Scientists receive $1.3 million to study new propulsion idea for spacecraft

Image credit: Spaceflight now

Light as a power source is only a theory so far, but could have interesting implications if it can be shown to work. Or it could go nowhere…

Spacecraft and satellites could in future be launched into space without the need for fuel, thanks to a revolutionary new theory, says EurekAlert.

Dr Mike McCulloch, from the University of Plymouth, first put forward the idea of quantised inertia (QI) – through which he believes light can be converted into thrust – in 2007.

He has now received $1.3million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a four-year study which aims to make the concept a reality.

Thermodynamics 101: Compression increases temperature.

Question: If I had a container, full with air, and I suddenly decreased the volume of the container, forcing the air into a smaller volume, will it be considered as compression, will it result in an increase in temperature, and why?

Answer on Stack Exchange by Luboš Motl: Yes, it is compression and yes, it will heat up the gas.

If there’s no heat exchange between the gas and the container (or the environment), we call it an adiabatic process. For an adiabatic process involving an ideal gas (which is a very good approximation for most common gases), pV^γ is constant where γ is an exponent such as 5/3. Because the temperature is equal to T=pV/nR and pV/pV^γ=V^1−γ is a decreasing function of V, the temperature will increase when the volume decreases.

Macroscopically, the heating is inevitable because one needs to perform work p|dV| to do the compression, the energy has to be preserved, and the only place where it can go is the interior of the gas given by a formula similar to (3/2)nRT.

There’s Ken Rice’s nonsense, and then there’s thermodynamics

Ken Rice, an Edinburgh University academic who selectively censors dissenting comments at his pro-AGW “and Then There’s Physics” propaganda blog, has another of mine in moderation:

tallbloke says:

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

March 12, 2018 at 10:02 am

OK, I’ll drop that subject and deal directly with the subject of your blog post.
You state that:

“If the Earth’s atmospheric pressure is to contribute to the enhanced surface temperature, then that would mean that the atmosphere would need to continually provide energy to the surface. It could only do this through the conversion of gravitational potential energy to thermal energy. This would then require the continual contraction of the Earth’s atmosphere.”

This quote demonstrates that you’ve fundamentally misunderstood Ned Nikolov’s hypothesis. He’s not positing a raised surface T due to an ongoing gravitational collapse producing a compression, generating heat which is then lost to space.

Atmospheric pressure produces a density gradient; i.e. it forces there to be more air molecules per unit volume at lower altitude than at higher altitude. Denser air intercepts and absorbs more of the sunlight passing through it than less dense air, producing more molecular collisions and excitation. It therefore holds more kinetic energy.The more kinetic energy it holds the higher its temperature will be.

Earth’s mysterious hum recorded underwater for first time

Image credit: strangesounds.org

But amplitude variations in the hum did not correlate with the seasons as once thought.

Scientists finally capture hum coming from the centre of the Earth, reports GeologyIn.

Although we like to think we know everything – and technology has advanced so much we practically have the answer to everything we don’t know at our fingertips – there are still plenty of mysteries left to solve.

For the past few decades, something has been becoming increasingly clear: Earth constantly hums, even though we can’t hear it.

NASA’s GOLD mission continues despite launch anomaly

The GOLD mission to learn more about the Earth’s ionosphere ran into comms problems after launch yesterday and may take longer than expected to reach its required orbit height. NASA’s own publicity says: “Just like an infrared camera allows you to see how temperatures change with different colors, GOLD images ultraviolet light to provide a map of the Earth that reveals how temperature and atmospheric composition change by location”.

NASA has reported that despite a glitch within minutes of its GOLD mission launch, the satellite is communicating with control systems, reports the Indian Express.

The aim of the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, mission is to study the dynamic region where space and Earth’s uppermost atmosphere meet.

APOD: Fibonacci relations appear in IR at Jupiter’s poles – Why Phi?

So to clarify here (because I messed it up earlier) what was presented this morning at #AAS231 were infrared images of Jupiter's north pole (left, via @lrebull) and south pole (right, via @Stardustspeck) showing respectively eight and five cyclones circling central vortices. 😲🤯 pic.twitter.com/lFkfl25wam

— Jason Major (@JPMajor) January 9, 2018

Why the wiggle in a crowd’s walk can put a wobble in a bridge

London’s Millennium Bridge [image credit: Alison Wheeler / Wikipedia]

Researchers now believe ‘that the synchrony of the crowd might not be a root cause but instead acts as a feedback effect that amplifies pre-existing small-scale wobbles’, but leave open the question of how or why the swaying starts. So to date any such resonance seems to be largely a matter of luck – or bad luck, which ideally is where testing comes in.

Some bridges could really put a swing in your step, says Science News.

