Is the revolution over yet?

21^st century science

:: 21^cs ::

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see also

:: http://www.eweek.org/ ::

:: http://www.brainpop.com/ ::

:: http://www.edge.org/ ::

:: http://www.real-science.org.uk/ ::

:: http://infinitecat.com/ ::

Monday, 20^th February, 2006.

Anna ??, BBC-Radio4-Weather 1757Z today ::

"east-Pennines, light dusting of snow by tomorrow (Tuesday) morning".

Reality: The 'light dusting' began around 1100Z today (Monday) and appears set to continue 'dusting' in a northeasterly breeze. Whom else reports? ed.

... follow this for more Holwick weather ...

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Revolutions in physical thought from the beginning to 1998: [Aristotle, Euclid, Plato], [Gallileo, Leibnitz, Newton], [Einstein, Minkowski, Poincaré], {Dirac, Fermi, Schrodinger}, {[Feynman, Penrose, Salaam]}, ({[Hawking, Steinhardt, Turok, Witten]})

Note to Peter Leonard, writer & director of the BBC-2 Horizon programme aired Thursday, 9th February 2006:

To claim that there are but two cosmological theories of gravity (“The standard model” and “variable gravity”) is simply wrong. We all know at least one other theory (goddidit), and some know of the existence of more :: M-theory, SU(N-> infinity) & F-theory, for example.

Heads-up! Peter. ed.

Tethered goat.

For a spherical field of radius r metres, a tethered goat could eat half of it if the rope were πr/2 metres long. (See also, communication with nickname, ‘SpeakerToAnimals2’, Science & Nature message boards, http://bbc.co.uk, 2005 and http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoatProblem.html)

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If we can agree that the Chernobyl site will not be used again to generate a useful watt of electrical power, the fatality count of 60 you posted is an accepted minimum value that will either not change or increase with increasing time. So, let’s normalise the output of Chernobyl reactor b in its working lifetime such that it equals 1 unit of power generation (that maps linearly to the units you require but I do not know the conversion factor. Heigh, ho…): Chernobyl reactor b power output total = 1 arbitrary unit.

Next, we realise that the total power output of sp. homo sapiens for the last 100 years is far in excess of this and the total for Tidal Power grows predictably (see earlier) as I write…and we have 1 ± 1 fatality (Canute, I don’t know if he survived the fable…). This total will not increase with future suitable care.

Hence, we conclude that the electrical power output from a ‘typical’ nuclear fission reactor is at least 60 times as dangerous to generate.

Thanks for the question. ed.

blushbairbabe: noun. An absurd result of the twisted admixture of anti-self-dual cohomolgy elements (Witten, Penrose). One that, through direct action, kills or causes to be killed other(s) of the same species. Usually, strong with the religious meme. Found only around planet earth this evolutionary cul-de-sac merits little. See also: dried, spiral paint. ed.

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My actual electrical energy consumption for 2005 is under calculation. Early estimates are that 20 megawatt-hours at an average cost of 5p per kilowatt-hour (total, approximately £1k) were converted to waste heat hereabouts.

The 1 megawatt-rated tide/power converters of an earlier thread will produce my requirement within a single lunar cycle in 2006 and thereafter. (And I’ll wager I could reduce my requirement.)

The dozen, or so, lunar cycles could, therefore, produce the annual consumption of a few others – giving a total of, let’s round it to 10 (to make the arithmetic simple).

If each group of 10 bought, had installed and contributed something towards the maintenance costs … the requirement for the species is 6x10⁸ devices (let’s round this to 10⁹). So, a grid of 1000x1000x1000 devices, separated by 10metres, say, from each other, would occupy a volume in the sea of 10 kilometre³ and pro-rata.

No need for any other electrical power generation. ed.

continued…

From June 2005 to January 2006, the electric meters here show that 7570 kw-hr (costing around £700 plus tax at 5%) disappeared somewhere nearby (I’ll have to check that the street-lights aren’t plugged in to School House!) and my estimates above should be adjusted (downwards) by a factor 0.7 accordingly.

By the way, alan, the ‘Stingray’ devices near the Shetland Islands vary their output much less than your post indicates: why would these be much different, I wonder? (I’ll check the information again later…)

Since power is proportional to amplitude squared for a sinusoidally varying input, then the root-mean-square value of the time series is more operationally relevant here. Since the r.m.s. value of A*sin (wt) is 2^-1/2 A (e.g. http://services.eng.uts.edu.au/~venkat/pe_html/ch04s2/ch04s2p1.htm, equation 2), I fail to see how the engineering doesn’t follow (there can’t be that many losses, can there?) to yield a cyclic average output of ~ 707 kilowatts, not 20.

