Water Droplets In Orbit On the International Space Station 159
BuzzSkyline writes "Astronaut Don Pettit, who is aboard the International Space Station right now, puts charged water droplets into wild orbits around a knitting needle in the microgravity environment of the ISS. A video he made of the droplets is the first in a series of freefall physics experiments that he will be posting in coming months."
Depression (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the kind of news that saddens me. The grand endeavor to explore the universe that I knew as a kid has turned into, well, basically nothing at all, and the astronauts that once went where no one had gone before have turned into Mr. Wizards doing Newtonian physics demonstrations for ten-year-olds. I mean, the off-the-cuff demonstrations of floating pencils one saw in the Apollo program videos, in between doing stuff like developing space rendezvous techniques and going to the moon, have turned into the raison d'etre of the space program.
I am depressed.
Re:Depression (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, it will get better when they post the videos of microgravity sex experiments.
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I dunno. This is a /. denizen we are talking about. I'd suggest that he try pharmaceuticals instead.
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Roger Boisjoly [latimes.com] recently passed away. He was one of the engineers who tried to stop the ill fated launch of Challenger on an abnormally cold morning in Florida. He knew there was a high risk of the O rings leaking if they were cold, NASA management refused to listen to him, an O ring did failt, it ended in catastrophe. The Shuttle program was crippled from that day on.
From the article:
"It was the end of the dream," said John Pike, executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime analyst of U.S. aer
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With knitting needles? Pro-lifers will be the ones doing the relative spinning in those experiments!
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That would be probably the most effective way to finance the space program nowadays. That combined with the next TV-reallity-soap à la "Americas next hot space chick".
Combining a mission to mars with a two year Big Brother show could improve financing considerably. Just wait until the first "actor" gets kicked out. Oh the drama.
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So we will go from the porn industry furthering the multimedia industry to the the porn industry furthering the space program? :P
Re:Depression (Score:5, Funny)
The space program is really really great
For porn
I've got fast rockets so I don't have to wait
For porn
There's always some new planet
For porn!
I experiment all day and night
For porn!
It's like I'm flying at the speed of light
For porn!
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2) Gravity isn't kind to women's upper chest. Zero gravity is even less kind.
With the proper implants gravity has seemingly little effect on Earth.
God knows what it does to a man.
Hence the need for experimentation.
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Some camerawork can be dodgy enough as it is, without having to have the cameraman and actors floating freely and having to account for a "Newton's Third Law" of two colliding bodies exerting force on each other isn't going to help any.
100% disagree.
That all sounds like tremendous FUN !
As long as the camera operator is not afraid of some really friendly fire...
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Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree that there should be a more grand purpose to manned spaceflight, getting grade school children interested in newtonian physics through demonstrating the principles in a compelling way isn't a complete waste.
The next generation needs inspiration too.
Is it really that inspirational, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really that inspirational, though?
I mean, think of what really inspired generation X. I don't think it was just the prospect of having a chance to sit in a cramped capsule in orbit for two days, and even that chance being lower than being hit by lightning.
I think it was more like the extrapolation of where it's going. SF told us stories of it becoming a mass thing, every other guy being at least a space freighter pilot, and the cool ones like us would be space FIGHTER pilots, exploration, whole colonies on other planet and in orbit, meeting horny green alien babes, and going bald where nobody had gone before. Oh wait, the last one was the porn ;) And not just space travel. It told us tales of robots, lasers, near-infinite sources of energy, etc.
It was an age of very rapid progress in a whole bunch of domains, and a naive linear extrapolation ahead promised to soon take us where we can't even imagine. Now it was the moon, tomorrow it will be colonies on Mars, and the day after tomorrow probably meeting the Vulcans.
It was that imaginary destination, not the current state that got us SF nerds dreaming.
Nowadays, it seems to have pretty much become a horizontal asymptote. Or near enough. Within your lifetime, or even your kids' lifetime, we'll probably still have half a dozen people in orbit. Your grandkids' chances of being an astronaut will still be lower than winning the jackpot and retiring to a tropical resort.
And even if they won that lottery, what will they do in orbit? Where does that extrapolation lead nowadays? They'll maybe levitate droplets of oil instead of water? Study the growth of mold on a petri dish in zero gravity?
