Fusion power better be ready soon.
Humans only have 2500 years ahead to get at real good energies.
Why 2500 ? Because I met à big shot retired from nuclear physicts at CEA, his career in research and teaching.
He enlighted, stuff I was quite aware off.
We have 100 years of nuclear fuel available. He told me, there is about no hope to find more. Then, because of more nuclear plants worlwide, we can expect no more than 50 years.
Hopefully pressurized water reactors is not the only way to produce nuclear energy; We have fast neutron reactors.
Thanks to re breeder reactors we will get x50. So we can expect 2500 years.
2500 years, only...then, what’s next ?
Humans only have 2500 years ahead to get at real good energies.
Why 2500 ? Because I met à big shot retired from nuclear physicts at CEA, his career in research and teaching.
He enlighted, stuff I was quite aware off.
We have 100 years of nuclear fuel available. He told me, there is about no hope to find more. Then, because of more nuclear plants worlwide, we can expect no more than 50 years.
Hopefully pressurized water reactors is not the only way to produce nuclear energy; We have fast neutron reactors.
Thanks to re breeder reactors we will get x50. So we can expect 2500 years.
2500 years, only...then, what’s next ?
Why worry?
Humans and all other life on the planet may not be around two and a half millennia from now!
I thought the Renewable Energy thing was trundling along quite well. Albeit too slow to stop Climate Change and meet Net Zero, on which we have 25 years, doubtless because "It's all about the Economy, stoopid!"
We have the big fusion reactor in the sky and solar panels. We have the tides and wind due to the Earth's rotation. Even thermal heat in some places, like Bath Spa.
See me and Galu out anyway! Which is the sort of thing us Oldies say... 🤣
No, whatever the Times, we get on with our Science. Like this morning at 5.30 AM. I have been snapping the wretched Corona Borealis again as it rises in the East.
The magnitude 2 Nova is due to appear at the thin end of the red pointer sometime in the next 500 days, near Epsilon. It may even advance our understanding of fusion reactions.
A Map:
I have been further pondering upon The Moon, here shown to scale with our tiny Planet:
There is a great deal to take on board with orbital calculations:
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? 😕
It means the Moon wobbles far more than I expected.
I have decided to employ the relatively obscure Runge-Lenz Vector to advance my understanding. We always look for a Conservation Law in these situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace–Runge–Lenz_vector
An explanation called "LRL made Easy" by John Baez's buddy, Greg Egan, is to be found here, and I am relying on Galu to sum it up in his jocular style, as usual:
https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/LRL/LRL.html
This is proper mathematics. Symmetry based. It even works in Quantum Mechanics. 🙂
We have the big fusion reactor in the sky and solar panels. We have the tides and wind due to the Earth's rotation. Even thermal heat in some places, like Bath Spa.
See me and Galu out anyway! Which is the sort of thing us Oldies say... 🤣
No, whatever the Times, we get on with our Science. Like this morning at 5.30 AM. I have been snapping the wretched Corona Borealis again as it rises in the East.
The magnitude 2 Nova is due to appear at the thin end of the red pointer sometime in the next 500 days, near Epsilon. It may even advance our understanding of fusion reactions.
A Map:
I have been further pondering upon The Moon, here shown to scale with our tiny Planet:
There is a great deal to take on board with orbital calculations:
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? 😕
It means the Moon wobbles far more than I expected.
I have decided to employ the relatively obscure Runge-Lenz Vector to advance my understanding. We always look for a Conservation Law in these situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace–Runge–Lenz_vector
An explanation called "LRL made Easy" by John Baez's buddy, Greg Egan, is to be found here, and I am relying on Galu to sum it up in his jocular style, as usual:
https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/LRL/LRL.html
This is proper mathematics. Symmetry based. It even works in Quantum Mechanics. 🙂
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All I can say is that the red vector reminds me of my red Victor.
P.S. Greg Egan's idea of "made easy" differs immensely from mine!
Firstly, here is my version of 'LRL made easy':
- The LRL is a vector that is useful in describing astronomical orbits, such as the motion of the planets around the Sun.
- The LRL describes the orbit of the electron around the proton in the hydrogen atom and led to the first derivation of the element's spectrum.
I have given up driving a car for local errands due to global warming. (also cardio health). Everybody else is buying cars with an extra 300 kg of battery to move energy consumption from the vehicle to the central power plant. Meanwhile $1000000000 of insured houses (10000 units) burned this week in LA due in part to global warming. The philosopher was right, democracies vote themselves bread and circuses.
As for the red Victor, I may have seen one of those last week in an episode of Danger Man on TeeVee. I like the tailfins.
My sister crashed her first Triumph Herald head-on into a lorry turning into our house in about 1966, with her youngest siblings and mum in it. We all thought it was very exciting!
It was a write-off. She then bought a much faster 2L Triumph Vitesse, which could take off on hump-back bridges on Dartmoor when we encouraged her to test it. We all bumped our heads on the roof. Also very exciting!
In 1919, Arthur Eddington tested Einstein's theory of General Relativity that light would bend by a tiny 1.75 arc seconds at the edge of the Sun in an eclipse.This was twice Newton's prediction.
