From the Discovery of Electrons to a Nuclear Meltdown

Frank decided to look up the path from simple electronics to nuclear power, and he found that a few things happened on today's date. Here they are:

In 1895, Jean Baptiste Perrin (born today in 1870) showed that what had been called Cathode Rays weren't actually rays, but physical particles that had mass and travelled from one end of a vacuume tube (the cathode end) to the other (the plate). He had found electrons.

In 1882, the first hydro-electric generator, designed by Edison, began operation today at the Appleton Edison Electric Light Company.

(On a side note, in 1913 on today's date, Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, died under mysterious circumstances. He was on board the Dresden, bound from Antwerp to London for a meeting, and after dinner, he headed for bed at 10pm requesting to be woken shortly after 6am, but he was never seen alive again. Over a week later, a decomposing body was found adrift with items that belonged to him, but due to the advanced state of decay, the body itself was never verified to be his.)

In 1935, the Hoover Dam was dedicated, and its hydro-electric generators now supply enough power to run public and private consumers in Nevada, Arizona, and California.

(Interesting and possibly useful, but also irrelevant, in 1953, on Sep 30, the International Federation of Translators was set up, and ever since, they have used today, the feast day of St Jerome (accepted as the patron saint of translators), as International Translation Day (also St Jerome's death date, 420). St Jerome was well known for translating the Bible from older Latin, with extensive reference to Greek and Hebrew texts. His version is known as the versio vulgata, or commonly used translation. The world 'vuglar' meaning having to do with ordinary or common folk.)

In 1954,  the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), was commissioned.

In 1977, Sir Nevill Francis Mott (born today in 1905) received the Nobel Prize for Physics due to his work in electronics and magnetism.

Sep 30, 1980, is a date that is probably not as well known as it should be, considering the medium we are using now. That was the date that the Ethernet specification was published by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Intel, and Xerox.

Finally, in 1999, an accident at a uranium processing plant in the village of Tōkai killed three technicians and caused dozens of people to be hospitalised. In that incident, due entirely to human error, workers added a critical seventh bucket of uranyl nitrate solution into a precipitation tank, exceeding the limits set for the tank and starting a self-sustaining fission reaction.

So, just on today's date, we have found everything from the initial discovery that electrons must be particles all the way up to a nuclear meltdown. We have certainly come a long way, haven't we?

Celebrating the Autumnal Equinox and other important dates in history

Frank is in a party mood today, what with all the things he has to celebrate today. First off, today at 9:04 this morning, the Autumnal Equinox occurred. That's when the Earth's axis is exactly parallel to its orbit around the sun. From our view down here, we see the sun rising and setting right over the equator.

Other things that Frank likes to celebrate today include these folks born on this date, going from the oldest to the most recent:

• 480 BC Euripides, who in effect created the theatre later used by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw.
• 1215 Kublai Khan, who was rumoured to have built a Pleasure Dome in Xanadu.
• 1926 John Coltrane, who could play a saxophone like nobody's business.
• 1930 Ray Charles, who also played the sax and trombone but excelled on the piano, which allowed him to sing along with his music.

But the biggest event that Frank celebrates today is that back in 1889 (yes, that does say prior to the 1900s!) the Nintendo company was formed. Of course, back then it only dealt with playing cards, but still it was the beginning of a vast empire that has influenced many. In fact Frank carries his Wii U controller around with him at work, so he can keep up on his games when he's not sitting in front of the tele at home.

Have fun, and I hope you don't get Nintendinitis!

Not Magnetic Monopoles? Possibly Reimann manifolds

We know from the last post that phones are a pain, but there's no need to elaborate on that. I think we've all recovered from that experience.

Anyway, Frank has been working on that magnetic monopole theory again, and he says that it's probably not relevant. On a macro level, we all know that if you break a magnet, you don't end up with a North piece and a South piece; what you get are two smaller magnets, each with their own pair of poles. In spite of the fact that Joseph Polchinski, a prominent string-theorist, claimed that the existence of monopoles was "one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen", Frank doubts that the Door is based on that theory. He says that it's just not logical (and if Frank is anything, he's logical).

Frank's latest theory has to do with Reimann surfaces. Those surfaces appear to be fairly normal if you only look at a small section, "but the global topology can be quite different", depending on the calculations involved. The overall impression of the shapes can be a sphere or a torus or even just a couple of sheets glued together. Frank thinks that the way the Door works is to fold our normal 3-space into a shape like those through some kind of 4-space, making two points normally distant very close together. The typical example is a folded piece of paper. (Quite a few examples of this appear all over.)

