[youtube]JVRsWAjvQSg[/youtube]
This is a very interesting discussion on the subject of Intelligent Design by Brown University’s Kenneth Miller. It’s just under two hours long, and if you have the time I highly recommend watching it. There is even a mention of Pastafarianism at around 90 minutes.
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An elaborate spoof on Intelligent Design, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is neither too elaborate nor too spoofy to succeed in nailing the fallacies of ID. It's even wackier than Jonathan Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to keep them from being a burden, and it may offend just as many people, but Henderson, described elsewhere as a 25-year-old "out-of-work physics major," puts satire to the same serious use that Swift did. Oh, yes, it is very funny. -- Scientific American
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Yes, I chose an academic job. There would have been plenty of oppurtunity for work at companies. Including research jobs. But few that do research just to find out how nature works. ‘curiosity-driven research’ as it is called. And that I find the most interesting. And I live a reasonably non-materialist life style, so no big problems for me.
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@Dr DPG
“But few that do research just to find out how nature works. ‘curiosity-driven research’ as it is called. And that I find the most interesting. And I live a reasonably non-materialist life style, so no big problems for me.”…*insert wabbit new found respect for that Dutch Pasta bloke*…good for you…you’ll probably become rich and famous 50 years after you’re dead…tis the way of the world…still…people forget rich arseholes…
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I looked up Lorenz forces and frankly it’s beyond my comprehension…what is it’s relationship to “relativity”…???
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@Wench Thumper
I’m less ‘noble’ than you think. There’s people who studied shorter than I did that make tons more than I do. But as a postdoc I probably still earn more than a good number of others. Not that many complaints there.
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Lorentz forces and relativity are usually not much related. Lorentz forces act on charged objects in a magnetic field. Those can be a macroscopic, every-day objects that have nothing to do with relativity. Relativity comes into play when objects move very, very fast. Fast means a non-negligible fraction of the speed of light. So not for every-day, tangible things.
Space craft are probably the fastest man-made, macroscopic objects. When calculating the orbit of a satelite you do need to take relativity into account. But even then, the correction for it is minute.
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@Dr DPG
Do you think that “perpetual motion” is possible??? Have you heard of “Browns Gas”???…hydrogen fuel cell…zero emissions…this stuff fascinates me…please feel free to contact me as follows:
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shockbadger@hotmail.com
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I may be a bit pissy but I’ve gotta say I love this site…and the reason is the quality people…I’m a fun lover by nature and I enjoyed being the troll…the quality of the people made me feel bad about being a troll and thus here I am…decided to stay…I really hope that the Thumper dislikers will come round one day…anywho Dr DPG…just keep firing that science in my direction…and be sure to dumb it down…
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@Wench Thumper
“Do you think that “perpetual motion†is possible???” and other questions.
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To echo Nikkiee here: I am supposed to be working here. But I’ll answer that one question for you, others may come some other time.
Yes perpetual motion is possible. It has already been realised for e. g. electrons. Take a ring-shaped piece of super-conductor (some materials become super-conductors when you cool them to a pretty low temperature) and induce a small electric current to run through it. If you leave it alone and don’t artificially stop the current, the electrons will keep flowing and flowing as long as you keep the ring cold enough for it to remain superconducting.
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I don’t know if perpetual motion of macoscopice objects has been realised, other than the trivial examples of e. g. objects circling the sun which would never encounter any friction or resistance anyway. Ok, maybe the word trivial is too harsh. Bertrand Russel caused many people to think twice when he mentioned a china teapot circling the sun.
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@Dr DPG
My understanding of “relativity” is that it encompasses a great many things such as the inability of an object to move beyond light speed to the possibility of space and time being altered…relativity was mentioned in Wikpedia under Lorenz forces and made me curious…I have a best friend who is a science type…computer systems engineer…he once told me that a 3 dimensional universe was an accident of nature and that further dimensions were possible??? Do you ahve an opinion on this??? he also explained time travel as follows…” a star supernovas and you witness it from a space vehicle capable of speed beyond light speed…you travel faster then light ahead of the explosion and watch it explode again and again as many times as you like…” Is this what Einstein was talking about in terms of the relationship between light speed and time travel…*wabbit lives in the future*
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@Dr DPG
“Take a ring-shaped piece of super-conductor (some materials become super-conductors when you cool them to a pretty low temperature) and induce a small electric current to run through it. If you leave it alone and don’t artificially stop the current, the electrons will keep flowing and flowing as long as you keep the ring cold enough for it to remain superconducting.”
