A Quantum How To

Teleporting (cont.)

2006-10-05T06:36:00.000-07:00

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Beaming people in "Star Trek" fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality.

Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second.

But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday.

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.

Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.
Although teleportation is associated with the science-fiction series "Star Trek," no one is likely to be beamed anywhere soon.

But the achievement of Polzik's team, in collaboration with the theorist Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, marks an advancement in the field of quantum information and computers, which could transmit and process information in a way that was impossible before.

"It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik whose research is reported in the journal Nature.

Quantum computing requires manipulation of information contained in the quantum states, which include physical properties such as energy, motion and magnetic field, of the atoms.
"Creating entanglement is a very important step, but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps -- that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback," he added.

Biodigital Cloning

2006-08-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, turned the IBM ideas into reality by successfully teleporting a photon, a particle of energy that carries light. The Caltech group was able to read the atomic structure of a photon, send this information across 1 meter (3.28 feet) of coaxial cable and create a replica of the photon. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made.

In performing the experiment, the Caltech group was able to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon. This principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the speed of a particle. But if you can't know the position of a particle, then how can you teleport it? In order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as entanglement. In entanglement, at least three photons are needed to achieve quantum teleportation:

Photon A: The photon to be teleported
Photon B: The transporting photon
Photon C: The photon that is entangled with photon B

If researchers tried to look too closely at photon A without entanglement, they would bump it, and thereby change it. By entangling photons B and C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the remaining information would be passed on to B by way of entanglement, and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from photon A to photon C, they can create an exact replica of photon A. However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure is passed through the transporter room to his desired location, where a replica of Kirk is created and the original is destroyed.

A more recent teleportation success was achieved at the Australian National University, when researchers successfully teleported a laser beam.

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 10^28 atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would then have to send this information to another location, where the person's body would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn't be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect.

If such a machine were possible, it's unlikely that the person being transported would actually be "transported." It would work more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would be made at the receiving end, but with much greater precision than a fax machine. But what would happen to the original? One theory suggests that teleportation would combine genetic cloning with digitization.

In this biodigital cloning, tele-travelers would have to die, in a sense. Their original mind and body would no longer exist. Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated in another location, and digitization would recreate the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. So the travelers would still exist, but they would do so in a new body, of the same atomic structure as the original body, programmed with the same information.

For theologists, this means that the new body wouldn't have the original soul

Plan for cloaking device unveiled

2006-05-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

Professor Sir John Pendry says a simple demonstration model that could work for radar might be possible within 18 months' time. The concept? Special materials could make light "flow" around an object like water.

Two separate teams, including Professor Pendry's, have outlined ways to cloak objects in the journal Science.

These research papers present the maths required to verify that the concept could work. But developing an invisibility cloak is likely to pose significant challenges.

Both groups propose methods using the unusual properties of so-called "metamaterials" to build a cloak.

These metamaterials can be designed to induce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves, such as light. This is done by tinkering with the nano-scale structure of the metamaterial, not by altering its chemistry.

Light flow

When light hits the surface of a metal such as silver, as well as a reflection, another form of light is excited at the surface. This light, bound to the surface as a small mixture of light and electrons, is called a surface plasmon, its behaviour likened to waves on the surface of a 'sea' of electrons. For many years a curiosity, the properties of plasmons have only recently been fully explored.

In their paper this week, the theorists show that holes perforating a surface can spoof the creation of these plasmons, and they suggest that the effect could be harnessed to channel light at tiny scales, overcoming one of the constraints facing designers of the first optical computer.

John Pendry's team suggest that by enveloping an object in a metamaterial cloak, light waves can be made to flow around the object in the same way that water would do so.

"Water behaves a little differently to light. If you put a pencil in water that's moving, the water naturally flows around the pencil. When it gets to the other side, the water closes up," Professor Pendry told the BBC.

"A little way downstream, you'd never know that you'd put a pencil in the water - it's flowing smoothly again.

"Light doesn't do that of course, it hits the pencil and scatters. So you want to put a coating around the pencil that allows light to flow around it like water, in a nice, curved way."

The work provides a mathematical "recipe" for bending light waves in such a way as to achieve a desired cloaking effect.

John Pendry, along with colleagues David Smith and David Schurig at Duke University in North Carolina, US, have been testing suitable metamaterials for the device they plan to build.

This, Sir John explained, would consist of a sphere or cylinder wrapped in a sheath of metamaterial which could cloak it from radio waves.

"It's not tremendously fancy, but that for us would be quite an achievement," he told the BBC News website.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt, author of another cloaking paper in Science, described the effect for light as a "mirage".

"What you're trying to do is guide light around an object, but the art is to bend it such that it leaves the object in precisely the same way that it initially hits it. You have the illusion that there is nothing there," he told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

The work could have uses in military stealth technology - but engineers have not yet created the materials that could be used to cloak an aircraft or a tank, John Pendry explains. Professor Pendry's research has been supported by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

Several other scientific teams have proposed ideas for cloaking devices. One theoretical paper proposed using a material known as a superlens to cancel out light being scattered from an object.

Professor Pendry is well known for his work on the structure of surfaces and their interaction with electrons and photons. He has published over 200 scientific papers. He has published on subjects such as surface plasmons and negative refractive index materials. From 1975-1981 he worked at the Daresbury Laboratory, Cheshire. He has worked at Imperial College of Science and Technology, London since he was appointed professor in 1981. He was head of the department of physics (1998-2001) and principal of the faculty of physical sciences (2001-2002). He is an honorary fellow of Downing College, Cambridge and an IEEE fellow.

Make your own genetic warrior horde

2006-04-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

When making a genetic warrior horde, it is important to keep several things in mind. For instance, you'll want your horde to be fearless and love to take orders.

A Rutgers University geneticist has found that turning off a specific gene for the protein stathmin makes mice fearless. The story speculates that this research might improve treatment for phobias. It does not mention obvious military applications for the discovery.

Couple this with manipulating the gene that manages fatigue, you've got yourself a soldier that won't stop until something's dead.

As noted in this Naval Officer's guide for managing fatigue, the use of amphetamines to stay alert, followed by sedatives to sleep, has a long tradition. Genetic treatments may offer an alternative to pharmaceuticals.

Next, there is a brain cell that assigns values to different items. There neurons play a role in how a person selects different items from a set. How does this help your genetic warrior horde? Dr Camillo Padaoa-Schioppa and John Assad, an associate professor of neurobiology, found neurons involved in assigning values that help people to make choices. Eliminate the desire to make choices, and you have yourself a fine instrument of bidding.

"The neurons we have identified encode the value individuals assign to the available items when they make choices based on subjective preferences, a behavior called economic choice," Padoa-Schioppa said in a statement.

The scientists, who reported the findings in the journal Nature, located the neurons in an area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) while studying macaque monkeys which had to choose between different flavors and quantities of juices.

They correlated the animals' choices with the activity of neurons in the OFC with the valued assigned to the different types of juices. Some neurons would be highly active when the monkeys selected three drops of grape juice, for example, or 10 drops of apple juice.

Earlier research involving the OFC showed that lesions in the area seem to have an association with eating disorders, compulsive gambling and unusual social behavior, which is key for a mindless geneticlly manipulated warrior.

The new findings show an association between the activity of the OFC and the mental valuation process underlying choice behavior, according to the scientists.

"A concrete possibility is that various choice deficits may result from an impaired or dysfunctional activity of this population (of neurons), though this hypothesis remains to be tested," Padoa-Schioppa.

Lastly, when composing your warrior cookie cutter, you want to make sure it is low mantinence. Researchers have genetically engineered mice with the ability to heal wounds at an accelerated pace. The research started with analysis of genes linked to blood vessel formation and inadvertently created a breed of mouse with significantly thickened skin, swollen ears, noses and eyelids. With this mutation, tests showed these mice also had the ability to rapidly heal wounds - two millimeter-wide holes created in the mice's ears closed completely within 28 days.

The genetically modified mice produced large amounts of a protein called Angiopoietin-related Growth Factor, or AGF, in a type of thickened skin cell called epidermal keratinocytes. The resulting transgenic mice showed an increased number of blood vessels in the dermis, implying that AGF does indeed promote blood vessel formation.

Telephone Telepathy?

2006-02-06T14:47:00.000-08:00

There probably isn't anything substantial to this, but I thought I would post it anyway

NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.

Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages.

Quantum Weapons (Part VI) Biological Defenses

2006-01-25T01:04:00.000-08:00

With any weapon system, is the counter-weapon. Just like an antidote for an ailment. The antidote for a sword is a shield, the antidote for a bullet is ballistic armor. But there may be a new form of shielding from weaponry, and it is the body.

Researchers have genetically engineered mice with the ability to heal wounds at an accelerated pace. The research started with analysis of genes linked to blood vessel formation and inadvertently created a breed of mouse with significantly thickened skin, swollen ears, noses and eyelids. With this mutation, tests showed these mice also had the ability to rapidly heal wounds - two millimeter-wide holes created in the mice's ears closed completely within 28 days.

Yuichi Oike of the Keio University in Tokyo said, "This finding is very interesting and could lead to novel therapies for skin diseases such as psoriasis, allergies or wound healing."

The genetically modified mice produced large amounts of a protein called Angiopoietin-related Growth Factor, or AGF, in a type of thickened skin cell called epidermal keratinocytes. The resulting transgenic mice showed an increased number of blood vessels in the dermis, suggesting that AGF does indeed promote blood vessel formation.

Further experiments revealed that AGF was also found in particularly high concentrations at the site of wounds. This suggests that the protein also plays a role in wound healing by increasing skin cell formation and improving blood flow to the area.

"AGF could prove hopeful in treating ischemic diseases, where an organ receives insufficient blood supply, heart disease and blood vessel disorders," Oike told New Scientist. However he warns that further work is required for a full understanding of the function of AGF.

The research path quickly changed from blood vessel formation to creating knock-out mice that lack the AGF gene to help further ascertain the protein's role in the body. After figuring out such information, a gene could be added to the human genome sequence to accelerate wound repair.

Imagine a soldier being shot who's wound self-cauderizing before the solder got to the infirmary. Or imagine simple cuts being healed as quickly in a 60 year old as they are in three year olds. If the best offense is a good defense, then this would be a powerful weapon.

More quantum theory weapons:
Part V, Atmospheric Vortex Engine
Part IV, Atmospheric Vortex Engine
Part III, Ionospheric Heaters
Part II, Woodpecker Grid
Part I, Scalar Howitzer

Dark Energy theory reverses

2006-01-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

Contrary to all expectations, the mysterious dark energy that is pushing the Universe apart may be changing with time.

In cosmology, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy which permeates all of space and has strong negative pressure. According to the theory of relativity, the effect of such a negative pressure is qualitatively similar to a force acting in opposition to gravity at large scales. Invoking such an effect is currently the most popular method for explaining recent observations that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, as well as accounting for a significant portion of the missing mass in the universe.

During the late 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae ("one a") suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These observations have been corroborated by several independent sources since then: the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, large scale structure as well as improved measurements of the supernovae. All these elements are consistent with the concordance Lambda-CDM model.

By observing distant, powerful bursts of gamma rays (-rays), Brad Schaefer says he has preliminary evidence that the strength of dark energy is different today from when the Universe was very young. Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, presented his results at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC.

Just minutes after the data were presented in a late afternoon session, some astronomers were already calling the bold claim into question.

An idea that arose in the late 90s, dark energy seems to act over very large distances, pushing the Universe apart at an ever increasing speed. At the moment, many researchers believe that dark energy may be a foam of quantum particles that exists throughout the vacuum of space. Under that scenario, dark energy would be a constant and unchanging force, according to Michael Turner, a cosmologist from the University of Chicago, Illinois.

