Nuclear power and advanced tech. The good, the bad, and the mentally unstable (aka the USSR).

[wolfenstein19]

But "scientific law" to me means : "no one has managed to disapprove it and there's lots of evidence its correct, absent evidence to the contrary its probably true"

Which is, for all intents and purposes, more then all of the people claiming these ridiculous things can say. The people that claim these things just don't accept that counterproof because they think everyone else is allied with the NWO or the Illuminati

 

[Feniks]

Gee thanks....

thought to be fair my area of expertise is genetics and medicine.... but that's still sciency

You should also ping @King Lemming if we are going to ping the science types

No offence intended. Reika is the only one I knew to have scientific background.

 

[trajing]

Again, imthatguyjordan, if you are so convinced that what you say is right, why are you afraid to share sources? Also, why not listen to others?

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

As to claims mentioned about scientists being in it for the money. That may hold true for dieticians and food scientists who are paid to make some foods look better then others and then a few years later their claims are found invalid. But energy? Not so much. Scientists that want tons of money make "weight loss shakes" not energy systems

I dunno... Global Warming Climate Change is a multi-billion dollar enterprise which has some serious questions about the validity of the results due to a significant portion of the data being deemed 'irrelevant'. The fact that climate is changing? Sure, it's only been doing this for a few hundred million years (that we can determine). Heck, back in the Triassic and early Jurassic eras, there WERE no polar caps. But that humanity is causing a measurable impact on it? That's another question entirely, and I haven't really seen much in the way of scientific evidence supporting it.

"Oh no, all the CO2..." is less than a tenth of a percent of what is coming out of the oceans due to sequestration. Furthermore, the only real impact an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere would have is to cause the plants to grow greener and become more efficient at producing oxygen. It's this thing called an 'equilibrium'. It means it is in flux, it goes back and forth every so often but is on the whole fairly stable. I don't know where CO2 got labeled a 'greenhouse gas', but it requires a LOT more than just CO2 to get any greenhouse effect going.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm right up there with not wanting to pollute. Take a look at Lake Eyrie about twenty or thirty years ago for an example of why this is a Bad Thing. But people have just gone too far and are going after things that don't need to be gone after. Renewable energy sources are a good goal to aim at due to economic, more than ecological, reasons.

The planet's climate will inevitably change, and there's very little (barring a nuclear winter or other cataclysmic event) that we can do to affect it in either direction.

Oh, even if we do manage to kill ourselves off... it won't be the first time THAT has happened either. There've been... what, seven major extinction events in geologic history? And yet... life finds a way. It might not be US, but I think we need to be less concerned with cow farts and more concerned with simple economics. Oh, and making sure that the crazy people don't blow everyone else up. I'm pretty sure that would be a Bad Thing too.

 

[wolfenstein19]

@Reika is all like

 

[trajing]

@Reika is all like

wat.

 

[pizzawolf14]

wat.

 

[Not_Steve]

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

YOU STOLE MY FUDGING PICTURE

 

[trajing]

YOU STOLE MY FUDGING PICTURE

But it isn't made of fudge.

 

[damagingbill]

Yay a page without bitching that something that makes no fucking sense is here!

 

[Jadedcat]

I would just like to point out that revolutions rarely occur except on the boundaries of knowledge, especially in recent memory. More common is refinement. So, for example, we may find that the universe is 13.8, not 13.6 billion years old, or that E=mc^2 has a small correction factor. We are not, however, going to wake up tomorrow and find out that the universe began last week.

Also worth noting is that as these refinements grow smaller, their importance in actual application also does. For example, Newton's law of gravitation is not quite correct; relativity is better. However, the Voyager probes used Newton's laws, as they were close enough (welcome to engineering).


I love this quote.

Ah but the age of the world isn't a scientific law. Right now its a best guess based on evidence. All that evidence does however make it highly improbable that the world is significantly younger than the best guess.

Impossible simply means no one has tried hard enough yet. I love the word impossible. People's reaction to being told something is impossible usually is to give up and stop trying. Sometimes however that one random person goes... "oh really?" and then sometimes awesome stuff happens (scientific term). My favorite science teacher told me "Science means questioning everything and learning enough to answer the question, only believe what you can prove and even then keep questioning". How and why have always been my favorite questions.

Which is, for all intents and purposes, more then all of the people claiming these ridiculous things can say. The people that claim these things just don't accept that counterproof because they think everyone else is allied with the NWO or the Illuminati

If the only argument you can come up with to attempt to disprove something is a massive conspiracy you are not going about science the right way.