Even robots are not what we dreamed they would be. Instead of cool HK-47 style androids at the bank teller, we have the more logical thing of a box with a screen and a keypad. Instead of robotic vendors, we have the more logical vending machines. And instead of having a robot copilot, you just have an autopilot AI, because it would be stupid to build a humanoid frame where just a few chips will do the same job better. And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
And you can forget the whole space fighter thing, since not only it turns out that blowing enough shit up in orbit would nix all our access to space, but pilots are being replaced by remote controlled drones even on Earth. And in space probably even more so, since you can do much tighter turns and accelerations if you don't have to worry about squishing the human inside.
So, you know, inspire kids to aspire to... what?
But even forgetting the extrapolation, the thing about the human brain is that it works with differences more than with absolutes. To be interesting enough, something must be different enough. You wouldn't think for example that a new LCD TV is new and interesting if it just has the buttons in a different position than yours.
At some point there was enough change per time unit to be interesting. Yay, we went to the moon. Yay, we have a space shuttle that promises to make space travel cheap and often (yeah, right.) Yay, we have a space station.
Now it's, what? Yay, we're stuck in the same orbit, but we can do another elementary-school level science experiments in space? :p
Re:Is it really that inspirational, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the basic problem - too many people refuse to grow the hell up and shed that naivete. They insist on blaming reality for not living up to their childish beliefs, and then they use fiction as 'proof' that those beliefs were reasonable.
Seriously, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the juveniles of Robert Heinlein are all creations of imagination. If you're over eighteen and can't tell the difference between them and reality, you're in need of some serious professional help.
So the f' what? Are you seriously so immature as to be disappointed that something as amazing as real time machine translation (which was nothing put a pipe dream when I was in high school a mere thirty years ago) is available 24/7 in something you can put in your pocket rather than being a 'kewl' 'droid? Hell, I consider the whole "in your pocket" thing far more impressive than the "being a droid" part. When I was a kid, we expected such things to take a whole room of computers, if it was ever possible at all.
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LOLWUT? (Score:2)
LOLWUT?
Exactly where did y
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By actually reading the message while sober and in full possession of my faculties.
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Provide an exact quote, my dear troll, or piss off. Just more postulating that your delusional strawmen are there, just won't cut it.
We're on a board where the message is still readable on the same page. Just postulating I said someth
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I "blame" Asimov. His premise to justify the android archetype was that positronic brains were so expensive and difficult to manufacture that you would want to use it for multiple purposes. Since most purposes already expected a humanoid formfactor, the humanoid android was an obvious choice.
However, processing power is actually fairly inexpensive. So it makes more sense to have a bunch of highly specialized "brains" carefully and specifically tailored to the application than have one expensive generaliz
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I mean, think of what really inspired generation X. I don't think it was just the prospect of having a chance to sit in a cramped capsule in orbit for two days, and even that chance being lower than being hit by lightning.
GenXers were very small children when we reached the moon. Armstrong is of my dad's generation, Korea War vets. Boomers flew the shuttles.
Star Wars and its sequels are what excited GenX.
Even robots are not what we dreamed they would be. Instead of cool HK-47 style androids at the bank tell
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Well, now that's a letdown. If a geek can't dream of getting laid with an alien babe, then what's the point of it all? ;)
Well, now seriously, I have some idea of my own on the topic. Whatever we meet, true, won't even vaguely resemble HOMO SAPIENS. On the other hand, if you think about how evolutionary pressures worked on Earth, it's not unreasonable to expect some Earth-style body plan.
For a start I'm going to assume that life is going to evolve from individual mollecules that self-replicate and get increa
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Heh, well, as an adult, I wouldn't. I already said in there that ATMs are the more logical solutions. Just imagine telling your pin by voice to a robot, with 20 people in line behind you, and you'll see the problem.
But as a kid? HK-47 is the kewlest droid EVAR, meatbag :p
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The furthest man has ever been from the Earth is into orbit around the moon ... and we last did that 40 years ago ...
24 people have been out of near earth orbit ... and none of these were in the last 40 years ...