We might have more about the theory behind the Door next time, as long Frank doesn't get distracted by any other bright, shiny objects.

POTS? No way! VOIP instead

When we moved into this new building, Frank insisted on upgrading the phones in our office. The previous tenants had been on POTS, but now we have swapped everything over to VOIP, and let me tell you, it's been a learning experience!

With POTS, the local phone company brings in a separate pair of wires for each line, and each one has a different phone number associated with it. Then someone (us!) has to physically connect them to each desk. Keeping track of all those interconnects is just plain ugly.

With a VOIP system, each phone number is encoded into the phone set itself, so all the wires going to all the desks are identical. There is no need to swap any wires. If we had someone move to a new desk, all we have to do is pick up the phone, unplug it, move it to the new desk, and plug it back in. That's it. All the number changes are done on a computer, assigning the phone number to a specific MAC address.

All I can say, after pulling an all nighter helping to update an old POTS system, I'm glad that Frank convinced us to install VOIP when we moved in here.

Tom's data untrustworthy? Electronics still don't work; Halbach Spheres?

Well, Tom collected quite a bit of data for Frank to analyse, but at first glance, Frank doesn't trust some of the numbers. Tom suggested that Frank go collect his own data, but Frank says that he's not going through the Door until someone he trusts is at the controls to make certain he can get back. Of course, Frank doesn't trust anyone, so he's likely only going to see the part of the other planet visible through the Door as it's opened. (Sometimes dealing with these two is like herding cats, I swear!)

Anyway, the initial guess that the planet is larger than Earth makes sense (even though we haven't actually measured it), but it must be far less dense (as Frank claimed), which explains why the gravity is still so close to 'normal'. So, what we've got is a larger planet that spins slower, doesn't have an iron core, and no magnetic field to speak of. All that still doesn't explain why electronic things don't work. We really need to get Frank working on that.

Instead, Frank is still trying to figure out how the Door itself works. He's made a supposition that the way it works is probably similar to a Halbach sphere. The only difference is that a typical Halbach sphere is made of permanent magnets, whereas the Door is basically a huge electromagnet, just with a twist to it. (Twist, get it? Frank opens the Door by spinning the magnetic field.)

Frank may have more for us soon, but Tom certainly will. He's been really excited about taking some folks out for an adventure, a 'walkabout' he calls it. We'll see what he has to say next week.

Measuring gravity with Kater's Pendulum

First off, let me describe how this Kater's Pendulum (shown in the adjacent picture) is supposed to work. There are two pivot points (a), one at each end. At one end there is a major weight (d) and at the other end a minor weight (b & c). The minor one is adjustable, and by moving it in or out, the period (the rate at which the pendulum swings) can be changed. So, what you do with this thing is hang it from one pivot and time the swing, then flip it over and time it again, moving the minor weight in and out until the two times are the same. Moving the minor weight counter-balances the major one and makes the whole thing effectively an 'ideal' pendulum.

Knowing the distance between the pivot points and the time of the swing, we can use this formula to get the value of gravity at that point. Of course Tom isn't going to be using a calculator over there, so all he's going to do is collect the numbers at various points and bring them back to Frank to do all the number crunching.

It turns out that Frank just happens to have a museum-quality piece that he's going to let Tom take through the Door to do some testing. It wasn't designed to be portable at all, so Frank has to make some modifications to the frame where Tom will be hanging the thing. Frank also has a set of hourglasses (though they really should be called minute-glasses) that Tom will be using as timers. I'm not certain if Tom (or ANYone for that matter) will have enough patience to do all this stuff. Those physicists must have been really dedicated to their field of study to invent stuff like this.

We'll see what we have to report next week. Until then, keep swinging!

Photos examined by astromers, and the core of the planet isn't iron

Well, the photos have been developed and most of them were quite good. Turns out Tom is fairly handy with a camera. Frank has sent the pictures off to an astronomer friend of his, and we hope to have some kind of estimate of the planet's location soon. Most of the pictures looked very much as we expected (see the adjacent picture from an amateur photo site). The only thing Frank has been able to determine from them so far is the rotation of the planet. Doing a calculation using the length of the star streaks and knowing the shutter speed, Frank says that a 'day' on the planet is a bit less than 32 hours. Much longer than here on Earth, but Tom says that it doesn't feel longer; he just has more time to get things done.

