I meant where I live there have never been any fusion reactors or H bombs made (I believe). Yet we have tritium seeping into our water from waste tanks.
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I meant where I live there have never been any fusion reactors or H bombs made (I believe). Yet we have tritium seeping into our water from waste tanks.
Some extra comments from a maths/physics major.
Einstein proved 'beyond reasonable doubt' that space and time are linked within the fundamental nature of the universe. There WAS no 'before the universe'. This comes under special and general relativity. As a side note ALL of our laws of physics and understanding of them come are themselves dependent on the universe itself (obviously!) We therefore can not test anything that happens outside our universe by any current or likely means. We can only speculate.
While the universe is currently expanding, no one really knows what the fate of the universe will be. It may either shrink into a 'big crunch' or expand forever. This area is under intensive research as it underpins a great deal of our understanding of the universe.
For those of you who believe in God here understand that God, if he exists, created space and time. He must exist outside of time rather than as a part of it. You can't really say 'he was the only thing that was back then' because there was no time. He must be well and truly beyond any mortal comprehension.
OneWayTraffic.
P.S. It is really HARD to talk about this properly as English depends on concepts like time being unscrewed up!
I gotta agree with you OneWayTraffic. If God is of outside the universe (as all definitions of a god present it to be) then our laws of physics wouldnt apply to it, at least not exclusively. How can you describe unfathomanable things? What does a monkey think about a 747 flying overhead, or of a PalmPilot when given one? Cliff Pickover does some thought experiments on what a being of a 4th dimension could do in our world . Entertaining, thought provoking material (which Pickover excels at) that you can get lost in, until you remember you gotta pay the bills :).
hmm....don't know how that post about symbols got here, that was meant for the math thread. anyway....
Tritium is the active ingredient in fusion bombs. But elim, now that I think about it (and you mentioned it), I think heavy water is also used in the reactor vessel of a nuclear plant. The extra neutrons aid the fission proccess. So the nazis could have been using it in fission research. BTW, tritium is one of the most toxic substances known to man. But hey, it looks good on a watch face.
Also, yes we have fusion bombs - they are called hydrogen bombs since hydrogen is the element that is fusing. Fission bombs only produce explosions of a few kilotons because of the difficulty in separating such a large mass of fissable material. You have to have chunks of fissable material just under critical mass. The higher the yield, the more chunks and the more difficulty in keeping them separate then recombining them. In Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," he goes into excruciating detail on the makeup and functioning of nuclear bombs. In a hydrogen fusion bomb, the fission trigger is only 10-20 kilotons, but can ignite fusion of a few megatons yield.
edit: Just as a basis of comparison, the bombs dropped on Japan were on the 10-20 KT range. So the hydrogen fusion bombs that we have can be as much as a thousand times more powerful. Kinda scary, huh?
Also, yes nuclear fusion is being researched for power. Princeton has the largest facility in the US. They have a working nuclear reactor, which is to say nuclear fusion occurrs - for a few miliseconds at a huge negative efficiency. I belive CERN (the center for european nuclear research) has one, as does Japan. I'm not sure what they are doing in England.
Engineers and physicists seem to agree that a practical fusion plant is still 50 years away because of containment and efficiency problems. The essential problem is twofold - to ignite fusion you need extremely high temperatures, millions of degrees F. This takes power and makes containment of the material difficult since no material on earth can withstand temperatures like that. So they use magnets to contain the hydrogen plasma, which is why the reactors are in the shape of a dounut magnetic field. The only promising alternative is using lasers to ignite the fusion, but I'm not sure how that is going.
There was recently some interesting news in the field of fusion.
'Tabletop' Fusion Report Elicits Mixed Reaction
Quite a creative approach to it. It may not be all that promising, but it is nice seeing people think different.
OK I just spent a lot of time reading all of this and I find one theory to be totally left out of the discussion. Why does time have to have a mono linear effect on the equation? If this variable is applied to some of Einstein’s work, then you will have some very interesting options.
