As Carl Sagan always said ' 99% of the speed of light would be fine '

Did someone noticed this article?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/explorat..._spaceship.html

If is serious (and it seems) I'm really disappointed; we know that antimatter is the best space fuel, but only theorically and I was convinced that should remain a SF matter for many, many years... at least, until we colonize solar system and start to think to interstellar missions!
Now they want to use for a Mars manned mission; idea is very intriguing, but seems a little bit crazy too...
We never created large amounts of antimatter (and 0.01g is a "large" amount), efficieny prodution is very low and safety issues would be huge during production, storage, launch and mission. I think a moon base should be best place to make antimatter, while on Earth should be forbidden.
I'm especially scared by possible military and terroristic use of it (consider that you can make a megaton bomb with only 1 gram of antimatter)... in fact, if you go at the positronics site, they talks about "national defense and security" applications and "portable/compact storage devices" too!
Very scaring to me!
I would know other impressions.

[quote name= quote in reply - removed
[/quote]
That is true since I have read lots of information about it. It is even more dangerous than the nuclear experiments not because of the radiation but of the Gamma Rays, heat, great force to explode. So, this must be a very long project. The human present technology is still not mature to manipulate it.

Rodolfo

Well, that is an overstatement, total annihilation of 500 g of matter and 500 g of antimatter will yield 21.47 Mt of energy. Meaning that to get one megaton you'd need 23 grams of antimatter. But indeed, even being very, very, very hard to acquire even this amount of AM, it's a frighteningly small amount for such a big punch.

Yes, the simple figure 0.01gr of positrons = 1 trip to Mars is very impressive!

But there are some drawbacks...

-0.01 gr of positrons are a huge electrical charge, and they repell each other with forces of millions of tons, far beyond any magnetic force we can do
-the magnetic confinment would weight thousands tons
-the cost would be much higher than with conventionnal rockets
-the crew would need a heavy shield
-etc


So this sounds still VERY VERY speculative. We shall not see soon positronic spaceships... nor positronic bombs.

...nor positronic brains!
(do you know Data character?)

About the only vaguely feasible fast rocket system I've come across is VASIMR, and I was thinking about it earlier today not so much with regard to pushing spacecraft about as to moving asteroids. I'm sure everyone has heard of the innovative 'gravitational tractor' concept, but I wondered whether it would be possible to create some sort of localised magnetospheric 'parachute' on the surface of an asteroid which might either repel charged particles or attract them. If you had a solar-powered system which charged capacitors then let go that stored energy in a series of pulses as the asteroid rotated then perhaps it might be possible to modify the orbit of a small body, even an Itokawa-class rock-pile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_spec...toplasma_rocket

Any thoughts?

Bob Shaw

I am reserving judgment on whether or not Vasimir will work (non-charge neutralized reaction mass 'reattachment' to vehicle issue), but even if Vasimir does work, if the craft develops a sizeable electric charge as a result of its' operation, per last months issue of Scientific American, the craft will start attracting free electrons (or protons, whatever is appropriate) and at a high enough potential, their impact could damage the craft.

Another possible antimatter space drive concept is AIMStar,
developed by members of the Physics Department of Pennsylvania
State University:

http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/

http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/Papers/AIMStar_99.pdf

I looked at some of Heim's work, and I believe he was a crank. His papers are a schizophrenic word salad of algebra, where he derives "fundamental constants" by feeding in mysterious parameters and massaging them into values close to the mass of the neutron or electron. Of course, today we know that most of the particles he talked about are not actually fundamental, but are constructs of quarks. The mass of a proton is the result of a very complex set of factors, and not what you would expect to pop out of some kind of new fundamental theory.

I also asked two honest-to-god physicists about Heim (including Stephen Wolfram), and they concurred. Wolfram pointed out that the observation of neutron stars, which have been carried out with almost unbelievable accuracy over long periods of time, do not indicate anything that deviates from general relativity and electromagnetism.

There are also people who believe that the US is hiding secret anti-gravity technology -- either secret Nazi experiments or found in the Roswell flying saucer, depending on which nut you listen to. Believe it or not, I got into an argument about this with Andrew Walker at the BBC, who believed and reported this (the Nazi version, not the UFO version).

Let's not waste time with hoaxes when there is so much exciting real science to do.

Couldn't agree more.

hmmm... Heim theory was a bit too beautiful to be true.

The problem with Heim is that it cannot simply be proven/dismissed. The stories of conspiracy/roswell can easily be proved false (it fall under common sense). But Heim mathematics are complicated, so only high scientist can judge them.

