Posts by ZenoOfElea

Scalene; New open source tool dramatically speeds up Python

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amhers, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow-up, to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages - and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code or higher performance.

Bad signs that LK99 replications are struggling and then Cold Fusion gets mentioned in the same article - kiss of death.

Big Think Ask Ethan Is LK99 The Holy Grail Of Superconductors

Of course if the article I referenced in my previous post above (Explainer thread on LK99) is correct then LK99 replication has a number of complications.

First is the fabrication which many are characterising as "simple". But in fact the fabrication of a successful sample may not be simple.

Quoting from the article I referenced previously;

"The approach outlined in the paper is to very evenly mix your sources of lead and copper, then to bake in an oven at high temperature. This last step provides the energy required to generate high-energy, strained states, but only stochastically.

By using the right molar ratios and crystalizing at high temp you can ensure that the right number of copper atoms replace lead in the unit crystal, but there is no way to ensure with this method that the linear chain of conducting atoms is strictly alternating as required.

Still you will get by chance some regions that have crystalized in the desired configuration. And with the right preparation steps maybe you can get these regions to selectively bind together. Or cleave the sample in such a way as to break it along superconducting lines.

Maybe. This isn't really detailed in either paper, and the L&K have had 20 years of trouble themselves reliably replicating their results. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But this is to be expected as the process is probabilistic by nature."

Second its superconducting properties may only manifest "in a linear chain, so it does not have the blowup of electron states that a 3D crystal structure would have."

If so its properties and measurement would be more subtle than more "standard" superconductors.

Now it may be that LK99 is not a room temperature superconductor, or maybe it is and Nobel Prizes will appear.

But a third option is that we have a novel breakthrough that fails because the "replicators" struggle to see what they expect to see.

Can the Cold Fusion history repeat itself?

Certainly some theorists have suggested that LK99 could work as a superconductor.

But it is the experimentalists that will crown it or kill it.

Brian Wang on NextBigFuture site has been giving a lot of attention to this story.

Lots of articles to read through.

Much of the reaction from the science community is still preliminary.

Some more "eminent" parties seem miffed at the poor physics on show!

Condensed Matter Theory Center at University of Maryland.

""Physics" being presented in these unrefereed preprints is a travesty. The original paper has no obvious SC transition and the T<T_c resistivity is 100 times that of Cu. Southeast also has no transition, just instrumental artifacts. What is the goal here? No one can fool nature"

I suppose science done via ArXiv and Twitter has certain downsides!

However a couple of take-aways that I thought were significant.

First the research on this "superconductor" material has been ongoing for 20 years. This has been mentioned in prior reports but is important to remember against a false impression that media stories can generate, when research news suddenly bursts into the public stage, as if it has happened all of a sudden and without due care. The team certainly have not rushed the publication of their research. In fact the news only broke because one contributor pushed out a paper without agreement.

Secondly, some are saying that even if LK99 does not pan out as a superconductor, or even as a problematic and difficult one, that it looks like it is injecting fresh ideas into the field that may well point towards a successful outcome.

See this article;

Explainer thread on LK99.

If is great fun just to see Shane getting so excited.

It is like one of those YouTube videos watching somebody who is watching a movie.

But we all have our fingers crossed, such landmark advances in science are rare and hard won.

Korea university claim room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.

Sounds too good to be true but if it pans out then big news!!!

We await confirmation.

Quote from Wyttenbach

In my case it was clear that the mafia (like IH folks) behind USPTO simply wanted to get more information. USA is a 100% mafia controlled state as we have learned during the fake Covid pandemics.

Still don't see how this works.

IH seem to have not managed to get very far, except for some hopeful patents maybe.

As far as government plots and elaborate schemes, in reality governments have great difficulty just functioning at a basic level and getting a group of countries to work together is like herding cats.

The UK government plans for a cleaner future are hardly coherent. We had one government that promoted diesel cars in 2001, that turned out to be a mistake we are now regretting.

The current government has talked up the idea of putting hydrogen into the gas pipe network. Yesterday they finally ditched that plan due to the realization that it is not practicable.

Quote from BEC

I think the ARPA-E money is strictly for academic work to come up with a scientific description of the phenomenon.

A mechanistic description or theory of LENR would be great.

But that is not always the way forward.

I have in mind the matter phase of superconductivity which was discovered in 1911, completely unexpectedly and no theorists predicted this phenomenon.

Some progress was made in 1935 with the London equations but theoretical explanations did not happen till the 1950s with the Ginzburg-Landau theory and the BCS theory.

But the implications of the BCS theory was that superconductivity could not happen at temperatures above 30K.

In 1986 the experimentalists Bednorz and Muller proved that this was not correct.

So in this area the experimentalists have had to forge ahead with the theorists taking years or decades to provide some insight and in some instances the experimenters have had to ignore the theorists.

