Lunch with George

Bussard Fusion: Looking for Funding

George was telling me about a lecture he watched on the web by Robert Bussard, an aging physicist (perhaps best known for designing the Bussard Ramjet) who recently came very close to a fusion power system which generates more power than is put into it.

His small company Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC²!) was funded by the U.S. Navy until recently, and he and his colleagues did not discover the amount of success they had achieved until weeks after they were forced to shut down their lab.

The reactor is constructed using six rings assembled into a box. Each ring contains copper windings, allowing a magnetic containment field to be created when power is applied. Here's a concise story at Defense News that does a pretty good job of outlining the project and its uncertain future (it looks like the U.S. Dept. of Energy doesn't like competition).

If you really want some in-depth information, check out the paper by Bussard: The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Super-performance Space Power and Propulsion.

Labels: energy, physics, tech

Einstein Centennial

September 27th marks 100 years since Albert Einstein submitted a paper which introduced his famous equation: E = mc².

I heard about it on NPR today, and thought I would include a link to their coverage of Einstein.

Even better is some major coverage on the NOVA site from PBS. The site is a companion to their series: Einstein's Big Idea. One of the articles on the PBS site lets you listen to 10 top physicists explain the equation.

Labels: history, physics

MIT to host a Time Traveler Convention

Last August, George and I talked about a group who is creating a trust fund for people who want to be rescued from this time by future time-travelers. Now, MIT is getting involved in time travel!

On Saturday, May 7th, 2005, MIT is hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention. Why the only one? Because one is enough! If time travelers want to come back each year of their own subjective timeline, they can just come back to the same convention. It'll be a time-travel Woodstock...

The organizers are urging supporters to publicize the event by doing any of the following:

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries
Carve them into a clay tablet
If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention

I first read about it on the web, but I just heard a prominently-placed story on NPR's All Things Considered on Monday. They're getting good coverage!

If you can't make it to the convention this Saturday, perhaps you can come back to it later, assuming time travel is invented within your lifetime...

(from Boing Boing)

Update: While no travelers from the future made their presence known at the Convention, there was plenty of anticipation, music, food, and a DeLorean! There were so many travelers from the past^*, however, that some people had to be turned away.

My personal opinion: Even if time travelers from the future saw the notices for the convention, it seems unlikely they would do something as dangerous to the timeline as appearing in public and proclaiming their ability to travel through time. It is entirely possible, however, that they were present, but dressed as "locals."

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(*) All of us are traveling through time from the past. Duh.

Labels: physics

LWG and the Speed of Gravity Debate

George and I had several lunchtime conversations during which we tried to grasp the non-intuitive aspects of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. We got started on this topic after George had read Tom Van Flandern's book Dark Matter, Missing Planets, & New Comets.

Van Flandern points out that gravity appears to act instantaneously at a distance, and proposes a very different theory for how it works. Steve Carlip, a professor of Physics and a specialist on Genreal Relativity, has countered Van Flandern's theories a number of times, and provides explanations for why a gravitational field propagates at the speed of light, yet it's effects on objects appears to be instantaneous.

Yes, yes... but why am I dragging all this out of the dustbin now? Well, in a recent discussion thread on Tom Van Flandern's website Metaresearch.org, one of the more sensible contributors actually cited the Lunch With George gravity web page (it's the fourth post down on the page).

We've come full circle. Van Flandern's ideas got us talking, we did a lot of research, and ultimately we wound up on Van Flandern's website.

Labels: physics

Einstein Right Again!

NASA's Gravity Probe B spacecraft in orbit around Earth has allowed astronomers to confirm a prediction made by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. They were able to directly measure an effect known as "frame-dragging."

According to Einstein's calculations, when a large, massive body such as the Earth rotates, it tends to pull the surrounding space around with it slightly, just as sticking a spoon in a jar of honey and twisting it will tend to drag around some of the honey.

The effect is extremely small -- amounting to about 6 feet (1.9 meters) in the distance that satellites, moving at about 18,000 miles per hour, cover in their orbits in a year -- but it is within the ability of NASA's tracking instruments to detect.

Read more at TechNewsWorld about the Einstein Gravity Effect Demonstrated by NASA.

Labels: physics, space