Interesting/promising measurements at CERN

Not as serious as fission. And there are neutron-free options that require higher energy, which we may be able to get out of laser acceleration of boron nuclei.

And another supernova will deliver even more.

Fission waste is always "walk-away safe" until you have some to look at. Neutron-free fusion is at least theoretically possible.

But if it were as good as is claimed, it would be a lot more popular.

But the clouds of pigs fly overhead would create a different pollution problem.

Of course they are. It's all commercial in confidence, so we can't find out anything about it.

And if there was any money to be made, politicians would be being bribed right, left and centre to relax the restriction.

Or maybe it didn't look as promising when it got examined more carefully.

Not if you want to stop and reverse anthropogenic global warming. John Larkin is the kind of gullible twit who gets suckered by the climate change denial propaganda pumped out by the fossil carbon extraction industry, so this doesn't worry him.

Fast-starting gas-turbine-powered generators are a useful stop gap until you have built enough grid storage to cope with intermittent output from solar cells and windmills, but the gas turbines will need to be phased out fast.

But the research was mostly funded by private industry--Bell and (later) IBM. Maiman worked for Hughes Aircraft.

Masers had been around for yonks.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Bell Labs was a rather odd sort of private industry. Bell had a telephone monopoly which paid for a lot of remarkably fundamental research.

Since 1953. 1952 if you count the first paper about the possibility.

I didn't lose my temper. I was just being scientific.

John Larkin thinking he was "being scientific" isn't a lie, it's just massive self-delusion.

He's about as capable of being scientific as a fish is capable of riding a bicycle.

Of course scientists swim in an ocean of scientific knowledge, and John Larkin bakes in a desert of ignorance, so it flips the environments.

CO2

Ah. So you are being scientific and all for science.

Only against cutting edge particle research, the Apollo missions and manned spaceflight as a whole.

Whatever you say.

Half as much as coal. But CO2 is great too. It's greening the planet.

Right. They are all insanely expensive for no apparent benefit to mankind. Let's get some serious science done, stuff that can benefit humanity, and worry about protons later. There's no rush.

I designed the wire chamber signal processing for a p-p collision experiment at CERN. I don't think it proved much and certainly didn't benefit sick and starving children.

I have opinions, you have distortions and contempt.

Quote:

"Do plants grow faster with higher CO2? Some plants do grow faster under elevated levels of atmospheric CO2, but this happens mostly in crops and young trees, and generally not in mature forests. Even if plants grew twice as fast under doubled CO2 levels, it would not mean they strip twice as much CO2 from the atmosphere."

Actually, I was doing X-ray spectroscopy (scanning monochromator and such) which benefits from exciting lower electrons (1S shell) and used a completely inappropriate energy range for making any photoresist. At those energies, it can shine right through a half centimeter or so of boron and carbon crystalline materials, so it was useful in probing megabar-range pressure cells.

For lithography, you'd want to tune something similar to the 100 eV range that the laser/droplet things are doing. It's hard to scale this sort of thing down, though, because a full ring, even with light electrons, can only be relativistic with lots of diameter (magnet limitations). And, the synchrotron radiation is simultaneously ON over about 100 meters of circumference...

That's the bending magnet losses, undulators and X-ray lasers

Actually, I was doing X-ray spectroscopy (scanning monochromator and such) which benefits from exciting lower electrons (1S shell) and used a completely inappropriate energy range for making any photoresist. At those energies, it can shine right through a half centimeter or so of boron and carbon crystalline materials, so it was useful in probing megabar-range pressure cells.

For lithography, you'd want to tune something similar to the 100 eV range that the laser/droplet things are doing. It's hard to scale this sort of thing down, though, because a full ring, even with light electrons, can only be relativistic with lots of diameter (magnet limitations). And, the synchrotron radiation is simultaneously ON over about 100 meters of circumference...

That's the bending magnet losses, undulators and X-ray lasers

You're such a BS artist. What's your real name, and where did you do your work?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Or none that John Larkin knows about.

Sadly, John Larkin doesn't know much, and his certainty about the nature of the eventual benefits is going to just as well-founded as the rest of his woefully superficial opinions.

John Larkin has shallow and ill-founded opinions, and resents the the contempt they quite properly evoke.

He writes off the corrections he gets as "distortions" of what he imagines to be the "real" story which he confidently imagines he understands perfectly.

John Larkin keeps on recycling that chumk of denialist propaganda.

More CO2 in the atmosphere does help plants grow faster, if they have enough water and other nutrients. Mostly they don't. Plants react to higher CO2 levels by having fewer stomata, so they can get all the CO2 they need while losing less water by evaporation though the stomata.

More CO2 in the atmosphere automatically means higher temperatures at the surface of the planet, and this does have progressively more unfortunate side effects as the average surface temperature goes up. John Larkin is blind to all of them.

In its most fertile periods, Earth had 6000 PPM CO2. Living things have sequestered so much that plants were close to starving. It's good that we are digging it up and feeding the plants.

There's a bit of discussion about the Cern results in the comments here.

Rubbish. Back then, plant leaves had many fewer stomata so that they could get the get the same - small - amount of CO2 while losing less water by evaporation.

They certainly aren't starving now.

The plants that we have got now have spent the past 20 million years optimising themselves for CO2 levels that have ranged between 280 ppm during interglacials down to 180 ppm during ice ages.

During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), ~55.53 million years before present. CO2 levels may well have gone higher - anything from 680ppm to 1800ppm but that didn't last all that long - some 200,000 years. John Larkin is going back a lot further. The plants won't thank him for it.

It was about thirty years ago, at SSRL. EXAFS, or XAFS, X-ray fine structure spectroscopy. At the conference where the X-ray laser was announced, I bought the tee shirt...