The fact that a 'day' is longer there can be the result of a couple different things. Either the planet actually rotates slower, or it has a much larger diameter. A larger planet should have a stronger gravitational field, but only if the composition is similar to Earth's. From the lack of magnetism over there, Frank has hypothesised that the planet is lacking the iron core that forms the basis of Earth's magnetic field, so although it might be larger, it has less mass. In other words, it is less dense.

So, based on his guess about the core, Frank's next experiment is going to test the exact gravity there, using a Kater's Pendulum. I suggested that he also measure the size of the planet the same way Eratosthenes did, but he just laughed. Apparently we'd have to explore a bit more of the planet to be able to get measurements like that.

BTW we can't just keep calling it 'the planet', so Frank thinks we should name it, but I'm certain that the natives already have a name for it. We just need to ask them. What do you think? Let us know in the survey.

I'll report on it next week.

Happy Birthday to the IBM PC (and what about Apple?)

Well, Frank has yet another anniversary to celebrate today. It's been 30 years since the IBM PC was released, and THAT was a step in the right direction. Of course, he's quick to point out that Apple beat IBM by four years when they released the Apple ][ in 1977. (I think Frank still has an old Apple ][ in the back of his closet, though he'd never admit it in public. In fact if he does have one, I know he'd never sell it.)

Back in those days, IBM kept most of the technical details close to the chest, if not outright proprietary, and Apple's reference manual not only had a schematic that folded out, but it also had the source code of the Monitor ROM (what is now known as the BIOS). Times have certainly changed since then, what with Apple keeping all the secrets and IBM being so open that just about anyone can build an ISA compatible board to expand the capabilities of a PC.

Well, enough reminiscing, we've got work to do. Next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Developing REAL film: a REAL task ahead of us

We had a bit of a difficulty getting the pictures Tom took of the stars developed. Do you know how few places are available that can take real film and make pictures? Yes, I know that may local stores can make prints, but almost all of them only handle digital pictures, which obviously won't work for us. In our case the decision was made easier by the fact that Frank is a bit paranoid about keeping the details of the Door secret (he's right to be concerned about industrial espionage). The decision was easier, but the results of that decision just made more work for us: Frank decided that it would be better to process the film in house.

Frank gave me a list of the chemicals needed, and whilst I was procuring them, he built a light-tight tank that would do the trick. BTW, this is not a procedure that I'd recommend to anyone who isn't seriously into doing things on your own.

Well, I've clearly got my work cut out for me, so I'll call it quits for now. See ya in a week.

Trojan asteroid in the news, and Tunnels go both ways

First off, Frank wants everyone to be aware that an asteroid  (2010 TK7) has been found to be stable in the L4 point in the Sol/Earth two-body system. (Of course, anyone paying attention to the science news would already know that.)

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, back to the normal stuff. So, Frank is really stuck on trying to locate the other end of the Door. Now he's even gone so far as to give Tom an old-style film camera and tripod, which Tom is supposed to set up, point 'north' (see discussions of 'east' and 'west' in previous postings), and take a few time-exposures of the stars. Frank will then use that information to plot out the relative position of the stars as well as establish the speed of the planet's rotation. From all that, Frank is very hopeful that he'll be able to identify the other end.

A recent concern that came up in random talk in the lunch room is that the other end of this obviously-alien device may connect with the home world of its creators. The worry here is that we might not be opening up a tunnel through space so we can go out and explore, rather we're opening up a hole that will let others come 'visit' us.

What do you think?

Not PI day, just almost PI day, but no invisibility cloaks

Welcome to PI approximation day. Today is the 22nd day of the 7th month, so if we write it in day/month format, it looks like 22/7, which is a close approximation to the value π (only off by 0.04%). 

• As an aside, a closer approximation that is easy to remember is 355/113, the first three odd numbers each used twice. It is only off by 0.000008%! 

Back to dates, March 14th, is often celebrated as PI day, with PI minute being one minute until 2:00 in the afternoon. At that moment, the date/time (in month/day format) would be 3/14 1:59. (Yes, it would really be 13:59, but only the most staunch nerds are willing to be up at 2:00 am to celebrate the right time, which they do.)

So what does all this have to do with the Door? Probably not much, but when we spin up the magnetic fields to open the Door, it does make a sphere, which has pi in the calculation of both volume and surface (just like calculating the area and circumference of a circle).