 

[Reika]

My favorite science teacher told me "Science means questioning everything and learning enough to answer the question, only believe what you can prove and even then keep questioning". How and why have always been my favorite questions.

Reminds me of a nice Einstein quote: "No experiment could ever prove me right. A single experiment could prove me wrong".

 

[Jadedcat]

Reminds me of a nice Einstein quote: "No experiment could ever prove me right. A single experiment could prove me wrong".

Yes, exactly. Science is awesome. Energy though is too complicated, I prefer my nice simple genetic stuff.

 

[wolfenstein19]

Yes, exactly. Science is awesome. Energy though is too complicated, I prefer my nice simple genetic stuff.

bzzzbzzzbzzz brrr bzzzz ....

 

[KirinDave]

I love science. However I also prefer to keep in mind that "scientific laws" have been proven false before.

This is really, really wrong to say. Since the widespread adoption of the Scientific Method, we've yet to really "overturn" laws. We've realized our laws are special cases of more general laws (e.g., Einstein revising Newton's work on Gravitation or Quantum Theory in development for handling things when it passes required for handling things when the Heisenberg limit gets unhelpful).

But we've not overturned almost anything we call a "law". Newton's laws still apply for the domain they were developed for, and can still predict the motions of the heavens just as well. We're not going to overturn any of the thermodynamic laws (which amazingly have held up even in the face of the revelations of the quantum world, albeit with STARTLING implications!) anytime soon either.

But "scientific law" to me means : "no one has managed to disapprove it and there's lots of evidence its correct, absent evidence to the contrary its probably true"

This is not the definition of "Scientific Law". Things ascend into "Law" when the amount of evidence necessary to overturn them is so massive they're basically rip apart the fabric of the core of that scientific discipline. It's difficult to imagine the magnitude of such evidence given the sheer amount of data that gets collected every day.

On the issue of scientists being in it for the money, I am with you Jaded. It's absurd If they wanted to use math for the money they'd be quantitative analysts for finance and start off at $120k USD/year with profit sharing at the start.

Culturally, the Western world is critically dependent on science and countries are desperate for supremacy in scientific achievement, yet scientists are poorly compensated and beg for money and positions for research are quite rare. It's depressing.

 

[Not_Steve]

So what are some thoughts on the traveling wave reactor (aka twr)? Some believe that it could be the future of our power. It runs off of what the current generation output as waste. The research has been mostly bankrolled by Bill Gates. He, as well as some others, have done TED talks on them. Rough estimates say that one single reactor could, without anyone changes, run for 40-60 YEARS. Another interesting piece of technology with some recent developments is the vanadium redox battery. A design involving bromine has made the concept significantly more realistic. Thoughts?

 

[dalekslayer96]

So what are some thoughts on the traveling wave reactor (aka twr)? Some believe that it could be the future of our power. It runs off of what the current generation output as waste. The research has been mostly bankrolled by Bill Gates. He, as well as some others, have done TED talks on them. Rough estimates say that one single reactor could, without anyone changes, run for 40-60 YEARS. Another interesting piece of technology with some recent developments is the vanadium redox battery. A design involving bromine has made the concept significantly more realistic. Thoughts?

Let me do a bit more research on this "Traveling Wave Reactor".


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Democretes]

So what are some thoughts on the traveling wave reactor (aka twr)? Some believe that it could be the future of our power. It runs off of what the current generation output as waste. The research has been mostly bankrolled by Bill Gates. He, as well as some others, have done TED talks on them. Rough estimates say that one single reactor could, without anyone changes, run for 40-60 YEARS. Another interesting piece of technology with some recent developments is the vanadium redox battery. A design involving bromine has made the concept significantly more realistic. Thoughts?

After doing some qiuck research, it looks good. There's a lot of promise in something like this that runs indefintely and fairly safe without using dangerous and expensive fuels. Although, from what I've read, the reactor in its current stance is fairly unreliable, and if that's an issue, then it's not going to work out down the road.

 

[wolfenstein19]

Culturally, the Western world is critically dependent on science and countries are desperate for supremacy in scientific achievement, yet scientists are poorly compensated and beg for money and positions for research are quite rare. It's depressing.

Not only culturally. Science is the driving factor for improvement in our lifestyle and has been for the better time of humanity. The explosion in technology we've seen since the industrial revolution has proven that. Nowadays with our highly complex and complicated infrastructure we need scientists to iterate and improve on the technologies we have.