We aren't hijacking "my" thread, this is PMBug's house, so that's up to him. I do have my own boards to talk this trash on if we want to go there.
On the solar:
For anyone living in their own home, for nearly all the country, yes, solar is workable, works great. The net standard of living might not be quite up to the current levels of waste, but it's surely good enough. Some places you're not going to run air conditioning day and night, to be sure, off this, but pretty much everything else is either no change, or switch to a more efficient way and there's plenty.
The trouble arises with high-density sardine-can living, where there's not much roof per family. I have a lot of reasons I don't like that one, not just the sustainability of it. Another whole discussion about importing the goodies from the world and exporting their trash and pollution - including votes and laws that suit them, but not us.
That old saw about PV not being net energy positive wasn't even true back in the day we were using super high purity silicon castoffs from the semiconductor business, which were and are a lot more energy intensive to make.
What have you got here - a big piece of glass, and a bunch of very thin polycrystalline silicon, with minor amounts of dopant, and some silver and plastic.
It's basically all sand with value added. Work out the energy required to melt that much sand, it's only a few days worth of output from a panel, tops, and they last decades. I can weld all day every day off my system, actually it will run 4 at a time!
In fact, it's making enough energy to throw my 4000 pound car uphill for over 40 miles a day...that alone equates to the energy in about 11,000 gallons of gasoline.
Batteries are getting better over time, and with care a set lasts perhaps 10-20 years.
They don't have to be that big, mine would fit in a short pickup bed (but would break the springs). Yes, they are toxic, which is why you don't throw them away, you recycle them (and get paid to do it, as they are full of lead which isn't free). Recycling them results in a lot less environmental damage than digging up lead ore and smelting it.
A lot of people have grid-tie systems, which basically uses the power company for batteries. Some places this is a great deal (out in the southwest) - but you still have that deal with the devils - they can change terms at their whim, not yours. But it's a cheap way to get going. Here the power co pays a lot less for power in than they charge for power out, and it's a bad deal. The thing with a grid tie system is you get no independence - when the power company goes down, you do too.
For larger installations, battery types that aren't practical for us little guys are workable. There's a huge, and I mean huge, test going on in TX of a sodium sulfur type (runs at high temperature) that is the size of a large warehouse for example.
There is talk of using used electric car batteries for this too, once they're not good enough for cars anymore. The Japanese are doing that vanadium redox thing. Good things are afoot if you don't have to sweat energy/pound much.
For bigger scaleups, there's the deserts to put panels into, but of course there will be people who object to doing that one. At really large scale, solar-dynamic looks pretty good as an alternative. Here you just use mirror concentrators to make a ton of heat, then run a boiler from that. NASA is working with this for space stuff, as when it gets to a certain size, it weighs less for the power and is more rugged in launch.
On the cosmology, it's going to take awhile to frame good answers, but I will.
Quickly though - who says we aren't inside a black hole now? Maybe they are white holes looking from the inside? It would explain quite a bit. The idea that there might be places we can't get to or see confounds a lot of people, but that's just a human limitation some have. People intuit that space must be infinite, but it need not be, and no, there needn't be a wall when you get to the end, it can easily wrap, just like some old video games, and actually, some think it does. Since we know we don't know it all, the possibility exists that we might at some point be able to get to those places we can't penetrate now anyway.
Science has no problem with multiple universes. Or the fact that our own might just be a quantum fluctuation in some other space (DeSitter) - it all rolls out neatly with the math we have. From our point of view, a common quantum fluctuation might not last very long at all (that Planck number up there - it's tiny), or have much energy, but what about from its own point of view? Since the speed of light gets involved, it's point of view is time-dilated as hell - so it thinks it's lasting forever! Since it will annihilate at some point, the net energy is zero - just like we predict our own universe to be!
In other words, it's possible we are a quantum fluctuation in a higher order space, and god might be a retarded 8 year old playing with daddy's particle accelerator.
Not saying that's the case...but there's nothing to disprove it, either. Or there might be the Judea-Christain god who said "let there be a place where Maxwell's equations are true" (let there be light). That particular "Creation myth" happens to be the only one that jives well with current scientific understanding - even evolution happens in the right order. Too bad neither side of that debate seems able to realize that. All it takes is an open mind.
