Captain Kirk might want to avoid taking the starship Enterprise to warp speed, unless he’s ready to shrug off interstellar hydrogen atoms that would deliver a lethal radiation blast to both ship and crew.
There are just two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average in space, which poses no threat to spaceships traveling at low speeds. But those same lone atoms would transform into deadly galactic space mines for a spaceship that runs into them at near-light speed, according to calculations based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
The original crew of “Star Trek” featured as unfortunate examples at a presentation by William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 13. The physicist showed a video clip of Kirk telling engineer Scotty to go to warp speed.
“Well, they’re all dead,” Edelstein recalled saying. His words caused a stir among the audience.
This pseudo-scientist has clearly failed basic Warp Theory, Astro-navigation and Elementary Starfleet Engineering. In the first place the deflector array is there to take care of these issues while at impulse and at pre-warp speeds. At Warp Speed they are dislocated from the normal space time continuum inside a subspace bubble.
Duh!
Nice try, Mr. Scientist.
Jamie posted this at 5:29 PM EST on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 as Nerdom
…but at least one dromaeosaurid species might have been venomous. That’s right: raptors with poison!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m locking my doors, boarding up my windows, and staying in for the rest of my life. My only consolations is that — whenever they come to murder me — it will all be over soon.
In our ongoing quest to go where no man has gone before scientists have bad another breakthrough:
To prove that they had really created the trios, called Efimov trimers, the researchers produced one set of three lithium atoms bound together, and then reproduced it with a binding energy 515 times the first one. (Essentially, binding energy indicates how tightly the particles hold onto one another and how much energy it would take to pull them apart.)
The researchers used a setup called a Feshbach resonance that allowed them to tweak the energy levels of their atoms. They found that when they hit multiples of 515, the particles would bind, but at other energies they wouldn’t, proving that the trios really were Efimov trimers.
“It’s an amazing effect, really,” Hulet said. “A lot of people didn’t believe [Efimov] at first. It was a very strange prediction.”
I am not what you would call an audiophile. I don’t obsess over my meticulously cataloged music files in .FLAC format, I don’t own $500 headphones, and I don’t buy all my albums in vinyl because “the music just has more soul, man.” That said, I was recently lent a copy of The Beatles Mono Box Set from a friend of mine.
Holy Crap.
To say that this was an entirely different experience is putting it mildly, it was like hearing many of these songs for the first time. Over the course of the day, and evening, it became quite clear that most of these songs were never meant to be heard in any other format. They were written, arranged and mixed for mono sound and to hear them the way they were intended is to hear the true genius of the greatest band of all time.
I highly reccomend this box set for any true fan of The Beatles (stereo…blech) I know I will need to buy it as my friend is expecting his copy back today.
And rightly so!
Jamie posted this at 10:28 AM EST on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves
Thought of the day: I’m studying under Tom Pangle, who once roomed with Alan Keyes, who ran for Senate in 2004 when Jack Ryan dropped out due to a sex scandal involving his wife, Jeri Ryan.
Dorothy posted this at 12:32 AM EDT on Friday, September 18th, 2009 as Nerdom, Ourselves
I just did a lesson in West Coast Swing. Neat stuff, and I have progressed from not knowing what I’m doing to knowing what’s what and doing so incompetently. Progress!
Chesterton quote: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”
Interestingly, I’ve gotten to the point where I have relatively little trouble asking men to dance, but women are trickier for me to ask. One more thing to play around with.
Orwell: “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”
Politics is getting to me these days. It’s a slow motion trainwreck. Both sides deserve to lose—and they’re doing that. I realize that trends inevitably end, but being patient eludes me. Better to focus on other things.
Florence King: “Another kind of conservative would get drunk. This is easy because we don’t drink liberals’ sissy concoctions; it takes forever to get drunk on wine coolers but we can get there on a few belts.”
I seem to be losing my taste for wine and beer and even my old standby, whiskey. People are starting to think that I’m in AA when I go out and get Diet Coke with lime.
La Rochefoucauld: “Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.”
When I’m too old to set a bad example, please do me the courtesy of not reminding me.
Eric Hoffer: “Facts are counterrevolutionary.”
The counterrevolution is coming. It’ll be interesting to watch.
