May 25, 2009

What kind of battery should you wish for? The boring old matter anti-matter E equals M C squared kind? OR the pulling atoms apart kind?
  • "Every other technology's improved by leaps and bounds in the last hundred years, but a lithium-ion battery today only packs about ten times as much energy per kilogram as the batteries that powered early electric cars." Batteries don't follow Moore's law. They store electrons. You don't have to know much about physics to know that electrons have to live on something. You can't just have a box of 11.5 grams of electrons.
  • True, you CAN'T just have a box of electrons...but if you COULD then you get some neat Weird Science dropping out, with neutron star mass densities and outrageous electric field gradients. Which I thought was kinda cool.
  • Yeah, that is pretty cool.
  • You can't just have a box of 11.5 grams of electrons. Truf! Mainly because they come in six-packs or boxes of 12.
  • I buy mine by the bushel or peck.
  • hogshead of quarks
  • LHCs full of Higgs-Bosons.
  • Prometheus was punished for giving Man fire. Now this part about the National Ignition Laboratory gives pause. But not MUCH pause since the first experiments are immanent this month. So if they achieve ignition, creating sunlike power, or fusion with lasers, I see the point here about the need to store a nearly endless energy feed. For this, who's going to have to sacrifice his liver every day like Prometheus did? What kind of booze are these guys drinking? Certainly their approach is the opposite of cold (sober) fusion...