And the first time God speaks to anybody in the bible "I am, that Iam". If you are lucky to know someone who speaks the original language, he's using all the forms of the verb "to be" at once, non specifically. In other words, god is saying he's a trans-time being who doesn't experience time as a succession of "right nows" like we do (mostly) but "all at once" like I can see the entire computer screen at once. A few little insights like that really change what that book appears to be telling us, IMO, in a good way. But it's hard to get most theologians to understand that one.
Most people can't visualize time anyway. Takes practice and some work, which puts most people right off.
Here's the trouble with your thesis that an infinite number of internally consistent theories are possible. Well, first look up
Godel's incompleteness theorem. But that's only interesting, not definitive. The real trouble is that the more we observe, the more we eliminate the possible theories that are internally self-consistent, and the number is getting "small" compared to what it was not too many years back. Thus it's becoming easier and easier to debunk junk science, actually, as most people who propose alternate theories forget that if you're going to start with some different assumption about things, it would imply different behavior of the universe than we've already observed is the case, and pretty solidly. The wiggle room is getting smaller all the time, even if you allow for the fact of certain things taken as gospel by some scientists are actually circularly defined and should be regarded as such (Hubble "constant" might be in that bag). It is almost always trivial for me to spot those, and frankly, it pisses people off if you're too direct in showing them the (obvious in hindsight) flaws sometimes. Not that there aren't still a lot of possibilities - just that they are becoming fewer all the time. It is the glory of science to progress. Which often results in us having to tell you we were wrong before - kind of the opposite of most religious views which posit no change possible.
Greene's "The elegant Universe" is a good one on this topic. (his other books not as good) It appears that some variation on string or M theory is certainly "it", and some of the properties of the implied topology are already nailed down pretty tight, to a symmetry group called Calibu-Yao [sic?] space. Within that "group" (this is some fairly weird math, group theory), there are a ton of possibilities, too many right now to try them all brute-force on today's computers - but the number is known and finite. What's cool about this, once you understand it, is that once the topology of this space (basically, where the holes and knots are) is defined, everything else pops right out - the speed of light, and all the other constants we have to put into the "standard model" as "assumptions" to make that work. It's becoming more and more obvious the standard model is like Newtonian physics - when the real truth is bigger, more like what Einstein did to it - Newton wasn't wrong, just incomplete.
Except this is a whole 'nother level of that. In most versions of string/M theory (Look up Ed Witten, maybe the smartest scientist/theorist to ever live) there are more physical dimensions than we directly observe - so far. They seem to be rolled up small, and sort of knotted, that shape being the determining factor for things like speed of light, gravitational constant and a bunch of other "magic numbers". Look at the implications of that - no one else is, but to me that means that in all but 4 (xyz and time) dimensions we're already everywhere - the Buddhists were in some sense correct - and it's only in the 4 we can't go faster than light and so on. We might indeed simply be a projection from the higher order space onto 4-space, and all we'd need to do is re-aim the projector to be somewhere else....like changing the local oscillator in a superhetrodyne radio. It might not even take any much energy. "Beam me up" might be possible!
I'm not chasing zero point energy, just working in a domain where it figures in, at present - fusion can't happen in my reactor without quantum tunneling, for example. I'm still going for fusion, but there are things going on at that level I have to work with and take into account.
My brownian diode concept is not zero point energy, it's a trick of thermodynamics.
(far larger scale, here - whole atoms and stuff, zero point is 10e20 times smaller than atoms or more)
The truth is, no matter what pseudo science thinks, is that ZP energy is there - but it took many decades after theory predicted it for it to even be measured - it's very tiny. The thermo dynamic energy extractor yes, uses just one tiny magnet per tiny cell - you'd have to adapt current semiconductor tech to make enough cells to add up to any energy you could measure or use. You might if lucky be talking about a watt/cubic inch as maximum density. The way the numbers work out that little magnet is pretty tiny for best capture - about a few hundred atoms worth, so the cells can also be really small. If you try to make one big one, the laws of probability don't let it work as well. It's a lot less rare to get say 7 out of ten heads in ten tosses than it is to get 70 out of 100 tosses. Sadly, my one connection with a semiconductor fab can't get them to make me one, and the cost is past my means to just order it done.
I don't care too much what the "scientific community" thinks about this or that. Like most professions, at most 10% of them are "real". You guys just happened on one of the real ones - me - I might know about 10 more out of a few thousand. Most of them are more interested in tenure, pay raises, job security, corner office and perks, like any other field.
