Environmental Physics 101

[MindAphid@xxxxxxx]

from a physicist friend...


>to the following?
>
>*****   Nader vs. the Big Rock Candy Mountain
>Jesse Lemisch
>
>[from New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 31, Summer 2001]
>
>... I SUPPORTED RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT IN 2000. Nonetheless, I
>think that in some ways Nader and the Greens offer a bad model for
>the future of independent politics....Here is my criticism, first in
>summary: Nader and the Greens abstemiously turned their backs on
>people's reasonable and deeply human longings for abundance, joy,
>cornucopia, variety and mobility, substituting instead a puritanical
>asceticism that romanticizes hardship, scarcity, localism and
>underdevelopment -- a traditionalism that blinds us to the
>possibility of utopia.

Of course human beings want a cornucopia.  We all want to have abundance
and largesse in our lives.  Wanting something and realistically getting
something are two different things.

There are two questions that NOBODY is addressing.  The first is whether
people will willingly adopt a life of scarcity.  The second is whether
there exists a method of providing the large amounts of energy required to
have an abundant life without the extractive and destructive processes that
have currently gone on.  Failure to address either of these two questions
renders all political ideological grandstanding completely useless.

Let us assume that there simply does not exist Gibbs free energy in
sufficient amounts to continue a socio-economic structure that provides an
abundant life to many people, or at least most within the wealthy nations.
It is then reasonable to state that a future with far more restrictive
boundaries and limitations is inevitable.  Given that eventual state of
affairs, then someone has to give the big "oh shits" report to the world.
Currently, the powers that be are working very hard to avoid having to do
this.  Frankly it is no wonder!  Any political party that goes out and
says, "You all are going to have to scrap most of what you have, live on a
fraction of your income, and give up your current employment to become most
likely a farm laborer," is not going to get many votes.  Then if that
political party further says, "well in spite of this we are going to
provide high levels of education and social welfare, and what we have
materially lost will be made up for in more spiritual things," is basically
offering up a social variant of the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.  Education
is frankly the product of wealth, and people only generally adopt so called
"spiritual life" once the material one has been completely lost.  So far
what I see is a lot of talk about spiritual things, but not a lot of doing
spiritual things.

Will the majority people willingly adopt a life of scarcity?  Shit no!
Outside of a few who see beyond the TV screens and have that monastic
tendency to begin with, when the fuel starts to run out most people are
going to scream for the "big man" who will keep them in their bacon.  Watch
out! this state of affairs is coming pretty quickly

http://www.oilcrisis.com

and just as people did not willingly accept the economic constriction
during the Weimer republic in Germany I doubt they will accept them in the
next 10 to 20 years.  There is a saying, "If you are not outraged, you are
not paying attention."  Frankly what is more apt is, "If you are not
horrified, you are not paying attention."

Ok, now that it appears that the scarcity model will have all the public
popularity of skunk scented perfume on the cosmetic counter, let us look at
the prospect of providing sufficient energy in order to maintain and
further expand a life of abundance to not just those in the wealthy
nations, but to the world at large.

This then means that we will have to find energy sources that do not
involve the high degree of extraction from the natural world and the degree
of damaging detritus that is produced.  Not only that, but these energy
sources will have to be rather abundant.  After all, our world does not
really run on money, it runs on energy.  Money is at best a metric for
telling you how well you are doing, and at worst a nasty game of social
power.  It is best to wake up from our delusions spun by the Alan
Greenspans, Milton Friedmans and others and admit that energy is more
fundamental than money, which is a purely synthetic artifice.

On this one you have to consider physics, and frankly physics is pretty
unforgiving.  Again if you are still caught in social and economic modes of
thinking, physics is more fundamental: the observable universe is dated to
14 billion years, and systems based on either Adam Smith or Karl Marx as
well as others are a couple of centuries old.  As for the popular renewable
energy sources, solar, wind etc, these will never provide abundant energy.
Wind is the most workable and in view of what is going on wind turbine
farms should be constructed as rapidly as possible.  Direct solar energy
has quite a ways to go before it really can be broadly applied.  Yet even
with increased efficiencies the renewable energy sources of today will not
bring us to a world of global cornucopia and largesse.  What about nuclear
energy?  Nuclear fission requires that a lot of energy goes into the
preparation of plutonium and into the management of waste.  As an energy
source it is frankly at best somewhat better than wind energy.  Further, it
is comparatively extractive.  So the energy sources we have available today
imply a life of much reduced commons and wealth than what we have today.
So they imply that we are heading towards the scarcity model for the future.