Today superconductivity is widely utilised and a lot of money is spent on experimental research but we still do not have a complete theoretical understanding of the phenomenon.

So I think LENR funding should not just bet on a theory of the process. We should support the experimenters to improve and validate the results and then the theorists can pick over the data and do their bit. The more data the theorists have the more chance we will get a useful theory.

Not been keeping up on this, and things seem to go quiet for long periods, so pardon my ignorance.

In my view Brillouin are one of the LENR research teams that I am most optimistic about.

So if the ARPA-E grants have not gone to Brillouin then are there some even more promising LENR groups out there?

Or was there some technicality that stopped Brillouin from getting the funds?

Or has the funding all been grabbed by the hot fusion mafia as we feared?

Northwest University Study;

Secondary bacterial pneumonia drove many COVID-19 deaths.

Machine learning finds no evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19

Secondary bacterial infection of the lung (pneumonia) was extremely common in patients with COVID-19, affecting almost half the patients who required support from mechanical ventilation. By applying machine learning to medical record data, scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine have found that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key driver of death in patients with COVID-19, results published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Bacterial infections may even exceed death rates from the viral infection itself, according to the findings. The scientists also found evidence that COVID-19 does not cause a “cytokine storm,” so often believed to cause death.

The investigators found nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia.

“Those who were cured of their secondary pneumonia were likely to live, while those whose pneumonia did not resolve were more likely to die,” Singer said. “Our data suggested that the mortality related to the virus itself is relatively low, but other things that happen during the ICU stay, like secondary bacterial pneumonia, offset that.”

***

I posted this because I think it is an interesting addition to the "with hindsight" story.

The suggestion is that the cytokine storm, which sounded plausible to me, is not correct.

And again there is another issue of interpretation of statistics.

It is suggested that more people in ICUs died from the secondary pneumonia infection than COVID-19 but they would not have been in the ICU and had ventilation if they did not have COVID-19. So what is counted as the cause of death?

Is it the upstream medical condition or the final medical condition?

Also is ventilation normally this risky as it is used on a daily basis in healthcare?

In any case the whole "rush to ventilation" in the early stages of COVID-19 shows how rapidly our health services default to desperate measures when they have a pandemic to deal with.

I dip into Thunderbolts occasionally, they have some interesting ideas.

Some of the ones I remember reading.

Apparently Venus was ejected from Jupiter in the recent past.

Also the gravitational force was weaker during the time of the dinosaurs which is why they were able to grow so large but could not exist today.

Also the big bang is a false theory, the big bang never happened.

I agree that scientists do form into "camps" and some of the fights for funding and recognition can be brutal, same as anywhere else, and great ideas can be squashed or derailed.

I agree that funding is a precious resource that is not well allocated. There is too much of the pie going to fusion research IMO. Those starting to push for a super expensive super particle accelerator do not have a strong enough case in my view, we need a rethink rather than just throwing ever increasing amounts of money to a subset of physics.

But one thing I would point out to those critical of current science, if the cabal of scientists were trying to hold on to their sacred ideas; big bang, standard model, evolution by natural selection etc then why do they keep doing research that tests their theories with new data? The current "crises" in cosmology has been brewing for a while and the Webb Telescope is about getting new data and pushing the existing theories and models. This is about science gathering data, debating then progressing, not avoiding and stagnating.

So the suggestion is to run two Tesla cars for the test with one being modified to run on SKLeps.

Of course there is absolutely no way that Rossi is going to buy even one Tesla car!

Over the years each test (sorry demo) has gotten cheaper and cheaper.

I guess if somebody drew a graph of the outlay by Rossi over the years then any future demo's will need to be well under $100.

At this rate the next dog and pony show will not be able to afford a pony and will just be a "dog's dinner" (British slang).

Quote from GRMattson

@Of course this whole thing could be a plot to confuse the Russians. There is after all an existential war going on.

Yes, that thought crossed my mind. There have been elaborate plots to release false information.

There was "Operation Mincemeat" in World War 2, but that involved a small group of plotters and a relatively simple plan.

The infamous Cambridge Five spy ring was a small, tight knit group.

When the scheme gets too grandiose you can end up with a Bay of Pigs style fiasco.

Which is why the USA was unable to stop the details of the Manhattan Project from leaking out.

Not only was Klaus Fuchs leaking information from the inside but Russian physicist Georgi Flerov was serving in the Russian air force in 1942 and during some leave he went to the library in Moscow to catch up on physics papers about spontaneous fission. He was surprised to find that there had been no papers published on the topic from top names in the USA or Britain which led him to the conclusion that something important was being hidden.

In this current case though the damage to US credibility is major and the fallout onto the US allies and Ukraine is requiring a major attempt at damage control.

I have only a sketchy idea of what was leaked but have not seen anything that would make it worthwhile.