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Yes but it takes energy to cool the rings…perpetual motion…as I understand it…is where the energy to create the motion is in a sate of equilibrium…
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@Wench Thumper
The relativity answer will have to wait but the latest one is less time-consuming to take care of:
“Yes but it takes energy to cool the rings…perpetual motion…as I understand it…is where the energy to create the motion is in a sate of equilibrium…”
True. But you could place the ring of superconducting material on a satelite. Space is horribly cold, you woudn’t have to cool it at all to keep it superconducting. So there the electrons could flow forever without putting in energy.
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@Dr DPG
And for the record I don’t make that much $ as a lawyer…the future Mrs Thumper made heaps though getting her “kit off” and by investing wisely ….the said “kit off” remuneration…go figure…*wabbit starts getting its “kit off”…wabbit lacks wisdom*
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@Wench Thumper
“the future Mrs Thumper made heaps though getting her “kit off†”
Not sure if the future Mrs Thumper would like you to tell too much about that……or if everyone here wants to hear.
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@Dr DPG
“True. But you could place the ring of superconducting material on a satelite. Space is horribly cold, you woudn’t have to cool it at all to keep it superconducting.”…
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That’s cheating…we need this the size of a shoe box under the bonnet of a car…I could also just use the sun to heat a cell to cool the rings…come on DPG…I want to be blown away by cutting edge massive brain science…
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@Wench Thumper
“That’s cheating…we need this the size of a shoe box under the bonnet of a car”
That’s no use inside a car. Things will only keep moving if you don’t take out the energy somehow. So you can’t drive a car with it. Each time you accelerate, you’d take out energy and that will not be spontaneously replaced. That’s probably the most consistent ‘no free lunch’ law in all of physics: conservation of energy. Beat that, and the Noble prize is yours for sure. In the process of winning the Noble prize, you’ll also have brought down all of physics as we know it today btw.
The important lesson to learn from this post is the following: perpetual motion means constant energy. Perpetual motion does NOT mean unlimited energy.
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@Dr DPG
“Not sure if the future Mrs Thumper would like you to tell too much about that……”…you’re correct…but that’s also one of the things she loves about me…my irreverent sense of humour…she does get a bit “funny” about her sordid past…ha ha…in point of fact she modeled “adult” garments for sex shops on severalo occasions…lucky she loves me heaps…but seriously…she now 32 and that was all….5 years ago….a life time…
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Does she ever read here on CoFSM?
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@Dr DPG
“The important lesson to learn from this post is the following: perpetual motion means constant energy. Perpetual motion does NOT mean unlimited energy.”…
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I don’t get it…if we can move the turbine perpetually why can we harvest it???…friction???…in space there is no friction or inertia…there must be a way!!!…Do you believe that you will ever win a Nobel prize for something??? If not why???…People like you Peter have the ability to make massive beneficial changes to the world we live in…think outside the box…*wabbit is naive and had too much to drink…yet remains hopeful*
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Oh FSM, this is getting a little too high for me. Loved chemistry, but I always sucked in physics. But, DPG, when you mentioned cold fusion: I thought it was impossible to hold a circular magnetic field, because of the polarities… don’t laugh if I sound silly in this high conversation… :(
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@Dr DPG
“Does she ever read here on CoFSM?”…read yes…post no…she thinks this is “silly”…we have no secrets and she respects my love of the FSM and it’s faithful…she posted once ages ago…she was smashed and McOar gave her a caning….suffice to say wabbit appeared in shining armour and bested the wretch…errr…by wretch I mean…errr…what the hell…McOar will never like me…I bested the wretch…
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Hello Enya…I actually failed year 11 Chem and thought I’d give physics a miss on principle…fear not wading in without wellingtons…
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:)
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@Wench Thumper
“I don’t get it…if we can move the turbine perpetually why can we harvest it???…friction???…in space there is no friction or inertia…there must be a way!!!…”
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No, the reason is that your friction-less turbine will only keep moving if you don’t touch it. The moment you e. g. couple it to the wheels of your car, you take out energy from the turbine. So it slows down, eventually it stops as you continue to drain energy from it. So it won’t be of great practical use: you can watch the turbine spin forever, but only if you don’t extract energy from it. Sucks, doesn’t it?
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“Do you believe that you will ever win a Nobel prize for something??? If not why???…People like you Peter have the ability to make massive beneficial changes to the world we live in…think outside the box…*wabbit is naive and had too much to drink…yet remains hopeful*”
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I won’t win any Noble prize. The work I do is academic research yet somewhat ‘applied’. Maybe ‘non-theoretical’ is a better word. What I do may well prove useful to others in the future. Or maybe not, maybe it will all be forgotten. But it certainly won’t revolutionise any field of physics. And the bar for a Noble prize in physics is awfully high. You need to revolutionise at least one field. But several people manage to do that occasionally, so that’s still no guarantee. Do something that revolutionises two fields, and then you can get your hopes up. I won’t revolutionise one field, let alone two.
