Tag: physics

Annals of Scientific Publication

It’s not every day one gets to write a paper that includes such excerpts as:

[the] structure would be assembled in space near the sun by an army of robots and built out of space-based materials

while talking about small black holes, Dyson spheres, and the possibility of re-purposing SETI as a means of detecting the telltale gravitational waves of and/or the gamma emissions from poorly collimated exhaust of ships built to these theoretical specifications. But, when you do touch on all that, you generally get to include this line:

In the epilogue, we discuss possible philosophical ramifications of this observation.

Science!

Incidentally, in the 23rd century, Scotty frequently raged about this part of the paper:

A microscopic particle of ordinary matter which drifted into the antimatter would cause an explosion, scattering the antimatter into contact with the ship, and destroying everything for millions of miles around.

while (typically and completely) ignoring this part:

Any electromagnetic force which held the antimatter in would also drive normal matter in.

Best to stay the hell away from the Engineering deck, then. Somewhere on the order of millions of miles away. Good to know. <hand_gestures> Good. to. know! </hand_gestures>

Dropping some LHC

Large Hadron Collider fun fact(s) of the day:

In experiments, researchers found that an 86-microsecond exposure of the beam would bore a hole 40 meters into a block of copper.

I see. Maybe this explains why they decided to go with a graphite composite.

…instead of letting it burn a single 1.5-mm-wide hole into the cylinder, CERN engineers designed the system to “scan” the beam onto the face of the cylinder, much as the electron beam is scanned in a cathode-ray-tube television screen…

Then let me be the first to say “Where’s the oscillator on this thing? I want to watch the other broadcast!”

Finally, it’s worth noting that:

Though the graphite beam dump becomes very hot (about 750 °C), it does not melt. In fact, after it cools down it can be reused a few hours later.

So they won’t have to run down to the spar to get yet another 10-ton graphite cylinder encased in 1000 metric tons of steel and concrete. That there is good planning. Officer thinking, even.