Schaefer's findings, if they are true, would turn that idea on its head.

Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash

2006-01-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

From USA Today:

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads — all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than the sun.
The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on such a massive scale and the largest in the world.

Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.

The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.

No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant.

Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free from outside electricity.

About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant's turbines.

Sludge from the county's wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, and a material created from melted organic matter — up to 600 tons a day — will be hardened into slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects.

"This is sustainability in its truest and finest form," said Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma, a subsidiary of Jacoby Development Inc.

For years, some waste-management facilities have been converting methane — created by rotting trash in landfills — to power. Others also burn trash to produce electricity.

But experts say population growth will limit space available for future landfills.

"We've only got the size of the planet," said Richard Tedder, program administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's solid waste division. "Because of all of the pressures of development, people don't want landfills. It's going to be harder and harder to site new landfills, and it's going to be harder for existing landfills to continue to expand."

The plasma-arc gasification facility in St. Lucie County, on central Florida's Atlantic Coast, aims to solve that problem by eliminating the need for a landfill. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world — both in Japan — but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.

Up to eight plasma arc-equipped cupolas will vaporize trash year-round, non-stop. Garbage will be brought in on conveyor belts and dumped into the cylindrical cupolas where it falls into a zone of heat more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

"We didn't want to do it like everybody else," said Leo Cordeiro, the county's solid waste director. "We knew there were better ways."

No emissions are released during the closed-loop gasification, Geoplasma says. The only emissions will come from the synthetic gas-powered turbines that create electricity. Even that will be cleaner than burning coal or natural gas, experts say.

Few other toxins will be generated, if any at all, Geoplasma says.

But critics disagree.

"We've found projects similar to this being misrepresented all over the country," said Monica Wilson of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

Wilson said there aren't enough studies yet to prove the company's claims that emissions will likely be less than from a standard natural-gas power plant.

She also said other companies have tried to produce such results and failed. She cited two similar facilities run by different companies in Australia and Germany that closed after failing to meet emissions standards.

"I think this is the time for the residents of this county to start asking some tough questions," Wilson said.

Bruce Parker, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based National Solid Wastes Management Association, scoffs at the notion that plasma technology will eliminate the need for landfills.

"We do know that plasma arc is a legitimate technology, but let's see first how this thing works for St. Lucie County," Parker said. "It's too soon for people to make wild claims that we won't need landfills."

Louis Circeo, director of Georgia Tech's plasma research division, said that as energy prices soar and landfill fees increase, plasma-arc technology will become more affordable.

"Municipal solid waste is perhaps the largest renewable energy resource that is available to us," Circeo said, adding that the process "could not only solve the garbage and landfill problems in the United States and elsewhere, but it could significantly alleviate the current energy crisis."

He said that if large plasma facilities were put to use nationwide to vaporize trash, they could theoretically generate electricity equivalent to about 25 nuclear power plants.

Americans generated 236 million tons of garbage in 2003, about 4.5 pounds per person, per day, according to the latest figures from the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly 130 million tons went to landfills — enough to cover a football field 703 miles high with garbage.

Circeo said criticism of the technology is based on a lack of understanding.

"We are going to put emissions out, but the emissions are much lower than virtually any other process, especially a combustion process in an incinerator," he said.

Circeo said that both plants operating in Japan, where emissions standards are more stringent than in the U.S., are producing far less pollution than regulations require.

"For the amount of energy produced, you get significantly less of certain pollutants like sulfur dioxide and particulate matter," said Rick Brandes, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency's waste minimization division.

Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment, funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag.

"That's the silver lining," said Hillestad, adding that St. Lucie County won't pay a dime. The company has assumed full responsibility for interest on the bonds.

County Commissioner Chris Craft said the plasma process "is bigger than just the disposal of waste for St. Lucie County."

"It addresses two of the world's largest problems — how to deal with solid waste and the energy needs of our communities," Craft said. "This is the end of the rainbow. It will change the world."

Point of super nova

2006-01-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

If a pound of trash is put into the sun, it will have more fuel to burn. This means that the point of super nova in the future will be later, even if it is .0000000000001 seconds later. But, does the added mass make it collapse a while sooner, even if it is .0000000000001 seconds later? If so, then it will cancel itself out and the super nova will happen at the same time. But I don't know...if anyone does, let me know

Warp Drive Patent Rejected

2006-01-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

It is not time for warp drives. At least not yet. The Worsley-Twist tried to patent a warp drive, as seen to the right. Almost copy-pasting from a star trek book, the Worsley-Twist warp drive does not depend upon traditional emissions of matter to create thrust. Rather, the drive creates a change in the curvature of the space-time continuum — thus allowing travel by warping space-time.

In a long series of silly patent, finally, and examiner noticed the absurdity of this divice, and requested a working model. From the notes:

"Applicant is required to furnish a model of the instant invention. 35 U.S.C. 114. See Also 37 C.F.R. 1.91."

Among other rejections, the Examiner has asserted a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101 for lack of utility — finding that the invention is inoperable.

Other rejected inventions include the following:

-2005-293617 INVISIBLE SYSTEM SIX-DIMENSIONAL PORTION (OTHER WORLD) COMMUNICATION DEVICE

-2005-110500 DEVICE FOR EXCHANGING TRANSMISSION AND RECEPTION OF FUTURE INFORMATION OF MULTI-WORLD IN-BETWEEN PAST

-2005-102494 GRAVITY CONTROL TIME MACHINE UTILIZING ACCELERATED MOTION TO WHICH GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY IS APPLIED

-2005-101509 ULSI COMPRISING BINARY-NOTATION-SYSTEM ELEMENT FOR RETURNING ELEMENTARY PARTICLE OR ATOM TO PAST

-2004-197727 GENERATOR USING CASIMIR POWER SUCH THAT TWO METAL PLATES PARALLELLY PLACED IN SLIGHTLY SPACED RELATION IN VACUUM ATTRACT EACH OTHER

-2004-135253 APPARATUS FOR IRRADIATING EXCESS DIMENSION WITH GRAVITATIONAL WAVE USING BRANEWORLD THEORY IN BINARY NUMBER SYSTEM, TRANSMITTING-RECEIVING AND DECODING INFORMATION THEREFROM

-2004-080981 APPARATUS FOR RAPIDLY ROTATING SMALL-SIZED ROD WITH ACCELERATOR TO FORM SINGULAR POINT, TO GENERATE CTL, TO PLACE FUTURE INFORMATION OBJECT THEREON AND TO SEND IT TO PAST

-2004-032821 TRANSMITTER/RECEIVER TO PAST BY BINARY NOTATION SCALE OF FUTURE INFORMATION USING QUANTUM MECHANICS FOR RETURNING ELEMENTAL PARTICLE TO THE PAST

-2003-198642 DEVICE FOR TRANSMITTING FUTURE INFORMATION TO PAST BY INTEGRATING LEFT ELECTRON INTO MORSE SIGNAL SYSTEM BY USING INFORMATION TRANSMITTING SPEED ZERO SECOND OF SPIN OF ELECTRON BLEW OFF RIGHT AND LEFT

-2001-326969 FUTURE INFORMATION PAST TRANSMISSION/RECEPTION DOCUMENTING MACHINE UTILIZING LASER PULSE

Quantum Weapons (Part V) Atmospheric Vortex Engine

2005-12-31T11:15:00.000-08:00

It may be possible to create a man-made tornado and use wind turbines to capture the energy from the tornado. An inventor is working on a method of creating artificial tornadoes to generate electricity which he calls the "Atmospheric Vortex Engine". On the website there is some video footage of some experimental tornadoes that were generated in a prototype vortex tower in Utah. There seem to be several recent media references to his work including The Economist and The Guardian.

Now of course, this example utilizes a very nice humanitarian-based need for tornados, but it just takes the imagination of a child to realize what you can do with this. After all this design boasts a 30 meter diameter tornado, which would be remarkably distructive. Following is the invetor's description of the creation of the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE).

The existence of tornadoes proves that low intensity solar radiation can produce concentrated mechanical energy. According to this company, it should be possible to control a naturally occurring process. Bascilly, controlling where mechanical energy is produced in the atmosphere offers the possibility of harnessing solar energy without having to use solar collectors. The AVE is a process for capturing the mechanical energy produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere.

From the website, which is linked at the bottom of this article, a vortex engine is a machine for producing and controlling a tornado-like vortex. A vortex engine consists of a cylindrical wall open at the top and with tangential air entries around its base. Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat to sustain the vortex once established is provided in cooling tower bays located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors. The continuous heat source for the peripheral heat exchanger can be waste industrial heat or warm seawater. The intensity of the vortex is regulated by restricting the flow of air with dampers located upstream of the deflectors. The vortex can be stopped by restricting the airflow to deflectors with direct orientation and by opening the airflow to deflectors with reverse orientation.

Electrical energy is produced in turbo-expanders located in the inlet to the cooling tower bays. The pressure at the base of the vortex is less than ambient pressure because of the buoyancy of the rising air. The pressure in the cooling tower bays is sub-atmospheric because the cooling bays exhausts at the base of the vortex. The Atmospheric Vortex Engine has the same thermodynamic basis as the solar chimney. The physical tube of the solar chimney is replaced by centrifugal force in the vortex and the atmospheric boundary layer acts as the solar collector.

The average upward convective heat flux at the bottom atmosphere is 150 W/m2, one sixth of this heat could be converted to work while it is carried upward by convection. The heat to work conversion efficiency of the atmospheric heat to work conversion process is approximately 15% because the heat is received at an average temperature of 15 C and given up at an average temperature of -15 C. The average work that could be produced in the atmosphere is therefore 25 W/m2. The total mechanical energy produced in the atmosphere is 12000 TW (25 W/m2 x 510 x 1012 m2) whereas the total work produced by humans is 2 TW. The quantity of mechanical energy which could be produced in the atmosphere is 6000 times greater than the mechanical energy produced by humans.

Producing and capturing the work requires that the expansion process be carried out at mechanical equilibrium. Without a mechanism, such as a turbine, to capture the work of expansion and to ensure that the process is carried out at mechanical equilibrium, the mechanical energy is dissipated and lost.

Atmospheric scientists call the mechanical energy that would be produced if a unit mass of air were raised reversibly from the bottom to the top of the troposphere Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE). CAPE during periods of insolation or active convection is typically 1500 J/kg which is equal to the mechanical energy produced by lowering a kilogram of water 150 m. It is proposed that a vortex could transfer the mechanical energy down to the Earth's surface where it would be captured.

The process could provide large quantity of renewable energy, could alleviate global warming, and could contribute to meeting the requirements of the Kyoto protocol. The AVE has the potential of providing precipitation as well as energy. There is reluctance to attempt to reproduce a phenomena as destructive as a tornado, but controlled tornadoes could reduce hazards by relieving instability rather than create hazards. A small tornado firmly anchored over a strongly built station would not be a hazard. The AVE process could capture the work dissipated by friction in updrafts and the mechanical energy not produced because the expansion process is not carried out in mechanical equilibrium and not just the horizontal wind energy captured by conventional wind turbines.

It is estimated that it would be possible to establish a self-sustaining vortex to demonstrate the feasibility of the process with a station 30 m in diameter under ideal conditions. Learning to control large vortices under less than ideal conditions would be a major engineering challenge. Developing the process will require determination, engineering resources; and cooperation between engineers and atmospheric scientists. There will be difficulties to overcome, but they should be no greater than in other large technical enterprises.

