Official "Science News" Thread

[Dr Sardonicus]

See FTL Photons by John G. Cramer

Alternate View Column AV-43
Keywords: Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations, virtual particles, FTL, superluminal
Published in the Mid-December-1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine;
This column was written and submitted 6/1/90 and is copyrighted ©1990, John G. Cramer.
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.

It explains things well IMO.

It appears the formula for the speed of light between the plates is misstated. Either v/c should be c/v, or the minus sign should be a plus sign. I'm too lazy to track it down.

BTW I first read this column in the Mid-December 1990 ANALOG (which is how I knew to look for it online). The original column had a cartoon with a speed limit sign something like

SPEED LIMIT

670,616,629 MPH

So strictly enforced you can't imagine!

Next to the sign is an open-mouthed, eyes-bugging-out traffic cop watching a photon (a grinning, round white blob wearing shades) going by in excess of the speed limit...

[jwaltos]

Originally Posted by xilman

So?

The Casimir effect violates the null energy condition. That has been known since the Casimir effect was detected in 1997 - at least.

In the early '90's when I was at UBC as a mature student, Prof. W. Unruh was gracious enough to answer a few questions for me in this regard..zero-point energy..that sort of thing. There are many "effects"..Hall effect, Coanda effect...and I've been keenly interested in all of them.
Although I don't like using Wiki articles, this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_condition near the bottom with the sub-title "Attempts at falsifying the energy conditions" gives a decent explanation for your "So?"
One of my all-time favourite papers is this one: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2689486 and I have a decent reference collection on this and associated effects. I followed the initial "warp drive" posting down that rabbit hole to see how "whatever I came up with" coincided with my prior inquiries on this subject. Since I only have my imagination to work with, communications, navigation, safety (not getting pockmarked by micro-meteorites..), motive power..etc. are relevant considerations; mathematical physics first and the Drake equation second..it would be nice to meet beings smarter than humans as a whole despite Hawking's misgivings.

I'm adding this note, using the keywords: entanglement, spacetime, factorization in a search engine you'll come upon a typical link like this one: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstrac...evA.103.022213
I joined this forum because it is a great resource for integer factorization tools, methods and results. Factorization, in a general sense, seems to have far more utility than simple number theoretic excursions. In 2001, when I first noticed the RSA Challenge (..then the Certicom Challenge..) I never thought my inquiries would lead to fundamental mathematical notions
nor abstract notions about the conception of the universe but they have. Both the forum and the subject of factorization (in its widest interpretation) have choppy water from time to time.

[rogue]

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[LaurV]

Originally Posted by rogue

Radical Plan to Make Earth's Deepest Hole Could Unleash Limitless Energy

Geothermal energy has become the forgotten renewable. With solar and wind increasingly dominating the market of green energy, efforts to tap the vast reservoir of heat deep beneath our feet remain stubbornly well behind. It's not hard to understand why. Despite being a perfectly good choice of clean, uninterrupted, limitless power, there are very few places where hot rocks suitable for geothermal energy extraction sit conveniently close to the surface.

Well, they forgot to mention the heavy patenting. For example, unless you talk about injecting water into the lava pool (through pipes) and getting steam outside to power a turbine on the other side, the "clean" way, using thermocouples, is mainly forbidden. Thermocouples produce ~0.6V and you can not cascade them, putting a sandwich of (for example) aluminium and chrome foils one over the other, still produce 0.6V, even if you put other metals in between (like copper wires), so you can only get more energy if you take their "cold side" away (lots of wires and pipes from the hole to the surface and back) or if you enlarge their contact surface, in which case you get billions of amperes, but still 0.6 volts. There is a whole branch of power electronics and tricks that work at such low voltages but they are so heavy patented, they are pain in the butt to work with (trust me here, I know what I am talking about, this is work-related).

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Well, they forgot to mention the heavy patenting. For example, unless you talk about injecting water into the lava pool (through pipes) and getting steam outside to power a turbine on the other side, the "clean" way, using thermocouples, is mainly forbidden.

The article says temps at the bottom of the borehole would be around 500 degrees centigrade. According to this University of Arizona geology lecture,

From the surface to the transition zone - lower mantle boundary (670 km depth) we can estimate the pressure by the simple rule of thumb that each 30 km depth change is close to 1 GPa pressure change.

The borehole article proposes burning down to a depth of 20 km. So, I estimate a pressure of 2/3 of a GPa, which converts to over 96,600 psi. My guess is, at such temperatures and pressures, the engineering problems of keeping the borehole open and maintaining water/steam pipes would be non-trivial.

[jwaltos]

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/new...tum-computing/
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/new...ement-forging/
Below is a link to the paper listed in the above article:
https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/...antum.3.010309

[tServo]

Scientists at CERN restarted the Large Hadron Collider this last weekend after a 3 year
period of doing maintenance and adding upgrades.

https://www.space.com/large-hadron-c...restarts-run-3

[rogue]

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[rogue]

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[rogue]

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[Xyzzy]

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