After Heim theory, quick rotation and strong electromagnetic fields should result into gravitationnal fields. Such fields should be easily observable into neutron stars, from where the pertinence of their observation (as I noted higher in this thread). Too bad if nothing was found.

I am still cautious though, because it would not be the first time that high establishment scientists dismiss a new theory or discovery which afterwards turns to be true (like Lord Kelvin with the X rays). But It would not be the first time too that "new revolutionary theories" turns to be false...

Heim's theory is not really beautiful, it is a tangle of random algebra. My own education in Physics was up to graduate level (at Caltech), but I do not practice physics as a profession, which is why I asked two real physicists for their opinions. Real scientists of merit do not take Heim seriously.

There have been a number of these attempts to unify gravity and E&M, and Einstein himself looked at some of them to see if they could be fixed up, or if they had some intersting clue within them. So have quantum field theoriests, since there is sometimes what is called a "correspondance" between a classical field theory and a quantum theory. Wrong theories are a dime a dozen.

There is always the possibility that a lone revolutionary scientist can be right. But if you take Einstein for example, his papers are clear and rigorous, and he engaged in a public discussion with the community of scientists. He was just a patent clerk, but the scientific community recognized his work quickly.

On the other hand, crank scientists are often seriously NPD. They are so confident and in love with their own ideas, that they don't bother to learn real science to an advanced degree, and they quickly resort to the tired claims of conspiracy, when their ideas are not hailed by others. That's bogus. Scientists are always clamoring for new ideas and solutions. You couldn't create a conspiracy of egotistical academics to supress something interesting, it would be like trying to herd cats. If something was really interesting, if it solved a real problem and made sense, some budding ambitious young scientist would look into it.

I think from an education statepoint, there needs to be a better job of presenting to the public what real scientists do. 1) it is hard work to become an expert in a modern field, and 2) it is extremely rewarding work. Cranks and pundits try to take a shortcut, to elevate themselves to the status of "expert", which really annoys me.

Saying it was too beautiful to be true is a direct translation of the french "c'était trop beau pour être vrai", meaning it was too promising, too appealing, it was deceiptful. No relation to the beauty of mathematics!





I agree with your analysis in general, and especially with this. There is a serious lack of science education, and too many wrong explanations and stereotypes about what science is and scientist are, even in standard media and education, not to speak of crank medias. I personally love science and defend it, but educating people in science is really a difficult task.

The secret is to arise interest...

I also have my own "revolutionary theory" in my drawers (who has not his own) but it don't bypass all the difficulties of relativity and quantum theories (that I am, anyway, unable to master). I consider that standard experiences are to confirm/dismiss it, and in case of a disagreement between "my" theory and standard science, the later wins.

Ah, we say "It is too good to be true." I understand.

Richard:

Which may, in British English, be taken as 'in my underwear'!

Nae luck, by the way!

Bob McShaw

the juxtaposition of "to arise interest" and of "I have my own theory" was not intended, but it sounds well.

Perhaps comming in a crank media to explain true science would catch the interest of people who are in a demand for it.

In particular, regarding theories of massive rapidly rotating objects creating or modifying gravity in the space around them...

The pulsar with 3 "quasi-terrestria" planets.... the radiation's enough to make me queasy.... has absolutely nothing remarkable about it's gravitational field at the distance of the planets. Grativtational interactions between the planets set up "beat frequencies" and (i think) a resonance that's led to extremely precise estimates of the orbits of the two larter ones and then discovery of a much less massive third buried in the "residuals" left from subtracting a 2-planet fit to the data.

Unless a non-Einsteinian/Non-Newtonian gravity effect is very small or closely confined to the pulsar, it's not showing up in the pulsar timing data as modified by the planets.

Heim theory is perhaps more difficult than relativity, and in more, Heim was severely impaired, forbidding him any social relation (A bit like Hawking, but worse, as he had no loving spouse to help him to communicate) and now he is dead.

So the problem of evaluating Heim and Einstein are comparable: only some high scientists are able to do so (to the contrary of, for instance, extracting energy from perpetual movement, or Roswell's affair, which could be dismissed by amateurs).

As you say, Einstein work was clear and rigorous, and the discussion with the science community allowed him to stay on an error-free trajectory. So his work was recognized, despites the fact he was not an establishment scientist, just a clerk.

For Heim, we just have to evaluate his complete work at a whole, and without the possibility of asking him for explanations. In the beginning of this thread, some said that there are high scientists who undertook this difficult task with some success, and now you come with your honest-to-god scientists saying that Heim work is just a tangle of random algebra. For this, I consider that the evaluation of Heim is not complete, but those who undertook it have to untangle it and make it understandable, if they want the other scientists to examine it.

