1 hour ago, thewowsignal said:

Many decades of scientific research in the area of particle and quantum physics did not manage to bring this civilization to a higher level in terms of energy efficiency. There are many smaller and bigger labs around the world trying to make a scientific breakthrough. A small team of scientists following their own path, in my opinion, has better chances of making a significant scientific discovery. At least if they fail the financial 'damage' is not that big.
I know that many people will never agree to the above. To support my point of view please take a look at the LHC and how much it already costed. Do you think it is really worth the money already spent on it? Besides, a small team of scientific and enthusiastic nerds is worth more than thousands of people following the same way of thinking and waiting for a coffee break.
I think last couple of decades is the best argument to support my point of view. And scientific forums full of unanswered questions and weird theories make many young people doubt in trying to follow what is going on.

Energy efficiency is not generally the goal of particle and quantum physicists, surely? Or do you mean those occupied with fusion research? 

1 hour ago, thewowsignal said:

Is there any alternative to nuclear energy? Long term, nuclear energy creates more problems than solutions. For many decades mankind has been trying to develop more efficient way of producing energy and tackle nuclear waste. Many scientific teams around the world hope to make some progress in this area. Billions of taxpayers money are being pumped into the research every year.
Is there any chance for nuclear fussion technology to power our homes and businesses in the near future? Is there any chance for nuclear power plants to become obsolete?

I want to start a serious discussion here about our future on this small planet. This thread is especially dedicated to those of you, who are enthusiastic about atomic energy and energy crisis.

"Fussion" isn't a word. Do you mean fission or fusion? If you mean fusion, then I doubt it will make a contribution for another 30 years at least. But its long term potential is such that it justifies the current level of expenditure. 

52 minutes ago, TheVat said:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/10/kfc-apologises-for-kristallnacht-chicken-and-cheese-promotion

 

This made me burst out laughing, it is so crassly ignorant and incompetent. The laziness of pretending to be local and neighbourly, without even bothering to have a German  sign off promotions referencing the local culture, is breathtaking. Some computer in the US seems to have been allowed to do it, unchecked, based on a calendar of anniversaries. 

1 minute ago, Externet said:

Thanks.    "times" ?

"times" = "multiplied by". 

35 minutes ago, Sensei said:

https://www.google.com/search?q=noble+gas+discharge+tubes (and click Image mode)

On the right are pictures of various noble gases glowing in discharge tubes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas

If you want to verify this more rigorously, get a prism and split it into spectral lines.

ps. Your HV is not steady - build Cockcroft-Walton generator and/or Marx generator.

110/230 VAC -> DC -> high-frequency AC (timer 555?) -> CW generator -> discharge tube

Indeed. The orange-red in the video looks like neon, specifically. But obviously videos may not represent colours accurately.

9 minutes ago, MacLeodNicholas said:

Thanks for this, I will look into it and try to do something with this information.

Good luck.

8 hours ago, Axxel said:

 

Hi there!

I have few years still without any solution.

I could find just only one exemplary of this bulb or lamp there I share pictures, this is exactly what I need to know what it is, brand or datasheet.

The base is E27.

 

 

 

 

AND the most important, In this VIDEO you can see the lamp working: (I don't know is this usage is the correct usage, the lamp is powered with HV with only a single cable, it runs like a Plasma ball lamp) - Aparenlty these lamps are used to generate ozone.

Hope you can help me! I have YEARS with this issue... I never could resolve it...

Kindly Regards ;D

 

If you don't know what they are, from where do you get the information that they are used to generate ozone?

The video (which is very poor quality) seems to show a reddish glow. However ozone production by photolysis requires UV. So something doesn't seem to stack up here. 

If the ozone information is wrong, then the red glow suggests to me it could be a neon discharge tube of some sort. 

2 hours ago, geordief said:

If any point in the spacetime  model  is specified  wrt any reference point is it  inevitably the case that that point can only ever be an approximation to any physical activity that actually  takes place there?

If so is this  because of theories like the Uncertainty  Principle  or does it simply follow from the spacetime model itself, because it models both position and time ,as well as (I imagine) that  at the most detailed level that all things are  in relative motion no matter how we try to set up any scenario that might illustrate processes at rest to each other?**

 

**Not completely sure if that is completely accurate and I think Studiot recently disagreed with Joigus as to whether "Panta Rhei" was as fundamental a proposition  as I have always taken it to be.

No. 

