SCIENCE

Do We Really Need Fossil Fuels?

The question arises whether we really even need fossil fuels for a prosperous human civilization given all the problems they represent (wars, air pollution, spills, etc.). At present,fossil fuels provide approximately 14 Terawatts of power for our global civilization. To put this in prospective, the total power of the all the world's tides is only about 2 Terawatts. The total power of the sun is many, many times more than this. Proponents of fossil fuels acknowledge that the power supplied by the sun is enormous, but argue that it is too dispersed to be useful. Just too much land area would have to be devoted to solar arrays to make it a practical replacement for fossil fuels, they say.

Fortunately, this is not true. The above map shows the average level of insolation received at different places around the world. All of the world's energy could be supplied by solar collecting arrays contained within just the area of the six black dots on the picture! Obviously it is possible to run our civilization completely on the Sun. Frankly, fossil fuels are far too valuable to be burned. They need to be saved for their use as chemical feedstocks from which so many useful products can be made. Consuming these precious resources the way we are and burning them as "fuels" is simply insane. (Map courtesy of Mlino76 at www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area )   

Sea Level Rise and the Melting Rate of the Greenland Ice cap

Because it is located so far from the poles, the Greenland ice cap is melting faster than the north polar ice cap or the Antarctic ice cap, and this melting will have a more immediate effect on global sea level rise than the melting of the other two ice caps. So just how big of an effect will it be, and when will a sea level rise of ten feet occur, which would obviously be catastrophic for cities like Shanghai, Miami, and New York?

Let's see. To answer this question we need to know three things: the area of the Greenland ice cap, the area of the world's oceans, and the melting rate of the Greenland ice cap. The area of the Greenland ice cap is 660,235 square miles. The total area of the world's ocean? That's a little more complicated. To find out this number we have to add up the areas of all the "little" seas and oceans (there are a lot more than Seven Seas!):

Total                136,617,885   

If you divide this number by the area of the Greenland ice cap, you get 206.92 (i.e. 206.92 Greenland ice caps would cover the world's oceans). Thus a 1 foot decline in the height of the Greenland ice cap would be equivalent to a 1/ 206.92 foot increase in the world ocean level (0.0579 inches). The current melting rate of the Greenland ice cap is about 20 centimeters per year.  Thus the sea level is rising by 0.0031711 feet per year due to the melting of the Greenland ice cap. At this rate of sea level rise, it will take 3,153.5 years for the world ocean level to rise by 10 feet.

That's somewhat reassuring. However, this model assumes that the melting rate stays constant. If the melting rate accelerates, which seems more likely, a more complicated differential equation needs to be solved to determine when the sea level will rise ten feet and bring catastrophe to our civilization. Measurement of the acceleration rate of Greenland ice cap melting is obviously one of the most important activities of science today. 

Andromeda to Collide with the Milky Way Galaxy

In the "All Good Things Must Come to an End" department, it appears that Andromeda and the Milky Way Galaxy are on a collision course. According to recent calculations, the collision will occur in approximately 4 billion years. These two beautiful spirals will then join the ranks of those ugly, horrifying 'train wreck' galaxies.

What We Are All Afraid Of

What are we all afraid of? That in the coming few years two things will happen which will jeopardize one of our most cherished notions, the notion of a human soul. The first thing that will happen will be the artificial synthesis of living organisms from what might be called laboratory ingrediants. They are very far along that path now, and might already be there, in all fairness. The second thing that will happen to upset our cherished notion of a soul will be the cloning of a human being.

So supposing these two events happen. Is there any way the human soul can still be said to exist?

I believe the answer is Yes.

I believe the human soul is WHO we are rather than WHAT we are. Thus, even though the riddle of creation has been thrust backwards into an even more primordial fog than the DNA -self recombinant fog it was in before, it still doesn't explain who we choose to become in life. This stems from that essential mystery of the Infinite which cosmic creation blesses us with.

It would be silly to outlaw recombinant human cloning for a variety of reasons once an understanding of the genetic code is had (it has already been well-sequenced). For instance, why would you outlaw the excision of bad genes to make more perfect children if you had the chance, saving them from spina bifida, or epilepsy, cancer, or congenital heart disease? It would be illogical. (Whether such logic exists in all cases is debatable. See http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/ick2.html )

Whether in the future human clones are made exclusively from natural or artificial genetic sequences won't matter.  It will happen. There will be trans-humans living among us, probably in the 23rd Century. Just as there are transgenic plants and animals living amongst us now. Some will be good and some will be bad. But they will still have the same mystery of life and of having a soul as we do. The real mystery of Existence is locked up in higher riddles (origin of space-time, etc.)  which won't be decoded anytime soon.

