Re: More physics :-) The phantom heat of empty space may soon be detectable

Or to provide something for the university publicity department to do.

The university publicity department is no more capable of assessing the value of new work than Jan Panteltje or you. Martin Brown is probably better placed, but if the work isn't in a area he has actually worked on there won't be a lot in it.

It is slightly less exciting than it sounded in the announcement.

They have *proposed* a possible experiment that might reveal such an Unruh effect in Phys Rev Lett (a highly reputable Physics journal).

I too am mystified by how they obtain huge acceleration and have the Josephson junction still work.

I gather from what I can access free on arXiv that it involves an annular JJ (whatever one of those is). When I am next somewhere with free access to PRL I will take a look see at their paper.

I don't understand how they obtain the huge acceleration required either, but the peer reviewers were satisfied given it was published. I look forward to someone doing it and reporting their results.

Measuring Plank's constant using the then very new Josephson junction apparatus was a final year practical experiment in my Physics course. ISTR it involved a niobium cat's whisker carefully manipulated inside a liquid helium filled dewar inside a normal dewar of LN2. The staircase waveform was rather pretty as the linked magnetic flux changed.

I remember doing that practical. We had to make the cat's whisker by grinding a short length of niobium wire to a fine point. The key to success was getting the tip hot enough to produce the optimum thickness of niobium oxide on the surface. With too much or too little oxide it would not work. John

It seems we were at the same institution and possibly the same years. I matriculated in 1977.

As a theoretician I didn't actually do the Part II experiment myself but both my best friends did. Looking up your name to check I stumbled upon the rather nice Ahmed 75 years of computing book online.

One was an incredibly good experimentalist and is now a grey beard wizard working on the big US synchrotron near Chicago.

Don't be silly. Gravity waves are gravito-magnetic radiation, nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation.

Le Sage particles are even simpler. They don't exist.

Since dark matter is about 85% of the total mass of the universe, any dark matter candidate can't be scarce, which puts charged gravitinos right out of the running.

If you paired up positively and negatively charged gravitino's as strange sorts of electrically neutral molecules you might be in with a chance, but they would interact with electromagnetic radiation, and wouldn't be "dark".

Peer reviewers are human and make mistakes. I've published a couple of comments about papers which would never have been published if the peer review process had worked as it should have done.

There may be a bit of a wait.

The US National Bureau of Standard had an integrated circuit made that stacked up some 20,000 junctions Josephson junctions to produce a precisely 10V step when irradiated with a 75GHz microwave signal of precisely the right frequency. It's now the international voltage standard.