This situation reminds me of Ramanujan, an Indian algebra genius, who left a dirty hand book full of hundreds of theorems, in a non-standard notation. When invited in the West, he died from health problems, and his supporters had to spend years to translate and re-demonstrate all his theorems, before Ramanujan was recognized by the mathematics community.

Was Heim some kind of Ramanujan of physics?

More likely a Velikovsky of physics. He has his followers, even a few marginal academics.

Perhaps. In their time, Velikovsky theories (Venus bumping into Earth to create the Pacific ocean, and the like) were not easy to dismiss, even by professionnal astronomers. But they are easy to prove false today (we know that such a collision would have melted both planets, to form one or more different bodies). The fact that they have still supporters is troubling. But there are other famous examples, such as Tesla (yes THE Tesla) who never accepted relativity. Until his death in the 1940', he was still reasoning into the frame of the aether theory, leading him to think that there would be two kinds of electromagnetic waves: the known Maxwell's "vectorial" waves, and other "scalar" waves (equivalent of the seismic shear and compression waves, but into aether). Of course his theory of "scalar" waves was never even studied, in front of the tremendous success of the relativity. But this refusal is today presented as a censorship by kooks who support the "scalar waves", who say there are numerous devices using them, but who never show these devices actually working.

Astronomers have long been the leading experts in Newtonian mechanics. I don't think anyone who knew what conservation of angular momentum meant ever believed Velikovsky. He's popular in part because this theories support Young-Earth Creationism and tie astronomy to bible stories. For example, he said the plague of locust on Egypt were caused by the Venus comet, because, as we all know, "comets are infested by vermin". There's a time to be open minded, and there is a time to say, "Wait a minute, this is bullshit!".

I'm a fan of Tesla, but again, there is a huge amount of "new age" science woven around him. Tesla was smart, but he didn't really have a good knowledge of physics. For example, Tesla did not really understand the theory of radio waves, and claimed that radio communication was just induction with currents in the Earth. Even Maxwell and Hertz knew better than that.

Incidently, I have a page on Tesla: Nikola Tesla

I did not knew all this about Velikovsky. Of course it is utter rubbish, from a physics point of view, and even from a religious point of view. Pardon me if I didn't studied Velikovsky in depth!!








Of course Tesla was an inventor, not a physicist, so he can be excused of some mistakes. But all that was extrapolated about the censorship of "Tesla Waves" and the like is defintively not his feat. There are some interesting things in the New Age, such as beautiful musics and paintings (that are not the point here) but it is true that there are a lot of rubbish, especially in "alternative physics". For such reason I don't involve in anything which claims to be "new age" and refuse to bear this name. I am a fan of freedom too, but we cannot accept anything and the contrary simply in the name of freedom...

Yes. I agree.

A year ago, the BBC found my Venera-9 pictures on NSSDC (I guess) and ran an article about it. I got email from Velekovsky people, saying "Your new pictures clearly show that Venus is a young surface.". I replied politely, "Yes, only a few hundred million years old, the surface is unusually young.".

Well done!

Anybody dumb enough to still believe in human progress should consider that Velikovsky sounds like the veritable Voice of Reason compared to Hoagland.

I suppose that the Venus' surface age is around 500 milliones after a big volcan eruption and the volcanic activity had prolonged for a long time that the lava had covered most of the surface, thus covering completely many small craters. Hence, at the present time, the age measurement on the planets is done by the superposition relationships and crater counting techniques. I suppose that it would lead a big approximate results.

The only way to measure with certainity about the absolute chronology is by sending a return probe with any Venusian sample to Earth and also send a lander with a new in situ age measurements in which MSL might be carrying. The age measurement instrument is based of laser rim which do a ablation, resonance ionization and mass spectometer to measure the amount of rubidium and strontium (Rb-Sr) isotopes. These techniques has a 10% error or around <+- 250 Ma.

"I cannot make sure about Venus' surface age without having any chemical measurement as the only sure way to date the surface age." Velekovsky wanted to have your reply in order to confirm that his theory is alike and raise his prestige. So he is like to Nikola Telsa , Gauquelin and others.

Rodolfo

In a society that values science, there are two strategies for participating personally in that status. One is to actually do the work to become a scientist, years of school, hard work. Another strategy is to embrace some pseudo-science which claims superiority to established scientist, and requires virtually no work -- crank theories rarely require you to learn how to solve a differential equation or master volumes of information. Instant gratification.

