physics

Chris Knight's avatar

General Fusion, a new company based out of Burnaby, British Columbia in Canada, has raised almost $14 million in funding to research what is being called an ambitious effort to create viable nuclear fusion. General Fusion believes it can engineer a reactor that uses 220 pneumatic pistons to generate acoustical waves that will be aimed at a plasma target, which will theoretically create a burst of fusion energy. Experts in the field believe that General Fusion might stand a chance of succeeding with their wild design, where countless others over the decades have failed.

Looks interesting. It also looks like the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb had Henry Ford engineered it šŸ˜›...

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The star Betelgeuse in Orion, one of the best-known stellar objects in the sky, has shrunk by 15% over the past decade and a half. Bear in mind the size of Betelgeuse: if our own Sun was placed at the center of this star, its outer surface would extend just past the orbit of Jupiter. Or at least it used to not very long ago.

Some astronomers are wondering if Betelgeuse is shrinking because it’s used up hydrogen as its main fuel and is now “burning” from helium and other heavier elements. Which would mean that it’s in the final stages of a star of its class. When it starts trying to fuse elements like iron and such, some positively hideous astrophysics come into play and Betelgeuse’s internal energy is going to overwhelm its immense gravity…

…and we’ll get to see a rilly big bang called a supernova.

The ...

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Twenty years after the infamous Pons/Fleishmann experiment (debate still rages on whether or not it actually worked) there is now substantial new evidence that “cold fusion” is a reality. At the 237th national meeting of the American Chemical Society which is going on now, researchers will be presenting date indicating that neutrons, excessive heat, X-rays, and tritium (a fusion by-product) were produced at room temperatures. Fusion has traditionally been thought only possible in environments of tremendous heat (like, say, the Sun, which is powered by fusion reactions involving hydrogen).

If this new research bears out and scientists can discover how cold fusion works, that might be a very large step toward potentially cheap and renewable energy.

(And I think now’s a good opportunity for some smart entrepreneur to trademark the “Mr. Fusion” brand šŸ™‚...

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In 1939, a young French student named Bernard d’Espagnat began considering that behind the empirical world of mass and energy, there might be something even more fundamental to our universe than we can measure. Reality, d’Espagnat came to argue, is only the sum of what we have observed… and may be a thin veneer over what is truly at work in the cosmos.

Seventy years, twenty books and many journal articles later on what he refers to as “veiled reality”, Bernard d’Espagnat has been awarded the Templeton Prize: a yearly reward of $1.4 million to that “honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.”

If you’ve an interest in things like physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the above-linked article is extremely intriguing. I am certainly feeling compelled to go hunt for some of d’Espagnat’s work, after ...

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The staff of Overthinking It has been celebrating an entire week devoted to the Back to the Future trilogy, of which among the highlights is this exhaustive look at the science and physics of how time travel works in the movie series. There’s stuff so dense in this article, that even I can barely comprehend it (then again, I’ve always sucked at more complex math… and there’s a ton of it in this essay).

That’s all well and good, fellas. And congrats on all the hard work you poured into this. But what I’d really like to know is: when can we expect to see Mr. Fusion on the store shelves? šŸ™‚...

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This one is way too wacky to pass up commenting on…

The Large Hadron Collider is a few hours away from getting turned on for the first time. This is a humongous particle accelerator (also happens to be the biggest machine yet built) that scientists are hoping will help answer some questions about the fundamental nature of physics.

All well and good. Except some people are afraid that the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC) is going destroy the planet. The biggest fear is that it’s going to spawn a black hole that’ll suck down the entire Earth. At least one lawsuit has been filed on those grounds, seeking to impose an injunction against the LHC’s activation.

And then there is the tale going around that the LHC has an even more nefarious purpose. That it is going to be used to open up a portal to an unknown ...

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Just south of the equator and nearly two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, researchers have discovered the hottest liquid water ever found on Earth, in a state that has never before been observed in the natural world. Hydrothermal vents are discharging water in a “supercritical” state (I’m thinking it’s analogous to plasma as a super-heated gas) that has been recorded to get as hot as 464 degrees Celsius. For us American folks, that’s a whopping 867 degrees Fahrenheit for liquid water! The conditions are so adverse surrounding the vents that computer modeling is the only way to study them, since regular equipment would melt from the heat.

Interesting stuff. Great fodder for discussion for any science and physics teachers out there who want to get their students thinking about how things like temperature and pressure affect water’s properties....

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Neatorama has a list of 9 laws of physics that are routinely ignored by producers of motion pictures. Among the conveniently forgotten concepts: bullets don’t spark when they hit metal, cars don’t usually explode and sound doesn’t move at the speed of light.

This article has inspired me to make all my future movies adhere to physical principles. Which will probably significantly drop the number of people who will want to watch them, but hey you gotta stick to principles…...

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