Tag: Science

Antimatter

Posted on by Neal Asher

I just received an email from ‘spaceoperaghost’:

‘Thought this might interest you if it hasn’t been emailed or otherwise brought to your attention already. CERN trapped antimatter! I suppose it’s too soon to start demanding warp drives and clean energy, but it’s still awesome.’

Yeah, I think we can safely assume that this is of interest to me.

Geneva, 17 November 2011. The ALPHA experiment at CERN1 has taken an important step forward in developing techniques to understand one of the Universe’s open questions: is there a difference between matter and antimatter? In a paper published in Nature today, the collaboration shows that it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. This development opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.

Here’s a link to the article at CERN, and here’s the press release. It’s all rather dry, but then, I have become rather tired of ‘scientists’ who step over the line into politics, produce self-aggrandizing press releases and start making ludicrous predictions based on their work.

Update:
CERN created the first nine atoms of antihydrogen in 1995, and then started to produce atoms in large quantities in 2002, as part of the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments. This is the first time that scientists have been able to trap antihydrogen atoms for a long enough time to study them, keeping them at 9 degrees kelvin (-443.47 degrees Fahrenheit, -264.15 degrees Celsius), suspended in a magnetic field inside this Ghostbusters-style machine. The other reason why this is an important step is its potential to solve our need for unlimited energy. When antihydrogen touches matter—as shown in the image above—it releases a huge amount of energy. Many scientists speculate that antimatter may be the key to provide unlimited power capable of driving machines that are unthinkable right now. Eventually, it could be the stuff that could power new engines capable of taking us to the stars at near-light speed.

Um, so why the present press release?

Urbanites Can Survive on Smog.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Feeling in the need of reading a bit more science I picked up a copy of New Scientist (as mentioned in a previous post). It was slightly off-putting for me seeing the front cover picture of a ‘green’ city and the title ‘Urban Utopia – why the city is greener than the country’ but I persevered. I even decided to swallow bile and try reading the main ‘Escape to the City Story’. Perhaps I was being unfair, perhaps I’m too biased, perhaps I need to read more of this sort of stuff to get a more balanced view.

The basic contention of the article is of course quite correct: people packed together in cities will use less energy because resources are concentrated. They don’t need private transport, all their turds go in the same sewer, there’s less need to run electricity through miles of wires or water through miles of pipes. The dustbin men won’t burn as much fuel collecting the rubbish etc etc. So far, so bleeding obvious.

But about five paragraphs in we are told that UN reports suggest ‘that in 2008, 50% of the world’s population lived in urban settlements, which together take up just 3% of the Earth’s land area’. Yeah, okay, got that: battery farmed chickens take up less land than free-range ones.

Then, the next paragraph gives us: ‘This mass exodus from the countryside should lift the strain of intensive agriculture from the land, allowing forests to bounce back.’

I am absolutely stunned at the deep stupidity of that statement. Are we to suppose that city dwellers subsist on a more meagre diet than those in the country? Is the contention here that city dwellers can exist on organic carrots and tap water and that this will relieve ‘the strain of intensive agriculture’?

This was another lazy divisive article to display the magazine’s green credentials. A fairly unsurprising product of a BBC ‘science’ researcher who already has a history of producing such trash. There’s also a sinister edge here concerning how much easier it is to deliver ‘services’ to city dwellers, and to deal with their ‘social problems’.

Of course, it’s also so much easier to look after animals when they’re in a zoo.

Note: the next article in the magazine, one titled ‘Nurturing Nature’, explains to us how children raised in cities are more obese than those raised in the country. Go figure.

New Scientist Snippet.

Posted on by Neal Asher

A gene linked with sociality and novelty-seeking may make people more liberal in outlook, but only if they had plenty of friends during adolescence. The gene, DRD4-7R makes a dopamine receptor and was identified from DNA samples and a survey of 2547 adolescents.

