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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Wednesday, April 20, 2022

What if Hydrogen Bombs could be built cheaply, from a wide variety of materials?

For some time I've been puzzled by why atomic and hydrogen bombs were always built the same way, from the same materials. Indeed, they are often called Uranium bombs, or Plutonium bombs. In principle, there are a number of other radioactive materials that could be used to build nuclear bombs. For example, kalium-40, vanadium-50, lanthanum-138, lutecium-176, tantalum-180 There's a Chinese patent here to build a Hydrogen Bomb using them: https://patents.google.com/patent/CN1417807A/en And, this would open up a wide variety of potential options for nuclear reactors, and, also, the possibility of cheaper and safer nuclear explosives that could then be used for civilian commercial applications, and, not just as military "bombs". I'm thinking in terms of Project Orion, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) and subsequent efforts and ideas. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns2.php#id--Project_Orion This is a patent for power generation using nuclear fusion explosives in an underground cavity. It's quite detailed. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4569819 And here's a german patent to build a starship using hydrogen bombs that can go faster than the speed of light. https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102011016845A1/en Well, it's right there in the patent: "With the invention it is possible to achieve a much higher speed than today's spaceships. The achievable speed is just below that of light or, if Einstein's theory of relativity is incorrect, several times the speed of light." So, how do physicists respond to this challenge to their authority? But...but...but...Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity while working in a Patent Office. The Irony! So, is it possible that all we've needed to do for the past seventy years or so, since the discovery of the H-bomb, is be a little more creative and flexible with the concept, and the universe of Star Trek would already be a reality? Earth-like planets in other solar systems all ready for our colonization, using H-bomb powered faster than light spacecraft?

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