The uncertainty principle comes from QM, not relativity, and relates to non-commuting operators or, in the wave formalism, to certain pairs of properties being related to each other through Fourier transforms, whereby increasing precision in one leads to loss of precision in the other. QM is applied to physical systems - objects, if you like - rather than to spacetime. 

27 minutes ago, Scienc said:

I am a beginner in QE and I have a question. During I was reading about Output file, I saw a part where have it:

"The calculation goes on step by step until convergence is reached. Then we show all the energies of all bands (eigenvalues of the Kohn-Shan orbitals) for each k-point, the Fermi energy, the total energy, the contributions of all the terms to the total energy, and the calculation time used by each subroutine of the program."

Output file:

...
iteration #  9     ecut=   100.00 Ry     beta=0.70
Davidson diagonalization with overlap
ethr =  1.00E-13,  avg # of iterations =  1.0

negative rho (up, down):  1.151E-06 0.000E+00

total cpu time spent up to now is       28.4 secs

End of self-consistent calculation

     k = 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 (  3909 PWs)   bands (ev):

-17.8569  -5.9595  -1.3957  -1.3957   4.4242   9.2594   9.9561   9.9561

     k = 0.0000 0.0550 0.0000 (  3909 PWs)   bands (ev):

-17.8034  -5.8955  -1.6155  -1.5115   4.4968   9.3266   9.9837  10.1886
...
-10.9411 -10.9411  -8.9101   1.6562   1.6562  12.4084  14.2298  14.2298

the Fermi energy is     1.6562 ev

!    total energy              =     -22.80493136 Ry
Harris-Foulkes estimate   =     -22.80493136 Ry
estimated scf accuracy    <          1.5E-15 Ry

The total energy is the sum of the following terms:

one-electron contribution =     -44.02527202 Ry
hartree contribution      =      24.36506286 Ry
xc contribution           =      -6.99363523 Ry
ewald contribution        =       3.85762303 Ry
Dispersion Correction     =      -0.00870488 Ry
smearing contrib. (-TS)   =      -0.00000512 Ry

convergence has been achieved in   9 iterations

Writing output data file grafeno.save

init_run     :      2.26s CPU      2.29s WALL (       1 calls)
electrons    :     20.10s CPU     20.24s WALL (       1 calls)

...

Parallel routines
fft_scatter  :      4.35s CPU      4.44s WALL (   23020 calls)

PWSCF        :    28.46s CPU        28.70s WALL


This run was terminated on:  11:51: 0   5Sep2017            

=------------------------------------------------------------------------------=
JOB DONE.
=------------------------------------------------------------------------------=

 

I don't know the first thing about this program, but it sounds to me as if it may use some sort of method of iterative approximation that converges towards a final value. If that is so it may be programmed to stop iterating when the difference between successive iterations falls below a preset level, or something. Could that makes sense?

1 hour ago, MigL said:

There are such things as 'rotons' and 'maxons', so I don't thinkhe's missing the 'P'.
They are theoretical constructs, useful in Bose-Einstein Condensate theory.

See here       Roton - Wikipedia

Yes, so I discover.  

38 minutes ago, 2dlayman said:

Do I understand correctly that ordinary rotons increase mass and extraordinary rotons decrease mass?

20 minutes ago, MigL said:

Yes.
That's why I don't add croutons to my Caesar salad.

( an excitation in superfluids may increase momentum, but not mass )

Rotons go very well with "p"s, I find. 

2 hours ago, Malle said:

I have no idea how to calculate the following task since I don't know the enzyme concentration - can someone help me?
I can't find a similar task to this - so I'm pretty lost.

The KM value for an enzyme is 20 mM. At a koncentration of 30 Mm, how much of the enzyme in percentage is bound to the substrate?

A) 40% B) 50% C) 33% D) 60%

Well it's multiple choice, so all you need do is choose an answer that seems sensible.  

What % of the enzyme is bound to the substrate at the Km value? You should know this from the definition of Km.

So then you can ask yourself whether the actual concentration of substrate is higher or lower than this - and choose an appropriate answer accordingly.

(At least, that is how it seems to me. Being a chemist, I didn't know what Km was, so I've had to to look it up. But I think I could now choose the correct answer.) 

3 hours ago, kenny1999 said:

I mean, fine scratch that you can probably find under light sources and you don't even feel it with your fingers. Are those fine scratches enough to harbor germs and bacteria?

I'm not talking about large scratches or cracks that I'll simply toss them without question.

