high and "warping" to a higher platform!
No computer is safe!
If only someone could explain the vacuum catastrophe. 😉
For all I know, these particles come from disconnected universes having different properties of space!
It is an interesting place to visit. I went via a locally organised coach trip a while ago.
LOL When driving through there, work related, I used to show disbelievers the plastic cows. I wonder if they are still there.
The vacuum catastrophe: vacuum, emptiness, nothing, is not understood as vacuum, emptiness, nothing.
The vacuum catastrophe: our supposed "scientists" do not understand the simplest concepts;-)
The vacuum catastrophe: our supposed "scientists" do not understand the simplest concepts;-)
I'll tell you a little story about Morton Thiokol and it is absolutely true. In 1986, at the height of sanctions against South Africa, I worked for a small instrumentation company over there and we were exporting industrial electronics to the USA. We had a small rep network and found a niche for thermocouple amplifiers, 4-20 isolators, and a bunch of other stuff. To ensure customer orders were set up correctly (since most of the products were ranged and calibrated to specific customer requirements) and stuff was repaired properly, they sent me to the US for a year. I arrived in January 1986. A few weeks later one morning, everyone went out into the car park to watch the Shuttle launch. We were based in Lakeland, FL, so about 60 miles IIRC away from Cape Canaveral, but once the spacecraft got up high enough, you could see it from the parking lot. A TV in the office was on, volume up loud and everyone standing on the doorsill of their cars in order to catch the first glimpse of the shuttle. The thing launches, we hear it on the TV, and a short while later we can see the vapor trail as it climbs up and then disaster struck Everyone rushed back to the TV in office area to try to hear what was going on.
Over the previous year or two, we had sold hundreds of temperature transmitters to Morton Thiokol - they were shipped to a place in Utah. For a few weeks we were 'sh1t, I hope this wasn't because of us . . . '. The devices were used in the facility where the boosters were made and tested - I never knew what for since the work was all handled by a local subcontractor up there. Luckily, it turns out the South Africans had nothing to do with it. It was management (they never listen). Fast forward 35 years and now there's South Africa sending Tesla's into space 😀
Image by Astrophysicist Dr. Amira Val Baker.
To get a handle on the magnitude of the discrepancy, the Universe is only 40 orders of magnitude larger than a proton!
A bridge will have to be built between the theory of large scale things (general relativity) and the theory of small scale things (quantum mechanics).
Some physicists believe the transition may be provided by the 'generalized holographic model', which is said to give the real origin of quantisation without reference to quantum theory - not that I understand a word written about the model when I google it! 🤓
https://file.scirp.org/Html/8-2180368_91083.htm
ABSTRACT:
They are concrete cows, sculptures, pieces of art. They are still there, along with dinosaurs and other sculptures dotted around.
Bonsai, I was sitting in the remote launch control room at Goddard SFC monitoring the launch of piggyback scientific European Space Agency ESA satellites at Cape Canaveral when I heard the launch director give the instruction to blow up the rocket 🚀 a few moments after liftoff. 200 million down the tubes. Of course, they had insurance and backup satellites.
Who am I to argue, but I have to say, deep down I see this as snake oil. None of this stuff is testable and none of it moves the dial forward and helps us understand nature any better. The thing is, the people doing this stuff are all absolutely brilliant but misguided. 122 orders of magnitude? How about this just to put things in perspective as to how big a discrepancy we are talking about (quote):
" . . . it is estimated that the there are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the known, observable universe. In layman's terms, that works out to between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms." (Source: 'Universe Today').
Einstein was not impressed with QM.