Blacktooth - that sure looks like cold fusion. Its fraud (or simply delusion).
"Why does time have to have a mono linear effect on the equation? If this variable is applied to some of Einstein’s work, then you will have some very interesting options."
Huh? Please explain, Thermo...
We should know in a month or so once the experiments are validated russ (even Nature is reviewing it). I'm not holding my breath, but the idea of using sonoluminescense (sp?) is pretty slick. It pertained to the conversation and is big news in that community now. I had to share it here.
Isn't time only linear in the same point of reference? Ie, my time isn't the same as the time of that of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle. Which is what brought about spacetime, because time and space are linked. Light, having no mass, doesn't play with the same set of rules though.
Take Einstein’s work and replace the time constant with a variable value.Quote:
Originally posted by russ_watters
Blacktooth - that sure looks like cold fusion. Its fraud (or simply delusion).
"Why does time have to have a mono linear effect on the equation? If this variable is applied to some of Einstein’s work, then you will have some very interesting options."
Huh? Please explain, Thermo...
"Isn't time only linear in the same point of reference? Ie, my time isn't the same as the time of that of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle. Which is what brought about spacetime, because time and space are linked. Light, having no mass, doesn't play with the same set of rules though."
The first part of the first sentence is wrong, the rest is correct. Time is ALWAYS linear by definition because it is one dimentional - like a line. But everyone has their own uniqe timeline which varies according to their speed - so thats where the point of reference comes in. Though actually the "point" is not physical, its the speed of light itself thats used as the frame of reference. And the fact that light doesn't play by the same rules is part of the explanation for the craziness of quantum mechanics - time doesn't really apply because light has no time - the rate of time passage in light is zero.
"Take Einstein’s work and replace the time constant with a variable value."
Huh? Are you being cryptic on purpose, Thermo? As far as I can tell you want to somehow do away with the idea of constant time....That is in fact the very thing that Special Relativity does - thats the theory in a nutshell and all resulting theories are based on this. So I still don't understand what you are getting at.
If we accept the theory that time will pass more slowly for a person traveling near the speed of light, then we have to accept that the rate of time can be altered. That gives us fast-observed time, slow observed time, and everything in-between. The fact that we observe/perceive the passage of time in the way that we do does not mean that it is the only way it passes. Now if we were to force a localized change in the rate of time by means other than velocity, what would the result be? I don’t know, I was just asking.
If someone could figure that out they would quickly become very popular. Gravity could hold a key there (gravity=acceleration). Maybe once more about the mechanics of gravity are understood something along those lines may be possible. Then again, acceleration negates the effects I think. The whole time passing differently in different circumstances stretches my reasoning. I understand the premises but the actuality is... mind-boggling. It has been proven though (planes carrying synhronized atomic clocks experiment).Quote:
Originally posted by Thermo
Now if we were to force a localized change in the rate of time by means other than velocity, what would the result be? I don’t know, I was just asking.
According to relativity itself, the only things that affect the rate of time are gravity and velocity.
So this is the answer to the original question, right? Because if you go .9999999 times the speed of light and the light from your headlights was going at the speed of light, the way you perceive time would make it look like that light was moving away from you at 1c, as opposed to .00000001c, right?Quote:
Originally posted by Sinnersis
Okay, I have a few points to make:
Firstly, as you speed up time for you slows down. As you aproach the speed of light this effect increases exponetially until you reach the speed of light where time stops. (Incidentally I do have the equation relating to this but I can't find it - I'll post it when I do). Hence it is possible to reach anywhere in the universe before you die if you travel fast enough.
yep
Quote:
Originally posted by Talonator
So this is the answer to the original question, right? Because if you go .9999999 times the speed of light and the light from your headlights was going at the speed of light, the way you perceive time would make it look like that light was moving away from you at 1c, as opposed to .00000001c, right?