It’s not perfect, because sometimes scientific progress goes, “Boink!“
Daily Archives: August 13, 2010
Son of Atomic Revenge
Uncertain Principles: What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 2: Lasers and Optics
The lab porn keeps coming, and it’s not being faked.
All of these elements are arranged in very particular ways to get the beams where they need to go. Of course, this is incredibly sensitive to small changes in the position of the optical elements, which is why everything is bolted to the surface of an optical table. These tables are large, heavy tables designed to minimize vibrations, and with steel tops having 1/4″-20 holes drilled in a 1″ grid over the whole surface. The mounts holding the mirrors and lenses and so forth are bolted to the table, so they’re fixed in position unless you do something really stupid to knock them out of place.
Of, if only I had a dollar for each time I did something stupid and knocked an optics mount out of place …
The Power of Redefinition
Particle Accelerators Could Work As Power Generators
If, by “power generator” you mean “source of fuel for a separate nuclear reactor.
Imagine the protons in this accelerator are sent into a block of uranium. Each proton might then be expected to generate a shower of some 60,000 neutrons in the material and most of these would go on to be absorbed by the nuclei to form 60,000 plutonium atoms. When burned in a nuclear reactor, each plutonium atom produces 0.2 GeV of fission energy. So 60,000 of them would produce 12,000 GeV.
Using this back-of-an-envelope calculation, Wilson worked out that a single 1000 GeV proton could lead to the release of 12,000 GeV of fission energy.
Or you could throw the Uranium in a reactor and get the Plutonium for free while you generate power. Which we already can do …
Two Thousand Words
Short history of print in two pictures
This is why it bothers me when people say things like “the book is stalled out, in terms of technology, at 1500 AD.” You just have no idea what you’re talking about.