It’s this kind of dross in New Scientist that sets my teeth gnashing. Admittedly it was taken from ‘The Journal of Politics’ and is little but a snippet, but that it appears in NS tells you something about the underlying mind set.

The words ‘linked with’ immediately remind me of the now famous words of Al Gore in his film when he informed us that ice core data shows a ‘correlation’ between CO2 rises and temperature rises, and then neglected to mention that the ice cores showed CO2 rising approximately 800 years after the temperature rise. How, precisely, is a gene that makes a dopamine receptor ‘linked with sociality and novelty-seeking’?

The next weasel word is ‘may’, as this gene ‘may make people more liberal in outlook’. Now what definition of ‘liberal’ are we talking about: the adjective in the dictionary, or espousing present day liberal views and politics, which tend to bear no relation to the aforementioned adjective? What exactly is being said here?

Then we get the bit about the necessity for having friends in adolescence for this gene to express its liberalism. Of course the implication here is that if you are ‘liberal’ you are probably sociable, novelty-seeking and not a Billy-no-mates. If you’re not ‘liberal’ you’re probably a sad fuck who had no friends when you were younger.

All this comes from a survey and DNA sampling of 2574 adolescents. So, how many of these adolescents did not have this gene? How many of them really ‘fessed up to having no friends? How did you establish any link at all between this particular scrap of DNA and the traits mentioned? And since when did opinion become science? Karl Popper must be revolving in his grave.

Black Hole at Centre of Galaxy

Posted on by Neal Asher

I picked up on this quite some time ago but was again reminded of it by this article. It’s one of those cases where an SF writer got it right before the astrophysicists proved it. I’m guessing that some of you have read Larry Niven’s book? Remember why the Pierson’s Puppeteers were moving their entire solar system out of the galaxy?

I was sure I first read about it as a serious scientific theory about six years ago, and this National Geographic article seems to confirm that, whereas I’m fairly sure (correct me if I’m wrong) Niven was writing about this sort of stuff back in the early 70s. Quite likely he took the idea from some speculative articles knocking round at the time, but still…

Reading Science.

Posted on by Neal Asher

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Ah, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I must recommence reading and inwardly digesting more science (and a bit less politics). I’ll have to do this by picking and choosing from the Internet because magazines I used to read a decade or so ago, like New Scientist and Scientific American, became highly politicized advocacy platforms
In fact, during yesterday’s trip to Asda and while Caroline was having her hair done, I picked up a copy of the former magazine, popped into the nearby pub, bought a pint of IPA (my first in something like eight months) and sat down to read it. Straight away the cover was off-putting with its depiction of ‘Urban Utopia’ and the connected article the usual exercise in dead horse flogging. Sure, cram people together and they use less energy. Here’s an idea, why not bury the cities underground and assign each human a three metre box to live in. Why not genetically modify humans into rose-blood four-fingered nebbishes so each uses up less resources … if you haven’t read it, get old of T. J. Bass’s Half-Past Human.
However, that being said, there was a lot less environmental hectoring.than there was a decade and a half ago. Maybe I will pick up a few copies of the above mentioned magazines over ensuing months and consider renewing a subscription.

Currently I’m selectively reading articles from Science Daily, Science News (on the Internet) and generally fishing about with Google for anything interesting. So, if any of you guys come across something of interest, please let me know here.

Thinking about Rocks

Posted on by Neal Asher

So, throwing a spacecraft at the Asteroid Belt, with the asteroids on average being a million kilometres apart, your chances of hitting one are not exactly high, which is why the spacecraft we have sent out that way got through unscathed. However, what is an asteroid? From what I can gather they are the objects we can see through our telescopes and have counted. Beyond that the number is estimated and estimations vary widely. I also have to wonder what we can see. I’m guessing that objects the size of a football or a pea aren’t picked up. The chances of something the size of the Pioneer or Voyager craft hitting one of these was probably negligible, but they’d certainly have to be taken into account if you’re presenting a profile 5 kilometres across and travelling at 20,000 kilometres per hour.

