Rebel Intellectuals

The universe is a big place.  Its so big that it is difficult if not impossible to wrap your brain around.  And it just got a lot more difficult.  The previous estimate for the number of galaxies in the universe was 200 billion, each galaxy itself containing about 300 billion star systems and each star system represents a chance of harboring complex life. The new estimate is a ten fold increase which brings the number to 2 trillion and can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.03909v2.pdf

What is a trillion anyway? I don’t know.  I mean I know what a trillion is.  Its a 1 followed by a whole bunch of zeros.  But what is it really?  The image below, that I may or may not have borrowed, helps conceptualize it a bit. Just imagine each bill representing 100 stars.  And also imagine the guy standing next to all those stars not vaporizing….as a matter of fact forget the guy altogether but just use it a reference to see how millions billions and trillions compare to each other. I mean if you want to imagine the guy being vaporized you could do that too.

Big AF

So as you can clearly see a trillion is totally a lot more than a million or billion. A lot lot more.  How the hell did those crazy scientists figure this out?  Through the development of more accurate instruments and the painstaking task of analyzing data / images from those instruments.  An International team of researchers took a look at tiny snapshots of the sky and counted.  Or probably developed a computer program to count for them.  They then took the amount of stars they counted per size of the sky being examined and extrapolated outwards to the area of the sky unexamined.

This is a very exciting announcement for a few reasons:

1. Higher probability of the existence of fucking aliens…..seriously though.
2. Higher probability of other cool shit
3. We know so little about the universe and that’s ok.

When science is at its best it is falsifiable.  That’s what makes science the best tool of examining the world around us.  Because of bias and other flaws in both humanity’s nature but also things such as instrumentation this is very important.  Our ideas and world view shouldn’t be static.  They should be plastic and able to be changed in my opinion because as far as I can tell there are no absolute perfect truths.
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.  I think its much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.” Richard Feynman

Although Einstein developed the foundation for quantum physics he was uncomfortable with its implications. Einstein said famously “God does not play dice” or something to that effect.  Since the most accurate and experimentally verified explanation of the universe is one that does so by describing events probabilistically it appears as though he she or it does play dice. Or probably plays dice.  At least a few days a week.

A universe that has events occurring probabilistically is a much more interesting one in my opinion.  And as far as we can tell so far it appears that this is so.  In my last post I spoke about how electron’s locations were said to be potentially here and potentially there.  The highest likelihood of finding it would be somewhere close to the nucleus but there would also be a small possibility of finding it a few light years away.  What we didn’t speak about directly is the possibility of finding the electron in two places at once.  One electron…existing in two (or more) places at once.  This strange quality of the electron, as improbable as it sounds, occurs very easily and happens all the time in certain situations.  The video below gives a great description of it:
The Double Slit Experiment Dr. Quantum

Physics calls this strange quality superposition.  The double slit experiment was first conducted in 1801 by a man by the name of Thomas Young.  Young conducted the experiment with photons and it has been repeated with all kinds of matter, including complex molecules comprised of hundreds of atoms.

Its a mad world!

The Schrodinger Wave Equation was developed by Erwin Schrodinger and is ranks among the biggest breakthrough’s in the history of science. It serves as one of the pillars of quantum physics. The irony of the situation is that it wasn’t quite clear what the equation could be used for when it was first developed. It wasn’t known what the results actually meant however.  Over time it became apparent that it was describing the location and energy of a particle in terms of probability.  The time independent equation is shown below.

In the beginning of last century it was postulated that particles behaved both like particles AND waves. Schrodinger was the first person to prove this mathematically. Before the quantum revolution particles were described as having definite locations and other characteristics. As scientists began examining things a bit deeper it became clear that this was not the case.  The most accurate description of our universe, including subatomic particles, suggested that the physical characteristics of things should best be described as probabilities.  For example the location of an an electron, proton, atom, or even groups of atoms are not absolute. Their probable location of anything is both non zero percent and non one hundred percent for every possible location across space and time in the universe. While there is a higher probability for the electron existing close to the nucleus of a hydrogen atom but there is also a probability, albeit small, for the electron existing on the surface of Proxima Centauri which is over 4 light years away. That possibility of it being on Proxima Centauri is very very very very small and highly unlikely to actually happen. An event such as an electron moving across a few microns or even a few meters is still unlikely but not so unlikely as to not occur. These events are known as quantum tunneling, or as lay people know it: teleportation, and will be covered in a future post.
The picture below is a visual representation of the probability cloud of the various electron shells for the hydrogen atom. The bright areas are the areas of highest probability for the location of the electron and the darker areas have a lower probability of finding it but keep in mind although dark and unlikely there is a small possibility for finding the electron anywhere in the universe, no matter how much space and or time separate it from the nucleus.