Bacteria have a length of the order of 1 micron. The honing pattern in the cylinder liner of an engine, which is a pattern you can see but can't easily feel with your fingers, has grooves about a micron in depth. So if the scratches you are talking about are of this magnitude there will not be space for a colony of bacteria to hide in them. But as @Peterkinsays, there are some bacteria on all surfaces that have not just been sterilised and there will no doubt be a few in the scratches too. This is not a concern. The vast majority are not harmful and even for those that can be, our bodies are adapted to dealing with the sorts of low levels of them we are likely to encounter in daily life.

6 hours ago, kenny1999 said:

I find that when I cook with oil, if the pan isn't hot enough, the oil runs slowly, but when it gets hot enough, the oil runs faster. How to explain this phenomenon?

There are intermolecular forces acting between the molecules in the liquid, which have to be overcome in order for molecules to slide past one another. At higher temperatures, a greater proportion of the molecules have enough kinetic energy to overcome at least some of these forces, reducing the resistance to them moving relative to one another.  

2 hours ago, MathHelp said:

Hi there,

I wanted to learn some calculus for statistics but it seems like pre-calculus will take many months. If you look at this page from Khan Academy, it does not look like it will be something I can understand for a long time:

Precalculus | Math | Khan Academy

I was wondering if the path to calculus would be shorter if there is something very specific I want to achieve.

What I would like to do is learn one aspect of statistics through calculus - would anyone be able to offer me a roadmap for that? You can choose the part of statistics that the roadmap applies to.

My overall goal is to have a very strong understanding of statistics and eventually understand calculus through statistics. This roadmap would just be a start - I would continue to learn calculus. I happen to find statistics to be a strong motivator for me as I can easily see the direct application to it in my life.

Any help would be appreciated. 

Edit: I'm referring to basic 1st year statistics. Although I am not formally enrolled in a course. I work fulltime and just study a statistics book in my sparetime.

It looks as if this is part of a general mathematical course. Learning basic differential calculus is relatively easy and doesn't require much of all that stuff. I learned it when I was 15, as part of the old UK O-Level syllabus. I don't think statistics helps much with learning calculus. You just need to draw functions as a graph and see how you can make approximations to the slope of the line that, in the limiting case, give you an exact value. There are various videos on this. Looking at them quickly I thought this one was fairly clear.

The chief mathematical idea is the idea of limits, what happens to an algebraic quantity when one variable gets smaller and smaller and tends to zero.   

But then the power of knowing the slope of a function at any point on its graph is that that represents its rate of change. This leads onto all sorts of applications. For example the rate of change of distance with time is velocity and the rate of change of velocity with time is acceleration. Also, the point a slope becomes zero is a maximum or a minimum (or sometimes a point of inflexion) of the curve, so you can find maximum and minimum values of functions this way. And there are lots more applications of course.

Integral calculus is the inverse process, in effect calculating the area under a portion of a curve. There are teaching modules on that too. 

So I think you should be able to short-circuit the modules of the Khan Academy course and go directly to calculus, provided you are OK with algebra and graphing functions and can understand limits. 

(I speak as a chemist rather than a mathematician. It may be that a proper mathematician would disapprove of the short cuts I am suggesting.) 

2 minutes ago, geordief said:

Yes ,I noticed that.Makes it more immediately practical I would think.

 

I wonder if it  is much less costly  to maintain those systems than to develop  them after they have been lost.Does the soil just get washed away  and take hundreds of years to reestablish.

I wonder if the carbon credit economy will take off  as I think I saw mentioned  there or perhaps  it was elsewhere.

 

Would be good if that system worked to the advantage of poorer regions .

 

I noticed that the marshes in Essex (and elsewhere).were being flooded in recent years by punching holes in the sea walls.

 

Would that be the sort of thing they have in mind?

Not sure, but it could be. Salt marsh seems to be what they are advocating.

But actually this marsh stuff is different from your original link, which was about things like kelp and sea grass i.e. actual seaweed, growing under salt water. 

1 hour ago, geordief said:

This seems much better  and goes into much more detail but they are "players in the game" (not that I would be a skeptic for that  )

 

https://www.thebluecarboninitiative.org/about-blue-carbon

Thanks, that is more informative. I notice however that the emphasis is on conserving existing littoral ecosystems, i.e. preventing their loss, rather than developing them as new carbon sinks  to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.  

11 minutes ago, geordief said:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/02/opinions/mittermeier-nicklen-oceans-blue-carbon-climate-change-scn-spc-c2e/index.html

 

"Opinion: The ocean’s ‘blue carbon’ can be our secret weapon in fighting climate 6"

 

 

This is the first I have come across this idea.