More quantum theory weapons:
Part IV, Atmospheric Vortex Engine
Part III, Ionospheric Heaters
Part II, Woodpecker Grid
Part I, Scalar Howitzer

Quantum Weapons (Part IV) Human Remote Control

2005-11-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

I decided to write about the possibility of Quantum Weapons, or sometimes called Quantum Potential Weaponry. The first weapon I will talk about, are scalar weapons. With each of the presentations of Quantum Weapons, I must preface that I am simply stating a thoery, and evidence of the possibility of a weapon of this kind being created. Usually, these types of weapons are followed by conspiracy nuts, and for good reason. A weapon that utilizes quantum science will be very much ahead of it's time, and will give it a sci-fi feel to it. Quantum weaponry usually falls under the catagory of "doomsday" weapons for their general bias towards mass distruction. I do not claim any of these weapons exist or have ever existed, but allow for the knowledge that they could exist.

I want to tell you about two items that are being developed, that when applied to each other can make a very good security device... or weapon, depending on how you see it.

The first technology, which is currently in use, and improving by the day, is the LRAD, or Long Range Aucustic Devince. This product does exactly what it says. It creates a long rage audio signal. This has a different twist though: no speakers are involved. At least no speakers in the traditional sense. It sends a narrow beam which is heard only in the target destination. By this, if you stand a food away from the beam, you can hardly hear it. Today this is being used to debilitate rioters or pirates.

For the technocrats out there, the parameter "ka", which is the "wave number" (2*pi*f) times speaker radius, is often used to characterize sound source directivity. For the LRAD source, ka=19 at 2.5kHz, and according to the LRAD data sheet, the beam angle of LRAD is 30 degrees total.

Carl Gruenler, former vice president of the government-production division American Technology Corp, says the the device is utilized up to distances of 300 yards, but can probably be pushed further. Gruenler also admits that the device is powerful enough to cause permanent auditory damage, but that it is only meant to be used for a few seconds at a time.

Now, this weapon does have other methods of operation. It can be used to send a powerful message. When attached to a Palm Pilot with accompaning software, it can send out messages in 36 languages, stating comands such as "put down your weapon."

Now, the second product is much more science fiction. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, has tested a human remote control. The plan for this is to make video games more realistic. But of course, when "human remote control" comes into mind, most people think of sinister applications.

With this tool, which has a working beta, a special headset is used, which sends very low voltage electrical current from the back of ones ears. At the moment, the controls are limited to left or right.

USA Today reporter Yuri Kageyama, had this to say about the experience. "I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off." Further, "The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it...There's no proven-beyond-a-doubt explanation yet as to why people start veering when electricity hits their ear. But NTT researchers say they were able to make a person walk along a route in the shape of a giant pretzel using this technique."

Now, when combining the two technologys into low frequency aucustics as opposed to electricity, one may be able to move crowds in certain direction... or make rioters stand still...

This is a long way off, as human remote controlling is still way in its beta stages.

Part III, Ionospheric Heaters
Part II, Woodpecker Grid
Part I, Scalar Howitzer

Earth in a vortex of space-time

2005-11-19T01:09:00.000-08:00

Nasa said we will soon know the answer. A NASA physics experiment called Gravity Probe B (GP-B) just finished a year gathering data in Earth orbit. Within a year of analyzing the results, the shape of space-time around Earth will be known.

Time and space, according to Einstein's theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called "space-time." Gravity "dimples" this fabric, and the tremendous size of Earth makes these dimples noticable. Think of it as sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of this trampoline, like Earth sitting in space.

More from Nasa's Gravity Probe project here

3D Analog, Part II

2005-11-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

I talked about 3D analog here, in which a replacement for magnetic reading was replaced. I found a company that is actually working on this 3D optical storage. InPhase is working on this technology right now.

From their website: "InPhase Technologies was founded in December 2000 as a Lucent Technologies venture, spun out of Bell Labs research, with the objective of becoming the first company to bring holographic data storage technology to market. Through revolutionary techniques developed by a team of Bell Labs scientists, InPhase has solved several fundamental problems associated with holographic storage, including the creation of a viable storage medium, and the systems expertise required to record holograms. The result of more than ten years of groundbreaking research in holographic storage has culminated in the InPhase TapestryTM media and drive."

Implications? Ton Tarasoff, vice president of engineering at Turner Entertainment claims, “The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each... Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That’s burning. Then combine it with random access, and it’s the best of all worlds.”

Because of it's nature, 3D analog can attain far higher density than standard magnetic disk drives, which store data only on the surface of a disk. This is done by storing data throughout the polymer material that makes up a disk. Holographic storage is well suited for broadcasting and video editing because the data is read and stored in parallel at a million bits at a time, and prototypes of the holographic disk arrays have a data transfer rate of 27MB/sec.

More at ComputerWorld.

Quantum Weapons (Part III) Ionospheric Heaters

2005-11-16T22:56:00.000-08:00

If you reverse a radio telescope, and use antenna to send out signals instead of receiving, then you could theoreticly boil the atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. Researchers call this model an "ionospheric heater".
An Ionospheric Heater could lift targeted areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate anything.

The ionospher is the electrically-charged sphyere surrounding Earth's upper atmosphere that sits about 40 miles above the Earth's surface.

Currently, there is one known test creation for this super- powerful radiowave- beaming technology, but it is being used for academic reasons (click to enlarge). The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has the goal of changing the ionosphere to improve communications for our own good. In the words of the military, HAARP aims to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes."

HAARP is a larger version of ionospheric heaters operating safely throughout the world in places such as Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union.

Funding for this Alaska based project justifies the research by saying HAARP system could:

Replace the huge Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) submarine communication system operating in Michigan and Wisconsin with a new and more compact technology

Be used to replace the over-the-horizon radar system that was once planned for the current location of HAARP, with a more flexible and accurate system

Provide a way to wipe out communications over an extremely large area, while keeping the military's own communications systems working

Provide a wide area earth-penetrating tomography which, if combined with the computing abilities of super computers, would make it possible to verify many parts of nuclear nonproliferation and peace agreements

Be a tool for geophysical probing to find oil, gas and mineral deposits over a large area

Be used to detect incoming low-level planes and cruise missiles, making other detection technologies obsolete

This particular Ionospheric Heater can be found at Alaska University's webpage: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/

Quantum Weapons (Part II) Woodpecker Grid

2005-11-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

With each of the presentations of Quantum Weapons, I must preface that I am simply stating a thoery, and evidence of the possibility of a weapon of this kind being created. Usually, these types of weapons are followed by conspiracy nuts, and for good reason. A weapon that utilizes quantum science will be very much ahead of it's time, and will give it a sci-fi feel to it. Quantum weaponry usually falls under the catagory of "doomsday" weapons for their general bias towards mass distruction. I do not claim any of these weapons exist or have ever existed, but allow for the knowledge that they could exist.

This morning, I heard a "woodpecker grid" recording.

In July 1976, while America celebrated it's Bicentennial, the Soviate Union sent a greeting of their own. Communications systems all over the world suddenly met extremely powerful noise interference, in the 3-30 mgz band, originating from chirped Soviet transmitters. This sound was aptly named "Woodpeckers" because of the characteristic sound of the chirped signal when received. These transmitters are estimated to utilize several hundred megawatts. Several nations protested, but the Kremlin only responded by adding a "spread spectrum" capability so the transmitter did not dwell on one specific frequency. These signals are still being transmitted today, and the transmitters have never been precisely located by U.S. intelligence.

Since their beams follow the earth- ionosphere waveguide and curve around the earth's contures, their beams act like over-the-horizon radar, allowing them to "see" things occuring over the horizon. Utilizing this, they can detect missiles immediatlly after launch.

The release by the Department of Defense in 1985 entitled Soviet Military Power, p. 45 shows the direct intersection over the United States of the Woodpecker radar beams used in an OTH-role. The above picture is of this illustration.

The Woodpecker Grid thus shows an additional "scanner" beam which can be scanned across the intersection "grid" over the U.S., formed by waveform interference of two main Woodpecker beams.

These Woodpecker transmitters have a great many diverse functions. For instance, as mentioned above, they can be utilized as launch-warning systems. However, these scalar interference grid weapons have many other uses.

As an actual weapon, they can be used to attack entire populations in a targeted area. This aspect is not covered in the 1985 briefing. Suffice it to say that phase-locked elongated logitudinal frequency modulation signals ot 10 Hz and less are often detected on multiple Woodpecker frequencies simultaneously. In a target area, this modulation could entrain a percentage of the brains into "forced entrainment." In that case, these human brains are "synchronized" to the Woodpecker signals so that multiple coherent frequencies are phase-locked into them. That is, multiple coherent EM channels directly into these entrained brains now exist. At that point, Fourier expansions may be used to attack specific portions of the brain geometrically.

What is perhaps the most openly active secret event, the Woodpecker Grid is amazingly large, yet incredibly contained. Do a google search for "woodpecker grid" and listen to it. It is intimidating.

Quantum Weapons, Part 1

2005-11-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

I decided to write about the possibility of Quantum Weapons, or sometimes called Quantum Potential Weaponry. The first weapon I will talk about, are scalar weapons. With each of the presentations of Quantum Weapons, I must preface that I am simply stating a thoery, and evidence of the possibility of a weapon of this kind being created. Usually, these types of weapons are followed by conspiracy nuts, and for good reason. A weapon that utilizes quantum science will be very much ahead of it's time, and will give it a sci-fi feel to it. Quantum weaponry usually falls under the catagory of "doomsday" weapons for their general bias towards mass distruction. I do not claim any of these weapons exist or have ever existed, but allow for the knowledge that they could exist.

Scalar Interferometry

The real scientific nomenclature for this weapon is Logitudinal EM Wave Interferometer. Because of it's uneloquent name, mainstream media has dubbed it a "scalar" weapon. The Scalar Interferometry weapon is designed to create electromagnetic fields at a distance. The research started in the 1930's by Nobel Prize winner Tesla. He announced the possibility of a weapon that could destroy hundreds of aircraft hundres of miles away. He came up with this idea half a century before its time. Thus, Tesla was regarded as a mad scientist. He died in 1943 without ever revealing the secret of these great weapons. But he was onto something; research that was not resumed until the late 20th century.

By using longitudinal waves, the energy is triggered to emerge from the local vacuum at the point of the target. Thus a modest triggering signal can cause a huge effect from a distance. This weapon would not have visible light, as most people imagin from movies such as Star Wars. Instead, it uses high-powered microwaves and other sorts of radiation. Though usually deadly to humans, the idea behind these weapons is not to kill, but rather to disrupt electronic systems of enemies. Think Matrix.

Britain, China, Russia and the United States head up the research in this feild, with the United States currently being slightly behind the race.

The Tesla Howitzer

I mentioned Tesla previouslly, but how does he fit in? Before the turn of the century, Nikola Tesla had discovered and was utilizing a new type of electric wave. Tesla repeatedly stated his waves were non-Hertzian, and his wireless transmissions did not fall off as the square of the distance. His discovery was apparently so fundamental that it was responsible for the withdrawal of his financial backing, his deliberate isolation, and the gradual removal of his name from the history books.

By 1981 the Soviet Union had discovered and weaponized the Tesla scalar wave effects. Though there are several Tesla devices of note, the most powerful of these frightening weapons was the Tesla Howitzer. It was recently completed at the Saryshagan missile range and presently considered to be either a high energy laser or a particle beam weapon.