A copy of the plate survives:
This was apparently near Kappa Tauri, which is the first double star at 4 o'clock from Ganymede, Jupiter and darker Callisto tonight. It was a good eclipse to test on, because it was near the denser stars of the Hyades.
Einstein became an instant world-wide celebrity, even if most people had not a clue what Relativity was about. In a nutshell, Special Relativity is about velocity in flat spacetime.
General Relativity extends it to acceleration, curved spacetime and creates gravity. I will tell you more about redshifted galaxies, Cepheid variables and an expanding universe next.
I have nearly finished the book.
It was a write-off. She then bought a much faster 2L Triumph Vitesse, which could take off on hump-back bridges on Dartmoor when we encouraged her to test it. We all bumped our heads on the roof. Also very exciting!
In 1919, Arthur Eddington tested Einstein's theory of General Relativity that light would bend by a tiny 1.75 arc seconds at the edge of the Sun in an eclipse.This was twice Newton's prediction.
A copy of the plate survives:
This was apparently near Kappa Tauri, which is the first double star at 4 o'clock from Ganymede, Jupiter and darker Callisto tonight. It was a good eclipse to test on, because it was near the denser stars of the Hyades.
Einstein became an instant world-wide celebrity, even if most people had not a clue what Relativity was about. In a nutshell, Special Relativity is about velocity in flat spacetime.
General Relativity extends it to acceleration, curved spacetime and creates gravity. I will tell you more about redshifted galaxies, Cepheid variables and an expanding universe next.
I have nearly finished the book.
I couldn't find a modern map of this 1919 Eclipse which confirmed Einstein's General Relativity and his "New Physics":
So I have recreated it. 65 and 67 Tauri is now called kappa Tauri, and 69 Tauri is now called upsilon Tauri. All falls into place along the Ecliptic:
Now we know. 😎
So I have recreated it. 65 and 67 Tauri is now called kappa Tauri, and 69 Tauri is now called upsilon Tauri. All falls into place along the Ecliptic:
Now we know. 😎
Linking back to the previous discussion, it was Eddington who, in 1926, suggested that stars draw their energy from the fusion of hydrogen into helium.
The eclipse test of general relativity that Eddington undertook in 1919 made Einstein a world celebrity, however the accuracy of the light displacement measurement was only about 20%.
It wasn't until the advent of radio astronomy that Einstein's new theory of gravity was finally confirmed by accurate measurements.
Experiments with radio waves traveling close to the Sun confirmed the displacement to within 1% of what general relativity predicts.
P.S. 1.75 arcseconds is approximately 0.0005 degrees.
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I was curious if this experiment would have worked with The Moon at lunar eclipse. It seems the effect would be much smaller:
The mass is proportional to r^3 for a given density. So the angle of deflection at the edge would be tiny, being an r^2 relationship. You can look up Einstein Rings to see the full effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring
Eddington's experiment was done on May 29th 1919 in South America, and I suppose the Sun is at roughly this same point every year, moving a degree a day, but the Moon's orbit precesses every 18 years or so, so eclipse dates vary.
So I reckon my birthday of May 8 had the Sun in the constellation of Aries. Which differs from what the Astrologers reckon, saying I am a Taurus. This is due to the 26,000 year cycle of the Earth's axis.
It seems the actual ecliptic in the sky is relatively stable over 10s of thousands of years, being 60% dominated by Jupiter, which is always within a degree or so of Earth's ecliptic.
The mass is proportional to r^3 for a given density. So the angle of deflection at the edge would be tiny, being an r^2 relationship. You can look up Einstein Rings to see the full effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring
Eddington's experiment was done on May 29th 1919 in South America, and I suppose the Sun is at roughly this same point every year, moving a degree a day, but the Moon's orbit precesses every 18 years or so, so eclipse dates vary.
So I reckon my birthday of May 8 had the Sun in the constellation of Aries. Which differs from what the Astrologers reckon, saying I am a Taurus. This is due to the 26,000 year cycle of the Earth's axis.
It seems the actual ecliptic in the sky is relatively stable over 10s of thousands of years, being 60% dominated by Jupiter, which is always within a degree or so of Earth's ecliptic.
Astronomers are finding strange pairs of galaxies that may not be two distinct objects, but a duplicate image of the same object.
These discoveries are grist to the mill for string theorists who suggest this is evidence of gravitational lensing caused by incredibly dense and massive Cosmic Strings.
Cosmic Strings are hypothesised to have been created in the early Universe and, although no wider than a proton, they may extend the entire breadth of the Universe.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11994-x
These discoveries are grist to the mill for string theorists who suggest this is evidence of gravitational lensing caused by incredibly dense and massive Cosmic Strings.
Cosmic Strings are hypothesised to have been created in the early Universe and, although no wider than a proton, they may extend the entire breadth of the Universe.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11994-x
Took this one last year. NB the size comparison included - greater Stockholm fits into the circle 😉 ... my math and trig is know to fail so be warned...
//
//
That size comparison may be an astronomical first! 🥳
Area of Stockholm equals 187 km^2.