Considering the recent hoopla with the Potter movie, I was hoping to discuss bending light around objects and invisibility cloaks, but there's still more research to do on it. Maybe next time.

Time Travel still isn't possible, but Where does the Door put us?

All right, so there are plenty of folks out there who do think time travel is possible in spite of Frank's 'proof' (see last week's posting). Frank points out that even plausible Time Travel using an infinite Tipler cylinder would still require a spaceship accelerating along its length. May I point out, yet again, for those who haven't noticed, the Door not only isn't a spaceship but it also doesn't leave the general area where it's been set up.

The other end of it, though, is a different matter. Where it leads we still haven't figured out. From the few sighting of stars that Tom has been able to copy down and bring back, Frank hasn't been able to place it in mapped space, but once Frank has enough stars identified, he'll be able to pin down the location of the other side on a 3-D map of the stars, and then we'll know where we're going. (Although, Frank is the only one who even cares enough to worry about it; to the rest of us, it doesn't really matter as long as we get to charge folks to visit.)

 Keep up the comments. See ya!

42 and Is Time Travel Possible?

In honour of this being our forty-second posting, Frank insists on mentioning HHG2G and how it influenced his education. All right, so I mentioned it. Now we can continue, right?

Some folks investigating how the Door works have suggested that the wormhole effect isn't so much a connection between different points in space, but rather they say that it connects the same point in space, but in a different time. In other words, it's connecting two points in four-space that just happen to have the same x, y, and z values. Frank is convinced that it couldn't possibly happen that way, and his biggest argument is the one espoused by Steven Hawking: We don't see tourists from the future time travelling back for a quick jaunt. Of course Carl Sagan has an alternative viewpoint on that argument: The tourists from the future are very careful to blend in so that no one notices them.

Either way, bringing in big names like those is just Frank's way of name-dropping, so don't pay any attention to him and his head won't swell too much.

Space-Time curvature and Guinea Pigs

According to Frank, the Door causes a curve in space-time. I don't know exactly what that means, but he tried to explain it by drawing a picture of a mattress with different weights on it. A marble hardly affects the surface at all, but a bowling ball bends it quite a bit. He says that the Door goes so far that the hole comes out somewhere else (in the basement?). With the info we have now, there's no way to predict where the other end of the tunnel created ends up. Of course there's the opinion that it doesn't go far...at least not in the standard three dimensions, rather in the fourth: time.

Where ever the Door connects to, it's certainly keeping Tom busy.

I think I've found some guinea pigs to send out to explore. If they get back to me soon enough, I'll have info to post next week. See you then.

Lost Energy Chart and Language Issues

All right, so Frank seems to be excessively focused on energy conversion and efficiency. Now he's trying to find some chart he used to have. Apparently, it shows six or seven different types of energy and arrows linking them showing how each can be converted to another form. The problem is that he can't find it. If anyone out there can find such a chart, he'd really appreciate it.

In other news, Tom is still working with the natives to work out language issues. It seems the natives pick up English easier than Tom has been able to get a grip on their language, so in our next big foray into the unknown, we'll need to bring along some kind of expert linguist or at least a logophile. If there were some military use, I'm certain we could get the government involved.

Looking forward to some excitement next week.

Types of energy and conversions

So, in discussing the different ways to generate electricity, Frank diverged onto the topic of energy itself. I already knew about most of the energy types, but in spite of that, Frank insisted on defining each type of energy as he listed them off: thermal is heat, chemical is...well...chemistry, electrical is what we were talking about trying to generate last week, radiant energy he says is EM radiation, nuclear is known as atomic power, magnetic is obvious, right? Elastic is like a rubber band stretched out, sound is energy that you can hear, mechanical is something moving, and luminous energy is visible (in other words you can see it).

If you'll remember, we can convert almost all of those different types directly into electrical energy, but some require an intermediate step, such as converting sound into mechanical energy first, then using that to move a conductor through a magnetic field to make electricity. If we go the other way around, we can make electricity go through a wire, which will make a magnetic field that can move a speaker cone and make sound. Most of the conversions from one form of energy can be reversed fairly easily with little loss. Of course, some loss is to be expected. After all we can't fight the constant loss of energy: entropy.

Most of what Frank says certainly sounds true, but some of it I just accept without comment. I guess it's a case of credo quia absurdum est. (If you don't know what that means, go look it up!)