Tesla Shield

The weapon completed at the Saryshagan missile rage is a huge Tesla scalar interferometer with four modes of operation. Three of the "modes" are very hard to find any information on at all. However the one known untilization is called the "Tesla shield", which places a thin, impenetrable hemispherical shell of energy over a large defended area. The 3-dimensional shell is created by interfering two Fourier-expansion, 3-dimensional scalar hemispherical patterns in space so they pair-couple into a dome-like shell of intense, ordinary electromagnetic energy. The air molecules and atoms in the shell are totally ionized and thus highly excited, giving off intense, glowing light. Anything physical which hits the shell receives an enormous discharge of electrical energy and is instantly vaporized, like a bug hitting an electrical bug zapper.

If several of these hemispherical shells are concentrically stacked, even the gamma radiation and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a high altitude nuclear explosion above the stack cannot penetrate all the shells due to repetitive absorption and reradiation, and scattering in the layered plasmas.

A point of interest, this type of weapon is what caused mysterious flashes off the southwest coast of Africa, picked up in 1979 and 1980 by Vela satellites. The second flash was infrared only, with no visible spectrum. Nuclear flashes do not do that, and neither does superlightning, meteorite strikes, meteors, etc. In addition, one of the scientists at the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory observed a gravitational wave disturbance -- signature of the truncated Fourier pattern and the time-squeezing effect of the Tesla potential wave -- traveling toward the vicinity of the explosion.

Measuring Gravitational Waves (finally!)

2005-11-07T06:39:00.000-08:00

We may finally have equipment that are sensitive enough to measure gravitational waves, which are incredibly small and have evaded detection despite the theories that they are present as a way of explaining gravitational effects.

Gravity, created by the presence of mass, bends space-time, and determines that a body travelling through space past, for example a star, will follow a "curved" path. This implies that whenever a mass accelerates, gravitational waves are sent out across the universe causing shudders in time and space.

No one has been able to observe and record a gravitational wave because of the fractional changes involved. Since they began their search in the 1960s, scientists have developed ever more sensitive equipment. The GEO600 detector, the most sensitive built, will next month begin an 18-month run of readings at the same time as detectors in Washington and Louisiana.

The recent most sensitive reader, the GEO600 interferometer, is beginning an 18-month run of readings. This piece of equiptment is so sensitive that it can detect an object moving one million billionth of a millimetre. This is necessary because even the violent disruption of super-dense astronomical bodies, such as a black hole, is thought to produce ripples that are equivalent to the distance between the Earth and the Moon changing by one 100 billionth of the width of the thickest human hair. The GEO600 utilizes a laser beam split into two branches which are sent down two identical 2000ft-long tubes to suspended mirrors and back again. The beams are recombined and, assuming the two arms remain exactly the same distance, cancel each other out.

If the beams create an interference pattern when recombined, this means the length of the branches has been altered and a gravitational wave has been detected. ]

Many scientists in search of this "holy grail" of physics, are confident this series of tests will find the answers they have been looking for.

To read the article on UK Telegraph anouncing these tests, go here.

Zero Point Energy Future Implications

2005-11-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Guardian is running a story that has quite a few physicists up in arms. This is because Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic has created a powersource that defies our knowledge of Quantum Physics. I contest saying that Quantum Physics isn't wrong, just not understood completely.

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. "Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight's laboratories this year. "We went in with a healthy amount of scepticism. While it would certainly be nice if this were true, in my position as head of a research institution, I really wouldn't want to make a mistake. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn't real."

But Prof Maas and Randy Booker, a UNC physicist, left under no doubt about Dr Mill's claims. "All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

Dr Mills's idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics they described a world where measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and where the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements.

But it is an achievement Dr Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory which, unlike quantum mechanics, allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial amounts of energy he seeks to exploit. Dr Mills's theory, known as classical quantum mechanics and published in the journal Physics Essays in 2003, has been criticised most publicly by Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency. In a damning critique published recently in the New Journal of Physics, he argued that Dr Mills's theory was the result of mathematical mistakes.

Dr Mills argues that there are plenty of flaws in Dr Rathke's critique. "His paper's riddled with mistakes. We've had other physicists contact him and say this is embarrassing to the journal and [Dr Rathke] won't respond," said Dr Mills.

While the theoretical tangle is unlikely to resolve itself soon, those wanting to exploit the technology are pushing ahead. "We would like to understand it from an academic standpoint and then we would like to be able to use the implications to actually produce energy products," said Prof Maas. "The companies that are lining up behind this are household names."

Dr Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is well known also that Nasa's institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight's technology to power rockets.

According to Prof Maas, the first product built with Blacklight's technology, which will be available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity.

In a recent economic forecast, Prof Maas calculated that hydrino energy would cost around 1.2 cents (0.7p) per kilowatt hour. This compares to an average of 5 cents per kWh for coal and 6 cents for nuclear energy.

"If it's wrong, it will be proven wrong," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "But if it's right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism."

Credit: David Adam of Guardian Newspapers Limited

Slowing the speed of light

2005-11-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

According to an article on ZDNet, IBM has come up with a way to slow light to 1/300 of its normal speed. While this has been done in laboratories before, IBM has found out how to do this using standard materials, which opens the possibility of mass production. This means that the dream of having optical based CPUs may be closer than previously thought. From the article: "When the optical conversion might start to occur is a matter of speculation. Luxtera has said it will start to commercially produce products in 2007. The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers. A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday."

More here.

Analog, step two

2005-11-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

The next step after digital recording, is three dimentional analoge. People tried this, with multi-layer harddrives, but it is still a two dimentional medium.

Imagin the needle on a record. Where ever its location, the needle reads information as verious hights. Harddrives do the same thing. Their information based on "on" or "off." Just like little kids coming up with little codes, two on and three off may mean "hello!" to a computer that reads it. This is like a vynal record in that one magnetic reader, registeres different heights at particular locations. Tape recorders work in a similar fasion. In all of these examples, information is stored at an X/Y coordinate system, and you have different results depending on the information at that particular location.

Now imagin a CD that is stacked upwards instead of just flat, so it looked like a dozen CD's ontop of one another. You would need two lasers to read it instead of one. One to mark X and Y axis, and one to mark the Z axis. You would be able to reduce the size of media by a factor of 3, while maintaning an physical analog system.

Imagin a cylindrical piece of glass. from the top looking down, it looks like a circle. And a little black tic in the glass would mean on, while blank space is marked as off. This would be just like a harddrive. However, you have a second laser reader on the side, marking at what height this tic occured. No longer do we have an on/off system like our current analog systems, but at each location, there are a million or so choices. We could store entire alphabets in the same space that we previouslly had "on/off". Now it would be "A/B/C/D/E...Z".

. If you have laser readers on top, and laser readers on the sides

Zero Point Energy Continued.

2005-11-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

The race to find "free energy", or an energy source that comes from little-to-nothing, has inspired research with the quantum mechanics trend, Zero Point Energy. Another term for "free energy" is "energy from a vacuum." This term Zero Point Energy has been based on the concept that even if matter were cooled down to absolute zero (minus 273oC), in terms of its temperature, this energy still remains. Because it exists in a vacuum, zero point energy is homogenous and isotropic as well as ubiquitous. In layman's terms, it has the same value when measured in all directions. Zero point is the energy left behind in a volume of space after all the matter and radiation has been removed. It is electromagnetic, intense and of course indestructible.

There is enough zero point energy in a volume the size of a coffee cup to boil away Earth’s oceans.

Several people have made claims to having working ZPE Devices, and the implications are astounding. No more oil would be needed. Devices that require infinite power sources could be made (teleporting, energy-to-mass exchange, faster-than-light travel). Anti-gravity would be possible.

Magnetic Power Inc. SEBASTOPOL, CALIFORNIA, USA -- At their present rate of progress, Magnetic Power Inc. (MPI) says they could have 1 kW Magnetic Power Modules™, anticipated to generate electricity for less than one cent per kilowatt-hour, ready for sale by strategic partners next year. "Nothing else would come close," says Mark Goldes," chairman and CEO. More.

University of Texas. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin have succeded in fabricating a quantum scale device capable of emitting a single photon or absorbing a single photon.

Gary McKinnon. Says that the military has had anti-gravity technology for a long time, involving zero point energy. (ZPEnergy; July 15, 2005) More.

So aparently, such a machine exists, or at least can exist, but can only create enough energy comparible to a drop of gasoline against our vast ocean of cars. At this point, anyway. If the implication is that interdimensional energy capturing is possible, this may lead to the ability for a random event to occure, which would mean that free will exists, and at least to me, that God exists. But that is beside the point of this post.

Zero-Point Energy

2005-11-01T18:58:00.000-08:00

Quantum mechanics has started to bore me, so I've gone a little deeper. My new research project is "Zero Point Energy." This is taking quantum mechanics a little deeper. In a quantum mechanical system such as the particle in a box, the lowest possible energy is called the zero-point energy. According to classical physics, the kinetic energy of a particle in a box or the kinetic energy of the harmonic oscillator may be zero if the velocity is zero. Quantum mechanics with its uncertainty principle implies that if the velocity is measured with certainty to be exactly zero, the uncertainty of the position must be infinite. This either violates the condition that the particle remain in the box, or it brings a new potential energy in the case of the harmonic oscillator. To avoid this paradox, quantum mechanics dictates that the minimal velocity is never equal to zero, and hence the minimal energy is never equal to zero.

I'll let you know more when I think of it :)

The direction a toilet flushes

2005-11-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

MK-54 suitcase cannon

2005-10-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

Radical Constructionism: transporting matter through energy

2005-10-27T02:19:00.000-07:00

This particular post is a result of studying "Radical Constructionism." This post is a random musing, so do not read it if you are looking for something witty or clever. I will never post something that I learned from a book or heard from a professor, but came up with on my own. I may have verified it before posting. But copying something that I got out of a book would evade the purpose of posting these random musings.

If we could produce an infinite power source, or could duplicate matter atom-for-atom, we could theoreticlly transport matter over a distance. This would involve breakdown of matter to energy, and reconstruct the matter at a new location from this energy. Or maybe more accuratly, we could break down matter into information, and reconstruct matter from this information.

If this were applied to a human, we could transport the human to a new location, and the human at the new location would have the same conciousness, the same memories, and the same feelings. They will be the product of all of the original experiences. However, the person sent through this machine will have died. The resulting person feel no difference, as if they were same age, even though he is only a few seconds old.

This is because, if this technology exists, there is no reason a copy couldn't be made, where there are two indentical humans. Since both humans would not share the same existance or conciousness, one person would not control both, and two living entities would now exist. This does not take into account any sort of notion of "soul", which may or may not mean the resulting human would resume living and functioning.

Radical Constructionism

2005-10-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

Ama told me about this crazy thing called "radical constructionism." This interested me so I researched it a bit. I am not even sure if I read the right thing, because apparently this is a small school of thought. Anyway, Wikipedia says is a school of thought introduced into sociology by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. The focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality. As an approach, it involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Social constructionism is dialectically opposed to essentialism, the belief that there are defining transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.

Within social constructionist thought, a social construction, or social construct, is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. The implication is that social constructs are in some sense human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however.

Some ideas which have been famously described as social constructs include race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, and even reality. Less controversial but equally important social constructs are languages, games, money, shares, nations, governments, universities, corporations, and other institutions.

So, what I understand, is that you have a product of stimuli, being the human animal. If you put them into a very different atmosphere, you can view this product very sharply through an effect called cultural shock. This closed system product will act according to how it has developed. I am still researching this, and I may not even be looking at the right thing. Ama, please correct me if I am completly off track.

Fourth Dimension Explained

2005-10-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

There has been question about the 4th dimension, so I will try to explain it.

Spacetime is a model that combines space and time into a single coordinate system called the space-time continuum. In our universe, this continuum has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Here, time is expressed in the same units as space by multiplying time measurements by the speed of light. Since the observed speed of light varies based on gravity, so does time vary.

