Casimir, Levitation, and No Friction

[Select]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070806/sc ... 0806132733
Sorry it's a Yahoo link, but you can just pick the article out from under all the images. Found the content pretty interesting.

[Minute]

Aww you fucker, I tried to post this yesterday but couldn't cause chase.net.au was down.

Anyway yeah if this isn't bunk it's awesome. I want a hover board.

[Select]

Tinest hover board ever.
Still waiting on flying cars to be everywhere. I want a flying vette

[Arathena]

... Holy... Shit. It just sunk in what they were doing.

I need to read the research article. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I need to go back to school and specialize.

[Minute]

Yes you should, and build me a fucking hover board.

P.S. The stuff they listed for it's uses seems retarded... I mean yes I agree those would be good uses too, but how about some practical uses? I mean maybe I'm wrong but this is a BIG FUCKING DEAL man? In fact, outside a few sites I haven't seen this getting that much publicity. What the hell? Some baby machine spits out another addition to over population and that's big news, invent something that could completely revolutionize an enormous array of different things and it gets a spot of internet coverage. Again... WTF

[Select]

But America doesn't like science, Minute.
Still waiting on my fricking bullet train here... Which is possible

Go for it, Ara!

[Arathena]

Yes you should, and build me a fucking hover board.

P.S. The stuff they listed for it's uses seems retarded... I mean yes I agree those would be good uses too, but how about some practical uses? I mean maybe I'm wrong but this is a BIG FUCKING DEAL man? In fact, outside a few sites I haven't seen this getting that much publicity. What the hell? Some baby machine spits out another addition to over population and that's big news, invent something that could completely revolutionize an enormous array of different things and it gets a spot of internet coverage. Again... WTF

The immediate, practical impact is comparatively low. It will be ten years or more before this is properly implemented into the places it needs to be implemented. The field of micron scale machinery is very young. This, if it is confirmed and reproducible in the required environments, will take entire fields of engineering and turn them on their head. It has the possibility to upend a lot of what we know about field physics and giving it a good shake down. It's not the now... it's the next.

[Ddrak]

Why is there a picture of an airbag inflating beside the article? May as well have had a rabbit with a pancake on its head.

Dd

[Arathena]

Currently, the sensors used to deploy airbags are one of the largest commercial applications of micromachines, of the kind that this promises to alter. It is like having a bunny with a pancake on its head next to an article on preparing flour.

[Select]

This, if it is confirmed and reproducible in the required environments, will take entire fields of engineering and turn them on their head. It has the possibility to upend a lot of what we know about field physics and giving it a good shake down. It's not the now... it's the next.

Usually a good thing. Progress!

[Minute]

I hate the next. I want the next to be now. I need to win the damn lottery, I swear every cent of my possible funding would go to making cool shit a reality. It grinds my nerves to know how far behind in technology and the single and only reason is because there is no commercial demand for it... and what's worse is that there WOULD BE a commercial demand for it if other markets weren't so driven by greed.

Solar for example, I've seen articles saying that we've now reached a remarkable 43.5% efficiency rate... I've seen these rates jumping in the last few years since the whole Global Warming / Environmental thing has become main stream... but we're like 50 fucking years behind on this. Why? Cause it made more money for oil companies not to change. I also read that the earth receives somewhere in the range of 35k times the amount of power we use every single day in solar juice... so why we are logically still burning coal and oil ect just makes no sense to me. If we spent a quarter of that money developing better uses for solar, wind, geothermal, ect we'd have so much fucking power we wouldn't know what to do with it.

Yeah I know that it isn't practical to for humans to do things that benefit them unless there is a way to make money off of either doing it or suppressing it, but I'm not old enough yet to let go of all my ideological thinking completely. Still have a smidgen of hope that one day people will start doing things simply because it's a better way for people as a whole.

[Arathena]

I hate the next. I want the next to be now. I need to win the damn lottery, I swear every cent of my possible funding would go to making cool shit a reality. It grinds my nerves to know how far behind in technology and the single and only reason is because there is no commercial demand for it... and what's worse is that there WOULD BE a commercial demand for it if other markets weren't so driven by greed.