Crowds walking on a bridge can cause it to sway — sometimes dangerously. Using improved simulations to represent how people walk, scientists have now devised a better way to calculate under what conditions this swaying may arise, researchers report November 10 online in Science Advances.

When a bridge — typically a suspension bridge — is loaded with strolling pedestrians, their gaits can sync, causing the structure to shimmy from side to side.

Study may explain counterintuitive effect of why hotter systems can cool more quickly

Good luck grappling with this longstanding physics conundrum. Even the meaning of ‘faster’ in this context could be open to question. For example there’s rate of heat loss, then there’s total time taken.

Ever since the days of Aristotle, people have made the counterintuitive observation that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water, says Phys.org.

In modern times, the observation has been named the Mpemba effect after Erasto Mpemba, an elementary school student living in what is now Tanzania in the early ’60s. When making ice cream, Mpemba observed that using warmer milk causes the ice cream to freeze faster than when using colder milk.

Unique study tests fundamental laws of physics

As the Talkshop reaches the milestone of 5 million visits, do we hear echoes of Scotty of Star Trek fame: ‘Ye cannae change the laws of physics’? Does fundamental mean universal – or could some ‘laws’ depend on where you look in the universe? Meanwhile Tallbloke is boldly going…somewhere… 😎

A study that will ‘test our understanding of how the Universe works, particularly outside the relatively narrow confines of our planet’ is being undertaken by an international team of researchers led by the University of Leicester, reports Phys.org.

The research probes whether the fundamental laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe.

In their new study, the Leicester-led team assesses whether these laws are the same within the hot, dense conditions in the atmosphere of a dying white dwarf star as here on Earth.

An Iceberg As Big As Delaware–Should We Be Worrying?

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A handy beginner’s guide to large icebergs.

Climate Change Sanity

An iceberg as big as Delaware!   For those of you that are saying, “what’s a Delaware,?” — it is the second smallest State of the USA’s 50 States.   Even so, an iceberg that big is really impressive.  If it ran into the Titanic, the ship’s orchestra would probably not have had time to play for the people before the ship sank. (That’s from the movie– I am not sure the orchestra really played while the ship sank.)

Around 12 July this year, this huge piece of ice broke off from the Larson C ice shelf in Antarctica. The iceberg, named A68, has an area of 5800 km² (2239 miles²).  The authorities say it is the 5th largest berg in history. Because the continent of Antarctica is so inhospitable, it wasn’t till 1821 when an American seal hunter became the first person to actually put foot on this continent. History, in…

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Pressure Warming Effect featured on WND: Study blows greenhouse theory out of the water

Ned and Karl have finally got some big exposure to the general public for their paradigm shifting breakthrough in geo and astro-physics. World Net Daily front page stories are read by over a million people. This is a great step forward for recognition of their work.

Study blows Greenhouse Theory out of the water

7-9-2017 By Alex Newman for World Net Daily

BOZEMAN, Mont. – A new scientific paper contends the entire foundation of the man-made global-warming theory – the assumption that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere by trapping heat – is wrong.

If confirmed, the study’s findings would crush the entire “climate change” movement to restrict CO2 emissions, the authors assert

Some experts contacted by WND criticized the paper, while others advised caution.

Still others suggested that the claimed discovery represents a massive leap forward in human understanding – a “new paradigm.”

The paper argues that concentrations of CO2 and other supposed “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere have virtually no effect on the earth’s temperature.

Foundations of Greenhouse Theory Challenged by New Analysis of Solar System Observations

Back in late 2011, the Talkshop splashed the story on a ‘Unified Theory of Climate’  developed by PhD physicists Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller. They set out to show that the ‘greenhouse effect’ is not a phenomenon arising out of the absorption and reemission of outgoing long-wave radiation by the atmosphere (as thought for 190 years), but is a form of compression heating controlled by solar radiation and the total atmospheric pressure at the Earth’s surface. Pressure is in turn a product of the gas mass contained in a column of air above a unit surface area, and the planet’s gravitational effect on that mass.

It’s been a long and treacherous road involving many revisions and refinements of the original study. On several occasions the manuscript was rejected unread, but Ned and Karl have finally got their greatly improved and expanded paper published. This latest version is a tour de force strengthened by the rigors of criticism from an army of peer reviewers at several journals along the way.

Using dimensional analysis (a classical technique for inferring physically meaningful relationships from measured data), they show that the long-term global equilibrium surface temperature of bodies in the solar system as diverse as Venus, the Moon, Earth, Mars, Titan and Triton can accurately be described using only two predictors: the mean distance from the Sun and the total atmospheric surface pressure. This type of cross-planetary analysis using vetted NASA observations has not been conducted by any other authors. It represents the first and only attempt in the history of climate science to assess Earth’s surface temperature in the context of a cosmic physical continuum defined by actual planetary-scale observations. The result is a new insight that planetary climates are independent of the infrared optical depth of their atmospheres arising from their composition, and that the long-wave ‘back radiation’ is actually a product of the atmospheric thermal effect rather than a cause for it.