Published numbers include those from project Stingray and the recent northern Ireland installation. ed.

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Michael Harman, > Newolder: I'm not happy with your "grid of 1000x1000x1000 devices"; I think it should be a 2-D grid of 1000x1000. I'm thinking of it in terms of a water-wheel. With a given head, one can have a single wheel which extracts most of the power from the stream. You won't get any more power by putting a lot of such wheels in series - the power is limited by the head of water.

Hi Michael and welcome to the thread…

If you prefer to work two-dimensionally, who am I etc… Whatever pattern the nodes describe is fine with me – after all, very few (other than haddock) will see them. Even linearly, at 100 megawatts (peak) per kilometre, it’s not that long… ed.

Re: Feynman and S:

Flow perpendicular to plane of page (from above for injection, to below for siphon).

a) Injection

_<S^> gives anti-clockwise momentum transfer at ‘inward’ curve.

b) Siphon

_>S^< gives clockwise momentum transfer…

ed.

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23^rd January 2006

With regard to the total solar eclipse of 1^st of August, 2008 – and whence “Beijing Eclipse Olympic Games” – does anyone know the url to a suitable webcam – say atop an office or tower block? I could then try to arrange a mirror such that I could watch that bit of it slightly later than the moments to the north of Spitzbergen, where me and eddie the beagle warthog bike hope to get to after this year’s event…

There’s no rush to answer, by the way, I’ll probably not get out of Amsterdam by then… ed.

24^th January 2006

From ::

http://plaza.snu.ac.kr/~premed/The%20New%20York%20Times%20%20Science%20%20A%20Conversation%20With%20Bryan%20Sykes%20Is%20Genghis%20Khan%20an%20Ancestor%20Mr_%20DNA%20Knows.htm

“discovered ways to extract DNA from fossilized bones…”

Is this true? ed.

From :: http://www.skyandsummit.com/Glacegeneve/index.html

“Wednesday, 26. of January 2005. The local weather forecast announce a great cold coming on Switzerland; soon materialized by a massive ice layer all around the lake! The Ice Show is guaranteed for anyone who dares to attempt a lakeside walk, where the wind gusts reach 110km/h (60mph).. you guess the temperature...

Warning! some images are likely to shock certain people's sensitivity...”

:: SAMPLE ::

At this MAC address, ie6 shows a picture, firefox 1.5 doesn’t. Is it reported at bugzilla, yet?

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re: Bet loss

Information that falls towards the event-horizon of gravitational black-holes (Kerr solution or the stationary one, it doesn’t really matter…) is first stretched by the seemingly absurd geometry of General Relativity theory in four dimensions (like some ‘worm-hole’ effects in cinematography) and then twisted by Special Unitary group theory in eleven dimensions, SU(11), to reappear in the same universe (so it isn’t lost at the b-h ‘singularity’ of old) but in an exquisitely mashed state.

Since Unitary group in three dimensions, U(3), is real-positive-definite, physics is shown to be in the class of ‘solvable’ (soluble?) problems (Steinhardt & Turok, 1998).

This certainly wasn’t the case in the late 1970s, when the ideas behind string theory (Dirac/Veneziano) bounced into view. In fact, only as far as U(2), was close to being shown as real then since physicists couldn’t yet understand the mutual gravitational action of the constituents of a neutral hydrogen atom and they usually ‘ignored it’ as being very, very small. (Could this be why Fusion reactors don’t work, yet?)

Since then, analytical progress is good along routes that employ a fourth, large space dimension across which electromagnetism doesn’t propagate but gravity (and possibly ‘quintessence’) may…

Hope this helps. ed.

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You are welcome, harryo…

Glad some of my scribbles make some sort of sense…

So, like Newtonian mechanics in three dimensions + infinitely fast-travelling light, GR(4) is now thought to be the ‘low energy’ approximation to reality that is expressed by SU(11) – a very large group. The largest group, SU(N->infinity), contains itself. A theory of everything indeed: a twisted ouroboros, i wonder. ed.

h-bar

I didn’t arrive in a car

My feet, over grids, don’t walk far

But it’s nice down below (Oo, er!, Misses! … I know!)

clicking virtual joes at ħ.

ed.