Keep studying until we talk next week. See ya!

Power supplies, AC or DC?

I mentioned a problem with the power supply last week, and ever since then Frank has been pontificating on the various methods of electrical generation. According to Frank, there are seven different ways to do it. The problem is, the only one that's practical creates AC power, but we really need DC.

The typical method of creating electrical power involves moving a conductor through a magnetic field, called electromagnetic induction. That's how we get all our power for household use.

The other methods all make DC power and involve converting other forms of energy to electrical. Physically pulling electrons from atoms creates static electricity (like a Van de Graaff generator). Using chemicals is called electrochemistry (as in a battery). When light is changed to electricity it's known as photoelectric power (think solar power). Using heat is thermoelectric (used in electronic thermometers). Putting certain solids under stress is makes piezoelectric power (used in a scale). But the best one of all uses a radioactive source to produce loose electrons: betavoltaic power (but promethium can produce x-rays!)

The big problem is that all the DC power generators create such low voltages or currents that they aren't practical. We're still working on it.

Power supply issues and Technology that isn't available

We are still having a few problems with the Door. Apparently, the traditional power supplied on the grid isn't quite right. In spite of the fact that Frank has been filtering it through his bank of capacitors, the AC signal really isn't working very well, and it's causing degradation in the electrolyte (at least that what Frank said). It seems that the best power for the equipment would be flat DC (see the top graph in the picture), but that would take a whole pile of batteries. AC power is much easier to produce and transmit, so despite Edison's efforts to promote DC, we are a nation, no a world, of Alternating Currents.

Yes, there are methods to convert AC to DC, but both half-wave (see middle graph in the picture) and full-wave (bottom graph) have bumps. In other words, they still aren't flat. Even adding a few filter caps to the output only gets close. It still has wigglies. The best bet would still be to run the equipment directly from a full DCsource such as a battery, but as that's not feasible, we're just going to keep on with what we have.

There was this rather useful circuit that Frank came across when he was trying to reverse engineer the equipment, but he's been unable to reproduce it (mostly due to the language barrier). He says that it must have been a Unimolecular Rectifier. Unfortunately, the technology available to folks these days isn't fully functional, so all we can do is work with what we have. (He has been pretty good at re-building stuff just by analysing the equipment, in spite of the objections, and this stumbling block really irks him.)

If anyone knows of a better DC source, please let us know, and I'll report on it next week.

Area 51 covered elsewhere and curved surfaces

Last week I spent quite a bit of time talking about Area 51, but apparently someone else covered it quite completely, so I guess I don't need to mention it anymore.  :-)

So, Frank tried again to explain to me how the Door works. He wrote some equations on the chalkboard as he talked, but it just looked to me like a bunch of squigglies. Then he showed me a picture in a book he had, and it looked neat, and I said that I'd seen a similar hole at a minature golf course. (He didn't like it when I said that.) He explained the picture as showing a hole representing the Door, curved space in a flat area, except that our Door is a curved thingy in a flat space.

It's difficult for me to explain (especially as I don't understand it myself), but at least he did give me some kind of approach to getting my head wrapped around it: Picture a flat world where all the people living there are two-dimensional. Then try to explain to them how you can bend their world and connect two distant points. It's the same thing with the Door, except it's a three-dimensional world being bent through the fourth dimension.

It seems that the topic has been covered quite well, too. You just have to know where to look for the info. I'll see if I can get a hold of some of those reference books and let you know what I find by next week.

Area 51 is in the news, and Frank's in a book

Recently Area 51 has made the news. In fact it's there because of a new book, and the good news is that Frank was interviewed for the book. He may be famous! I just hope she quotes him properly. Anyway, consider reading it; we all need to support authors, right?

So, Area 51 is back in the public view again, but what do we really know about it? Many folks have heard about it, and many go to check it out, but the government denies it exists. Take my word for it, Area 51 really does exist. After all, where do you think Frank came across the equipment needed to make the Door function? If you want to read more about it, check out the Area 51 blog listed down in our Blog List (bottom of the left column).

And do you think that's the only one? Not likely. Consider Znamensk in Russia or Woomera in Austrailia, both secret locations, they lie just outside Kapustin Yar and the WPA, respectively. Neither one as famous as Roswell, NM and the incident that happened there, but to the locals, they are just as mysterious.

Lots of info to read, so I'll leave you to get to it. See you in a week.