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@Dr DPG
“But it certainly won’t revolutionise any field of physics. And the bar for a Noble prize in physics is awfully high. You need to revolutionise at least one field. But several people manage to do that occasionally, so that’s still no guarantee”…
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certainly not with that attitude…another friend of mine who is a gardener has a saying…”if you reach for the stars you may not catch them but at least you won’t come up with a hand full of mud”…never underestimate what you do…if you handed Da Vinci a TV we wouldn’t have had TV any earlier…point is that it’s the advances made every day that add to the wealth of knowledge that drives us forward as a species…you my friend are an integral cog in that wheel…come what may…
@Enya
Always hide the “green dream”…animals are people to…
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I meant “cog” in the machine….wheels have no “cogs”…damn scientists…fancy cars and all the rock badger they can eat…
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@Enya
I’m not sure if I understand your question. You can maintain a magnetic field in a toroidal ring for instance. That’s like a rather thin donut with copper wires wrapped around it. If you put a current throught the wires, it will generate a magnetic field inside the ‘donut’. So that’s one way of creating a circular magnetic field.
Another (quite simple) way is to take a number of long-shaped magnets and lay them down in a way that all the + and – poles connect and the magnets make approximately a circle. Many of the magnetic field lines would just pass from the end of one magnet into the next. So if you arranged the magnets in a circle, you’ve now got a circular magnetic field.
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You may have meant something else?
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@Wench Thumper
“certainly not with that attitude”
Trust me, I’m not suffering from a lack of confidence (check out my annoyingly arrogant post when debating Johnny Corvette on an older thread if you don’t believe me). But Nobel prizes are not for everyone. There’s people in my group at work who are a good bit more intelligent than I am. They won’t win any Noble prizes either. It’s not something to be embarresed about if you didn’t win one.
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DPG I just heard that they try to do fusions in a magnetic ‘ball’ (=all around, not just a ring), but the problem was, that the different polarities are bond to touch each other in a circle., so that the magnetic field won’t be stable inside the ball… oh it is so hard to explain, but maybe the solution is a Donut ;)
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@Dr DPG
…you need to assert your salutation…i.e. Dr DPG…when Enya said…”I thought it was impossible to hold a circular magnetic field, because of the polarities…”…as a lay wabbit I thought she was referring to + and – not being able to be contained within a circular configuration….but then again…I also thought that Laura Mars was a show about colonisation of alien worlds…
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@Enya
As I am a materials scientist, not a nuclear physicist, I don’t know the stuff well enough to pick up the right bits from your post. You probaly say it clear enough, but I don’t know it well enough to understand where you’re going.
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Why not antimatter as an energy storage media? IIRC, CERN was able to manufacture and store antiprotons(I think) for some time. There is the whole “Total conversion w/ hard radiation” problem when containment is breached, but still…
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@Wench Thumper
“you need to assert your salutation…i.e. Dr DPG”
No, definately not. In a scientific debate, the first thing you do is to leave your title at the door. A first year PhD student can ask the correct question to a professor who is a leader in his field. If the professor can’t answer it, it’s scientifically very bad if he were to stamp out the discussion based on his title. If someone is asking questions that show a complete ignorance you can ask the person if he is familiar with the basic concepts of course. But (good) science is non-hierarchical. The person with the best ideas deserves the most attention. That will often be the famous professors in the field, but not always. In fact, if you’re a young researcher and you ask the questions that well-established people can’t answer, you’re on your way to gaining a reputation. So let’s not have too much salutation around.
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Ok, I’m going home now, catch you people later.
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@Dr DPG
“There’s people in my group at work who are a good bit more intelligent than I am.”…and Einstein was a patent clerk…DPG I’m not suggesting you lack confidence or anything like that…I guess that I’m just a little envious of people who have the mind that can understand scientific concepts in the vein of applied physics…a PhD in anything is one hell of an achievement…I can understand the science community “press releases” but I have no ability to make head nor tail of the “meat and potatoes” of it all…*confused wabbit = MC…* I don’t even know how to make my ‘puter do the squared thing…
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Thanks WT, that’s what I meant, but it was a nuclear-guy who tried to explain this to me (me equals: no idea of physics), so I better shut up now ;)
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The wabbit has passed out in a puddle of its own filth…nasty wabbit…I think I’ll apply make up, strip it naked and place it in a taxi to “The Beat”…nasty wabbit…
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@Enya
“Thanks WT, that’s what I meant,…but maybe the solution is a Donut”…I find that a nice donut is the solution to most of life’s more complicated dilemmas…I’m not sure about being called “WT” though…becoming a wench was a big step and I’d like to bask in my feminine glory for a bit longer thank you…men are pigs…lucky I’m a committed lesbian…good night…
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Sorry ’bout the shortcut, Wench Thumper, I am lazy in typing. I read something about your gender change. Isn’t it a dilemma to be transexual and lesbian but love straight women and not lesbians? somehow I’m stuck in my thoughts again… damn, should sleep more and drink less coffee…
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Warning: long post ahead
@Wench Thumper
There still was the bit about relativity and the speed of light to answer.
