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View Full Version : Caging the Muse: From Shipstones to Light Sabers, Applications of Energy (NEXT BIG THING!!)



Tesla_WTC_Solution
26th September 2013, 20:31
[note to admins: I was unable to find the thread here on Avalon that mentioned Shipstones; I even tried combing our site via Google and it looks like it's gone! Maybe when the forum went down?]

We are all wondering when the next big physics breakthrough will arrive (publicly). Those of us who are tired of every promising development being patented and trashed, or classified and stashed, are following every tiny lead released by the press, hoping against hope that we will be freed from the "big oil" agenda and put back on the path of discovery.

A weird article came out on CNN today: http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/26/us/new-lightsaber-molecule/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Scientists create light-matter like Darth Vader's lightsaber
By Ben Brumfield, CNN
updated 9:49 AM EDT, Thu September 26, 2013

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/121031085533-darth-vader-story-top.jpg

(CNN) -- A beam of light is supposed to shine off into infinity, but when Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker whip out their lightsabers for some spark-flying action, the light blades extrude like stick deodorant and then just stop.

It's like they're sticks of light-matter.

Hollywood may have made that stuff up, but now, scientists at MIT and Harvard have actually made that stuff -- not enough for a lightsaber, only a subatomic smidgeon. But even that much is a big deal.

Light-matter existed previously only in theory, but now, for the first time, it has been observed in reality, researchers from the Center for Ultracold Atoms say.

To oversimplify things, we'll say that photons are subatomic particles that make up light. They have no detectable mass the way most matter does, and usually, they don't stick together. You can shoot two lasers at each other, and the photons will pass right through one another.

But physicists Mikhail Lukin and Vladan Vuletic recently got them to stick together to form molecules.

They published the results of their work in the science journal Nature this week
The newly created photon molecules don't behave like traditional light, but more like a lightsaber, Lukin said. "The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

But don't picture yourself swashbuckling with a lightsaber just yet. As in the creation of pretty much all unusual matter, scientists have to produce extreme conditions in laboratories that can't exist naturally anywhere on Earth.
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http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/26/4559762/darmstadt-researchers-stop-light-one-minute-quantum-computing

Humans tame light, stop it from moving for a full minute
By Jacob Kastrenakes on July 26, 2013 12:45 pm Email @jake_k

Beams of light are usually speeding along at around 186,000 miles per second, but for one minute, researchers in Germany brought some to a screeching halt. Using a crystal frozen to temperatures below negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit, a research team managed to hold light in place for a full minute — marking a drastic increase from the previous record of just 16 seconds. The technology will eventually be applied to quantum computing as a way to retrieve and read data, but it'll have to work on a much smaller scale and for much longer periods of time before that can happen.

LASERS AND A SUPER-COLD CRYSTAL

To allow the opaque crystal to hold light, researchers from the University of Darmstadt first created a small transparency within it that light could enter through, reports New Scientist. The transparent region was held open using a laser beam, but once the stored light had entered the crystal, the laser was shut off. This once again made the crystal fully opaque, giving the light nowhere to go. But importantly, the light wasn't simply absorbed by the crystal as it would when hitting a wall — it stayed put and could still be seen and read.

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http://www.isciencetimes.com/articles/5719/20130725/light-stopped-germany-fastest-particle-crystal.htm

Light Stopped: German Physicists Trap Light In Crystal For Record-Breaking 60 Seconds, Could Improve Quantum Communication [VIDEO]
By Philip Ross on July 25, 2013 3:25 PM EDT

Light stopped for 60 seconds inside a crystal at a research center in Germany after scientists fired lasers at it. No, this isn't the opening scene of a James Bond film -- this is physics, and it's happening right now. Scientists at the University of Darmstadt in Germany stopped light, the fastest thing in the universe, dead in its tracks, and held it there for a whole minute.

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http://www.correntewire.com/has_stanford_found_the_shipstone

Has Stanford Found the Shipstone?