Moon rocket : Retired
Supersonic Passenger Jet : Retired
Fastest Production Aircraft : Retired
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If you really want to demonstrate Newtonian physics, just show the schoolkids NASA's falling budget after 1968.
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This is exactly the news to make my point. Our resources are best spent on sending instruments into places where man can't go, because that's where the science is happening. That is exploration.
Stupid human tricks belong on the David Letterman show. Or the Guinness book of world records.
Thank goodness we could get up there to fix the space telescopes though. You know, that kind of thing is important too.
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Perhaps there is one ten-year-old out there who sees this video, and as a result becomes a physical chemist with interests in rocket propulsion, and grows up to invent the critical element to make interplanetary travel possible. Looking at the Space Shuttle astronauts, more than one of them got started in similar ways, so the odds are pretty good that something similar will happen. Then this simple science experiment will have done as much for our growth into space as anything else the space program has d
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This is still better and awe inspiring than anything I've seen on TV this year so far, apart from an Apple Keynote. ;-)
Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
The grand endeavor to explore the universe that I knew as a kid
You mean that you imagined as a kid. Like a lot of things you knew as a kid, it was just the wide-eyed fantasies of youth. The space program has NEVER been about being a grand endeavor to explore the universe. It isn't now, and has never been in the entire global history of space programs. They've been about politics, they've been about national security, they've been about national pride. They've *never* been about exploration. Why do you think every single "pure" research project has such brutal trouble with funding? Why do you think the only substantially successful programs in the last 20 years have been the "cheaper, faster" programs?
It *is* depressing, but I vaguely remember it being depressing when I was five years old and figured out Santa, too.
In fact, for the first time in *history*, there's cause to NOT be depressed about the reality of space travel. We've got Branson getting ready to let anyone with a couple hundred grand be an astronaut. We've got a private company nearly ready to be lauching people into orbit. Those are BIG deals. Those are space exploration, even in its infancy, that *for once* is NOT coupled to national posturing.
Today, in 2012, has the greatest number of reasons to be *excited* about space travel, because for once its being done for real.
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We now have private companies nearly able to take people on joyrides into near earth orbit, which 6 or more governments can already do ...
They are simply catching up with where we were in the 50's and 60's ... but (a bit) cheaper
They have no plans to do any more than joyrides, because that is what people are willing and able to pay for ...
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We now have private companies nearly able to take people on joyrides into near earth orbit, which 6 or more governments can already do ...
They are simply catching up with where we were in the 50's and 60's ... but (a bit) cheaper
They have no plans to do any more than joyrides, because that is what people are willing and able to pay for ...
The first 10-20 years of aviation were also limited nearly exclusively to joyrides. There's nothing wrong with that. But imagine what the world would look like today if the US government was the only organization that had airplanes.
The people paying for joyrides (at 1% or less of what the government was spending 60 years ago!) are funding the rapid development of technology, driving costs down by making profit actually matter, and that will lead to greater corporate use.
If you're a 2nd-tier school today, an
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Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education.
The free market you worship did NOT make us educated. That was 100% a government endeavor. Just like the space program. Were it not for governments, industry would not be in space today.
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Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education.
The free market you worship did NOT make us educated. That was 100% a government endeavor. Just like the space program. Were it not for governments, industry would not be in space today.
You might want to study your history of public education in the US, and why it was enacted.
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The space program has NEVER been about being a grand endeavor to explore the universe. It isn't now, and has never been in the entire global history of space programs. They've been about politics, they've been about national security, they've been about national pride. They've *never* been about exploration.
Exploration is always about politics, even if the explorers are not, because whatever is discovered will affect the political balance back home. Even the "Age of Exploration" in the 1400s-1600s was fueled largely by governments, government grants, and government charters of independent companies (e.g., Hudson's Bay Company [wikipedia.org]). The point is, exploration did occur during this time. If you think space exploration is occurring today, we have a different definition of the word, "is."
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Re:Depression (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think they'll have a choice, though (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they'll have a choice, though. The problems are that:
1. As Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." So you'll need incredible speeds to get anywhere interesting even within one lifetime.