A380 jetliner flips business jet upside down in freak mid-air accident

Image credit: liveandletsfly.com

Wake turbulence rules for A380s require other aircraft to observe minimum separation distances of 5-8 miles in a variety of situations.

A harrowing freak air accident that has only just been revealed saw an Airbus A380 commercial jetliner flown by Emirates cause a much smaller business jet passing beneath it to flip upside down and plummet thousands of feet, reports the IB Times. The incident is a sharp reminder of why passengers should always wear their seat belts.

According to information obtained by the Aviation Herald, on the morning of 7 January an Emirates Airbus A380-800 was flying from Dubai to Sydney. While the aeroplane was en route over the Arabian Sea, roughly about 630 nautical miles southeast of Muscat, a Bombardier Challenger 604 business jet operated by German carrier MHS Aviation passed by 1,000ft beneath it.

When lukewarmists attack

It’s a bit like being savaged by sheep. Anthony Watts and his psychotic sidekick Willis the drug-addled cowboy are at it again. They’re trying to undermine the work of Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, who gave an excellent presentation at our highly successful London Conference. Their theory covers the underlying physical principles which determine surface temperature across a range of solar system bodies with radically different parameters in terms of insolation, surface pressure, atmospheric composition and rotation rates. There’s not a snowball on Venus’ chance of Watts or Willis understanding it, as they amply demonstrated last time they had a go.

‘Water Battery’: Charging water by means of a mini water bridge

Floating water bridge setup [image credit: Argonne National Laboratory / Physorg]

This Science Daily story dates back to March this year, but the water bridge phenomenon itself is nothing new. In the linked video [see note below] Robert Johnson discusses ‘Plasma Behavior in the Floating Water Bridge’.
So how do floating water bridges defy gravity?

Together with the Wetsus research centre in The Netherlands, researchers of TU Graz have managed to produce electrically charged water by means of a floating water bridge.

Until its scientific rediscovery in 2007 at TU Graz, the “water bridge” phenomenon, discovered in the 19th century, had sunk into oblivion.

New Dawn Of Truth: London Climate Change Conference 2016

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller,  Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will  Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

NASA mini-balloon mission gets a magnetic surprise

Near Earth’s magnetic poles, some of Earth’s magnetic field – shown as red in this diagram – loops out into space and connects back to Earth. But some of Earth’s polar magnetic field connects directly to the sun’s magnetic field, shown here in white. [credit: NASA]

Earth’s magnetic field is more dynamic than expected, as Phys.org reports. Old-fashioned observation gets a result.

During the Antarctic summer of 2013-2014, a team of researchers released a series of translucent scientific balloons, one by one.

The miniature membranous balloons – part of the Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses, or BARREL, campaign – floated above the icy terrain for several weeks each, diligently documenting the rain of electrons falling into the atmosphere from Earth’s magnetic field.

Then in January 2014, BARREL’s observations saw something never seen before.

Logarithmic spiral beaches

Half Moon Bay State Beach, California
[credit: Wikipedia]

The Talkshop is dabbling in education today with this extract from Wikipedia.

A logarithmic spiral beach is a type of beach which develops in the direction under which it is sheltered by a headland, in an area called the shadow zone. It is characterized as a logarithmic spiral because if you look at it in plan view or aerially, it represents the same shape that is created from the logarithmic spiral relation.

These beaches are also commonly referred to as ‘half heart’ or ‘crenulate’ shaped bays, or ‘headland bays’.

Can a gaseous atmosphere really radiate as a ‘black-body’?

Commenter ‘USteiner’ asks this question on suggestions 16 and explains the reason for asking.

Let’s put aside the conclusion that CO2 makes the antarctic cool the earth. In the Schmithüsen paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL066749/full) they claim to have made the calculation, and it shows that. However, what is new? This had been measured with – gosh – real data some 45 years (!) ago. See here the Nimbus data from 1971 in Fig. 12d (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710026041.pdf )

Further, look at Schmitthüsen’s Fig 2. You see the spike on the CO2 pimple at the South pole at a Spectral radiance of 2.5. And exactly at the same level for the US Standard atmosphere. This is at least consistent with an interpretation that CO2 radiates the same everywhere on earth, but becomes only visible, when the background black body radiation from the ground is low enough. And this requirement is fulfilled only at the very cold south pole. So, what is left as excitement?