But the cranks and zealots are still annoying. I tend to get snippy with people who try to talk to me about Velikovsky or UFOs (or Jesus or Linux or whatever makes the whites of their eyes show all around). :-)

A well-stated analysis, Don, but...American society values science? I disagree, else there would be a lot less "Poindexter-bashing" on the playgrounds of our schools, and high-school nurds would have a lot easier time getting dates...but I digress.

Our society craves quick, simple easy answers, preferably with a sinister twist like a conspiracy against "common sense", which is why cynical snake-oil salesmen like Hoaxterrain have always flourished in this country. The inherent uncertainty in any honest scientific hypothesis (which contrasts so sharply with the absolute convictions found in religious dogma; we must remember that the country was founded by religious dissidents, and that forever colored the public image of science), as well as the enormous difficulty of merely framing a given complex problem properly and working through dQs (for example) leads to a sort of "shock and awe" amongst those in the general public who distrust anyone or anything that might be "better" than them. Easy answers in proverbial plain English are so much more reassuring by virtue of the fact that they have an emotional appeal that supersedes the tedious need to critically re-examine (and understand) basic assumptions...

The problem is sociological, cultural, and deeply entrenched. We had better find a way to convey to the general public what most experimental scientists learn often so painfully through direct experience--critical thinking vs. the easy way out, plus the fact that true knowledge is frequently only obtained after a series of errors and false starts--or else American science will become entirely subordinate to ideology and/or the needs of powerful vested interests. Not that that has ever happened recently...

I don't think Nicolas Tesla was a crank. he was simply not learned in physics. I think the end of his life was sad, especially to die during World War II without seeing the victory against evil.

However Tesla's zealots who still foster his bad ideas certainly are cranks. And I shall not remove this until I see a Mooray generator working...

There is a lot said about Tesla's life, and it is difficult to know what is true or what was invented afterwards. One story says he was a pacifist, and he proposed shields of "scalar waves" to avoid World War I. But of course he was dismissed (good reason: nobody believed his scalar waves. Bad reason: all the politicians wanted war). This episode is often invoked to show the "censorship" on Tesla ideas.

Good analysis too, nprev.

Especially the beginning: Pointdexter-bashing activities are certainly a symptom of something very wrong. In my country France politicians had enough wit to forbid this (This is not to put my country forward, but when we are right it is to be said too).

More generaly, the problem is that raw science is very difficult, so that it is impossible to understand for most people. There is an important work to do, and it is possible, to present science stakes and science results in a people-friendly way (even dumbo-friendly way). There are some talented writers and media people who are very good in this.


The problem (in France, but elsewhere it may be the same) is that science is taught in an academic way. For instance you must learn to solve a differential equation before knowing what is a quanta. Good for motivated people who want to work in the domain. But an unsurpassable obstacle for all the others. Worse, we find this problem from nursery school to academy: all the education system is such repelling!


As I say before, there are some good talented popularizers, but they are not endorsed by the education system, and are presented in the medias among the "alternative science" and hoaglandites, without making the difference!! So how could non-educated people make the difference themselves? And how could people learn basic science methods if they don't know what it is for??



A thing which is very confusing too is bad science fiction, like the "fusion" movie, which shows completelly imaginary things (the solar wind able to melt a steel bridge!! A nuclear powered machine melting thousands of tons of rock at a second, and when we open the reactor, the plutonium charge can be touched at hand!!!!! wooooowowowwowoo! ). On the countrary, a movie like "Apollo 13" is a precise reconstitution or real work in space. Despites much more emotionnal emphasis and deaths in "fusion", I feel that "Apollo 13" is much better a movie, even from non-science criteria.


So what could be the solutions?

-regognizing their works for good popularizers, inviting them at school, giving them academic/political endorsement for their work. Eventually giving them some state funded income would cost a bit, but save much more in science work, and also in seemingly unrelated domains such as violence and delinquancy.

-give popularizers a prefered place in medias. There are real conspiracies, well known, such as denegating real hazards like the climate change. I would not be astonished if anti-greenhouse awareness medias were also the less scientific and the most hoaglandite. When people think hoagland and run after imaginary conspireers, they left true conspireers and vested interest at peace. I could quote a little family-scale australian fanzine about alternative life, like "Nexus", which suddenly became distributed world wide, after its new director suppressed "spiritual stuff" (understand any reflection) and began to spread false news, such as soy or aspartame being highly toxic...

-aim especially at children. Descending at their level of reasoning to explain them things in an emotional way, and arise, if not vocations, at least a basic interest and critical mind in science.