Surface area of Moon equals 37.9 million km^2, of which only about 59% is visible from Earth in the course of an orbit, i.e., 22.4 million km^2.
The Moon/Stockholm area ratio is therefore 22400000 to 187 or approximately 120,000 to 1.
I'll leave it to our resident world class mathematician to convert that area ratio into the ratio of the diameters of the two circles in your image!
I am shocked and disappointed to see Sabine Hossenfelder employing Internet clickbait timewaster tactics!
Questions having the unsurprising answer "NO".
"Could this be the first evidence for Cosmic Superstrings?" 😕
Nice pic, TNT. Was it a telephoto lens?
If Stockholm was on the Moon, it would be near the North Pole, of course. With the Lunar Bears.
I have a picture of the Dark Side of the Moon, and it's totally different:
My methods must remain secret. 🤣
Questions having the unsurprising answer "NO".
"Could this be the first evidence for Cosmic Superstrings?" 😕
Nice pic, TNT. Was it a telephoto lens?
If Stockholm was on the Moon, it would be near the North Pole, of course. With the Lunar Bears.
I have a picture of the Dark Side of the Moon, and it's totally different:
My methods must remain secret. 🤣
I have finished "The Day Without Yesterday" and a ripping yarn it was, loosely based on fact.
It seems Einstein was stubbornly slow to accept the consequences of his own discoveries.
He always persisted that "God does not play dice", even in the face of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at Solvay in Quantum Mechanics.
Drove his colleagues crazy.
In fact, Bohr, in exasperation, did a calculation overnight at Solvay which paralelled a General Relativity explanation of Energy-Time uncertainty alongside a Quantum one, but I don't fully understand the details.
He was slow to accept an expanding Universe and its consequence of a point zero in time we call the Big Bang, though the astronomical evidence was clear as day..
Lemaitre was vindicated in his Big Bang idea, not his own name btw, by the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background. His cause was not helped by the Vatcan adopting a creation moment though.
The lesson for older Physicists is to keep an open mind and keep up to date on the literature.
Clearly when the Universe was tiny, quantum effects must play a part, which was doubly troublesome to Einstein.
Maybe String Theory has something to say, but I rate it an outsider, as is well known...
We scratch around for inspiration. I currently like the LRL vector as interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace–Runge–Lenz_vector#Conservation_and_symmetry
Seems to look like Relativistic 4-vectors in the unbound state. I have no idea what it means, but bound states really don't evolve in time. Just rotate or vibrate or something.
I have lost the reference currently, but John Baez was describing how mass strings can resemble point particles in elliptical orbits a while back.
Might explain how String Theory works after a fashion, even if you have to believe in extra dimensions beyond 4.
I think I'll stop there.
It seems Einstein was stubbornly slow to accept the consequences of his own discoveries.
He always persisted that "God does not play dice", even in the face of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at Solvay in Quantum Mechanics.
Drove his colleagues crazy.
In fact, Bohr, in exasperation, did a calculation overnight at Solvay which paralelled a General Relativity explanation of Energy-Time uncertainty alongside a Quantum one, but I don't fully understand the details.
He was slow to accept an expanding Universe and its consequence of a point zero in time we call the Big Bang, though the astronomical evidence was clear as day..
Lemaitre was vindicated in his Big Bang idea, not his own name btw, by the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background. His cause was not helped by the Vatcan adopting a creation moment though.
The lesson for older Physicists is to keep an open mind and keep up to date on the literature.
Clearly when the Universe was tiny, quantum effects must play a part, which was doubly troublesome to Einstein.
Maybe String Theory has something to say, but I rate it an outsider, as is well known...
We scratch around for inspiration. I currently like the LRL vector as interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace–Runge–Lenz_vector#Conservation_and_symmetry
Seems to look like Relativistic 4-vectors in the unbound state. I have no idea what it means, but bound states really don't evolve in time. Just rotate or vibrate or something.
I have lost the reference currently, but John Baez was describing how mass strings can resemble point particles in elliptical orbits a while back.
Might explain how String Theory works after a fashion, even if you have to believe in extra dimensions beyond 4.
I think I'll stop there.
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I'm resisting mentioning which mathematician/physicist I'm following on Mastodon ...
But that's not why I'm here, your discussion seemed to be about scientists almost becoming crackpots, and I just saw this video, even had to comment about Wolfram's latest efforts:
But that's not why I'm here, your discussion seemed to be about scientists almost becoming crackpots, and I just saw this video, even had to comment about Wolfram's latest efforts:
Hossenfelder is running a YouTube business and must attract viewers to make cash. Note her copious use of question marks as get-outs!
I watched her new video on cosmic strings last night. Here she reacts to BBC claims that researchers have found the first evidence for string theory.
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This resident Mathematician says that TNT's statement is TRUE. 😀
Stockholm must be about 10 miles across, and the Moon is 2000 miles across. I always use Miles in my natural thinking, being old-fashioned.
TNT's circle is therefore about 4x bigger than the minimum necessary. Now I can sleep. Perchance to dream, maybe of Sabine Hossenfelder.... 🙂