How promising  is it?

 

1. Can we "farm" the seas to sequester carbon from the atmosphere?

The article seems pretty poor at explaining it. There is a handwaving mention of kelp and seagrass but no discussion of the associated carbon cycle. These are plants with finite life. What happens to the carbon when they die? Maybe someone here can comment.

I've a feeling I've seen this silly question before, somewhere. 

On 10/29/2022 at 12:08 PM, studiot said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-63402811

 

 

Just look how low this dam is.

Surely the relevant question is how high this lake or tarn is above the generating station, i.e. the head available for power generation. In the Highlands, one of the things that is free is height. 

1 hour ago, Eise said:

Oh, I nearly always see steel constructions in thunder clouds ...

OK, without joking, there is a nice subtle difference in Kevin's thunderstorm, and real-life thunderstorms. With Kevin, all the droplets fall downwards. So my guess is that this construction is needed, because otherwise the influence can not be self-amplifying. In real thunderclouds of course we have up- and down-streams, making steel constructions unnecessary. 

Indeed. If you read my description of the inductive mechanism in the OP, it explains how that can take place.

1 hour ago, trevorjohnson32 said:

Hey Exchemist, hot handing my question from the other forum ay?

I think we need to look at the difference between non lightning rain clouds and lightning bearing rain clouds. Both are going to have friction in the clouds. Could perhaps the keys lie in the clouds reaching up to a higher level of ionsphere? Perhaps the heat from humidity rises and collects in the ionsphere and produces lightning that is attracted to the heavy metal on and in Earth?

The electrosphere layer (from tens of kilometers above the surface of the Earth to the ionosphere) has a high electrical conductivity and is essentially at a constant electric potential.

Storm clouds are 6-12 miles high.

So as gravity tapers off into the exosphere, it gets colder and probably more conductive, or it could be conductive from Earth's magnetic field, or a combination of the two, the clouds reaching up so high are like wires for the heat on the surface up into the colder regions, then the heat converts to electricity probably from running water through the conductive zones, or maybe something else, and of course then you get lightning.

Yes Trevor it was stimulated by the research I did on this arising from your question on the other forum. There are more scientists here, so there is more of a chance of getting further with the topic.  Suggest you read and learn, and refrain from outlandish speculations. 

28 minutes ago, studiot said:

No I don't think so.

For a start that machine requires large continuous metallic conductors AKA wires in the sky.
Last time I looked I didn't see any.

Secondly you quite rightly identified upward movement as well as downward movement.
Again I don't see this in the machine.

But many thanks for bringing this gadget to my attention.
I had not heard of it before.
If you listen to others, you can learn somthing new every day.

+1

 

The Maynard model I referred to is the result of many measurements of the electric field at various altitudes and is used in the flying industry for calibrating navigation equiment.

It is a capacitive model.

It also has both upward and downward movement of particles.
It was the result of a geat deal of research in the decades mid 1940s to mid 1960s.

Curiously, Maynard's name does not appear in the review of the various models that I linked in the OP. A lot of work has been done since the 1960s, so it may have been superseded.

Rather than sending me 10 pages by PM, is it possible for you to post a short summary of its key features?

1 hour ago, Eise said:

Kevin's Thunderstorm? See here, from Veritasium.

Are clouds with upgoing and downfalling drops and ice crystals not gigantic influence machines, so to speak wet versions of the Wimshurst machine?

Which, of course as nothing more than you suggest...

Nice. This seems to be the inductive model, more or less. 

8 hours ago, Scienc said:

So, is the true value for work +22, because work is done on the system?

I used the 𐤃U = q+w. because I studied in a chemical class. However, I considered the contribution to work as negative. The book on the other hand, used a positive signal for work.

The images is from the book.

I think it best to keep in mind what is happening physically, to ensure your answer makes sense. If there is a volume reduction, the atmosphere is compressing the system. Then as @sethoflagossays, that adds internal energy, so if what you get out as heat is less than this, the net internal energy must have gone up, so ΔU has to be +ve.   

But I confess I too was thrown by the term "expansion work" when in fact what happens is the opposite, viz. compression work - at least from the system's point of view. It may be that the learning point for both of us is what @sethoflagos says about "expansion work" being used to denote any form of PdV work, regardless of whether it is expansion or compression of the system. I was never taught this terminology. We always spoke of "PdV work" and left it at that, which is far less confusing in my estimation.