Most humans have what I call "lazy brain" - always looking for some super oversimplification, so they can not have to actually think. Just want to be told what to think, and rely on authority, rather than learn HOW to think, which after all, is a lot more work, and there's no "done" to that job. The reason this place is nice is that there are a higher than normal percentage of folks here who don't mind thinking.
Quote :
Science substitutes the answers to important questions, that it cannot answer, with unimportant ones, that it can
Honest scientists realize this one in spades. The better ones say it out loud. The question is, who decides which are the important ones? Sure, "why am I here", "what's the meaning of life" - those science can't and shouldn't even try to answer at this point. Good vs evil - not in that domain at all. Some people would call those questions more important than anythng science even attempts to answer. But...who made you god to make that determination, perhaps "what can I do" is more important than "why am I here".
I don't think that, but really, if you want to achieve full intellectual honesty, you have to consider that one.
But as Asimov said, the thing about the religion of science is that by golly, when we call down fire, it comes down, every time, and almost always on the right altar. If I curse you, I don't have to wait for some other being to carry it out - there's a nuclear explosion at your placem you're poisoned, or a bullet is incoming. Likewise, I can heal many things with near 100% certainty.
It's repeatable - and that's the key. If it isn't, it isn't science, as currently defined. So, science doesn't, and shouldn't attempt to, cover everything. When it tries to prove/disprove some religion - it's simply out of line, we don't get those kinds of answers from it. It doesn't define good vs evil, it simply defines what I can do and have it always work -and why it didn't if it doesn't. And that's what I meant when I said science doesn't handle the "why".
Chris MacDonald-Bradley is our resident crusty skeptic, he's useful that way, and willing to think at least a little bit. He's the court jester who can tell the emperor he's naked. CS Lewis had such a character in "That hideous strength" in his trilogy. His public persona and private ones are quite different - he's a cool guy.
Funny he gave up so easily - he doesn't normally. i think he's realized I've gotten him into some turf he's not the master of, yet. All the books on thermodynamics toss in the integration symbol too often, in places it's not justified, there's some circularity of definition going on I detected myself. So it stays internally consistent until you consider non linearities (like diodes) which it doesn't cover at all, and in truth it only makes honest statements about big averages - that are true under the assumptions it makes. I simply started a little further back and said, well, what if those assumptions don't cover everything - and what could I assume differently that didn't "break" all the stuff it gets right. It's been awhile, but I probably thought of that while playing guitar for the squirrels and raccoons in the yard. The mere fact that there is such a thing as Brownian motion proves I'm onto something it doesn't handle very well - because the assumption you're always averaging over huge numbers doesn't hold in every situation - observations do drive theory.
CS Lewis covers Merlin quite well in the book I mention above (which won't make sense until you've read the other two). He notes that Merlin really stood out among all "magicians" by technique. While most of them were really alchemists or people who were more or less satanists who practiced all sorts of interesting rituals of self-degradation, with uncertain results, Merlin apparently got his results just by being Merlin and getting the "energy" from his surroundings - kind of a resonance effect with what was already there. He left a very different footprint in history/mythology than the rest. I can kinda fall in with that one - there's a place here on my land where that "energy" is concentrated, as though humans hadn't "used it up" yet, and most people I take to that place I don't have to say a word - they get it and comment on it themselves. It's in fact a big reason I bought that land. But so far, that's religion, not science - a different field in which the meaning of even the word "energy" is quite different. I'll take it as a compliment though - you like my clown suit? That's the kind of thing I used to wear as a stage costume in the music business. I recently donned the extreme version to greet Dr Jon Howard at the airport (he flew over from England to collaborate), so I'd stand out enough for instant recognition, it worked well, but got interesting attention from airport security too. Now that was funny, we had a riot with those guys.
FWIW, I myself think "dark" matter and energy are a bandaid on a broken theory, and I''ve got company. Ed Witten's M theory would account for most of that, if it turns out to be correct anyway, and that one just subsumes all the current thinking, which becomes a simplified subset of M theory. I know of only one other person working on what I consider a possible replacement "Theory of everything" and strangely, he's another trader - Curtis Faith, one of the original turtles. He's working on a topology-based theory too, using fractional fractals, that is starting to make some sense, but it's a big job for a guy who doesn't specialize in science as I do to tie it all together. Until quite recently, I (and he) strove to keep him ignorant of "accepted knowledge" of current theories, so his wouldn't be tainted by what we know is at best incomplete thinking. It's coming along...
