Christmas lecture

Patience. They have to start somewhere. It may develop and improve.

What "new technology"? And if you can see into the future, how about telling us next week's lottery numbers?

No fusion on the horizon yet then?

today's is about how animals create/store/use energy so I am not hopeful

tim

I dunno, it's not my professional field so I was hoping to learn about new stuff.

For example, there are supposed to be some new battery technologies that are a couple of orders of magnitude better than currently available.

Where science is concerned the future is all about making commercially viable what is actually possible today, but only in the lab - not speculation of things which are completely unobtainable.

Even fusion is possible in laboratory conditions, just not in a way that generates more energy that you need to put in to start it. It's the engineering that we need to improve here, not the science.

OTOH, no-one has even the faintest idea how to make a time machine.

(BTW please don't interpret the above as my giving support for fusion, I was just using it as an example that everyone has heard about)

tim

Of course

breakthrough within the next 10 years.

but weren't they saying that 50 years ago? (OK I'll admit, in that respect, perhaps my 50 years was a small exaggeration)

tim

I can assure you there are not....

Wrong. That's engineering.

Haven't looked up lately?

Please either switch this off or correct the separator (which should be "-- ". It's stupid and pointless.

Yes well this is for da kids innit and with a person in charge who substitutes k's for Gs on the end of words like something what do you expect.

Its entertainment not education as I see it and as such I guess its OK. Why cannot we have just a few programmes which deal with the really technical stuff, like why is a certain substance better in a solar cell, and all of that, not just that it is and we are looking for stuff even better, and dumbing stuff down to how much power in an aa battery, was this sponsored by duracell?

I got the distinct impression that the lecturer and some of his mates was enjoying going back to childhood rather than enjoying teaching science. Brian

Well Its somefink out of nuffink if it does. Brian

Yes prisoner power is coming. Might as well use all that rioting energy and pump it into the grid...:-) Yes I know the treadmill was used years ago as a penal punishment and why else do the gov want to opt out of human rights legislation? Brian

What is needed is to use all that radiation and heat from nuclear waste in such a way that it can give us power while gradually removing the radiation from the material. That would be a winner even if at the start it would be dangerous to allow the public to buy batteries full of hot carbon or plutonium. Brian

What about chemical batteries? Ie the idea of storing the energy made as surplus electicity so it can be used later on and transported safely. Brian

What would you do with a time machine in any case. There would seem to be only a one way trip in most accepted theories there is, and who would want to go away for a year only to come back and find your daughter is older than you? As for Fusion. I'd stick my neck out and suggest it will never be possible to create a fusion system capable of sus tained operation at an efficiency where enough energy can be extracted to make it viable. The actual temperatures needed will reduce anything near the heat source to plasma or change it so substantially that you will not be able to get that energy out. Of course as was demonstrated last evening, the more work you try to do with any energy producing device the harder it is to operate the device, in the case of fusion, if you had some miracle substance and could use the heat and make it into electricity and use that energy, the effect would be to make fusion more and more hard to sustain. If the laws of nature as described really are true, this has to be the case, surely?

If you cannot use all the energy then a lot of waste energy has to be got rid of somehow to stop the whole thing blowing up, and that too seems like a probably very difficult thing to do without warming up the earth.

Brian

All you have to do is travel faster than light. (To go backwards in time.)

We are all time travelers in the forward direction.

as I went on to explain

very funny

tim

I know, you have told me before

but you are just a random person on the internet so why should I attribute more weight to you than to all the other "random" persons on the internet who disagree with you.

Some of whom are actually academic physicists (even if I have never heard of them) and some people with a very real interest in it actually being right.

I have no personal opinion on who is right, but you really do not have the visibility for me to believe that it is you.

Especially when, without these two orders of magnitude improvement, electric cars for the masses, that automotive companies are investing billion in, are never going to happen.

tim

I think Thorne is wrong. The worm hole would connect in real time so after 12 hours the connection with the space ship would be to where the space ship was on its 10 year journey. Meanwhile communication between the two would be impossible since for Carolee the trip lasted a mere 12 hours while Thorne was waiting for the return of his wife for a full 10 years. If they had been holding hands Thorne would have been dead for some weeks before Carolee could release her grasp.