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Oct 22, 2012

New whitepaper on Nuclear Industrial Safety

Posted by in categories: engineering, existential risks, nuclear energy, transparency

New whitepaper/critique on Nuclear Industrial Safety — International Nuclear Services Putting Buisness Before Safety and Other Essays on Nuclear Safety — Asserts specific concern over the 2038 clock-wrap issue in old UNIX/IBM Control Systems. This is an aggregation of previous contributions to Lifeboat Foundation on the topic of Nuclear Safety.

http://environmental-safety.webs.com/apps/blog/

http://environmental-safety.webs.com/nuclear_essays.pdf

Comments welcome.

Oct 21, 2012

I Need your Help

Posted by in categories: existential risks, particle physics

I proved that black holes are different – they can only grow in a runaway fashion inside matter.

So if anyone would produce them on earth, earth would be doomed as soon as one would stay. No one disputes this.

Nevertheless the biggest effort at producing them on earth is going to be made during the next 10 weeks. CERN stages it.

I do not ask CERN to stop it: I only ask CERN to explain why they do it.

AND I ASK EVERYONE TO LISTEN

Oct 21, 2012

The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 4)

Posted by in categories: business, cosmology, defense, economics, education, engineering, nuclear weapons, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, scientific freedom, space

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationship, & Technological Feasibility.

In this post I have updated the Interstellar Challenge Matrix (ICM) to guide us through the issues so that we can arrive at interstellar travel sooner, rather than later:

Interstellar Challenge Matrix (Partial Matrix)

Propulsion Mechanism Relatively Safe? Theoretical-Empirical Relationship?
Conventional Fuel Rockets: Yes, but susceptible to human error. Known. Theoretical foundations are based on Engineering Feasible Theories, and have been evolving since Robert Goddard invented the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.
Antimatter Propulsion: No. Extensive gamma ray production (Carl Sagan). Issue is how does one protect the Earth? Capable of an End of Humanity (EOH) event. Dependent on Millennium Theories. John Eades states in no uncertain terms that antimatter is impossible to handle and create.
Atomic Bomb Pulse Detonation: No, because (Project Orion) one needs to be able to manage between 300,000 and 30,000,000 atomic bombs per trip. Known and based on Engineering Feasible Theories.
Time Travel: Do Not Know. Depends on how safely exotic matter can be contained. Dependent on a Millennium Theory. Exotic matter hypotheses are untested. No experimental evidence to show that Nature allows for a breakdown in causality.
String / Quantum Foam Based Propulsion: Do Not Know. Depends on how safely exotic matter can be contained. Dependent on a Millennium Theory. String theories have not been experimentally verified. Exotic matter hypotheses are untested. Existence of Quantum Foam now suspect (Robert Nemiroff).
Small Black Hole Propulsion: No. Capable of an End Of Humanity (EOH) event Don’t know if small black holes really do exist in Nature. Their theoretical basis should be considered a Millennium Theory.

It is quite obvious that the major impediments to interstellar travel are the Millennium Theories. Let us review. Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize 1965) & Sheldon Lee Glashow (Nobel Prize 1979) have criticized string theory for not providing novel experimental predictions at accessible energy scales, but other theoretical physicists (Stephen Hawking, Edward Witten, Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind) believe that string theory is a step towards the correct fundamental description of nature. The Wikipedia article String Theory gives a good overview, and notes other critics and criticisms of string theories. In What is String Theory? Alberto Güijosa explains why string theories have come to dominate theoretical physics. It is about forces, and especially about unifying gravity with the other three forces.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 4)” »

Oct 20, 2012

The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 3)

Posted by in categories: cosmology, defense, education, engineering, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, space

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts:

1. Legal Standing. 2. Safety Awareness. 3. Economic Viability. 4. Theoretical-Empirical Relationship. 5. Technological Feasibility.

In Part 1, we learned that Einstein was phenomenally successful because his work was deeply meshed with the experimental evidence of the day. In Part 2, we learned that to be successful at developing new useful theories and discovering new fundamental properties of Nature that will bring forth new interstellar travel technologies, we need to avoid hypotheses that are not grounded in experimental data, as these are purely mathematical conjectures.

In my book on gravity modification I classified physics hypotheses and theories into 3 categories, as follows:

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 3)” »

Oct 20, 2012

The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 2)

Posted by in categories: cosmology, defense, engineering, philosophy, physics, policy, scientific freedom, space

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts:

1. Legal Standing. 2. Safety Awareness. 3. Economic Viability. 4. Theoretical-Empirical Relationship. 5. Technological Feasibility.

From Part 1 … “that mathematics has become so sophisticated and so very successful that it can now be used to prove anything and everything, and therefore, the loss of certainty that mathematics will provide reasonability in guidance and correctness in answers to our questions in the sciences”.

We need to note that there are several different relationships between the mathematics of physics and the physics of the real world.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 2)” »

Oct 18, 2012

“In Search of a Friend for the End of the World”…

Posted by in categories: existential risks, particle physics

http://www.cinemablographer.com/2012/06/last-night.html
… is too early a movie at the present time (although it is nice). I instead re-iterate that I cannot understand the stubbornness of a whole planet refusing to check whether the offered proof of danger contains an error or not. All of the planet’s media never behaved as irresponsibly before: to refuse checking is never intelligent or defensible in retrospect, or is it?

