RE: Attention to detail lacking
Careful, or you'll be W.A.S.T.E.d Oedipa was perfectly sane - it was the people around her who were interesting. TCOL49 was my first introduction to conspiracy theory and the notion of 'hidden history'. I remember it fondly. Peter -- From: Phillip H. Zakas[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 10:29 AM To: Tim May; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Attention to detail lacking Tim May Wrote: I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what mass and energy and group velocity and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way. maybe Choate is the long lost son of oedipa maas. phillip
Re: Attention to detail lacking
At 8:35 PM -0700 7/24/01, Tim May wrote: At 8:24 PM -0700 7/24/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: Have you ever seen the two of them together? (Not that college physics is needed. I should hope not, I've got a Fine Art degree with a smattering of philosophy and English. Which is why I work with computers for a living. When I was in high school I knew enough about physics and math not to have made some of the boners Choate has come out with.) I don't know enough math, but I know that I don't, so where I get confused I ask.
Attention to detail lacking
Jim, I think you often don't word things carefully enough. The resulting discussions get pointless in a big hurry. The optics used for focusing are NOT mirrors, they are (hopefully) transparent at the frequency under use. A mirror on the other hand is required to be OPAQUE with respect to transmission, we want full, 100%, reflectivity. That means that every photon that hits that mirror interacts, loses some energy, and gets re-emitted. ^ Are you implying that the wavelength for incident photons changes upon interaction with the mirror? The energy loss at the mirror is lost photons not altered wavelengths. The lost photons have varying fates. You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted. I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. Your blurb about absorption and cascades is only true for some fraction of the lost photons that constitute the inefficiency of the mirror. Others have a different fate. Maybe that's what you meant but you did say every photon. And here's an exchange with Tim : At 6:30 PM -0500 7/24/01, Jim Choate wrote: And these are reasonably low power lasers... http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/IJSSE/issue1/unwin/unwin.html The simple fact is that the thermodynamic impact of a laser beam that is several feet across and emitting more photons than the surface of the sun will not be easy to reflect unless immense cooling is taken. Cost/weight factors alone argue it in the negative. More photons than the surface of the sun for HOW LONG? A minute? A second? A millisecond? A microsecond? You confuse fluence with flux, a classic mistake. (A pulse brighter than the sun but lasting only milliseconds will have far less heating effect than other flux level pulses lasting longer. Calculations matter. And, yes, I used to do these calculations when I was refuting Kosta Tsipis' calculations of the late 70s. Fluence matters.) --Tim May The sun produces shitloads ( check your CRC Handbook for conversions between the shitload and more familiar units ) of power : http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html says 386 billion billion megawatts If we know the spectral characteristics of the sun ( the black body spectrum perhaps? ) we could come up with a photon count. I'm not sure whether you mean to talk about photon counts and adjust the power and wavelength variables or you really mean to discuss something that operates somewhere between IR and UV. Let's assume the latter. It is after all a LASER. You did say surface of the sun. To me that means integrate over 4 pi. 3.86E26 W regardless of the radius. I doubt if anyone has made a laser that operates at that power level even for one fs. Let's try the other approach... The power output from the sun is about 1350 W/m^2 as measured here. Maybe that was what you meant as a reference power level. Let's see, 1350 W/m^2 - 1.35E-3 W/mm^2 so a 1 mW laser with a beam area of .74mm^2 is as bright as the sun at least in terms of gross energy density. That disregards spectral effects. Not too tough to be brighter than the sun. I don't think you could even light a bucket of gasoline 1 m away with it no less knock down a rocket. It's also pretty easy to handle with a basic mirror. I'd say that's a pretty wussy power level for something that needs to melt a rocket in flight. Focussed to a spot that is 1/1000 the area of the parent beam it starts to get interesting but let's see you hold that spot steady from a 747 in turbulence long enough to burn a hole in a nice shiny casing going 8000kph 200km away. So if we're going to discuss physics let's do it with a bit of care. Maybe it will be more interesting. I'm no expert but I'm willing to try. Yawn, Mike
RE: Attention to detail lacking
Tim May Wrote: I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what mass and energy and group velocity and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way. maybe Choate is the long lost son of oedipa maas. phillip
RE: Attention to detail lacking
At 10:29 AM -0400 7/25/01, Phillip H. Zakas wrote: Tim May Wrote: I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what mass and energy and group velocity and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way. maybe Choate is the long lost son of oedipa maas. What a w.a.s.t.e. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED]Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
Re: Attention to detail lacking
Tim, I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. Photons hitting a surface most definitely do not lose some energy and get re-emitted. There are some very particular configurations that can act as wavelength doublers, but this is a particular, and hard to set up, configuration. Photons hitting a mirror either are re-emitted with the same energy as before or interact via the photoelectric effect and are thermalized (converted to phonons). That colors are preserved in mirrors, absent tints (special absorbers), is a Physics 1 clue that mirrors do not downshift photon energies!. The reason for the weak statement I think is that I imagine you might make an argument that the momentum transfer from the photon to the mirror results in a very small doppler shift...I'm just not positive about it at the smallest level of interaction. I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what mass and energy and group velocity and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way. I don't know Choate's educational background, but I would not be at all surprised if he is self-taught and moved into computers out of some technician training school. I've reached the same conclusion. I've known some very bright people who lacked access to a formal education. The results were some startling levels of understanding mixed right in with some mind blowing misconceptions and some outright gaps. Mike
Attention to detail lacking
On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted. Sure, it has it's momentum changed. Think about it. The photon comes in from one direction and is absorbed/interacts with the atoms. As a result they get re-emitted (reflected) in the exact opposite direction. The point is the photons that get re-emitted ARE NOT THE SAME PHOTONS THAT WERE ABSORBED. You can't do that without losing something. photons only have one thing, energy as represented in their wavelength. The beam that gets re-emitted is less energetic than the beam that came in. Even if it does have the same phase and time coherence as the incident one. 2nd law of thermodynamics. You're confusing the intermediate vector boson as the carrier of information with the information itself. -- Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Tesla be, and all was light. B.A. Behrend The Armadillo Group ,::;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'/ ``::/|/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com.', `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