The Seven-Sphere and the E8 Symmetry Group

The above diagram is a two dimensional representation of the roots of the E8 Symmetry group. Like the advice to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate "Plastics!", my advice is to learn about the E8 Symmetry group.  As Minkowski posited, there is really only a single, unified spacetime. Normal spacetime can be thought of as the hyper-surface of a seven dimensional hypersphere, in which all real entities are eleven dimensional. Elementary particles and their worldlines (and their fields) are the palpable, four-dimensional manifestations of these 11 dimensional objects. The higher dimensional aspects of these objects remain hidden.  In other words, the ordered set of points which represents the basic structures and world lines of real particles and fields trace themselves as patterns in a higher than four dimensional reality. The geometrical symmetries of this higher reality, as well as our four own dimensional reality, are governed by E8 and give rise to the immutable laws of Nature (viz.,  electromagnetism, quantum chromodynamics, gravity, etc.) on our own manifold. Kip, Thorne and Wheeler in their monumental 1978 book "Gravitation" have a chapter on the magical properties of pre-geometry entitled : "Pre-Geometry as the Magic Building Material" which calls particles which we see merely 'geometrodynamic excitons'. The force laws we experience come about as effects of these geometrical symmetries and nothing else, assuming Occam's Razor. The fact that the seven sphere has the maximum hyper-surface "area" of all hyperspheres, is highly suggestive that the  seven sphere represents ultimate reality

The Indivisible Unity of the World

"We now come to the third important modification in our fundamental concepts brought about by the quantum theory; namely that the world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical limit. This conclusion is based on the same ideas that lead to the principle of complementarity; namely that the properties of matter are incompletely defined and opposing potentialities that can be fully realized only in interactions with other systems. Thus at the quantum level of accuracy, an object does not have any "intrinsic" properties (for instance, wave or particle) belonging to itself alone; instead it shares it properties mutually and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts. Moreover, because a given object, such as an electron, interacts at different times with different systems that can bring out different potentialities, it undergoes continuous transformations between the different forms in which it can manifest itself."

Bohm, Quantum Theory, page 161

Quantum Wavepacket Decoherence
Thinking of going somewhere in a hurry? Try catching a ride on an electron wavepacket! Electron wavepackets spread out extremely quickly. In one second, a wavepacket that was originally one Angstrom in width (i.e., Gaussian full-width) will expand to be 1,158,889 meters wide if it does not interact with anything else. I'm sure that everybody has this naive feeling (I know I did) that electron wavepackets stay pretty much together as they travel along through empty space. But that isn't so! That same angstrom-sized packet will be 7e7 meters wide in one minute and 4.29 e 9 meters wide in an hour! I find this one of the most incredible things I have ever learned. (Check out pages 64-65 of David Bohm's Quantum Theory if you want to learn more about this, including the formula for calculating the spreading rate.) The reason why electron wavepackets do not spread out to infinity and in fact remain fairly localized has to do with a phenomenon known as quantum decoherence. I wrote a program which shows a toy wavepacket undergoing a single episode of quantum decoherence which is available on request.
 
New Invention

One of the inventions I have been working on during the past several years improves the basic thermodynamic efficiency of internal combustion engines. Conventional engines equipped with conventional fuel delivery systems deliver a 30% Brake Thermal Efficiency, as opposed to the  58% Brake Thermal Efficiency which is theoretically achievable at a compression ratio of 8.5:1. My invention works on the principle of creating a homogeneous fuel air charge in vapor form and has the potential for delivering much higher efficiencies than those achieved presently. It is now in the process of being tested extensively.

Cold Fusion

After writing a cdrom on cold fusion, people have been asking me what I think about the recent CBS 60 Minutes episode (Spring 2009) which shows a resurgent interest in this field. Unfortunately, I have to say that I land in the camp of Richard Garwin and others who believe that the 'excess heat' that is being measured is not from nuclear reactions. (Instead, it may be an artifact of a purely crystallographic process akin to Wigner relaxation.) Furthermore, I believe that the helium that is being evolved from cold fusion cells is probably a contaminant. Anomalous effects in deuterated palladium crystal systems definately do exist, however, the principal one being the higher diffusion rate of deuterons in the lattice compared with protons. Deuterons should diffuse more slowly by a factor of one over the square root of two in the lattice because of their greater mass, but in fact they diffuse faster than protons. As Einstein would say: "How can that be?" Furthermore, in this regard, I wish someone would explain to me how quark matter can delocalize over long distances as it obviously does in order to get neutron diffraction results from neutrons with deBroglie wavelengths of 1 angstrom or so, results which are routine today.

Another strange-but-true fact about the palladium deuteride system is that one of the major isotopes of palladium has a nuclear energy level that is resonant with annihilation radiation. This means that the 0.511 MeV photons from any electron-positron annihilation events occuring inside the metal would be soaked up by the metal lattice. If D+D =He-4 is happening inside the strange world of the palladium deuteride quantum crystal, it is possible that the annihilation radiation would never make it outside, and the only perceptible result would be a warming up of the crystal. This energy release mechanism has never been properly investigated, for instance by reacting small amounts of positrons and electrons inside a palladium spherical cavity and spectroscopically scanning the radiation appearing outside of it. (See a paper I wrote in New Energy Times for a more detailed explanation of this possible energy release mechanism.)

Update: January 16, 2011

It occurs to me, after intently studying the zeropoint energy these last few days, that the large zeropoint motions of deuterium in palladium could offer an explanation for cold fusion that I hadn't thought of before. Palladium deuteride is a quantum crystal, with the zeropoint motions of the interstitial deuterium ions sometimes exceeding the lattice constant (deBoer Parameter > 1).