-scientist being less academic... When explaining to ordinary people, science needs to be simplified and presented in an intuitive way, in appealing images. Sometimes such simplifications are a bit abusive, but it must not stop us. What we should not see are articles trying to popularize quantas, explaining the history background, giving some very approximative images, to conclude that the mathematics behind is very difficult and that only high mathematitians can understand quantas. This is very false: quantas can be presented in some simple and intuitive images affordable by everybody. Such images are not "exact " in the scientific meaning, but they are much better than nothing or than wild speculations.

-scientists being less proud... There is a temptation, when we have a knowledge above the common people, to thoroughly maintain this gratifying situation. There are too some scientists who are true zealots, for a good cause, but zealotism is still the worse ennemy of any good cause it pretends to foster.

-avoid to instrumentalize science out of purpose. For example saying that we are "genetic code" and thus that there is no ground for ethics... Not only this is false (we are not genomes, but persons) but it infringes into a domain (morals) where physics has nothing to say, where the ground is within our desires and emotions. It is not astonishing at all if so many religious people are rigidifying themselves into anti-science and fundamentalism: simply they feel such "scientific" justification of amoralism as a direct threat againts their very way of life (which is based on morals). A science which is a killer of every mystery, of every poetry, is also a good ground for raising anti-science and hoaglandism/conspirationnism.

Science is a complex issue in America. Nerds may not be as popular as jocks in school, but I do think that Americans generally admire successful technology and business. Deep down, American society rewards practical achievement, science, capitalism, personal bravery. So you can pretty much catagorize the attempted politcial mass movements in terms of who they are most jealous of:

Creationist movement attacking science
Leftist movements attack industry in general
Radical ecology movements attacking agro-research (GM crops, etc)
Crank-science movements attacking real science

In America there is also a big divide between practical achievement, and the pure intellectual. I might be wrong in saying this, but I think European society tends to elevate and empower the pure intellectual, while Americans want to see concrete action from someone. So the average American thinks Bill Gates is a great man, but the average computer science professor hates the software industry with a jealous passion (hehe, my own field, so I see this every day).

I think you could write a computer program to generate random political movements, and dicover that every one of them had a few nutty people doing it. But when one group is successful and famous, there will always be another group who feel left out and very angry.

yes there is something like that, especially in France, whith a strong tendency of certain academic scientists to send us peasans cultivate our potatoes even when we sincerely demand to learn. Pity for them.






There are good and bad reasons in all of these cases. As an insider I can say that ecology often relevantly disagree with a polluting industry. But there is also kind of degenerated ecology movement who attacks science and industry in general and dreams to come back to a Middle Age technology level. Useless to say that I disagree. Same for the leftists. As a spiritual man, I also disagree with science when it irrelevantly intefere with ethics and what we love in live. But the same goes here, there is many degenerated spirituality where matter is considered as "bad" and so with technology and science. There too I disagree: spirituality is about how we love life and manage to be happy, not about rejecting useful technical tools to help achieve these goals. I don't want to come back to Middle Age and live forty years and work 12 hours a day in complete ignorance of the world and universe! At last, scientists make us a terrifying promise: after death, to lose consciousness for eternity. With such a terifying future in mind, I consider I have no whatsoever right to take anybody who has pure beliefs of paradise after death, and try to persuade him he is not true. Especially as a scientist, I say I have not this right, as physics knows nothing of what could happen to consciousness after death. (we could continue this discution privately if you like, as it is off topic on this forum)





I am a bit in the domain too, and what I think of Bilou is that ▼§↕☼☻♥♦•♫◄↕‼¶↑↓→←∟↔ gasp choke bugged again

It may be easier to make antimatter in space by collecting antiprotons
naturally trapped in Earth's radiation belts:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=674

Truth to tell, never mind 'easier' - I think I'd *prefer* any large-scale anti-matter production to take place well away from any planet I happen to live on, or would like to visit.

Bob Shaw

I see NASA defunded Marc Millis a while ago. I believe the Gray Aliens ordered our government to shut this guy up immediately, or they would stop feeding us new micro chip technology. I mean, god forbid we would visit their planet and give them anal probes! There is just no way they will let that technology fall into our hands.

Not that long a while ago. The BPP Project's own homepage at NASA says "NASA funded the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project from 1996-2002". A Wikipedia page on the BPP notes that Millis "apparently hopes to reinstate funding", which doesn't sound that impossible given that it apparently only cost NASA $1.6 million over that period (according to a Centauri Dreams page).

======
Stephen

After his site, which seems to be a nasa site, Millis is just on a break.

Why this negativity? See it like this instead: it's the only fuel that is guaranteed not to lay around and pollute the environment after an accident.

tty

Why this negativity? See it like this instead: it's the only fuel that is guaranteed not to lay around and pollute the environment after an accident.

tty