That's such a short paper. How did it count for his tenure file?
What if there are coherently converging waves but they killed the dinosaurs?
A coherently converging wave (OK, a shock really) is what I'm going to be trying to create come August 1st. By "I" I mean a big team of people most of whom are smarter than I. The fun part is that I'll be committed to 250% of full time due to working on 3 separate grants. August through December (first major deliverable milestone) is going to be interesting.
I am contractually obligated to recommend my friend's book about symmetry in this thread. I mean, it's also very good. It has a great chapter on Emmy Noether, because you're a feminist.
3: you're building a bomb? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosion-type_weapon
5 was exactly my first thought.
3. Taylor's blast wave paper is amazing. Reading his work or Chandrasekhar or Landau or Kolmogorov is something else.
http://www3.nd.edu/~powers/ame.90931/taylor.blast.wave.I.pdf
Good luck with the fusion, any great-grandchildren will thank you.
When I was still in physics, I got the advice to read papers by pre-computer thinkers that failed to rtesolve the problem they approached in order to get a useful identification and framing of analytically intractable problems that would benefit from numerical approaches.
I am a bear of very little brain and I lose the plot here:
While Einstein thought that the irreversibility of radiation processes could be explained probabilistically
How does such an explanation work? Can you point me at something that will clarify it for me?
5-7 Coincidentally I was just reading this fascinating post on Alex Wellerstein's great blog the other day (got there from this tweet of his showing Von Neuman's diagrams of the reflection from the blast wave.
3: It does make a big bang and occasionally bits of the lab get damaged, so sort of. I had fun doing blast damage calculations for the vacuum vessel.
9: sort of related. In 1947 some photographs of the first atomic bomb detonation at Los Alamos were published in Life magazine. From the pictures, one can read off the radius of the shock wave as a function of time. From this one can estimate the yield of the blast, which was of course highly classified.
This is used as a homework problem in this book.
8. Most of reversible classical physics describes a continuum, smooth indivisible stuff, often time-reversibly as with the wave equation. The continuum is a mathematically convenient fiction. In fact, a small number of particles move coherently to originate an outbound wave. A very large number of particles far from each other would have to cooperate in order to produce an inbound one. This cooperation is improbable.
When we use the convenient continuum description, the apparent reversibility that results is an illusion, present in the description but almost never the underlying physical system. Maybe take fragile reversible counterexamples and consider how they differ from typical physical situations.
Not sure if this helps, hope so.
I can't help but read this as a subtle commentary on today's Supreme Court ACA ruling.
Perhaps too subtle.
Also, I'm impressed by the mature debate in comments at your link.
Assuming that I am right about what togolosh is building, this is particularly unsettling:
The fun part is that I'll be committed to 250% of full time due to working on 3 separate grants.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea? Iran, North Korea, Facebook? Iran, Facebook, Texas?
And this is even more unsettling:
August through December (first major deliverable milestone) is going to be interesting.
Must remember to be upwind of major metropolitan areas over the Christmas holiday.
"Deliverable" in this context is especially worrying.
Quite. Castle Bravo, rather than Ivy Mike.
We must encourage togolosh to liveblog the delivery. (Presidentially might be a good idea.)
Also, which of togolosh's clients only hired him part-time? Cheapskates.
Because he was part time, togolosh figured he could skip the targeting mechanism. The client would find out soon enough.
That said it would be hilarious if someone from unfogged got a fusion reactor working. "'Sup?" "Not much. Fusin'" "rly?" "yeah, ignition was so last week" "
16: Unfortunately I don't do anything as dramatic as that. It would be fun to make something like the Tsar Bomba, though. What I do is Magneto-Inertial Confinement . There's some funny politics around the name, since the guys who are furthest along want to call it Magnetized Target Fusion, which everyone else thinks sounds a little too much like a weapon. They are also the ones who most heavily edit the relevant Wikipedia pages.