A German higher administrative court (OVG Münster, Az. 16 A 591/11) ruled definitively yesterday that the principle of reversal of the burden of proof is not applicable in this case: You have to prove that the potentially earth-eating black holes are actually being produced before you can lawfully object to the ongoing attempt at their production.

———————————————–

Let me re-iterate how I see the situation in a manner that is maximally self-critical in a Popperian sense:

Continue reading “‘In Search of a Friend for the End of the World’…” »

Oct 17, 2012

The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 1)

Posted by in categories: business, cosmology, defense, economics, education, engineering, events, finance, human trajectories, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts:

1. Legal Standing. 2. Safety Awareness. 3. Economic Viability. 4. Theoretical-Empirical Relationship. 5. Technological Feasibility.

In Part 1 of this post I will explore Theoretical-Empirical Relationship. Not theoretical relationships, not empirical relationships but theoretical-empirical relationships. To do this let us remind ourselves what the late Prof. Morris Kline was getting at in his book Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, that mathematics has become so sophisticated and so very successful that it can now be used to prove anything and everything, and therefore, the loss of certainty that mathematics will provide reasonability in guidance and correctness in answers to our questions in the sciences.

History of science shows that all three giants of science of their times, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton & Christiaan Huygens believed that light traveled in aether medium, but by the end of the 19th century there was enough experimental evidence to show aether could not be a valid concept. The primary experiment that changed our understanding of aether was the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887, which once and for all proved that aether did not have the correct properties as the medium in which light travels.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Theoretical-Empirical Relationship (Part 1)” »

Oct 15, 2012

“Thanks for the Fish!” – paid to an Anonymous Group on the Internet

Posted by in categories: existential risks, particle physics

Today is Felix-Baumgartner day since creativity wins. And today, I saw an interesting dialog about my potentially planet-saving results on the Internet. The latter was conducted by amateur physicists ( http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?113769-Invited-%28pe…-R%F6ssler ) who thereby have earned great merit since the whole rest of the profession refuses to come out.

The young colleagues tried to convince themselves and their readers that my “Telemach” result, which has the planet-saving potential if flawless, violates textbook and wiki wisdom and therefore is bound to be false.

Nevertheless I am very grateful to Mr. “rpenner” (pseudonym) and his friends for their being the only scientists so far who dare come out in a not totally anonymous way.

The emphasis they place on the Rindler metric at the beginning is especially meritorious. The Rindler metric is arguably the most important post-Einsteinian discovery. It implies the Telemach theorem – on the truthfulness of which the survival of the planet is predicated as no one denies.

Continue reading “‘Thanks for the Fish!’ – paid to an Anonymous Group on the Internet” »

Oct 14, 2012

The Kline Directive: Economic Viability

Posted by in categories: business, complex systems, defense, economics, education, engineering, finance, military, nuclear weapons, philosophy, physics, policy, scientific freedom, space, sustainability

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts:

1. Legal Standing. 2. Safety Awareness. 3. Economic Viability. 4. Theoretical-Empirical Relationship. 5. Technological Feasibility.

In this post I will explore Economic Viability. I have proposed the Interstellar Challenge Matrix (ICM) to guide us through the issues so that we can arrive at interstellar travel sooner, rather than later. Let us review the costs estimates of the various star drives just to reach the velocity of 0.1c, as detailed in previous blog posts:

Interstellar Challenge Matrix (Partial Matrix)

Propulsion Mechanism Legal? Costs Estimates
Conventional Fuel Rockets: Yes Greater than US$1.19E+14
Antimatter Propulsion: Do Not Know. Between US$1.25E+20 and US$6.25E+21
Atomic Bomb Pulse Detonation: Illegal. This technology was illegal as of 1963 per Partial Test Ban Treaty Between $2.6E12 and $25.6E12 . These are Project Orion original costs converted back to 2012 dollar. Requires anywhere between 300,000 and 30,000,000 bombs!!
Time Travel: Do Not Know. Requires Exotic Matter, therefore greater than antimatter propulsion costs of US$1.25E+20
Quantum Foam Based Propulsion: Do Not Know. Requires Exotic Matter, therefore greater than antimatter propulsion costs of US$1.25E+20
Small Black Hole Propulsion: Most Probably Illegal in the Future Using CERN to estimate. At least US$9E+9 per annual budget. CERN was founded 58 years ago in 1954. Therefore a guestimate of the total expenditure required to reach its current technological standing is US$1.4E11.

Note Atomic Bomb numbers were updated on 10/18/2012 after Robert Steinhaus commented that costs estimates “are excessively high and unrealistic”. I researched the topic and found Project Orion details the costs, of $2.6E12 to $25.6E12, which are worse than my estimates.

Continue reading “The Kline Directive: Economic Viability” »

Oct 14, 2012

Congratulations Skydiver Felix Baumgartner

Posted by in categories: business, complex systems, defense, engineering, events, fun, philosophy, physics, space

Congratulations Skydiver Felix Baumgartner, on the success of your 24 mile skydive. You proved that it is possible to bail out of a space ship and land on Earth safely.

The records are nice to have but the engineering was superb!