More respian developer insanity

Perhaps electromagnetism is a more significant effect. I was amazed when we did the calculations (Cambridge maths entrance exam preparation) that the relativistic correction for the repulsive force of the moving electrons (at all of a few mm/s) was precisely enough to account for the magnetic force generated between two wires by the current flowing in them.

And that in a nutshell is the sum total of the 'accepted, settled, science'. Everything else is wild extrapolation

The bait and switch is to claim the settled science is - settled - and then infer that the wild extrapolation is in fact also 'settled science'.

Oh dear. You shouldn't have quoted that site. Its is pure lies.

Unfortunately that graph was made before the revelations about the hockey stick fraud became apparent. Which invalidates the last pert completely.

That is AFAIK a correct observation, climate is weather on a long scale.

Therein lies the main problem. All the causal paths are complex, loaded with feedback and interact non-linearly, but if you say something like that to a policy maker they'll tell you to come back when can give them simple explanations that they can understand and convey. Hence the current dogmatic certainty.

I believe that they are not. These days there is enough computing power that they don't have to either.

Is that General Relativity? The gravitational business for Mecury is.

No special (do not ask for calculation details it was more than four decades ago) - as for Mercury IUSC Special Relativity gets it closer than Newton but General Relativity gets it spot on.

These days the puzzler is the behaviour of galaxies - hence dark matter, dark energy and suchlike kludges, at least they look like kludges to me but the maths involved is way beyond anything I ever touched.

To me they feel like the same sort of kludges that those who in earlier times insisted that the Sun's and planetary orbits be perfect circles around trhe Earth had to resort to in order to fit observed reality. At some point someone will come up with a new paradigm and we'll all be going, "Oh yeah, why didn't I think of that?"

Mind you, quanta were initially introduced as I recall to solve the ultra-violet catastrophe but then took on a life of their own.

Yep very similar - glue bits onto the theory until it works. Inflation in the early universe is another one - it did what ? why ? and the in stopped ? why ?

I've seen one candidate that apparently avoids all the kludges, but it made my head spin horribly.

It was as best I can tell a fusion of graph theory with iterated function theory using iterations over the space of possible graphs constrained by the fact that we exist - at least I think that was it. There were derivations of Schroedinger's wave equation and the Einstein's General Relativity tensors (apparently deriving from the same thing) but at my peak of mathematical skill (a long time ago) it would have taken me weeks to work through it all to and see if it made any sense.

I did start to get the impression that the approach was the mathematical physics equivalent of digging numerical relations out of the bible and deriving conclusions from them, it appeared to be able to lead anywhere but I could easily have been misinterpreting what I was reading.

The most ironic part of that is Einstein's Nobel was for his work on the photoelectric effect which is one of the key results backing the quantum mechanics theories he never believed.

My take on quantum mechanics is that the maths works but all the explanations seem completely off the wall, although there are at least some formulations which avoid the very problematic observer.

Hence the ease with which random dogmatic *claimed* certainty affects policy...

It is important to note that the Kantian view of the world - that science is no more the descriptions dreamed up that *happen to work*, rather than the *discovery* of *truths*, that the classical physicists averred - is becoming far more useful in terms of both cosmology and quantum level interactions.

Have a look at - I think it is Steve Carroll - lectures on you tube.

The one that made the most sense to me basically said 'the classical world we think we live in is just a fairly juvenile approximation to a world actually constructed of one vast quantum probability field. The rest is all in our minds'.

"Happen to work" is a bit misleading. Science is a process designed to filter descriptions that work repeatably from those that don't, it's pretty effective at it too.

More simply the idea that when you have something that works it must be the truth turns out to be false. Provably so because there are multiple contradictory explanations that work as well as can be tested and they can't all be true.

Whereas we're getting our noses rubbed into the fact that it will only be an approximation and even if we stumble on "the truth" we'll never know it or be able to prove it, we'll only know that it seems to work.

It is what is required to affect policy, nothing less would do the job. That's why anyone working at changing policy toes the line and never expresses doubts whether or not they have any.

BTW have you seen the recent commercialisation of iron-iron flow batteries ? They appear to have really useful properties, very long lives and really low costs for long term bulk energy storage. Energy density is nothing to write home about but it's not too shabby either and tanks of iron chloride solution are cheap.

No, its not misleading, its very accurate. There is no magic about scientific hypotheses other than they represent a compressed form of

The Problem of Induction, in a nutshell.

Exactly. Our 'knowledge', is not the truth, it's just usable algorithms.

Nuclear power is already way cheaper - despite attempts to render it impossibly expensive - than renewable energy WITHOUT the storage.

I don't see the point in adding even more expense to it to solve a problem that nuclear power doesn't have.

The CO2 emissions of fission energy remain pegged at around 30% that of coal once the cost of mining and refining fissile material are included along with the emissions from producing the steel and concrete needed to build the plants are both combined with the energy costs of building a reactor and then demolition and clean-up when its reached end of life.

The other unacknowledged problem with fission reactors is waste products and the cost of dismantling and cleaning up obsolete reactors. So far there are no accepted cleanup methods or long term storage facilities. Neither US or UK have completed any long-term radioactive storage facilities and nor have anybody else apart from one Scandinavian facility.

Note that the earliest British reactors have still not been decontaminated or dismantled (unless you think that simply mothballing them is good enough), and there seems to be no accepted way of disposing of obsolete reactors from ships and subs apart from throwing them in the sea. I believe the Russians dump theirs off Kamchatka but I haven't heard what everybody else does with theirs.

Building more fission plant seems problematic to me until there are operational recycling plants to recover and reuse valuable isotopes from spent fuel rods and safe, proven operational systems that are disposing of the long-term radioactive waste that can't be recycled in any useful way.

Fusion systems would seem to be were they've always been - 40 years in the future - though their associated costs continue to rise.

The waste could be reprocessed to extract the unfissioned uranium but AIUI, uranium dug out of the ground is a lot cheaper. So at the moment the rods are left for 10 years, then vitrified. You might like to look here:

The issue of long term storage is a political one.

Given the priority of the first reactors was plutonium for bombs, unsurprising that little or no thought went into how they would eventually be dismantled. This is not the case for modern plant.

Well, I'm happy to burn more coal if you are.