What about fusion or other exotic energy sources?  Fusion in theory does
imply a cornucopia that is not very extractive.  However, it suffers from
scaling problems in order make fusion energy reach a sufficient surplus of
energy (more energy output than energy input).  Research funding on fusion
only rather timidly pushes forward.  As for exotic energy there are two
prospects.  The first is with magnetic monopoles and X gauge bosons that
can convert quarks to leptons in SU(5) and SO(10) Grand Unification of
gauge fields.  However, these field theories are still tentative, and the
energies required to produce these particle fields that will catalyse the
conversion of matter to energy are beyond current capabilities.  Another
prospect is quantum gravity, where the renormalization of the Planck length
may permit the direct conversion of matter to energy.  As a sort of
appendix I give a brief overview on this below for the tiny minority who
might be interested.  This would provide a cornucopia, but I would not hold
your breath.  This will likely suffer from the scaling problems currently
seen with fusion energy.  Again this does not make it impossible, just as
fusion is not impossible, but it means that a lot of hard work has to be
done before you break through the barrier to the cornucopia.

There are other schemes or rather scams, such as vacuum energy.  However,
these ideas are simply wrong.

So there you have it.  The future situation looks terribly uncertain.  It
appears that the scarcity model, with all the promises that somehow a
social eden will further emerge, and the cornucopia model are very
problematic.  The problem with the scarcity model is that it realistically
implies: economic chaos ----> sever nationalistic and political agendas
----> war.  The problem with the cornucopia model is that the physics
required to support such a model is at best incomplete.

Lawrence B. Crowell

***********************************

QUANTUM GRAVITY AND ENERGY

The first is the uncertainty principle where two conjugate variables, say
position and momantum (x, p) are such that the uncertainty in them (&x, &p)
is related to a constant unit of action (= energy * time or = momentum *
position) called hbar

&x&p = hbar.

So if the uncertainty in one increases the uncertainty in the other
decreases.  The squeezing of the vacuum state involves squeezing the
uncertainty or quantum fluctuations in one variable to zero, and where the
uncertainty in the other becomes huge through parametric amplification.  I
have worked out how the quantum gravity vacuum is "self squeezing," in that
it acts as its own parametric amplifier.

The next concept is that of the Planck length.  A black hole has a radius
that defines where its event horizon is.  Anything that gets within this
sphere is sealed off from the outside universe.  Everything has its quantum
wave length.  One can then find out what is the length where a black hole
horizon radius is equal to its quantum wave length.  This occurs on a scale
of 10^{-33}cm, which is very small.  On that scale are virtual black holes
that emerge from the vacuum for a brief period of time, 10^{-43}sec and are
reabsorbed into the vacuum.

Now here is where my work comes in.  The self-squeezing of the quantum
gravity vacuum by the field (which can be the vacuum itself) has the
property that for a certain degree of squeezing the uncertainty in both
variables actually begin to increase.  It is as if hbar is being increased
in value.  This also means that this Planck scale increases in size.  So in
principle if one can coherently induce squeezing of the quantum gravity
vacuum, or "prime it" so that it is coherent, then the Planck scale can in
principle be scaled up to 10^{-13}cm which is the size of a proton and even
massive nuclei are only a bit larger.

So in principle it is possible to do this with high powered lasers that
accelerate protons to beyond 10^{24}cm/sec^2, which is 10billion-trillion g
forces.  A proton could then be absorbed into a virtual black hole
renormalized to the scale of a proton.  Once the virtual black hole is
reabsorbed into the vacuum it will leave behind a positron (anti-electron)
and high energy photons.  In effect we can convert matter 100% into energy.
 Nuclear energy only converts a few percent of the mass of a nuclei into
energy.

So that is the good news: yes in principle quantum gravity could be physics
to provide energy on a vast scale.


However, do not hold your breath.  There are a number of things that have
to be figured out.  The first is that we do not have high powered lasers
that can induce these accelerations.  The closest we have is the NIF at
Lawrence Livermore.  I am in contact with people there to do experiments to
measure self squeezing of states and certain departures from standard
quantum theory.  Further, the beam quality of these high powered lasers
would have to be much better than what is currently obtainable.  So much
effort would have to go towards that.  Further, this might easily run into
the same scaling issues that plague the fusion program.  With fusion in
order to get breakeven, or further a decent EROEI, the facility has to be
scaled up much beyond what has been worked on.  I have no real idea of the
engineering that might go into a quantum gravity reactor if it were
pursued, but my sense is that a similar matter could easily come to the
front.  Further, it would not be pollution free, the high energy photons
that are produced would likely knock the nuclei in the containment vessel
into radioactive isotopes.  However, the reactor would also be a
radioactive pollution solver, just use radioactive waste as the fuel
(matter) to be annihilated.  A quantum gravity energy age, the 22nd or 23rd
century?, would probably be what solves the radioactive pollution from the
nuclear fission age, maybe the 21st century?

So I doubt that quantum gravity can have any bearing on the problem with
the end of the petroleum age, which will doubtless be a major theme of the
early to mid 21st century.