You ain't seen nothin' yet... science is cool.

[Bzalthek]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208130038.htm

Under just the right conditions -- which involve an ultra-high-intensity laser beam and a two-mile-long particle accelerator -- it could be possible to create something out of nothing, according to University of Michigan researchers.

Apparently, there's a theory that the vacuum of space isn't really just nothing, but rather a mixture of matter and antimatter, and under the right conditions it is theoretically possible to extract that matter and antimatter out, essentially MAGIC!

[Lantyssa]

Isn't that interesting?

I imagine that has serious implications for both dark matter (it was there all along, it's just jumbled up matter and anti-matter) which could still have different densities, and the Big Bang.

"Let there be Light" indeed.

[MahrinSkel]

This concept has been around for a while, essentially it's saying that the zero-point energy of the universe, the lowest actual energy state, and the lowest *possible* energy state, are not the same (and neither one is truly zero).  So, under the right conditions you could force vacuum to a lower energy state and extract energy.

Of course, you might in the process create a pocket of lower-energy space with completely different laws of physics (and maybe even different dimensional properties).  And it's possible that pocket would unravel space as we know it at C, dividing the existing universe between a high-energy (but low entropy) remnant of our current universe and the low energy (but very high entropy) new universe.

Oh, and this has probably has happened before, and might even have been what we currently call the "inflationary" phase of the Big Bang.

--Dave

[pxib]

Heh. What he said. Not something out of nothing. Matter out of energy.

Zero-point energy has been theoretical for at least a hundred years and quack generators claiming to be based on it have been around for at least half that time. The trouble tends to be that it takes at least as much, and in practice considerably more energy to separate the particles from the anti-particles than can be gained by exploiting them. Like the article says, the main application they're researching is making fusion cleaner by directing the stray particles and high energy photons current prototype reactors create.

In related news, some scientists at CERN are making considerable quantites of relatively stable antihydrogen:

Cold antihydrogen will be a new tool for precision studies in a broad range of science. Most fundamental will be the comparison of the interaction of hydrogen and antihydrogen with electromagnetic and gravitational fields. Any difference between matter and antimatter, however small, would have profound consequences for our fundamental understanding of Nature and the Universe.

[Draegan]

Are we closer to flying cars yet?

[Nerf]

Are we closer to flying cars yet?

Most people can't even manage to operate a grocery cart, do you really want to live in constant fear of some drunken idiot turning your house into a smoldering crater at 2am?

On the plus side, you'll only have to worry about any particular idiot once..

[Draegan]

Are we closer to flying cars yet?

Most people can't even manage to operate a grocery cart, do you really want to live in constant fear of some drunken idiot turning your house into a smoldering crater at 2am?

On the plus side, you'll only have to worry about any particular idiot once..

Obviously my house has a force field around it.  On the down side, your land lord probably is still asking for your vets number before he fixes yours.

[Morat20]

Doesn't this all date back to virtual particle pairs? Ye Olde Fenmen diagrams? Shit pops into existance, floats around, collides in an orgy of mutual annihiliation whose only product travels back in time to set off the original 'shit pops into existance' bit?

And the Casmir effect is related, I think.

Reality is where at the quantum level. Sometimes "It's all just a giant computer simulation" makes a heck of a lot more sense. Although casuality violations would be interesting to code.

[Sheepherder]

Most people can't even manage to operate a grocery cart, do you really want to live in constant fear of some drunken idiot turning your house into a smoldering crater at 2am?

You do know that a car can leave a road, right?

[Murgos]

Doesn't this all date back to virtual particle pairs?

Yes, it's the same theory.  Just recently rediscovered by some wanna-be science journalist who knows less than they should and then spewed out for mass consumption without understanding it.

[Morat20]

Yes, it's the same theory.  Just recently rediscovered by some wanna-be science journalist who knows less than they should and then spewed out for mass consumption without understanding it.

Might be someone actually doing something new with it. The LHC is moving up to the 'tiny black hole' territories, which while not exactly new science is pushing it in new directions.

Or possibly destroying the earth. Who knows. :)

[Typhon]

This is not new at all, and even the article recognizes this:  "An experiment in the late '90s managed to generate from a vacuum gamma photons and an occasional electron-positron pair."

So, since the 90s (my memory from being a physics graduate student says prior to 1992), it's been known that if you generate an electric field strong enough you rip an electron-positron pair out of the vacuum (and the electric field gets weaker).

All they seem to be saying here is that there is a way to create a bit of a cascade at higher energy levels (sucking more out of the field all at once) - possibly creating hadrons instead of leptons.

[Nerf]

Are we closer to flying cars yet?

Most people can't even manage to operate a grocery cart, do you really want to live in constant fear of some drunken idiot turning your house into a smoldering crater at 2am?

On the plus side, you'll only have to worry about any particular idiot once..

Obviously my house has a force field around it.  On the down side, your land lord probably is still asking for your vets number before he fixes yours.

Goddamnit, i rost.

Also, of course cars can leave the road, drunken idiots crash into houses all the time, it generally doesn't make the news with the headline 'local home turned into smoldering crater', just like plane crashes generally don't have stories showing a picture with everyone standing around unharmed looking at the nose of the plane inside their dining room.

[Nevermore]

Also, of course cars can leave the road, drunken idiots crash into houses all the time, it generally doesn't make the news with the headline 'local home turned into smoldering crater', just like plane crashes generally don't have stories showing a picture with everyone standing around unharmed looking at the nose of the plane inside their dining room.

[Sheepherder]

Cars are probably more dangerous, they're heavier and tend to move faster while in the proximity of houses.  There is also the factor that most roofs are designed to absorb quite a bit of weight, while walls are not designed for horizontal impact.