Let all of this sink in.

Any questions or comments so far?

I’ll expand on this in my next post later on in the week on the 4th of December!

Until then may the force be with you!

Thanks so much for everyone’s support and interest in the blog.  I’m not blowing away any records but traffic has been growing steadily and I couldn’t be happier.

Today we will be discussing some tweeks and advancements that will take 3D printing to the next level.  These developments will make the device a true world changer.  In my opinion a sufficiently advanced 3D printer will have a greater impact then the printing press, antibiotics, the transistor and even the internet.  In this post I’ll focus on two additions to the 3D printing that are simply the synthesis between already existing technologies.  Nothing new needs to be invented.

I can’t think of a thing that wouldn’t be better with a little nuclear fusion.  Or maybe a lot of nuclear fusion.  The benefits would be two fold.  The first benefit of nuclear fusion is the amount of power that is released during the process.  Fusing together two hydrogen ions, or protons, releases enormous amounts of energy, relative to the mass of the protons of course.  Aside from matter-antimatter fusion proton-proton fusion is the most powerful process that we know of.  It also has some very interesting byproducts.  Unlike nuclear fission which produces dangerous radioactive heavy elements, fusion produces stable lighter elements as its waste.  These waste products would be used as starting material to be used in the printer and the energy released can be used to power the printer with a great excess that will be used to power your house, car, etc.

Through the process of nucleosynthesis, aka the creation of heavier atomic nuclei, fusing protons will produce heavier elements.  This process releases energy up until the production of Iron.  After that the process becomes endothermic, or it requires more energy to make these things than is released.  The basic process is that you would take two protons and smash them together, one of the protons degrades into a neutron and the element is called Deuterium.  Then Deuterium is fused together with another proton, the proton degrades into a neutron and yet a new element is produced which is called Tritium.  Deuterium and Tritium are isotopes of hydrogen in case you were wondering.  If you fuse another proton to Tritium the result is something more familiar: Helium!

Nucleosynthesis occurs in stars and nuclear reactors but it also takes place in particle accelerators.  Particle accelerators tend to be very large but they have shrunk dramatically in size over the decades.  As of about 15 years ago they have been shrunk down to the size of a room.  That might be small enough for our purposes but I imagine there are some that are even smaller by now, if not I would imagine they are on the horizon.

My other tweak that I thought of would be to integrate nanotechnology that would be able to assemble molecules from the elements that we produced in the previous step.  Once we have these more complex compounds we would be able to assemble most anything we could design.  I don’t think we would need to look any further than nature for inspiration.  Organic processes in animals in plants produce a whole host of useful compounds.  For example the chloroplasts in plants make sugars of many variety.  These sugars can be linked together to form complex carbohydrates such as wood or chitin, the protective shell of insects.  We will be able to mirror a lot of these methods and expand on them to build inorganic compounds as well.

What are your thoughts?  What would you change or add to the 3D printing process to improve the technology?

This is a video of my friend Brian Leibowitz and myself. It was our first attempt at a podcast. Its long. Its a conversation. It needs to be cut up and published as a few “highlight” reels.

The gods of fate are not without their sense of humor. The attention hog that I am didn’t figure out how to make the podcast split screen and unintentionally made the entire video side of the recording of Brian and not me.

Boo Hiss.

Anyway it was fun. I had a great time.  It wasn’t as bad I had imagined.

Moving forward we plan on making it less conversational and more informative.

So without any further adieu….I give you…. 2 Nerds Nerding Out!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJBKf7N4z_w&feature=youtu.be