Hi Bikerman,

All good stuff …

Will there be enough space in one of these mirror-sites to hold a copy of the eclipse2006 site I am currently blogging? :: http://eclipse2006.netfirms.com is less than two megabytes in size. ed.

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February, 2006

The nights at the end of January/beginning of February 2006 were below water’s triple-point (273 Kelvin degrees).

Date	School House 290 ± 10 metres above mean sea level												Hield House 310 mamsl		Holwick larynx 300 mamsl
	Kelvin degrees								metres per second	kilopascal	millibar	Inches of mercury	Kelvin degrees		Kelvin degrees
	Minimum				Maximum				Gust (2 seconds)
	Mercury0	Mercury1	Bead thermistor	Other	Mercury0	Mercury1	Bead thermistor	Other	Cup anemometer (6.0 ± 0.1 metres above ground level) metres per second ± 1				Mercury	Other	Bi-metallic strip	Other


29th January	261	260	255.3											261
30th January
31st January
1st February	267	266	268.6
2nd February
3rd February	271	269	273.8		278	282	288.0		6	103.1	1031	30.39			278

5th March	268	266	269.4		275	279	281.4		14	100.6	1006	29.63

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Evidence of a living entity

The recent (and remarkable!) activity with poster Bikerman (Chris Snowdon) regarding web-sites associated with the forum: http://www.elmhurstsolutions.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1138688866/0 : is evidence that the ‘net passes the Turing test, easily.

It is possible that either or both of CS & i are entirely virtual (to twist Déscartes though, “i think therefore I'm real” and I’ll let CS write for his-self – but don’t forget to delete your e-address from reply #14, CS). The procedures and methods CS & I used to construct the web-site object and its (mutated) replica are easily coded. The ‘robots’ CS sent to retrieve and mirror information from an ip address show this is achievable.

Since the photons from each address are real but not identical, isn’t this very close to the ‘replicator’ technology of Star Trek?

I wonder what is next? ed.

A fair summary?

The metric defines the distance between points but Gabrielle Veneziano showed that, in 1970s reality, the metric does not vanish as object separation approaches zero: instead, the metric becomes ‘stringy’.

The product - multiply, vector (dot or cross) or wedge (Clifford and other non-commuting algebras &c) – is used once to give an area, twice to give a volume and more to give hypervolumes. Yet Penrose (2005) describes further how the product may be twisted, it seems, and the framework in which this all takes place appears as ‘fully dried paint’ by the ‘magic’ of complex number theory.

Hawking proposes that the dimensions of ‘time’ and ‘space’ are of the same complexity (T => i θ, 1976). To imagine that complex time is as real as anything else is, truly hurtz.

Eventually, Steinhardt and Turok managed to quantize all of the above (and probably much, much more) in 1998.

Result: Physics wins (it is the first to be shown as ‘solvable’) by an ħ. ed.

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/dm2004.pdf

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Re: Google moves prime merdian

The error is 100m on a circle close to 40 million metres in length, i.e. 1 part in 10⁵. Fine engineering! ed.

Re: Genie question.

Hi Steve,

I think you will agree with the following reason that SEF indicated and I posted as -1p…

-1p is the same as “The Genie gives me the bottle and a penny.” (Where “a penny” is the lowest currency unit in circulation.)

The sole condition upon me sampling the juice is that I must then sell-on cheaper.

So, I let a customer offer me (and I accept) -2p.

Result: The potion cost me and anyone else in the chain, until the last molecule is supped, 1p to sample and sell but we all sell it for less than the previous guy, including the Genie, since it can drink and leave the bottle apparently untouched.

Hence, -1p is a correct answer to the riddle and there are probably at least an infinite number of others in Witten’s co-homology but I am not currently sure of the details…

Monday, 20^th February, 2006 (continued)

… Oh yes, I am ...

e^iπ + 1 = 0 Fourier (1800s), gives e^iπ p.

e^2πni + 1 = 0, for n = 1, 2, 3… Riemann (1850s), gives the 'first-level' infinity, ∞, Aleph0, Cantor (1845-1918) solutions.

e^2πn(i ,j ,k ...) + 1 = 0, for n = 1, 2, 3… and i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1, Hamilton (1860), gives a further ∞^∞.

Since unitary group in three dimensions, U(3), is real, positive, definite, that's all there is.

What happens to the accumulation after the last molecule is supped? ed.