2. In that domain, Albert Einstein is the biggest mofo. He'll be a bigger pain in your dreams of space domination than Mace Windu.
Everyone has some half-baked solution like "well, just keep accelerating at 1g for a few years, and you'll be at 0.9c". What they don't think about is what kind of energy you need to keep doing that. Even fusion won't cut it.
At 0.9c, every gram of your ship packs enough kinetic energy as a 29 kiloton atom bomb. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. Even at near perfect efficiency, you'd need two of those to accelerate just one gram of matter to 0.9c.
If you want to do a round trip, you have to accelerate then decelerate in one direction, then accelerate and decelerate again in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And that's with a cannon kind of a setup, so you only accelerate that one gram of matter, not also the rocket and fuel and whatnot. If you carry your own fuel and engines, you'll have to accelerate those too.
Doing it slowly or doing it fast, won't change anything. At the end of the acceleration period, each gram of your ship will still pack that much kinetic energy, so still that much energy will have gone into accelerating it.
Take your choice of realistic engine. Orion? If you took all the atom bombs ever made, they still wouldn't be enough to push even a modest capsule for a one way trip to a good habitable planet. Engine with uranium salts in water? Ditto, plus you now have to accelerate the water and the moderator bars too. Ion thrusters? Well, you still need that much energy piped into accelerating the ions. You'll still need a reactor that produces that much energy, and there just ain't enough uranium produced in the world for that.
The point is that even the next generation still ain't going anywhere. It doesn't matter if they want to push space travel or not, they're still not going to put a guy farther than maybe Mars. Unless some miraculous new source of energy is found -- note that even Star Trek essentially has infinite energy and stored as densely as antimatter -- the next generation is just tied to this rock as we are.
Solar System (Score:2)
Isn't that the same thing, though? (Score:2)
Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either. It's economics and technology that put the kibosh on it.
Going anywhere in the solar system is, of course, going to be an easier proposition, and you can get some of that energy by slingshot fly-bys of planets. It's still going to involve a lot of time, a lot of shielding, and ultimately a lot of energy. I don't think technology and economics will make that a realistic goal for
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Well, that price is actually a function of supply and demand. Namely the supply is infinitessimal. If you start bringing back tons of it, I would expect the price to drop a heck of a lot.
After all, the same happened already to several materials. E.g., at one point aluminium was more expensive than gold, and that's why it was chosen for the cap of the Washington monument. It was a statement to put a cap of a ridiculously expensive precious metal on it. But then in a couple of years a new process started chur
Well, that was of course about space TRAVEL (Score:2)
Well, that was of course about space TRAVEL. Which usually is understood as involving at lea
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Well, I probably am not. You'll notice that in the equivalence to nukes I assumed you can get 29/30=0.9667, i.e., 96,67% efficiency in getting 30 kilotons of energy in the fuel into 29 kilotons of energy in moving that gram of matter. Real engines will be worse than that. I'm trying to be as geberous as I can with the assumptions, really.
Well, I'm making a much more modest claim (Score:2)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that that energy is why it can't EVENTUALLY be done. I'm just saying it's why it won't be done during the lifetime of generation Y either. Since, really, that's what I was answering to: whether it will inspire the next generation to not fail to move on with space travel.
I'm just saying that, yeah, focusing on the here and now, I wouldn't bet on the next generation getting a guy out of the solar system.
Further in the future... who knows? We've only had even cities for l
And just to add one thing about space travel (Score:3)
And just to add one thing about interstellar travel at relativistic speeds: that energy per gram works both ways. If you're going at 0.9c and hit a grain of mater (e.g., ice) just half a gram in weight, that's pretty much stationary compared to your own speed, the energy in that impact is going to be equivalent to having the Hiroshima bomb strapped to your ship and detonated.
When you're moving at relativistic speeds, every single spec of dust or ice is a relativistic weapon, packing energies measured in kil
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Well, the moon race was purely political. What they're doing now is far more useful and interesting. There's no way to know what kind of technology will come out of their science.
And meanwhile, when I was 20 there were two things I knew would never happen in my life: I'd never be able to see without contacts or glasses, and I'd never go to space. The first I was used to, the second depressing, since I've always been a big SF fan.