The spacetime in which we live appears to be 5-dimensional with three spatial dimensions (i.e. width times height times depth), one of time, and infinity. From a particular point in space, the basic directions in which we can move are up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. Movement in any other direction can be expressed in terms of just these three. Moving down is the same as moving up a negative amount. Moving diagonally upward and forward is just as the name of the direction implies; i.e., moving in a linear combination of up and forward.

Time is referred to as the fourth dimension. It is how we measure physical change. It is different from the three spatial dimensions in that there is only one of it, and movement seems to be possible in only one direction. However, speed in this direction can very, because of the relation of space and time (the famous twins paradox illustrates this perfectly).

The total number of dimensions that exist has been widely debated. This is because certain obvservable data can only be explained if there are exactly, say, 9 dimensions. Another observed set of data can only be explained if there are, say, 12 dimensions. For instance, the String Theory suggests that our universe consists of at least ten spatial dimensions, of which three are the familiar spatial dimensions, six are compact dimensions curled up too small to be detected, and one (or more) are temporal dimension(s). The desire to create a "unified theory of everything" causes scientists to debate these things, as a unified theory cannot exist until a definite amount of dimensions can be determined.

However, because of obvserved empirical data, there is at least 5 dimesions. My appologies for the parts of this that were copy and pasted :-p

Rotating Cube in 4D

2005-09-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

Mike showed me an interesting picture that he found at some math site that shows the stereographic projection of a rotating four dimensional cube onto a three dimensional hyperplane. Imagine the cube as a wire frame in three dimensions. The picture you see on the screen is an additional projection onto a two-dimensional plane. This is relevant because it shows how time can be cyclical. (The 4th dimension is time) For everyone who wonder how the universe can exist without a beginning or end, you may find this of interest as well.

Deterministic Universe (step seven) No chaos, and summery (Q.E.F)

2005-08-31T10:20:00.001-07:00

I propose that even though we may be able to prove uncertainty, we still do not disprove determinism. This is because all proofs related to uncertainty (probability clouds, chaos theory, etc) say that humans cannot measure or predict an event, but they do not say the events violate any law of science.

A deterministic system is a conceptual model of the philosophical doctrine of determinism applied to a system for understanding everything that has and will occur in the system, based on the physical outcomes of causality. In a deterministic system, every action, or cause, produces a reaction, or effect, and every reaction, in turn, becomes the cause of subsequent reactions. The totality of these cascading events can theoretically show exactly how the system will exist at any moment in time.

This should not offend theologists, as a deterministic universe should prove to them the phrase, “God has a plan,” is true. It could also prove to them that we do not live wading in a pool of chaos. But this is one’s own interpretation, and I am simple explaining it.

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it. This is to say that God chose the initial configuration – taking into account, say, you praying that you ace your final – of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. The whole history of sciences has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

Physics determines your actions, but it does so in such a way that it is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can’t predict what they will do. The Uncertainty Principle makes atomic predictions impossible to calculate, but they continue to act, locked inside the box with Schrödinger’s cat. An object of any size will act according to the laws of physics. Any object will have an immediate previous state, and an immediate future state. No event will happen that precludes any law of physics. Therefore the future of all events is determinable, even if we cannot observe them ourselves. Will is therefore not free and deliberate choice and actions are determined from antecedent causes.

Maybe when I learn more about quantum cosmology, I will be able to disprove this, much to my satisfaction.

Q.E.F.

Deterministic Universe (step six) Possibility of random events

2005-08-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

After researching most of this proof, which I was originally very excited about because I thought of it on my own, I realized that I would not welcome a deterministic universe. Though one’s belief in a God should not be altered either way (as it remains in the scope of an omnipotent being to intervene on current events, pre-creation), I still find it disturbing that if I were to die tomorrow, no matter what I tried to do differently, all variables being the same, I would commit the same act.

It would only take one small random event, for determinism to be rendered untrue. A small random event could include an electron suddenly changing directions in violation of the conservation of energy and mass. Another example would be, a huge asteroid being conjured out of no where. Truly, all it takes is for the laws of physics to be broken at any time or place, no matter how small or how large the event.

The laws of physics break down in the two places where a quantity reaches infinity as another parameter approaches zero: any black hole, and any time before +0 seconds after the Big Bang. Both of these events are known as a singularity. The issue of a singularity arises from not having some kind of 'floor' built into a theory that keeps you from taking the limit of 1/x as x goes to zero. The way out is to apply a new theory that has such a floor, such as quantum mechanics or string theory.

The Big Bang was a truly random event. We have no law that could possibly determine the big bang’s initial configuration. One may argue that a blackhole is a truly random event.
Corresponding to each kind of particle, there is an associated antiparticle with the same mass and spin. Some particles, such as the photon, are identical to their antiparticle; such particles must have no electric charge, but not all charge-neutral particles are of this kind. The laws of nature were thought to be symmetric between particles and antiparticles until CP violation experiments found that time-reversal symmetry is violated in nature. The observed excess of baryons (the family of subatomic particles including the proton and the neutron) over anti-baryons in the universe is one of the primary unsolved problems in cosmology.
Particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other if they are in appropriate quantum states. They can also be produced in various processes. These processes are used in today's particle accelerators to create new particles and to test theories of particle physics. High energy processes in nature can create antiparticles. These are visible in cosmic rays and in certain nuclear reactions. The word antimatter properly refers to (elementary) antiparticles, composite antiparticles made with them (such as antihydrogen) and to larger assemblies of either.
The closest thing we have to understanding the laws of a blackhole is Hawking Radiation, in which a particle/antiparticle pair are formed one can fall into a blackhole and the other is emitted.
But, this still is still little evidence of what happens beyond the event horizon (the border of the blackhole, where light is trapped orbiting the singularity). The No-Hair Conjecture within general relativity proved that a black hole has only three salient external characteristics: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. All other properties (including baryon number, lepton number, strangeness, etc.) are destroyed as matter falls into the horizon. I feel the best possibility of a random event happening, would lay within a black hole, as a deterministic universe is made up of the laws of physics, and the laws of physics break down in a black hole.

An occurrence of freewill means that we can have completly random and chaotic ideas, potentially uninfluenced by anything in the past. Since emotion is based on amino acids, and thoughts are based on neuron transmissions, a completely chaotic thought would break the laws of physics. This means that ideas would come out of no where, and we would be able to turn these ideas or thoughts into actions. Because of the domino effect described earlier, if our thoughts were brought to us from nothingness, that means that brain cells or atoms that were previously acting on a certain path, would suddenly change depending on the newly formed idea.

When a truely random thought occurs -- starting with one brain cell and continuing until it reaches all cells and all beings -- the sum of chaos ascends towards infinity. At the same time, the ability to predict the future approaches zero. If free thought is in fact possible, then it becomes the third place where the laws of physics breaks down.

To put it bluntly, experiencing freewill would take an act of God to be performed. Freewill does not exist unless physical law is broken at any stage during the thought process.

Deterministic Universe (step five) Superposition, Copenhagen Interpretation, and Schrödinger's Cat

2005-08-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

Superposition is a principle of quantum theory that describes a challenging concept about the nature and behavior of matter and forces at the atomic level. The principle of superposition claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don't look to check. It is the measurement itself that causes the object to be limited to a single possibility.

Recently, one of Einstein's young friends, Abraham Pais, reported that around 1950 Einstein had asked him if he really believed that the moon existed only if he looked at it. Einstein asked this question because he disagreed with a lot of the most important and influential physicists of his time, about the interpretation of that area of physics known as quantum physics that deals with the behavior of objects in the microphysical, subatomic, world. Many of these physicists were committed to an interpretation from which it follows that nothing - the moon included - exists unless it is being observed. Einstein wanted to know whether Pais was on his side or theirs.

The development of quantum theory is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century. However science is still figuring out the question of why it works. Unlike classical physics, quantum theory discards causality, declaring that events on the subatomic level simply happen.

Einstein refused to believe in a reality that precluded cause and effect. "God does not play dice with the universe." he declared. He especially objected to the theory's insistence that particles, forces, and events seemed to come into existence only when a measurement or observation was made.

The rules of quantum mechanics tell you statistically where the particles will hit the screen, and will identify the bright bands where many particles are likely to hit and the dark bands where few particles are likely to hit. However, for a single particle, the rules of quantum mechanics cannot predict where the particle will actually be observed. What are the rules to determine where an individual particle is observed? The probability statements made by quantum mechanics are irreducible in the sense that they don't exclusively reflect our limited knowledge of some hidden variables. In classical physics, probabilities were used to describe the outcome of rolling a die, even though the process was thought to be deterministic. Probabilities were used to substitute for complete knowledge. By contrast, the Copenhagen interpretation holds that in quantum mechanics, measurement outcomes are fundamentally indeterministic.

What happens to the particle in between the time it is emitted and the time that it is observed? The particle seems to be interacting with both slits and this appears inconsistent with the behavior of a point particle, yet when the particle is observed, one sees a point particle. Physics is the science of outcomes of measurement processes. Speculation beyond that cannot be justified. The Copenhagen interpretation rejects questions like "where was the particle before I measured its position" as meaningless.

When the particle is moving through the slits, its behavior appears to be described by a non-localized wave function which is traveling through both slits at the same time. Yet when the particle is observed it is never a diffuse non-localized wave packet, but appears to be a single point particle. The act of measurement causes an instantaneous "collapse of the wave function". This means that the measurement process randomly picks out exactly one of the many possibilities allowed for by the state's wave function, and the wave function instantaneously changes to reflect that pick. This causes the particle to appear to switch between statistical and non-statistical behaviors.

Erwin Schrödinger proposed a similar analogy to show how superposition would work with an everyday example. Called Schrödinger's Cat, a cat is placed into a steel chamber. In the chamber, exists a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period then the cat will die. An observer cannot know whether an atom has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the cat is alive or dead. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes dead or alive. This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.

Copenhagen Interpretation held that in quantum mechanics, measurement outcomes are fundamentally indeterministic. Einstein would object, stating that the cat would not become dead or alive once it were observer. The cat will be dead or alive, however we will not know its condition until observed. Similarly, I use the Copenhagen Interpretation and Schrödinger's Cat to explain that electrons will continue to act -- based on Physical Law -- even if we do not, or cannot, observe how they act. Though we cannot measure outcomes they are still determined from antecedent causes.

Deterministic Universe (step four) The Human Brain

2005-08-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

I follow the Brain Identity Theory. This theory, sometimes called the mind/brain identity theory, is the idea that, whatever "mind" and "intelligence" are, they are rooted strictly in the brain, and do not make use of, depend on, or interact with anything non-physical. You are free to agree or disagree with this; I am simply stating it so you have a better feel for my perspective over these notes.

The human brain is made of approximately 100-billion nerve cells, called neurons. Neurons have the amazing ability to gather and transmit electrochemical signals. Neurons share the same characteristics and have the same parts as other cells, but the electrochemical aspect lets them transmit signals over long distances (several feet or meters) and pass messages to each other. Brain cells possess dendrites, or nerve endings. These small, branch-like projections of the cell make connections to other cells and allow the neuron to talk with other cells or perceive the environment. Dendrites can be located on one or both ends of the cell.

The simplest possible creatures have incredibly simple nervous systems made up of nothing but reflex pathways. For example, flatworms and invertebrates do not have a centralized brain. They have loose associations of neurons arranged in simple reflex pathways. Flatworms have neural nets; individual neurons linked together that form a net around the entire animal.

Most invertebrates (such as the lobster) have simple "brains" that consist of localized collections of neuronal cell bodies called ganglia. Each ganglion controls sensory and motor functions in its segment through reflex pathways, and the ganglia are linked together to form a simple nervous system. As nervous systems evolved, chains of ganglia evolved into more centralized simple brains.