“My understanding of “relativity†is that it encompasses a great many things such as the inability of an object to move beyond light speed”
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Correct, objects can’t go faster than the speed of light. It’s best explained by looking at the equation that covers this, see equations 2 and 3 at
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_mass
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These two equations can be turned into one that would read
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m(v) = m0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
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As equations show poorly in html, in words it reads that the mass m of an object moving at velocity v is equal to its mass in rest m0, divided by the square root of 1 minus the velocity squared divided by the speed of light squared. The speed of light is 3 times 10 to the power 8 m/s. Makes sense? Let’s look at some cases.
We begin with a stationary object, v=0. If v=0 then v^2/c^2 = 0 and the square root is just one. That leads to m = m0, which is as expected of course.
Now we take a moving object. Say it’s you, running slowly at just under 11 km/hour, or 3 m/s. That means that v/c is 10 to the power -8. The square of that is 10 to the power -16. So the term under the square root is just under 1, and so the demoninator is just under one. And therefore your mass is just a tiny little bit larger than when your were standing still. But when I say tiny bit it really is a tiny bit. The effect is present only at many digits behind the comma. You won’t notice. The mass of the air you breath out is orders of magnitude heavier.
Now we speed it up a bit. Instead of going at 11 km/h you’re now sitting in Concord. It’s heading towards the sound barrier, you’re doing 1100 km/h, or a hundred times fatser than running. v/c is then 10 to the power -6 and the denominator is still only very little smaller than one. The effect is still present many digits behind the comma, but fewer for the case where you were running. Still tiny, but already a little bigger.
Now we switch to space craft that go 25 times faster than your Concord flight. Then the effect on the objects mass moves another digit closer to the comma. If a GPS satellite didn’t correct for it, it would slowly drift away from the position that controllers thought it would be. So we are now looking at the fastest macroscopic objects we humans make, and the effect of relativity is only just becoming noticeable.
Now we make a big leap. Suppose we borrow some sci-fi tech and we can go at 90% of the speed of light. If you now calculate the demoninator in the equation it’s 0.43, so the mass of our space ship is now more than twice that of the rest mass.
We go on to 0.999 times the speed of light. Then the mass is more than 22 times the rest mass.
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You can see the pattern emerging. For slow-moving objects, relativity plays no noticeable part at all. That is one reason why people trusted the classical, Newtonian, non-relativistic physics for almost 3 centuries (from around 1600 to early 1900s), they didn’t have things like rockets or particle accelerator that showed Newtonian mechanics to be wrong for fast-moving objects. But as things start going faster, the mass of an object increases. Hardly noticeable at first, but as the speed becomes a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, the mass goes up very fast. To infinity as you get very close to the speed of light. So no matter how powerful your missile engine is, it won’t have much luck pushing forward an object that appears infinitely heavy due to its velocity. So you can’t go faster than the speed of light. Ramen.
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Questions about todays class on relativity?
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@Dread Amish Pirate John
“Why not antimatter as an energy storage media? IIRC, CERN was able to manufacture and store antiprotons(I think) for some time. There is the whole “Total conversion w/ hard radiation†problem when containment is breached, but still…”
That makes no sense at all. Creating anti-matter takes lots of energy. So converting energy to antimatter loses energy. It’s also incredibly volitile as it annihilates on contact with ‘normal’ matter. And getting the stored energy out will be not be easy, as it comes out in the form of very high-energy photons.
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You’re a Star Trek fan aren’t you? You listened to all that silly jargon Jordy spews out in The Next Generation. And you thought you could bluff your way into our pirate fleets science vessel with that, didn’t you? Nice tried, but no.
Not that there is anything wrong with Trekkies btw. In fact, nerds are held in high esteem in the CoFSM.
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@DutchPastaGuy
“And you thought you could bluff your way into our pirate fleets science vessel with that, didn’t you?”