But I got an implant in my left eye in 2006 and no longer need corrective lense
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These "Newtonian physics demonstrations for ten-year-olds" as you call them are done for PR purposes. They are not the raison d'etre of the space program and are not intended to be.
The astronauts spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public. Taking a small amount of time to do these experiments helps maintain a level of visibility for NASA that translates directly into public support for the program. Without public support, they would quickly lose their budget and
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Um, no. You are obviously too young to remember NASA when it actually had public support. At that time, the public didn't support it because it could demonstrate microgravity parlor tricks. They supported it because it, and its predecessor, NACA, were on the leading edge of human achievement -- making discoveries, setting records, and in general advancing the state of the art -- in almost everything they touched.
And apparently I need to repeat that
According to the original Memorandum of Understanding between NASA and RSA, the International Space Station was intended to be a laboratory, observatory and factory in space.
Fine so far, but can you recall three scientific discover
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You are obviously too young to remember NASA when it actually had public support
I'm quite old enough to remember when the public supported NASA without PR experiments like this. I remember being told the big bad Soviets were going to beat us to the moon, build space based weapons and destroy us all. We were all told constantly that it was our national duty to support the space program and we did.
Those days are over and good riddance.
I mean, what else comes out of it?
It's not my fault that you're too stupid to use Google:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/coolstation.html [nasa.gov]
And no, before you count the it
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Those days are over and good riddance.
These are the days to which I refer. [nasa.gov] Read that speech. Note the minimal amount of nationalistic jingoism, and the upbeat, positive view of exploration. There's only a single, passing reference to the Soviet Union. Sure, there was a space race, but nobody liked NASA because of it. People liked NASA -- and NACA before it -- because of the X-15, because of the probes to Venus and Mars, and yes, because of the trips to the moon. NASA made people feel like they were part of human progress -- doing things
Re:All about energy (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth remembering that the V2 effort helped Germany lose WW2 - the energy needed to produce the fuel meant shortages of fuel for aviation and transport.
That is a LOL moment. If you're going to rewrite engineering history as part of tiresome environmental guilt trip prattle, don't do it on a website populated with engineers. Wrong both at the microscale in that A4/V2 didn't burn avgas or diesel or petrochemicals at all, wrong at the macroscale that every A4/V2 ever launched added together adds up to frankly not very much fuel. Those were relatively tiny SRBMs roughly similar performance to a modern MLRS not a thundering herd of saturn-5s.
fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman ... if they were around to see it.
He didn't die that long ago, you know. Yes he chilled out with the manhatten project dudes as an extremely young man hanging with middle aged and old men. You may have missed he was on the Challenger loss commission in the 80s, etc. Even Dirac didn't die until the early 80s. If you want to surprise a physicist, find someone who croaked before WWII not a recently deceased.
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and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it
Don't be too sure. Feynman and Dirac are still aweing today's physicists.
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It isn't suitable for ground to orbit vehicles, mostly because of environmental concerns.
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The Atomic Airplane project, besides being one of the worst managed, most snake-bit projects, did have one reasonable success - the GE direct-heat engines worked pretty well on the test stands. Those were only driving turbines so it's not directly comparable. But (not having seen any serious analysis of this application) I speculate that a Thorium-fueled (LTFR) atomic engine might well work. If so, then the risk of serious radioactive contamination in the event of rocket failure might well not be very se
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Lolwhut? Fuel costs are an utterly insignificant fraction of the cost of a launch.
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On the other hand, the attempt to produce low cost, low power universal communication tools has been successful beyond the imaginations of people even thirty years ago, and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it.
You are kidding, right?
Feynman and Dirac are responsible for the most successful scientific theory in all of the history of mankind thus far.
Its Quantum Electrodynamics and the theory fits experiment to such a great degree that they were able to predict the value of a fundamental constant verified in their lifetimes to billionths of a percentage point. You talk of modern communication tools but you dont seem to realize that they all owe their existence to the very men you wish to brush off.
Richard Fe
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Feynman diagrams are pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles.