Submitted by captain nemo (not verified) on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 10:38am
Departments: Department of The Happy Dance
Tags: energy storagebattery technologyobscure Heinlein novels

One of Robert Heinlein's later, odder novels was one called Friday, set in a fairly-near-future world. While it had some interesting political notes (the former US has been balkanized into a dozen or more independent nations) the technological setting was based on a device called the Shipstone, after its inventor. To paraphrase as best I can without digging out the book, "To call a Shipstone an improved storage battery would be to call an atom bomb an improved firecracker."

We may be, if not all the way there, another big step towards this. The folks at Stanford have come up with an improvement in lithium-ion batteries which effectively raises their storage capacity by a factor of 10. The battery that powers your computer for 2 hours now would run for 20 on this new device.

So our firecracker, if not yet to atom-bomb levels, is at least elevated to a-big-stack-of-C4 level. The talk is about how this would take the electric car to acceptable levels of both function (500 miles between charges is close to infinite as that's about as far as anybody can, or at least should, drive in a given day) and affordability. The all-electric Tesla is great but it's a hundred thousand friggin bux.

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As I am no physicist, I can't offer explanations better than those of the press, but I can offer my good faith that scientists will continue toward developing technologies that help all peoples, with the final objective of achieving colonies on other planets and freeing humankind from Malthusian principles of population destruction.

Breakthroughs in the realm of energy storage (not just big booms) and access to energy in controllable forms are the future.

Together with the rest of you, I become happier each time the news gives us something to think about -- perhaps the future is not a dark, empty place, but a place full of light and people living in the light, grateful for the gift it gives to all.

Tesla_WTC_Solution
26th September 2013, 20:52
http://news.yahoo.com/curiosity-rover-makes-big-water-discovery-mars-dirt-180441890.html

http://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-rover.html

Curiosity Rover Makes Big Water Discovery in Mars Dirt, a 'Wow Moment'
by Mike Wall, Senior Writer | September 26, 2013 02:01pm ET

Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

"For me, that was a big 'wow' moment," Leshin told SPACE.com. "I was really happy when we saw that there's easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it's probably true anywhere you go on Mars." [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]

"For me, that was a big 'wow' moment," Leshin told SPACE.com. "I was really happy when we saw that there's easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it's probably true anywhere you go on Mars." [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]

The new study is one of five papers published in the journal Science today (Sept. 26) that report what researchers have learned about Martian surface materials from the work Curiosity did during its first 100 days on the Red Planet.

Soaking up atmospheric water

Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. It achieved that goal in March, when it found that a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

But Curiosity did quite a bit of science work before getting to Yellowknife Bay. Leshin and her colleagues looked at the results of Curiosity's first extensive Mars soil analyses, which the 1-ton rover performed on dirt that it scooped up at a sandy site called Rocknest in November 2012.

Using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, Curiosity heated this dirt to a temperature of 1,535 degrees Fahrenheit (835 degrees Celsius), and then identified the gases that boiled off. SAM saw significant amounts of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds — and lots of water on Mars.

SAM also determined that the soil water is rich in deuterium, a "heavy" isotope of hydrogen that contains one neutron and one proton (as opposed to "normal" hydrogen atoms, which have no neutrons). The water in Mars' thin air sports a similar deuterium ratio, Leshin said.

"That tells us that the dirt is acting like a bit of a sponge and absorbing water from the atmosphere," she said.

ThePythonicCow
27th September 2013, 07:10
[note to admins: I was unable to find the thread here on Avalon that mentioned Shipstones; I even tried combing our site via Google and it looks like it's gone! Maybe when the forum went down?
Here it is: Light completely stopped for a record-breaking minute -- Post #3 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?61685-Light-completely-stopped-for-a-record-breaking-minute&p=707222&viewfull=1#post707222).

Tesla_WTC_Solution
27th September 2013, 21:57
Thank you for finding that! :)