VSS Enterprise Completes First Manned Glide Flight

Posted on by Neal Asher
I signed up quite a while ago for news updates from Virgin Galactic, which have been interesting but infrequent. Two I received while in Crete I really should have mentioned here, but a lot of other stuff was going on and I didn’t get round to it. Now I will.

VIRGIN GALACTIC’S SPACESHIPTWO ACHIEVES MAJOR MILESTONE IN ITS PROGRAM TO BECOME WORLD’S FIRST MANNED COMMERCIAL SPACE VEHICLE.

 While most of the media of the world concerns itself with a sick economy, various apparently pointless wars, and a mid-term president who seems to be losing his grip, it’s heartening to know that this project is on course and doing well.

VSS Enterprise achieves manned free flight from over 45,000 ft (13,700 metres) and successfully glides to land at Mojave Air and Spaceport.10th October 2010, Mojave, CA. Virgin Galactic, the US company developing the world’s first commercial manned space flight system and tourism business, is delighted to announce the successful completion today of the first piloted free flight of SpaceShipTwo, named the VSS Enterprise. The spaceship was released from its mothership at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 metres).

Reading that last bit I can’t help but wonder about reality catching up with fiction, and the way that science fiction can be swiftly put out of date. Isn’t there a scene in one of the Star Trek Films where one of the Enterprise captains (Picard?) shows off a display case full of models of ships called Enterprise? It strikes me that now that display is short one model.

During its first flight the spaceship was piloted by Pete Siebold, assisted by Mike Alsbury as co-pilot. The two main goals of the flight were to carry out a clean release of the spaceship from its mothership and for the pilots to free fly and glide back and land at Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, who was present during the first successful flight, added “This was one of the most exciting days in the whole history of Virgin. For the first time since we seriously began the project in 2004, I watched the world’s first manned commercial spaceship landing on the runway at Mojave Air and Space Port and it was a great moment. Now, the sky is no longer the limit and we will begin the process of pushing beyond to the final frontier of space itself over the next year.”

Good on you Mr Branson, it’s excellent to know that someone with money and power shares the dream. However, bringing things thumping back down to Earth, much as I admire what you’re doing, I’m still comparing that BT broadband offer against what I pay for my Virgin account…

Go check out the Virgin Galactic site.

Thursday 14th

Posted on by Neal Asher

You won’t see top ten book lists from me scattered with worthy titles by German philosophers, nor will you see lists of favourite films including those that are noir, French and subtitled. Generally, such lists are more about a writer trying to demonstrate his intellectual credentials, whilst shameful favourites like Lord of the Rings, which is of course no longer de rigueur, or Terminator, which is far too much fun, are carefully edged to one side.

I won’t write deeply intellectual essays on futurology. I haven’t got a clue what’s going to happen, though I suspect it might be boring and dismal. I’m more concerned with honesty than appearances, which may sound strange coming from a writer of quite bizarre science fiction. Truth is important to me, even when it hurts me or others.

This is why I’m going to ’fess up that I had an extreme ‘oh shit’ moment yesterday when I realised how close I’d come to making a huge mistake with the book The Departure and the ensuing book Zero Point. It was one of those that would have resulted in me being beaten with anoraks until blood started oozing out of my ears. I actually felt quite sick when I finally saw the mistake, but luckily The Departure has yet to be published and just a little further editorial work will sort it out:

So, on its way back from Mars, the Traveller VI spacecraft stopped at the Asteroid Belt where its fusion engine, a thing the size of a cathedral, was removed. This engine was then attached to an asteroid loaded with metals, which was then blasted back into Earth orbit.

Okay, I now leave it to all of you reading this to point out my extreme fuck up here…

More Zero Point Stuff.