A Feynman diagram is a contribution of a particular class of particle paths, which join and split as described by the diagram.
a Feynman diagram is a graphical representation of a perturbative contribution to the transition amplitude or correlation function of a quantum mechanical or statistical field theory.
a Feynman diagram represents a term in the Wick's expansion of the perturbative S-matrix.
A Feynman diagram is a representation of quantum field theory processes in terms of particle paths.
Feynman diagrams are a pictorial representation of a contribution to the total amplitude for a process which can happen in several different ways.
Feynman diagrams are graphs that represent the trajectories of particles in intermediate stages of a scattering process.
A Feynman diagram represents a perturbative contribution to the amplitude of a quantum transition from some initial quantum state to some final quantum state.
Now surely there is a more concise and meaningful definition of a Feynman diagram that doesn't require four years of post graduate level physics to understand. After all: "Feynman diagrams allow for a simple visualization of what would otherwise be a rather arcane and abstract formula."
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and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it.
If Feynman were around he would be doing fundamental physics. He was actively doing research and teaching 'till the week he died. Look up "Plenty of room at the bottom", or some of his last published papers to see if he would be in awe, or leading the field.
I do agree that there will not likely be enough energy to move a large fraction of people off the planet any millenia soon; but look up the population estimates of humans as they left Africa, we only need to send tens to hundreds to start an off planet s
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Or not.
The shortage of fuel the Germans suffered in WW2 was far more about bombing the crap out of refineries, railyards, and suchlike than about V2 fuel.
Which V2 fuel was ethanol. Made from potatoes.
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You know, I normally hate trolling (you wre trolling, right? You're not REALLY that ignorant, right?) but this one was a gem. It produced many very good comments by folks who seem to know what they're talking about. Well done!
Oh, good job fooling the mods, too. They'll give points to anybody these days...
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The Mars mission* became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved.
* The Mars mission mentioned here was a NASA mission planned in the mid 1960s.
The only reason we don't have nuclear powered rockets right now is that politicians were worried about budget.
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Earth's scape velocity is 10.735 km/s at the Equator. A 100kg men (an obese one) would need 5,8e9 J for reaching that speed, or a bit less than 171 liters of gasoline. (Isn't Wikipedia great? There is a XKCD about that.)
Of course, if you ever intent to get there by a rocket, that need will increase a lot (except if it is nuclear). Also, if you intent to actualy use gasoline on your rocket, you can already forget it.
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For a rocket to get into orbit, most common propellents end up requiring 80% or more of the mass of the rocket be propellent. Now, if we had a big cannon we could do it with the energy you are mentioning.
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If you're young you're almost certain to get the chance to go to space. I'm old, and I may even get the chance.
My grandmother was a nine month old infant when the Wright Brothers first flew. She was on a commercial airliner when I was a small child.
I was six when the Russians launched Sputnik. I still may be able to get to LEO! If you're young, you may make it to the moon.
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. . . but at one time, it was. Whether or not we agree that it is a massive corporate welfare system, at one time NASA did do something constructive. Now, they can't even launch an astronaut.
What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Could be worse I guess; ridged potato chips, for instance.
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Watch out! They're ruffled!
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That wasn't a knitting needle, that was apparently something called a Nitten needle. Either that, or it's easier to learn the skills to be an astronaut than it is to figure out how to pronounce English words.
Science FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care what you say, that is pretty cool, On his free time he is making great videos that, potentially for hundreds of years, will be available for future generations of k-12 science classes.
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Since, at the rate we're going, it's going to be that long before we actually venture seriously into space again.
Alternately, there WILL be such videos, but they'll be in Chinese.
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K-12? These videos will be available for everyone all the way up to physics graduate students and beyond.
You have a cylindrical charged object attracting spheres under a static potential. You can discuss this with first year undergraduates being introduced to circular motion, or final year undergraduates who have learned about cylindrical motion and 3d cylindrical coordinate systems.
You can talk to EM students, and get graduate EM students to consider the conical tapering of the needle and how it affects th
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Perhaps only the central portion of the needle was charged.
Is this experiment about gravity or electricity? (Score:2)
High school was 20 some years ago and I didn't pass physics anyways.
To me it LOOKS like gravity. But I am having a lot of trouble imagining that a knitting needle has enough mass to orbit water droplets. The description talks about another needle off camera which sounds like he is trying to keep a charge on the needle.