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A geometer, a chemist and a physicist were discussing the naming of children...

The geometer, who just happened to have been born in Athens, AΘΕΝΑΕ, outlined that because their triplets were born across midnight, 31^st December, 1999, one was named Fox, another Millennium and the third Bug.

The Kilmarnock-bred chemist retorted that its gender-twisted, monozygotic and cloned twins were born across midnight too, but the first on a Friday. Whence: Wee and Kender.

The Boltonian physicist's offspring was born on Shrove Tuesday and is named Pancake.

Thursday, 23^rd Februray 2006

Electricity meter readings at School House, read by a power distribution agent:

Low: 62087

Norm: 55462

The bill this creates will arrive whilst I’m away.

The Microsoft® Excel™ spreadsheet is here.

Saturday, 25^th February, 2006

Snailrind (in answer to unicorns…)

Consider Aristotle's taxonomical categorisations. The 'viviparous' group included man, hairy quadrupeds, and cetacea. A unicorn would therefore belong to this group, but a hairless quadruped wouldn't. The 'Oviparous' group included all creatures in possession of shells and similar body armour. A generic shell-like creature would belong to this group, but a viviparous quadruped wouldn't.

If one came across a hairless viviparous quadruped with body armour and a horn in the middle of its face, one might have trouble categorising it according to Aristotle's method. One might wonder if maybe it belonged to an older phylum than unicorns and shell-like creatures.

http://www.bryerpatch.com/news/africa2000/animals/rhino1.jpg

Will they evolve into Pullman’s Mulefa? ed.

Snailrind: It would certainly help them to get over cattle grids.

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Since all monetary systems are faith-based (e.g. what is ‘trusted’ by USG?) and the planetary grid seems to function whatever currency is employed, how do i turn these 77 Mutual Points (thread@real-science) into something someone else wants? Anyone hear a virtual busker anywhere? ed.

Schrödinger’s cat and SU(n -> ∞) :: http://www.elmhurstsolutions.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1140966533

Air compression engines? Yes, please!

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At this MAC address, ie6 shows 5 gifs, firefox 1.5 doesn’t. Is it reported at bugzilla, yet?

MathType, version 5.1 :: 30-day free trial (of which, 24 remain…)

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Tuesday, 7^th March 2006

This morning’s bbc-weather forecasts were peachy: the snow that was due to arrive here ‘later’ (than 0600Z) has been falling since 0415Z, when I awoke…

I rode eddie the beagle warthog bike through the afternoon sleet {bbc-weather gets 0.1 Mutual Point} to the un-named fork in the bridalway where the Strathmore English Estate shooting-road and the ‘Green trod’ towards Cronkley Fell (~580 m) part. Nothing extraordinary happened, so we took a third route, home, again.

Friday, 10^th March 2006

I was asked yesterday, by a DPN using the telephone, ”So, you are worried by terrorists, then?”

>Richard Dawkins (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html) : There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger.

Anyhoo, moving right along…

SU(11) describes, in simple enough terms for a Boltonian Physicist to comprehend, that General Relativity theory in four dimensions (the spacetime continuum of old) is but another low energy approximation to reality – just like Newton is an approximation to reality at, slightly less, high energy.

The astounding M-theortic claim to be able to answer all physics had me on the back-foot for a while too.

Two steps forward, one step backwards still makes progress. ed.

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Wednesday, 15^th March 2006

Re: http://www.elmhurstsolutions.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1142295157/15

I appreciate that your mental gears are taking somewhat of a scrunch at the moment, Patty, but it’s often best to stop digging…

Meteoric impacts, volcanoes and other lava-flows are directly analogous to the hot-rocks in a sauna and cause the same effect when contact with liquid water (7/10ths, or thereabouts, of the planet’s surface) is made: they boil it to vapour.

Since there has been no crime committed here then I think no punishment should ensue. Pax. ed.

Hyperfine structure constant…

The energy difference between the spin-up and spin-down configurations of a neutral hydrogen atom in its ground state yield the number 1/137 or thereabouts for this so-called ‘hyperfine structure constant’ α.

Something from reality with which Andrew is, no doubt, more familiar. ed.

Where is science going?

Kevin Kelly > The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped. (http://www.edge.org/)

I dunno, Kevin, of the ideas that get space-time in this neck o’ the woods, half of them go straight into the waste bin whilst the other half are simply on their way to the bin… Excellent thought though. ed.