[Nevermore]

I almost posted that one of the dudes with the shovels standing around out front but decided to go with the plane sticking out of the house instead.  Point being, small aircraft don't leave smoldering craters where houses used to be when they crash into them.

[Nerf]

Planes carry a lot more fuel than cars do, and that tank is much more likely to rupture on an impact than a cars gas is.  Couple that with the crash severing gas lines and electrical wiring, and you've got a much higher chance of a plane leaving a smoldering crater than a car.

[Pennilenko]

Planes carry a lot more fuel than cars do, and that tank is much more likely to rupture on an impact than a cars gas is.  Couple that with the crash severing gas lines and electrical wiring, and you've got a much higher chance of a plane leaving a smoldering crater than a car.

You are insane, and like to argue.

[Sheepherder]

Planes carry a lot more fuel than cars do, and that tank is much more likely to rupture on an impact than a cars gas is.  Couple that with the crash severing gas lines and electrical wiring, and you've got a much higher chance of a plane leaving a smoldering crater than a car.

You have no fucking clue what you're talking about, do you?

FAKEEDIT:

[Nerf]

You're both right, planes never catch on fire when they hit things.



It was all a setup, and there were already explosives planted in the towers, the planes were just a diversion.

Edit: Name an airplane with an 11 gallon fuel tank, I'll wait. 

[Kitsune]

A lot of people seem to be hung up on high school science class telling them that perpetual motion is a myth, you can't have lossless transfers of energy, etc, and never catch on to the unspoken corollary '...in a closed system.'  We aren't in a closed system and are constantly awash in random energy from countless sources.  If somebody invented a little machine that would run forever (or as close to forever as possible before wear and tear broke it), you just know that someone who really didn't get it in the audience would jump up and be all "But perpetual motion is impossible!"  If the machine is running off of power from heat in the air, radio waves, the planet's magnetic field or gravity, etc, it's not a perpetual motion hoax, it's just clever.

Where this comes to relevance is in the fact that, apparently unknown to the astute author of the article, he isn't describing something actually coming from nothing.  It's something coming from something that we can't see and weren't making use of before.  Tapping into an undetected and unused source of energy is 'free' in the sense that it was just going to waste before but is now powering our TVs, but that doesn't do a damn thing to skirt the basic fundamentals of the universe.  If anything, I'd be more than a little worried if someone did discover something that appeared to be genuinely free energy.  Next thing you know, it'll turn out that we were gnawing at the fabric of the universe for that energy, and now the planet's hurling out of orbit or something.

[MahrinSkel]

You're both right, planes never catch on fire when they hit things.

It was all a setup, and there were already explosives planted in the towers, the planes were just a diversion.

Edit: Name an airplane with an 11 gallon fuel tank, I'll wait. 

Small planes rarely catch fire when they crash.  For that matter, neither do cars, outside of TV and movies.

--Dave

[NowhereMan]

Holy crap did Nerf just Giuliani an internet argument about flying cars?

[DraconianOne]

Flying car hits church...



,

[Murgos]

Anyway, AVGAS is basically liquid wax and needs certain conditions to combust and light planes full of fuel aren't typically the ones that crash into houses (unless your house is at the end of a runway).

Also, there are about a million reasons why a 747 hitting  the WTC != a Cessna plonking into a roof.  About 550 of them are called MPH, 950,000 of them are called Mass the last 50,000 or so are called gallons of fuel.

[Chimpy]

There is also the little detail about no 747 ever hitting a building. 

[Nevermore]

Wait, you mean the picture Nerf posted isn't of a 25' long, 3600lb max weight Cessna 400 hitting a building, with its 98 gallon tank using fuel that's actually less explosive than automotive gasoline?  Surely you jest!

[Lantyssa]

Planes always explode in huge fireballs.  Every Arnie and Bruce Willis movie ever taught me this.

[Yegolev]

This thread is going places.

[HaemishM]

You're both right, planes never catch on fire when they hit things.
< 9-11 Picture Snipped >

I may be completely mistaken on this one, but the difference between the picture you posted and the pictures posted about is that one set of planes were ginormous jumbo jets while the others were very tiny prop planes. I think jet fuel may be a little more flamey than that used for prop engines. But you go right on and tilt at that windmill, Don.

[Xuri]

Exploding Cessna

[Daeven]

Isn't that interesting?

I imagine that has serious implications for both dark matter (it was there all along, it's just jumbled up matter and anti-matter) which could still have different densities, and the Big Bang.

"Let there be Light" indeed.

I'm still going with 'Dark Matter is nothing but a hell of a lot more Brown Dwarfs and loose Hydrogen than we thought' - until someone actually finds some anyway. But definitely a nifty article.

[Morat20]

I'm still going with 'Dark Matter is nothing but a hell of a lot more Brown Dwarfs and loose Hydrogen than we thought' - until someone actually finds some anyway. But definitely a nifty article.

I think distribution on that is a problem. If it was that evenly distributed, I think I'd defintely go with "We're all in a simuliation, and someone forgot to turn off the Brown Dwarf node markers for the 3D grid".

[Daeven]

I'm still going with 'Dark Matter is nothing but a hell of a lot more Brown Dwarfs and loose Hydrogen than we thought' - until someone actually finds some anyway. But definitely a nifty article.

I think distribution on that is a problem. If it was that evenly distributed, I think I'd defintely go with "We're all in a simuliation, and someone forgot to turn off the Brown Dwarf node markers for the 3D grid".

Oh there's definitely problems with the distribution. Conversely, it's better than 'magic really heavy invisible unicorns'. ;)

[Mrbloodworth]

My first question is.....how?