So my best guess is that the water droplets are negatively charged, the needles positively charged.
The only thing missing is the orbit. I wasn't aware you could get an orbit out of somethin
Re:Is this experiment about gravity or electricity (Score:4, Informative)
Orbit is usually associated with gravity but it can happen with any attractive force.
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Like I said, didn't pass High School physics.
Strange how the things that interest me change as I get older.
I mean, this stuff is genuinely interesting to me now. It wasn't then.
I had the time to learn it then, I don't now.
life is funny that way.
Suddenly this disembodied voice says: (Score:2)
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Of course electricity can make things orbit. Anything that pushes stuff toghether can make things orbit.
Also, if that something pushes with a force that doesn't change with the 1/r^2 that gravity and electricity do, you can create some quite interesting orbits. Try a string sometime.
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Any attractive force can cause orbit. The water droplets were forced out of a syringe and have a velocity pointing away from the syringe .. when the droplets get attracted to the knitting needle they still retain that velocity/momentum .. the attraction of the needle can't erase the droplet's pre-existing velocity .. this causes the droplet to orbit .. it slowly spirals inwards because air resistance that slows down it's velocity.
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Let me chime in with a zoom-out perspective.
Physics is using math to predict what matter will do in certain circumstances. (I find that pretty mind-blowing - that you can *calculate* what will happen to *stuff* if the system is simple enough. Too bad the calculation approach didn't work out for me so well in the girlfriend department in high school - another story.)
Anyway, the math behind how positive and negative charges attract is the same as the math behind how masses attract: they're both "inverse squ
Gravity vs. EM (Score:2)
So remind me again why this EM effect is unworkable when scaled to the size of planets, moons, and suns? Simply because these astronomical bodies don't maintain charge?
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So remind me again why this EM effect is unworkable when scaled to the size of planets, moons, and suns? Simply because these astronomical bodies don't maintain charge?
Pretty much. Because each type of charge (positive and negative) repels like types of charges and attracts opposite types of charge, in order to get this type of attraction between two objects you need to cram a bunch of positives onto one object, and negatives onto the other. But those positives do not "want" to stay crammed onto the object - they don't "like" each other. Similarly for the negatives. If you get significant numbers of them together, they have a tendency to fly apart.
In contrast, "gravitatio
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in fact, electricity and gravity are identical, except that for gravity there is only one kind of "charge", and the force is only attractive. in electricity, there are two kinds of charges, and there is attraction only between opposed charges.
in practice, if the moon was positively charged and the earth negatively charged, and there was no gravity, you could still obtain the same trajectory of the moon around the earth (provided that you have the correct charges).
the force for gravity is (m1*m2)/(r^2), wher
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I am deaf. I can't hear the sound in the video.
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Your best guess was the right one. Also that second needle was of a different material. I think part of his little experiments was using different charged materials. Teflon, nylon, and so on.
Zero g education (Score:2, Troll)
Zero g as in dropping the 'g' off 'knitting' . It was interesting that he kept the g for orbiting, always dropped it for knittin, but there was one other word that I heard him say where he dropped the g. Is this an indication of when and where he first learnt these words? Or is it just lazy pronunciation, and he can get away with saying knittin, but not orbitin?
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There is a wealth of scientific research about G dropping. For example:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000878.html [upenn.edu]
Unfortunately there is very little research into how zero gravity affects phonology. Time to lobby Congress for more funding,
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There is a wealth of scientific research about G dropping.
The more you know! That was a fascinating read. Thanks for my new word of the day: Phonology.
Nylon / Teflon (Score:2)
I believe if you rub the nylon knittin' needle against the teflon one, one will become positively charged and the other negatively charged. I'm not sure which one is shedding the electrons and which is picking them up, but that's the reason. I'm guessing that the nylon one gains electrons, and teflon donates them.
He's transferring the charge from the needle to the droplets, then they're orbiting the oppositely charged needle due to electrostatic attraction. (the needle wants its electrons back, basically
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They key though, is the induction created to the water droplets which you can read about it here (http://www.eskimo.com/~bi
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