Solar for example, I've seen articles saying that we've now reached a remarkable 43.5% efficiency rate... I've seen these rates jumping in the last few years since the whole Global Warming / Environmental thing has become main stream... but we're like 50 fucking years behind on this. Why? Cause it made more money for oil companies not to change. I also read that the earth receives somewhere in the range of 35k times the amount of power we use every single day in solar juice... so why we are logically still burning coal and oil ect just makes no sense to me. If we spent a quarter of that money developing better uses for solar, wind, geothermal, ect we'd have so much fucking power we wouldn't know what to do with it.

Yeah I know that it isn't practical to for humans to do things that benefit them unless there is a way to make money off of either doing it or suppressing it, but I'm not old enough yet to let go of all my ideological thinking completely. Still have a smidgen of hope that one day people will start doing things simply because it's a better way for people as a whole.

You're trying to jump steps, unfortunately. This is the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, then turning around and asking them to build a 787. It's going to be a few years before we can start building nanomachine blood-scrubbers for your body from this, but it's certainly going to help that goal. This could be the key to a whole new branch of engineering and field physics. Takes time to come out of the lab. Then it takes time to evolve into something useful on the mainline. Then it takes time to bd adopted. And adoption is slow. LED lightbulbs have hit the market. They take next to no energy, and are already an over-time savings agianst CFLs. No one has them in stock in the stores that you can walk into and shop in. And are you going to pay $70 up front for a single light bulb? Solar power is often much the same. It is expensive, unsightly, and gives next to nothing 12 hours a day and four months a year.. or more in many places. But it is being built, it is creeping in. Progress comes by evolution, not revolution.

[Partha]

Progress comes by evolution, not revolution.

Actually, I'd argue that the science is revolutionary, but that the engineering is evolutionary. As it should be.

[Arathena]

Progress comes by evolution, not revolution.

Actually, I'd argue that the science is revolutionary, but that the engineering is evolutionary. As it should be.

Only in as much as the old error is exposed and replaced by the new, bit by bit.

I can count the real, foundation shaking discoveries of science on my fingers, and they have names. Newton. Dalton. Maxwell. Planck. Einstein. Those are the building blocks. This is just a new way of putting them together.

[Ddrak]

By "Newton" you mean "the theories Newton assembled as his own", right?

I'd probably add Galileo or Copernicus in there too. I want to add Feynmann, but only because he's just a great guy.

Dd

[Select]

Galileo

I was wondering where he was on that list.

[Rsak]

Because he is an astronomer not a physicist.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Because he is an astronomer not a physicist.

He was an astronomer AND a physicist, you blithering idiot. Everything you.. scratch that.. others learned in high school and college about uniformly accelerated objects is based on Galileo's work.

[Rsak]

I would argue that his legacy in Astronomy is much more lasting then in Physics.

[Arathena]

By "Newton" you mean "the theories Newton assembled as his own", right?

I'd probably add Galileo or Copernicus in there too. I want to add Feynmann, but only because he's just a great guy.

Dd

I would not. Galileo's actual contributions to physics and astronomy are irrefutable, and absolutely necessary, however, his critical contributions are not sea changes in the understanding of the world, but rather, a sea change in how we approach the universe. His methods of scientific experimentation are absolutely critical even today, however, they belong more to the realm of philosophy than to the realm of science. He taught us how to -think- like scientists.

As for Newton... if you wish. One can argue that the assembly of these theories into a whole, under the framework of Newton-Liebniz calculus is the most valuable contribution to physics in history. Scattered, each of the laws is nigh useless, together, in an integrated mathematics (Oh, fuck, that's an awful pun), they are 350 years of science, astronomy, and engineering. Within them is everything that Galileo found.

Dalton is the weakest of these, but without his contributions, molecular chemistry as we know it might not exist. His theorem of constant proportions is the basis of every chemical system known.

Maxwell took the tiny bits of Ampere and Voltaire and created Electromagnetism. Without his laws, we would be stuck in a world of steam-powered contraptions, arguing about the world's recent depletion of coal.

Planck quantized light, and in doing so, unlocked the door to quantum physics.

Herr Einstein needs no introduction.