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I don’t know too much physics :( I do like Star Trek though :)
Can I be on the science vessel anyway?
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Long Post.
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In addendum to DPG, antimatter is only ever produced a few particles at a time… kinda hard to blast a ship around space with only 10^(-27)kgs (thats 0.000000000000000000000000001 kgs) of matter.
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Incidentally back up the thread enya commentented on the failure of cold fusion (ie fusion in solution as opposed to hot fusion, a la DPG’s explanation).
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From what I understand, the basic theory is that by using platinum electrodes (platinum being a very porous metal – full of little holes and tunnels) in a solution rich in heavy water, it is possible to use electrolysis (in this case splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen) to produce free floating hydrogen (correctly, deuterium), which then fuses on the platinum surface. Also, trace amounts of *I think* Boron are supposed to help somehow.
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The problems are two-fold. One; our current theories cannot realistically explain how two nuclei can fuse through adsorption (sticking) on a surface. (electron interactions -chemistry in other words- yes, nuclear fusion, no).
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Secondly, it is only limitedly reproduceable. Several scientists have claimed to acheive it, hundreds more have failed totally. Even the people that claim to do it, have had trouble, though they often blame it on things like microfine cracks in the electrode, or incorrect boron ratios.
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Cold fusion isn’t dead, it’s just that nearly no self respecting scientist will touch it, either for fear of ridicule or complete disregard for shaky psuedoscience.
(note all this info is shamelessy stolen from new scientist :p)
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@Wench Nikkiee
“I don’t know too much physics :( I do like Star Trek though :)
Can I be on the science vessel anyway?”
I thought you had stepped on board ages ago?! Didn’t notice you stepped off, please come on board again. We appear to be well stocked on physicists but short on biologists, so excellent if you can cover that angle.
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@Jingles
I like the addendums you do to some of my posts, thanks. Maybe I can do a small one to yours.
“From what I understand, the basic theory is that by using platinum electrodes (platinum being a very porous metal – full of little holes and tunnels) in a solution rich in heavy water, it is possible to use electrolysis (in this case splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen) to produce free floating hydrogen (correctly, deuterium), which then fuses on the platinum surface. Also, trace amounts of *I think* Boron are supposed to help somehow.”
Apart from the electrolysis experiments, there also was the claim by a man (I believe an Italian) that the implosion of small bubbles caused such acceleration that it could also make nuclei fuse. I believe some sonic wave pulse was supposed to induce the process. Unfortunately, that also prove irreproducible. So one more cold fusion attempt consigned to the Journal of Irreproducible Results (that’s a journal that really exists btw, it wouldn’t have a very high citation index I imagine).
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“I thought you had stepped on board ages ago?! Didn’t notice you stepped off”
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Ah yes it’s coming back to me now :) Think I fell overboard and bumped my head resulting in temporary amnesia. :)
Biology….*salutes*… aye aye Captain
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Ooh goody :) Can we look at some sea life which may contain compounds useful in chemotherapies? I like that :))
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“Think I fell overboard and bumped my head resulting in temporary amnesia. ”
No reason to ever let a bump on the head keep you from the beer, right?
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Beer :(
But Vodka, Tequila, Jack Daniels, Sambuka (sp.), a nice wine….ect. ect. No way :)
Not that big a drinker to tell the truth but when I do I…..well when I do, I’m not that small a drinker…leads to a very late night/early morning :))
I just saw a post somewhere that said “Google the worlds most annoying website”…so I did. It’s all… YELLOW…CAPS…and bad spelling.
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http://www.angelfire.com/weird2/mostannoying/
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Oh worse I think….scroll down on this one
http://www.voy.com/48912/
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I wanna be on the starship to! Please! I specialist in non-human medicine, don’t you need that on a spaceship? Me! Take me!!! Pleeeeaaase!!!
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@DPG maybe we could develope something to make mass into energy. Like a Transporter. We could ’store’ the mass there until dropping out of warp-speed, then put it back again… :)
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@Jingles: yes, that’s what I meant ;))
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@Enya
Once we get a pirate space ship, you’re happy to come on board. But we’re still looking for ways to obtain an ordinary fleet of sailing ships first. We can use someone skilled in non-human medicine aboard those too btw. The ships will carry lots of animals, and these animals suffer tons of abuse. Verbal abuse in the case of wabbits, or physical abuse in the case of sheep and giraffes. Maybe you could help the poor things recover after their sufferings?
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Giraffes??? I mean, I get the sheep, but.. c’mon!! Giraffes! do you really think you are that long… eh… tall?!! :) and don’t overdo it with the animals, I’m good in neutering hehe
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