Posted on by Neal Asher

The three Zero Point Energy books progressed to a stack in the hall – ready to go down to one of the bars in Makrigialos that keep books to loan out to customers – but then I decided to bite the bullet and have another go with them. There’s certainly some interesting real science in them, like the Casimir effect, Casimir batteries, the possibility of solid-state rectification of ZPE and the Alcubierre warp drive. The problem I have is sorting the nuggets of gold from the crap-heap. The book that first detailed the stuff above included a piece by one Richard Boylan Ph.D suggesting that declassifying ZPE technology would be a good thing – that would be the ZPE tech the Americans obtained from ‘Star Visitors’, which included antigravity tech. Oh dear. It all read very coherently, but it was like a post I once read on the Asimov’s message board – a perfectly coherent explanation by a guy of why he believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

This sort of stuff puts me in mind of the state of play a few centuries back as real scientists researched electricity, magnetism and electric fields, and as new technology began to result from them. Whilst the real scientists worked with real problems and conducted real research, a whole crop of pseudo-scientists grabbed these new shiny toys and attributed to them the kind of properties previously attributed to holy relics, bathing at Lourdes or rubbing yourself down with damp celery to cure leprosy. Newspapers of the time were full of adverts for electrical or magnetic treatments to deal with every ailment from gout to cholera. Of course out of that crap-storm came some real stuff, like X-rays, ultraviolet light skin treatments (I choose those because we’ve been watching Casualty 1900s).

Here, according to the book I’m reading now, are the paradigm camps regarding ZPE:

1. Quantum physics is wrong. Quantum events can be explained classically using self-fields. ZPE does not exist.

2. Relativity is wrong. A material-like ether exists.

3. Quantum physics is correct, but ZPE is a theoretical artefact; it is not real.

4. The ZPE physically exists, but its magnitude is too small to be an appreciable energy source.

5. The ZPE physically manifests large fluctuations, but they cannot be tapped because of entropy; they are random and ubiquitous like a uniform heat bath.

6. The ZPE is a manifestation of chaos in an open nonlinear system. Under certain conditions it can exhibit self-organisation and therefore become available as a source.

7. The ZPE is a 3-space manifestation of electric flux from a physically real, fourth dimension of space. It can be twisted into our 3-space yielding alterations in the space-time metric. It can be tapped as a source, and doing so locally alters gravity, inertia and the pace of time.

I think I can live with number 7, just so long as the tech doesn’t come from greys from Alpha Centauri or secret Nazi projects, just so long as there are no homeopathic, acupuncture or crystal healing miracles involved, just so long as the Zero Point Field isn’t God and our souls don’t transmit to the fourth dimension when we die etc etc etc.

Zero Point Energy … or Not?

Posted on by Neal Asher

So, the first book of my new contract is to be called Zero Point. In the past I’ve read fragments about zero point energy and thought it seemed like a good science fictional tool I could employ. My plan was for the title to have a double meaning. Zero point energy would be employed as an inertia-less drive for a space ship, whilst there would also be a link to certain ‘year zero’ events I don’t really want to go into here. I therefore bought some books about zero point energy so as to learn more about the subject.

Oh dear.

I started reading then failed to finish three books on the subject. The impression I get is one of wish fulfilment, of, as one scientist has noted, ‘the modern equivalent of the search for a perpetual motion machine’. There’s plenty of science involved and zero point energy, according to current theories, does exist, but when I start reading about its connection to Chakra points and acupuncture, homeopathy, the soul and the ‘energies that bind us all together’ I start to consider whether the book might better serve as fuel for our stove here. That was one of the books. Another one started rambling on about how zero point energy would solve global warming, whilst another referred to Nazi technology and secret projects on American air force bases, and I put it aside before Area 51 got a mention too.

It seems to me that using zero point energy might be about as daft as having my heroes gunning each other down with lasers powered by cold fusion – also connected to zero point energy.

Now, I know, from the ‘Who Reads My Books?’ stuff here, and other contacts with readers, that an awful lot of you work in proper science-based professions. I know there’s a good chance that one physicist, two biochemists/geneticists and hundreds of high-function IT people will be reading this. I also know that there will be many others who love SF and understand science (the two are inextricably linked) who will be reading this. So tell me, what is your opinion of zero point energy?