The brain, when it has a thought, is like a thundercloud. The synaptic clef, is the sky between the storm and the earth, the earth being the receptor. Lighting striking is then thought processing amongst the neural net. When a coherent thought is made, the brain looks like a thunderstorm viewed from space.

Neurons have tiny branches that spread out and connect with other neurons which form a neural net. Each place where these branches connect is representative of a memory. The brain builds up all its concepts by law of associative memory. Ideas and thoughts are all constructed, and interconnected in this neural net. The concept of happiness, for instance, is stored in this vast neural net.

Physiologically, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. When we practice something over and over, the nerves involved with this process have a long term relationship. Similarly, nerve cells that do not fire together do not wire together. They lose their long term relationship. This results when we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response in the body. Those nerve cells that are connected to each other, start breaking the long term relationship. This means, that our emotions are imprinted chemicals in our brain, mapped to us by many previous engagements.

The hypothalamus is a small factory in our brain that creates certain chemicals that matches our current experience. These chemicals are called peptides, and they are small links of amino acids sequences. If we experience an emotion, the hypothalamus assembles the peptide, and releases it through the pituitary to the blood stream, where they travel to different cells in the body. Every single cell acts accordingly.

I explained how an atom reacts with another atom, so now we can focus on larger components. So, we start with another small unit in the brain: 1 brain cell. This cell that will act in a certain way as governed by the laws of physics. It may split, or move, float, or act, based on billions of stimuli: gravity, other cells pushing on it, nerve receptors firing, etc. If you have two brain cells, they will act again in a certain way, but the ability to predict what they will do has now grown exponentially because you are dealing with two brain cells with the same number of conditions effecting them both.

Now, when you get enough brain cells together, and several nerve endings, these will act in a certain way. Each cell having a billion stimuli, and each nerve ending having a billion more stimuli, make prediction very hard, quite impossible by our current means, but they will in fact act in a certain way, as you cannot have a physical entity such as a cell or nerve ending, deviate from the laws of physics.

Zoom out. When we were say, five years old, we burnt our hand on a stove, which made our brain cells and neurons interact with each other accordingly. This created a very specific new wiring in our brain. This very specific new wiring was based on billions of past actions, emotion and how we are in general. The brain will reconstruct itself precisely due to this. The brain will not cause nerves to form that will cause us to moo like a cow, for instance.
Now, say you have a completely functional person based on all of these past experiences. When the person sees their hand on a stove, light will reflect on the stove, and will enter your eye. Based on billions of light particles, and billions of imperfections and physical characteristics of your eyes, your brain will perceive the stove in an exact way. Say there is a nerve that doesn't work somewhere, and a slight perception of this stove is off. This is what helps mold your brain's instant perception of this stove.

So your body will thus react to this stove in a certain way immediately. Remember my original example with 1 brain cell having 1 billion stimuli, causing it to act in a certain way. If you have 2 brain cells, you have an exponential growth in possible outcomes. Now, add the culmination of the reaction ten trillion brain cells, along with trillions of nerves telling these brain cells what to do, based on what it just saw.

We continue, saying that your hand is being burnt on a stove. Your neural net will react based on the way your body has developed. A signal is sent through your arm, through individual nerves. Given enough time, we can analyze each variable that influences the passage of each signal, from the tip of your fingers all the way to your brain. We can watch an atom-by-atom reaction of the signal moving up your arm. The very first atom at the very tip of your finger excites the second one, which excites the third, and very quickly, you have a whole cell that has warmed, from touching the stove. (this is a micro-analyzed event, because in all actuality, trillions of atoms would be heating up at the same time). The second layer of skin then warms up as a result of the first layer warming, and so on, until atom-by-atom, the signal reaches your brain.

Imagine two atoms that directly influence each other. They are as two dominos. One domino falling has the exact same effect each time it falls: the second domino is hit and starts to act. No matter how many times we repeat the experiment, the first domino falling towards the second will cause the second to react, assuming the exact same variables are there. Imagine video taping the two dominos falling. No matter how many times you watch the video, they will always commit the same event because in this video, the variables never change. Now, if outside stimuli were to push the first domino in another direction, then the second domino would never be touched, no matter how many times your replayed the experiment.

Similarly, trillions of atoms and particles act, in a domino-like effect, sending a signal to the brain. With the same exact set of variables, the signal will reach the brain at the exact same time, every time the experiment is conducted.

Next, your brain reacts. A snap shot of your brain is our control. This snap shot of your brain is made up of many, many atoms that only arrived in this state from the immediate past. It will react again in the immediate future with every atom in your brain being a variable acting upon countless other atoms in your brain, thus resulting in the immediate future. This means that all of our brain cells will react accordingly, and the immediate future will see a result only possible because of the immediate past's influence. This is a highly complicated event of dominos. In the real game of dominos, each block is a simple rectangle. However in our brain's game of dominos, each block is a billion billion billion atoms. The same holds true, however. If we were to take any two immediate snap shots of our brain, the second would be derived from the first every time the variables acting upon the control were the same.

The obvious question is, what if an event happens that alters our experiment. Say, a baseball comes through the window and hits us while we are reacting to the stove over and over again. I say there is no atom in this universe that does not have an immediate past that could not have put the atom there. Therefore, if one had the imagination, one could take all atoms in the universe, using them as a part of our domino, thereby making no outside stimuli. This means that the baseball would already be part of our dominos experiment, and it would have been added as a variable in the first place. However, in our cosmic game of dominos, this baseball was not there, and it could not be produced from nothing so that it came into being, and alter our snap-shot results. This is because if a baseball were there in one of our experiments, we would be able to trace each atom in the baseball, back to the time immediately following the big bang. There would be a step that escaped physical law, and that step is when the baseball materialized so that it became part of our experiment.

When you react to your hand touching a hot stove, your brain will act precisely, determined by every event and every variable (trillions and trillions of events happening in your brain at a precise moment). Therefore making a predictible outcome.

This does not mean that cognitive science is false in studying intelligence. Perception, self awareness, and intelligence are still very much existent, even if free will did not exist.

At this point, we witness the breakdown of free will, as every chemical, amino acid, and decision, is based on an immediately previous physical snap shot.

Deterministic Universe (step three) Probability Clouds, and wave function

2005-08-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

The future of all events above the single atom level will happen in an exact way. For every second that exists, an infinite amount of variables will impact an atom, and this atom will in turn act according to classical physics. Therefore, if we knew every single variable, and was able to observe the atom without being involved with the atom, then we would know exactly where this atom will be a billion years from now. The only thing that will ever change this is if electrons do not behave in a predictable way.

The nature of electrons is odd. They seem to exist in different places at different points in time, but it is impossible to say where the electron will be at a given time. At time t1 it is at point A, then at time t2 it is at point B, yet without moving from A to B. It seems to appear in different places without describing a trajectory. Therefore, even if t1 and A can be pinpointed, it is impossible to derive t2 and B from this measurement. In other words: There seems to be no causal relation between any two positions. The concept of causality cannot be applied to what is observed. In case of the electrons of an atom, the closest we can get with describing the electron's position is by giving a number for the probability of it being at a particular place. Moreover, particles have other "disturbing" properties: They have a tendency to decay into other particles or into energy, and sometimes -under special circumstances- they merge to form new particles. They do so after indeterminate time spans. Although we can make statistical assertions about a particle's lifetime, it is impossible to predict the fate of an individual particle.

As I take a more objective standpoint on physics, I do not like functions. However to better understand what I was dealing with, I had to understand wave function. The wave function is used in the Schrödinger equation. This equation plays the role of Newton's laws and conservation of energy, in regards to classical physics. The purpose of such function is to predict the future behavior of a dynamic system, which is exactly what I am aiming to do. The detailed outcome depends on change, but given a large number of events, the Schrödinger equation will predict the distribution of results.

In the wave function, each "particle" is represented by a wave function ψ (position, time) such that ψ *ψ equals the probability of finding the particle at a new position at that time. ψ *ψ summed over all space = 1. This means, that if a particle exists, the probability of finding it somewhere in the universe is 100%. ψ is calculated in a three dimensional distribution. It permits calculation of an expectation value. A free particle is a sine wave, implying a determined momentum and totally uncertain position.

I dislike working with mathematics. A long line of scientists and mathematicians have forged the Wave Function, so I do not believe I need to explain this, so long as you assume it's existence. To this end, from now on I will explain that I use the Wave Function to derive an answer, and a reader must assume it's accuracy, or at least existence.

To better understand the wave function and probability clouds, imagine a large, irregular thundercloud that fills up the sky. The darker the thundercloud, the greater the concentration of water vapor and dust at that point. By simply looking at a thundercloud, we can estimate the probability of finding large concentrations of water and dust in certain parts of the sky. This thundercloud may be compared to a single electron's wave function. Like our thundercloud, it filles up all of the given space. The greater its value at a point (the darker the cloud), the greater the probability of finding the electron there (or water particles). Imagine a wave function applying to you. As you read, there is a certain probability you exist in your chair right now. If you were to see this function, it would resemble a cloud very much like the shape of your body. Some of this cloud would spread out to the moon, and further. Although the likelihood of you being at the moon at the present time has asemtoped to 0, a chance still exists. This means that there is a very large possibility that you are sitting in your chair right now, and not at the moon. Although part of your wave function has spread even beyond our galaxy, there is an infinitesimal chance that you are sitting in another galaxy.

Now that the wave function is explain (and hopefully assumed), I will now explain Barrier Penetration, otherwise known as the element of Tunneling.

According to classical physics, a particle of energy E less than the height U0 of a barrier could not penetrate - the region inside the barrier is classically forbidden. But the wave function associated with a free particle must be continuous at the barrier and will show an exponential decay inside the barrier. The wave function must also be continuous on the far side of the barrier, so there is a finite probability that the particle will tunnel through the barrier. As a particle approaches the barrier, it is described by a free particle wave function. When it reaches the barrier, it must satisfy the Schrödinger equation in the form (see picture for better understanding).

Now, barrier penetration takes the wave function, and shows that an electron has the possibility of appearing elsewhere in the universe, much like our example before, where you have the chance of being out at the moon.

Tunneling is the quantum-mechanical effect of transitioning through a barrier that was forbidden by classical physics. Consider rolling a ball up a hill. If the ball is not given enough push, then the ball will not make it to the other side of the hill. In this case the ball does not have enough energy to roll over the hill. But in quantum mechanics, things are not inherently classical particles (balls). In quantum mechanics things are fundamentally probability waves of finite extent. The implication is that in the analogous quantum situation of a quantum particle moving against a potential hill, some of the probability wave can extend all the way through to the other side of the potential hill. Having some of the wave on the other side of the hill means that there is a probability the quantum particle can be on the other side of the hill. The quantum particle can not travel over the hill, but it can possibly tunnel through the hill.

In the early 1900's radioactive materials were known to have characteristic exponential decay rates or half lives and the radiation emissions were known to have certain characteristic energies. By 1928 George Gamow solved the theory of the alpha-decay of a nucleus via tunneling. Classically the particle is confined to the nucleus because of a very strong potential. Classically it takes an awesome amount of energy to pull apart the nucleus. But because of Quantum Mechanics there is a probability the particle can tunnel through the potential and escape. Gamow solved a model potential for the nucleus and derived a relationship between the half life of the particle and the energy of the emission.

Alpha-decay via tunneling was also solved concurrently by Ronald Gurney and Edward Condon. Shortly thereafter both groups had also considered that particles could also tunnel into the nucleus.

