Out of Pod Experience

You also may be able to explain this to me ..

I once saw a 'gimmik' item on a website that was a small ball that somehow became heavier with somesort of spinning item inside . Never saw one and only vaguley remeber the details but it did sort of imply to me it is possible to increase the gravity of an item somehow.

Is that true.. if so how and are there more than one method?

I remember reading 10+ years ago that someone built a spinning device that uses the fact that capacitors become slightly heavier when they take a charge. The idea was to charge the capacitor at the top of the loop and discharge it at the bottom, adding a tiny bit of inertia "lifting" the device and making it lighter. The sensationalist press reporting it called it "antigravity". It was a neat trick that could only reduce the weight by a fraction of a percent.

How possible is FTL Travel? If it isn't why isn't it?

Though I believe that anything is possible through Science, because our understanding of the Universe is all Theory

Thanks again for this thread , most enjoyable on EVE gate EVA so far

I hope your not offended if I seem to be stubbonly holding on to my small minded lttle view but truely that is probably a fair assement. 'Small minded'

I more than appreciate you taking your time and effort to teach me somehting I'm very interested in, but unfortunatly I don't have the knowledge of the fundamentals nor the mathmatical ablity to fully understand your answers, while I generally know what your on about and I can compare that to what I think I know, your full meaning escapes me.

I'm not being obtuse and stubborn of my views (well hopefully) I really don't understand the technicalities or full implications of what you say and it would take me some time to fully study the subject to understand even half of what you have said in this thread.

But if you would be good enough to indulge me once again

Oribital deteration- Is the earth destined to die in a fiery death by orbiting closer and closer the sun?

Not to mention that in theory 4 billion years of technological evolution is also likely something that would allow us to stop it from happening, seeing as how we're already considering how to do this with asteroids headed our way.

Why look at something that is far away, unreachable and happened in the past?

Why the need to find and to explain gravity when it is all around us?

Why make a difference between time and gravity?

It's still a scientific problem, but it's also an engineering problem. The two can overlap sometimes. This is mainly because of the fact that there is a possibility of using muons to catalyze the fusion reaction, but god knows nuclear physics is mostly based off of "Does this data fit this model? IF SO PUBLISH!", or get data and make model from data and while it works well for a lot of stuff, it usually doesn't hold the answers to *everything*, and producing muons at the rate needed takes a lot of energy.

But no, they aren't going to be gyroscopes. I cringe at using the general word "magnets" when describing it also, but some designs include large electromagnets. The reason that I cringe at using the word magnet is that the plasma inside a fusion reactor produces it's own magnetic field also.

The big problem with these is that none of them run continuously, they all pulse over and over again to produce fusion. These pulses use a LOT of energy. Hint, this is also why I scoffed at people in a thread a long, long time ago who suggested a space craft that runs off fusion of deuterium in free space. The energy required to acquire that hydrogen and fuse it? BHAHAHAHAHA.

I got sidetracked, any who it gets more complicated than that. Different fuel types produce different types of particles which also carries it's own issues, or creates a better method of energy production (some fuels produce charged particles at high energy, which is nice charged particles produce electric energy very efficiently). However, some of these fuel types are almost non-existent naturally on earth, and while they can be produced, no one has really made the effort yet (probably due to funding problems and over-regulation by the government).

The other method is kinetic confinement, and I don't know much about that other than it uses huge lasers to compress deuterium into a very small space until it begins to undergo fusion.




One note you should consider is most advancements in nuclear reactors/technology (fusion included) is almost always hampered by over regulation of the government. There are designs floating around right now which still have yet to be accepted by the NRC, and these all just use UO2. Hint, some of these designs would make disasters such as the one at Fukushima essentially impossible for an earthquake and Tsunami, I kid not. Also, when you start using new fuel types, it's incredibly expensive and time consuming.

So, in short, no, fusion reactors aren't coming any time soon and probably won't until people realize "OMG WTF WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF FOSSIL FUELS" or "OMG WTF THE WORLD IS ON FIRE FROM GLOBAL WARMING".

When I saw a proggrame about that sort of experiment the (biggest) laser (array in the world) wasn't used for commpresion , the 'pellet' was in a massive pressure chamber, the laser was the 'Ignition' device.

Ignition is achieved by compression of the fuel pellet down to a certain volume, at which point it begins to fuse.

You see, this is one of the biggest misconceptions about magnetic fields.

A magnetic field does not attract. It does not repel. That is an electric field. All particles have an electric field. However, a particle only needs charge to respond to a magnetic field, in itself if a particle is still, it has no magnetic field.

A magnetic field simply causes charged particles to go round in a circle. However, moving electric fields also cause a magnetic field, but no, it's not pointless to use magnets on something that does not have a magnetic field. This is a misconception. It's pointless to use a magnetic field on a particle without charge (like a neutron) though, or a charged particle that isn't moving..