Even any leaks about Ukrainian counterattack plans will result in the plans being revised.

If you find such things amusing the idea of some fool "leaking intelligence" is a bit disturbing as a metaphor.

But more than one person is in trouble here I imagine.

It would be interesting to know who vetting him to have such clearance.

It would be even more interesting to know, in a secure unit that does not even allow phones for fear of photography, how somebody could so easily smuggle classified documents out of the building. Doh!

This is exactly why I do not believe in clever, sophisticated, deep state conspiracies, the state is neither clever nor sophisticated.

Ged' s post reminds me that we have a vast surplus of foolishness.

If only some genius could figure some way to capitalise on foolishness then anything is possible.

Oh wait ... somebody already convinced some fools that anything is possible.

Years ago I was one of those fools so maybe there is hope for us all.

Edit; Apologies to Jed for spelling his name wrong, I have a drinking buddy called Ged.

Daniel_G I appreciate the sentiments and I too am worried about the ARPA-E testing, but I think the LENR community, after all these years, is still struggling even to validate itself without tasking itself with overthrowing the standard model. But it that happens then great!

I really hope this delivers on the promises. It could change the world massively for the better.

I note the description of the process avoids the use of the terms "cold" and "fusion" or even "LENR", so I will be interested to see how mainstream academia takes it on board as a real and working device.

Combining Chat GPT and Wolfram Alpha

There is some talk about how Chat GPT and Wolfram Alpha could complement each other.

So this guy (JoeStrout) decided to have a play.

It is interesting to see how Chat GPT can in fact give some very wrong answers and even stick to its guns when the error is presented to it.

But it does look like combining the two would eventually provide a very powerful utility.

A few thoughts;

Obviously the particle model is useful as far as it goes and not useful in other circumstances, hence the move to quantum field theory.

The journey of reductive science has spanned from our complex everyday world of biology to the more structured world of chemistry and then down to the even more structured world of physics. At each level there seems to be greater simplicity so that an electron can be described by a small set of properties, mass, charge and spin.

This journey implies that increasing simplicity must lead to a base level from which everything arises. Thus the 1940s science fiction fantasies about an atom being a solar system etc are just fantasies.

In respect of the issue of infinity;

As the author says, we can only measure to the limits of our instruments and data. Science has no way to measure any kind of infinity, as far as I am aware.

Infinity seems to be a plaything of mathematicians and therefore manifests through the mathematics that scientists employ.

However there are other approaches to mathematics that have been explored that do not require infinite numbers such as "intuitionist mathematics" see this article from Quanta.

Quanta Does Time Really Flow New Clues Come From Century Old Approach To Math

OK so I decided to check out the story of the comment in my post above that I read somewhere about Toyota banking on hydrogen cars to help keep Japanese car suppliers in business.

Toyota does indeed have subsidiaries and suppliers that are gearing up for fuel cell production and related EV components.

Toyota is also investing in a hydrogen combustion engine which will be able to fit with some of its long standing ICE component suppliers.

So it looks like Toyota and Japan are indeed aiming to safeguard their car manufacturers business by adapting, in some cases by evolving towards hydrogen fuel-cells but also making a push for hydrogen combustion vehicles.

So the win here is for the Japanese manufacturing base and they can tout hydrogen combustion as "green".

Meanwhile they will get a lot of support from the fossil fuel industry because the main way to make hydrogen is to use natural gas.

Whether this pans out for them remains to be seen.

See this article for example;

Toyota hydrogen combustion engine vehicles.

"Toyota believes that hydrogen can also prove to be useful in combustion engines. The automaker recently demonstrated a custom-built GR Yaris with a hydrogen combustion engine that it has been developing for some time. These events have led to several tier one suppliers deciding to take hydrogen seriously, following in Toyota's footsteps in order to develop technology to stay current in a hydrogen future.

One of these suppliers is BorgWarner, a company that specializes in turbochargers for combustion vehicles. BorgWarner has since branched out past accessories for combustion engines, developing a line of electric drive motors for EVs and other components to ensure that its future is well-footed in when the combustion engine goes mostly extinct. The manufacturer is also launching a complete lineup of accessories for hydrogen combustion motors, according to Automotive News, including fueling components and an engine control unit."

Quote from Wyttenbach

No this is not the case. Hydrogen cars are fully electric just the accumulator is replaced by a Gas tank that is totally different from a gasoline tank.

Thanks for this.

I saw pictures of hydrogen cars being filled like a petrol car so it sounded plausible that there was some kind of engine involved.

That is the problem with pseudo-authoritative statements from random people on the Internet.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Hydrogen cars produces excess heat what is nice during winter times...

Apart from the "cold-start" issue that Sabine mentions.

She does say that pre-heating systems are being explored as a possible solution, but of course that also uses energy.