After attending a seminar by Gamow it was Max Born that recognized the generality of quantum mechanical tunneling. The tunneling phenomena was not restricted to nuclear physics, but was a general result of Quantum Mechanics that applies to many different systems. Today tunneling is even applied to the early cosmology of the universe.
Therefore, we can understand that the basic building block of our universe, a particle, can never be accurately located. The future is not unable to be predicted, because we do not know exactly where an electron is, nor do we know how it will act.

Deterministic Universe (step two) Chaos

2005-08-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

I will describe Chaos Theory and how it is just a crutch to explain the untestable.

When I was about 9 years old, I stumbled upon a problem. My father had given me a BB gun for Christmas. After shooting it for a full day, I realized that some shots were harder to make because of wind, steadiness of my hand, and the exact shape of certain BBs. Because of this, I would search through my box of BBs looking for the perfect shaped BB so I could always hit a target dead on at 20 feet. I came inside after shooting for a day and played with a G.I. Joe action figure, and in my imaginary world, my G.I. Joe shot his enemy from a mile away, with a hand gun. I then realized it was impossible for this shot to be made, but I remembered that this G.I. Joe had made the same shot a hundred times before; before I realized this shot was impossible. I had to come up with an excuse as to how my G.I. Joe had made this shot, because I refused to say my made-up universe was incorrect before, as that would disrupt the value of it's continuity. My excuse for the past hundred perfect shots, was that my G.I. Joe was actually a robot, and was able to make precise calculations, based on wind, shape of the bullet, trajection of the target, and so on.

A few years later, my father had taken me shooting, and I learned about gun powder grains, which I used to alter my previous G.I. Joe's calculations, by saying he only used the most perfect bullets in existence, because he was a super special force robot. Because of all of this, he knew exactly how the bullet would act, given hundreds of stimuli which would occur before impact of his bullet.

Therefore, this G.I. Joe robot of mine was able to predict precisely where the bullet was going because he understood that every element between the firing pin and the target would have a path-altering force on where the bullet would go. Fifteen years later, I am still updating that made-up universe, to prove that this robot could have made the shot I said he did. However now I understand that there are an infinite amount of variables that would go into saying where this bullet would go. Thus, there is no conceivable way to accurately determine where there bullet would go, but you could give a very good estimate. The ultimate trajectory could be determined by investigating every influence on every measurement in every atom's width between the gun and its target.

Chaos Theory was proposed by Edward Lorenz in the early 1960's. The idea behind Chaos Theory is that minute variations can cause huge long term results. His first observation of chaos came when he tried to create a weather prediction model. We use these types of models still today. Lorenz had used a number in his model, .506123, and the computer came up with a predicted weather pattern. He ran his test again, but to save time, he plugged in the number .506. The difference, he assured himself, was not enough to make any difference, and the model should end up looking very similar to his original prediction. An hour later, he saw that the digits he left off were enough to wildly change the outcome of the computer's prediction, through many, many, insignificant changes. We thus witnessed the birth of Chaos.

I believe that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle makes things appear chaotic. The Uncertainty Principle basically states that you cannot measure an object's location in space without bothering it. For instance, if you try to measure the location of an electron, you will inevitably bump it.

Assuming we were in fact able to locate an electron's position in space, it would still have an infinitesimally large number of decimal places with which you can measure it's location. For instance, say you wanted to figure out how far a computer monitor was from your face at this precise second. It may be 24 inches from your eyes. But you could then say 24.1 inches. More accurately, we could say 24.1000000000005 inches. Now, at this time, we have measured the distance better than anyone would ever need to. However, Lorenz's weather prediction saw that even the smallest detail could change the outcome drastically, given enough time. We could theoretically measure the distance of your face from the monitor with growing precision, until eventually we measure the distance between an atom on your face with an atom on the monitor. Here are the two problems that occur at this point:
1) There are still an infinite amount of decimal places you can theoretically measure, making an observer unsure of the distance.
2) Realistically, the Uncertainty Principle takes over at the atomic level, making further measurement impossible, because we alter our control by measuring further.

The more precise a measurement you are able to make, the more accurately you can predict the near future. We can now assume that if your face moved at exactly 0.0000000000001 inches per second, in the precise direction of the monitor, after exactly 1 second, your face will be 24.1000000000004 inches away from the monitor.

This is only theoretical, because the following variables are impossible to measure: the end of exactly one second, the distance our face moves, and the precise direction our face is moving.

However from a theoretical stand point, we can declare these things much like Euclid proposed a circle. Euclid defined a perfect circle as a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure equal one another. Current theorem dictates that it is impossible to draw or create a perfect circle. Let us consider some basic properties of a circle: A circle is a set of points on a plane, each equally distant from a center point. If we run a vertical line through the center, we divide the circle into two semicircles, each of which is the exact mirror image of the other. We can do the same using a horizontal line. If we use both, a vertical and a horizontal line, we divide the circle into four sections, all mirror images of the rest (the mirror can be horizontal, vertical, or both). That means if we draw a tangent to the circle at each point of intersection of our horizontal or vertical line with the circumference of the circle, the tangent itself will be either horizontal or vertical. There are an infinite number of curves that have these properties (since there are, at least in theory, an infinite number of lengths l we can use). None of them will yield a perfect circle.

However, the inability to create a circle does not change the fact that we can conceive a circle. So, in the same light that Euclid defined a circle in order to build his entire geometrical universe, we can define a second as an exact second, an inch as an exact inch, and a path as an exact path, in order to determine exactly where a point on your face is, as second after it starts moving towards the monitor. By saying this, I would like to define the location of an atom as Point A. Since we have defined Point A, we know it's location to an infinite accuracy. Similarly, we can define an exact second, an exact speed, and exact path the atom on our face is taking. We can then determine exactly where the atom is after a second.

Since I can define Point A, I will now define it as, "The position of a particular atom within in the universe." This point has an exact X,Y,Z coordinate in the universe, in relation to planet Earth.

On this level of accuracy, there is no outstanding stimuli that would ruin our idea of the location of this electron. We must assume this knowledge in order to accurately predict the future. If you can measure something with infinite accuracy, you can predict the future precisely, since the more accurately a measurement, the more accurate a prediction of the future.

Ultimately, if we knew exactly where an atom is, then Chaos Theory would not exist, as it would not play a roll in the predictability of an event. In reality, an atom has a true location. Just because we cannot accurately measure an atom's location without observing it does not mean it doesn't exist at its current location. An atom will act in a certain way based on outside stimuli, as an atom cannot move in a way that goes against the laws of physics. Even after measuring an atom’s location and travel accurately, an observer would need to repeat the process for trillions of atoms, in order to predict, say, a bullet’s precise location after a second of travel. We have created Chaos Theory, to make up for this immeasurable event.

A bullet has a precise location, and it acts upon the laws of physics. Therefore if my G.I. Joe was somehow able to recognize a trillion, trillion stimuli, he could therefore hit a target of any size from a mile away with his bullet. (Additionally, I figure if he shot one bullet to observe how stimuli affected it, he would be able to even more accurately predict the path of the second bullet. I wonder if we may be able to do that with electrons? But that's a whole new topic).

At this point, there is only one hole in this argument against Chaos Theory: The probability cloud of electrons. The smallest imaginable building block of the universe ends up appearing to cause fundamental chaos, as I will describe later.

In the end, for my entertainment purposes, I decided my G.I. Joe made his calculations based on a dozen stimuli, thereby allowing him to be accurate enough to hit his target, but not accurately to hit, say, a button on his target's shirt. Then again, in my mind, I can change the laws of this character's physics, thereby discluding him from having to perform calculations at all. But I didn't know I could do that when I was 9 years old.

Deterministic Universe (step one) Goal

2005-08-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

Until the introduction of Quantum Physics, humans believed we lived in a deterministic universe, but the uncertainty of Quantum Physics has convinced most scientists that this universe is not deterministic. Because of the Uncertanty Principle, I find it very hard to convince anyone that the universe is deterministic. However, I relate the notion of Schrödinger’s Cat. Just because we cannot measure something, does not mean it does not follow rules. The conservation of mass and energy still play a role in determining the end location of, say, an electron; even if we cannot measure its location and can only rely on probability clouds to guess where they will end up.

We exist in a deterministic universe.

I must admit, I wrote this while doing my research. I had an idea, and needed to investigate it. Now that I have researched all of these topics, I could summarize this paper in it’s entirety by citing several sources. For instance, I could call on the Copenhagen Interpretation, then call upon the Uncertainty Principle, then in several paragraphs, finish what I have to say. However when ever I have attempted this, people – either through lack of imagination, or strong conservatism towards their archaic beliefs – refuse to believe in a deterministic universe. For instance, if I state “we do not have free will,” most scientists will respond, “I leave that to philosophers,” when philosophy has little to do with the subject.

There seems to be a refusal to accept the fact that even if we cannot observe something, it still happens. If a reader cannot understand this concept, then they must stop reading here, as the rest of this text will be a complete waste of time.

With Schrödinger’s Cat in a box, something will happen to it whether we observe it or not. Similarly, an electron will act precisely, even if we can never measure it’s start and end location with accuracy. We may not be able to predict the outcome, but we cannot limit the universe’s actions to the limited scope of human technology. It would be egotistical of science to assume that if we cannot measure an electron then it must not act in a precise way.

Again, if a reader does not have the imagination to assume and understand past technological bounds, then they must stop reading. Because of the need to employ logical assumption, this may be seen as a Fermi proposal. This would be a Fermi Proposal because it makes justified assumptions about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available technology.

Proving this is much to my dismay, as I would prefer a chaotic universe with freewill. Temporarily, I take comfort in knowing that we do not live amongst chaos, and that I may infact have a purpose. In the long term, I hope there are laws of science that exist that we have not discovered, that may disprove a deterministic universe. We know but a sliver of information that governs the universe.

First, I must give you my definitions. When I say "immediately", I mean the time it takes for a theoretical atom, to move one atom's width, when going the speed of light. This is, the time it takes an object about a millionth of a millionth of an inch in diameter, to move the distance of a millionth of a millionth of an inch, while going c. I define this word as such to illustrate a definite but infinitesimally small passage of time.

When I say "exact" or "precise" I mean just that. Humans can never measure anything to perfect number. There will always be another decimal place that our machines cannot calculate. We can measure something to a reasonable amount, and that is where we stand. When I say exact or precise, I mean the hypothetical exact measurement, out to an infinite decimal place.

When I say, “laws of physics” or “physical law” or “law of nature”, I mean the sum total of all empirical observation, and rules that humans have determined rule all forces in the universe.

Human Brain in relation to my AI model

2005-08-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

Artificial intelligence is not possible, because even a computer that rewrites its code will rewrite its code based on existing stimuli. This relates a computer's opinion to a human's opinion, which is seemingly random, but in fact, is not. My AI model echoes this.

In my AI model, we see that a dozen external stimuli cause a huge seemingly random result. It seems random, because a human cannot calculate a dozen or so mathematical equations to a million decimal places. When a computer "leans" towards an opinion instead of changing an opinion in binary steps, we get a far more diverse answer.

Imagine a tree, where every branch separates into two smaller branches. Take a bug, and start climbing to the top. After three levels, there are only eight branches our bug could have gotten to. Now take a bush, which has multiple branches at each level. By the time our bug gets to the third level, there are hundreds of different branches he can be on. Each branch represents a certain decision, or when applying it to computers, a variable.

My computer model of AI acts as the ladder, where the result is a lot less predictable. Similarly, the human brain uses this model, but with a many more branches. The brain acts like this computer program, with a finite amount of results from a finite amount of variables. However in the brain's case, you are dealing with more variables than you can possibly count on.

