Posts by Balvenie Doublewood

Space tourists splash down in Atlantic Ocean after three days in orbit

Re: Space tourism?

I see something similar to the early days of cars and also of powered flight, the toys of the wealthy.

It didn't take long to become commonplace. We'll see what happens to spaceflight in the next decades

Laser probers sniff more gravitational waves from mega black hole smash

Re: Why LIGO Is a Scam

Sorry Steve Carlip does not say this. Cranks rarely read and/or understand the papers they reference. This is what Carlip wrote in 1999:

Finally, let us return to the question asked in Ref. [1]: what do experiments say about

the speed of gravity? The answer, unfortunately, is that so far they say fairly little. In the

absence of direct measurements of propagation speed, observations must be filtered through

theory, and different theoretical assumptions lead to different deductions. In particular,

while the observed absence of aberration is consistent with instantaneous propagation (with

an extra interaction somehow added on to explain the gravitational radiation reaction), it is

also consistent with the speed-of-light propagation predicted by general relativity.

Within the framework of general relativity, though, observations do give an answer. The

Einstein field equations contain a single parameter cg, which describes both the speed of

gravitational waves and the “speed of gravity” occurring in the expression for aberration

and in the velocity-dependent terms in the interaction. This parameter appears in the

gravitational radiation reaction in the form c

−5

g

, as in eqn. (3.3), and the success of the

theory in explaining the orbital decay of binary pulsars implies that cg = c at the 1% level

or better [22].

I doubt Steve Carlip would be impressed with the misrepresentation here as he does spend time debunking bad science from creationists in Talk Origins. The observations from LIGO clearly show speed of light gravity is reality

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

Re: Plutonium fizzle

Hi Zsn, not sure that is the case - it has been done with high burnup UK plutonium http://www.ccnr.org/plute_bomb.html

similar yield, implosion is not too fizzle sensitive to the neutron emitting 240

Did North Korea really just detonate a hydrogen bomb? Probably not

Re: H-Bombs, its the fission not fusion

Depends on the design - the hohlraum U238 will fission from the faster fusion neutrons but the yield would be about 50:50. The Tsar Bomb 50Mt was 95% fusion energy if i recall correctly, upgradeable to 100Mt with a U238 jacket to be 50:50.