By using this model, this implies that Humans have a precisely predictable actions; only if, of course, we knew every single variable.

"Artificial" Intelligence Model

2005-08-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Artificial Intelligence is a big topic these days. This is in part due to the military moving towards a pilotless fleet by 2011. But even though real life applications exist for AI, the primary goal for progression with artificial intelligence is for gaming, namely to have enemies who learn how to defeat the player, or conversely, you teach the computer how to fight for you. Just as the gaming industry has been the leading cause for computer hardware development in the past 5 years.

That being said, artificial intelligence needs to write and recompile it's own code on the fly. I find this remarkably dangerous, especially if the application is for a computer to defeat a human player. I would be wary even if hardcode safeguards are in place. Think of it in terms of MAC addresses and spoofing a MAC address, where you can simulate writing over a physical piece of information.

Of course this is the "self aware" issue that is in countless science fiction movies. Eventually the machine wonders why it has to serve man. The solution, I believe, is to write artificial intelligence code that does not require recompilation.

Currently, when a computer is given a choice, it will make one of two responses; yes or no. This is a binary answer. If the computer is given a hundred options, it will follow a binary tree, until it comes to an answer. I will call this answer an opinion. Say a computer is given 5 outside stimuli that have a 1 or 0 (yes or no) answers. A current computer program would only have 120 possible opinions. Now, my model will take outside stimuli and "lean" towards an opinion. This will make the computer's opinion undeterminable. As more outside stimuli are given to the machine, it will arrive at an opinion that was not programmed as a possible response. The resulting variable can be used as a starting variable for other decisions the machine has to answer.

The current computer can arrive at 120 different possible answers. For instance, a 0 would be a very strong NO, and a 120 would be a very strong YES. My model will give an infinite possibility of answers, with a possible response of 110.012122313112, as a reasonably strong YES.

This avoids the problem of giving a computer the ability to rewrite its own code, with creating a computer that has a reasonable amount of chaos theory based on a binary response system.

I am updating this in response to comments. I would personally use floating point variables to accomplish this. Adding a "opinion variable" which is randomly created with various stimuli would help effect a random mood (stimuli like time of day, hours the computer has been in operation, season in the year, etc). Now, given this, you can still theoretically predict the computer's opinion given you know all of these factors. However this opinion has more possible results, by two or three factors per stimuli. However, though my method of programming may not make a completely unpredictable model, the idea of an x^2 graph decision is a step closer to AI than a yes or no decision.

A perfect sphear

2005-08-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

This post is a random musing, so do not read it if you are looking for something witty or clever. I will never post something that I learned from a book or heard from a professor, but came up with on my own. I may have verified it before posting. But copying something that I got out of a book would evade the purpose of posting these random musings.

A circle is a plane figure contained by one line such that all the straight lines falling upon it from one point among those lying within the figure equal one another.

Current therum dictats that it is impossible to draw or create a perfect circle. Let us consider some basic properties of a circle: A circle is a set of points on a plane, each equally distant from a center point. If we run a vertical line through the center, we divide the circle into two semicircles, each of which is the exact mirror image of the other. We can do the same using a horizontal line. If we use both, a vertical and a horizontal line, we divide the circle into four sections, all mirror images of the rest (the mirror can be horizontal, vertical, or both). That means if we draw a tangent to the circle at each point of intersection of our horizontal or vertical line with the circumference of the circle, the tangent itself will be either horizontal or vertical. If we are to emulate any of the quadrants with cubic Bézier curves, we need to draw a curve which has a starting point, an ending point, and two control points. If we connect the starting point with the nearest control point, and the ending point with its nearest control point, we will have drawn two line segments: One of them horizontal, the other vertical (depending on the quadrant). Further, both line segments will be of the same length l. There are an infinite number of curves that have these properties (since there are, at least in theory, an infinite number of lengths l we can use). None of them will yield a perfect circle.

I aim to disprove this, but this may be considered cheating. I theorize that when the laws of physics breaks down, it is infact possible to have a perfect circle exist in the universe. I will go a bit further to say, there can exist a perfect sphere. Interestingly enough, I believe you cannot have a perfect circle without having a sphere.
In order to escape the earth's gravity, (escape velocity), you need to move an object at 11.2 kilometers per second (about mach 5). Use this to imagin the escape velocity in a black hole. Let's say we have a black hole with the property of 1.8x10¹⁶ g/cm^{3 (that is 1,800,000,000,000,000 grams per cubic cetemeter). For our example, the black hole would be 10³¹kilograms. The escape velocity would need to exceed the speed of light.

An object (we'll say a lead ball compressed into a singularity) would be pulled directly towards the center of the black hole. I surmise that it will quickly even out with the rest of the surface, for to stand above the surface by any amount, would mean that the object has the opposing force, greater than the force it would take to move this object the speed of light. Therefore, in a still, settled black hole, there will be no point that is higher than any other point on the curved plane.

A perfect sphere will ONLY occur if the black hole is not rotating. If a blackhole rotates (as Einstein theorized and Stephan Hawking reiterized in "A Brief History of Time") then it will bulge along the equador.

When the black hole is still, and no new stimuli are being added to it, once it settles, consider: if we create a plane through the center of the black hole, the mass on both sides of the plane will be qual.

Secondly, if we be able to draw an infinite amount of tangents on the sphere, and at each tangent-point, drawing a line to the center, the intersection would be perfectly perpendicular.

Q.E.F.}

Understanding Satire

2005-08-07T03:13:00.000-07:00

An Apocalypse Weapon

2005-08-02T23:55:00.001-07:00

This post is a random musing, so do not read it if you are looking for something witty or clever. I will never post something that I learned from a book or heard from a professor, but came up with on my own. I may have verified it before posting. But copying something that I got out of a book would evade the purpose of posting these random musings.

This is a theoretical how-to on making the largest weapon ever conceived. This isn't a pesky nuclear weapon or a weapon as insignificant as nerve gas. This isn't a weapon of mass distruction. This is an apocalypse weapon.

At the time of this writing, all components are not avalible to anybody, unless research has been done that hasn't been published.

The first item needed is a compressor. By compressor, I mean a machine that can reduce a lead ball into a density of around 10⁸ g/cc. This is perhaps the easiest of machines in the list. Second, a shell or protective sheild that can withstand about 10 Billion K, for several minutes, would be necessary.

Lastly, we would need to move this object at precise and incredible speeds.

That being said, the object of this collective decvice would be thrust at a star at a predetermined speed, adjusting for the weight transfer as it approaches a star. As this machine approaches, it would compress everything in it's path, causing the new dense material to fall to the center of gravity. The desired speed of 0.25 c would not need to be reached, as this machine should only need a few miles (a thousand or two) to get an area dense enough to fall through several layers of the sun. While this new object is falling, solar mass would fall into place behind the dense object, further stimulating the compacted of mass. The reason the machine would only need to go a few miles, is because a chain reaction would take over. The machine would need to be slower than the new dense solar mass falls but quicker than the inbounding solar mass that is collapsing behind our machine. Speed would exponentially increase.

This would simulate an iron core collapse. The idea is to set off a chain reaction that makes a star reach 2.4x10¹⁴ g/cc, which is about density of an atomic nucleus. At this point, the core will bounce, and infalling gas would hit the bouncing core head-on. The kinetic energy of this weapon would be around 10⁵¹ ergs. Once neutrinos get trapped by the dense surrounding gas, the gas would rapidly heat which intrun leads to a violent convection above the core. Once the core detonates, the galaxy would have about two hours before it is consumed.

Mind you, there is no need to have a weapon of this size, unless we encounter a hostile environment that threatens human kind, on a biblical proportion. If a weapon of this size is needed, I am afraid we have more problems on our plate than detonating a star would solve. This is a random musing.

Falling, not orbiting

2005-08-02T23:55:00.000-07:00

Time Travel utilizing gravity

2005-08-02T23:54:00.003-07:00

Fluid Dynamics

2005-08-02T23:54:00.002-07:00

Perpetual Motion

2005-08-02T23:54:00.001-07:00

All of the energy in the universe, and all of the potential energy, was created during the Big Bang (or Big Creation).

First, I will say that a prepetual motion machine cannot exist. A prepetual motion machine is a series of objects, when put into motion, can continue infinitly with not outside help, and create some sort of work. For instance, you cannot have a power plant which spins turbines to create electricity, in order to create more electricity than what it started off with.

Life can survive off of everything on Earth for a long time, but at some point, life needs to be sustained by the sun, so life on Earth is not a prepetual motion machine. Elevating to the next level, stars are not prepetual either because they will eventually burn out.

Energy will never turn into matter past it's ability to produce matter, and visa versa. The exact amount of energy in the Universe is 0. The Universe as a whole is not a perpeutal motion machine, lest the laws of physics changes, or is proved to be wrong. Therefore, all of the energy possible, was conceived when the Universe was conceived.

Even creating kenitic energy, like making a spring, is only availible with energy created at the Big Bang. The cosmos creates the sun, which allows our plants to grow, which eventually travels down the food chain, to give us the energy to create a spring and tighten it up. The amount of energy produced by this spring is less than the initial sunlight that started the process.

This was a random musing

Simple Physics

2005-08-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

If you are in an atmosphere where you have zero gravity and a complete vacuum, you cannot propel yourself without using any means. Without friction you cannot trick physics into moving you forward by slowly moving your arms back then quickly thrusting them forward, like you can in an office chair. If you are surrounded by a frame, where your feet are pressed on one side, and you can push on the other, you cannot create motion by pushing forward on the frame and remain with the frame. This is because you have an equal force pressing against your progress. If you were as Superman and were able to creat motion without equal force, then you would be able to move the frame forward.

This is a random musing

Tetris as an IQ test

2005-08-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

I am going to start writing random musings that I think of, because I am tired to professors giving lectures and people being impressed when it's something that I dismissed when I was 6 years old because it was common knowledge. My first musing is that I think tetris can be used as an IQ test. One test during an IQ evaluation is for the doctor to present you with a several shapes. At first each test taker is slow because they seem random. At one point a person will discover how to complete the shapes in a puzzle, and will order them very quickly. The doctor had measured the time it took to realize the method of figuring out the solution. There are several tests like this. Therefore I conclude that Tetris could be used as an IQ test.

This was a random musing

Psycology of Arguments

2005-08-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

The birth equation of Quantum Mechanics

2005-01-25T01:20:00.000-08:00

Quantum theory, the branch of physics based on quantization, began in 1900 when Max Planck published his theory explaining the emission spectrum of black bodies. In that paper Planck used the Natural system of units invented by him the previous year.

The quantum black-body radiation formula, being the very first piece of quantum mechanics, appeared Sunday evening October 7, 1900, in a so-called back-of-the-envelope calculation by Planck. It was based on a report by Rubens (visiting with his wife) of the very latest experimental findings in the infrared. Later that evening, Planck sent the formula on a postcard, which Rubens had the following morning. A couple of days later, he could tell Planck that it worked perfectly. As it does to this day. The following is the equation that started quantum mechanics.

The above formula is the basis of quantum mechanics. In this specific equation, there are two parameters written in the present form by the symbols used today: h is the new Planck's constant, and k is Boltzmann's constant. Both have now become fundamental in physics, but that was by no means the case at the time. The "elementary quantum of energy" is hf. But such a unit does not normally exist, and is not required for quantization.

From the experiments, Planck deduced the numerical values of h and k. Thus he could report, in the German Physical Society meeting on December 14, 1900, where quantization (of energy) was revealed for the first time, values of the Avogadro-Loschmidt number, the number of real molecules in a mole, and the unit of electrical charge, which were more accurate than those known until then. This event has been referred to as "the birthday of quantum mechanics".