Rocket Man

that would work, provided you run an AC current. also the rate of temperature rise would be determined by the frequency of the ac. higher frequencies generally produce better eddies. if you build this, insulate the material from the coil, you dont want tto confuse ohmic heating in the coil with eddies in the experiment. it may work to suspend the test material in the water, and wrap the coil around a styrofoam/insulating cup. it probably wont, but an irregular coil shape might yeild a better result. i think eddies only occur in conductive materials so you'd probably be better off testing resistivity. the only thing i can think of that this experiment will tell you is how irregular the conductive patterns are. it'll probably have some good use in that case, equipped with an IR camera to spot the differences, you'll be able to tell where the conducitvity layers are on the suface of certain materials.

xenon, helium and argon, theyre all noble gasses, and all turn to plasma very easily. also, the breakdown drops when pressure decreases because theres less particles to heat and strip to the nucleus on the way between electrodes. air doesnt like ionising. apparently carbon dioxide ionises easily, they use it in lazers a lot, also you can lower the breakdown of air by adding impurities, humididy will drop the breakdown substantially (i may have a confusion of terms in there, i dont know much about the ionisation energies of certain gasses, correct me if im wrong) if you have an AC HV rig, my suggestion would be to rectify it, a diode bridge will give you dc, and a cap in parralel with the gap will smooth the voltage output. i should have though of it earlier, but dismantle a large-ish fuse and assemble the spark gap inside just for the first stages of the experiment. you'll have less detrimental factors to deal with. make sure you dont get any cathode rays coming off it, cathode rays + glass = Xrays you're talking about unsustained sparks, current might be a problem, if youre not delivering enough energy, the plasma will cool faster the the HV will heat it. an inductor may also help, it'll stop the caps draining too suddenly and dropping the voltage below an acceptable limit, it'll still need resistors though. if you put an inductor on it, please remember to put multiple diodes in series to prevent the kickback from kicking too hard

i see what your getting at; a photons momentum would come out as: p=(1/0).0.C which as you said, fails. my point is, an object heated with a set energy, emits a photon and cools. the object had extra mass because of the heat energy, so that mass has to go somewhere. logic would say the mass/energy is now contained in a photon. I reckon photons follow a different set of equations to describe mass-energy compared to mass itself at speed. a photon is just energy that, oddly enough, travels at the speed of light. the energy of a photon is not determined by it's velocity alone, a gamma ray slowed by the same amount as an IR photon will always have a higher energy because of its frequency. since a photon consists of energy, it must have a "sort-of" mass but i highly doubt it follows the same inertial dialation as matter.

the brain has many neurons, some of which are devoted to very specific things, a study done on epileptics to remove afflicting neurons shows that in two patients, the surgeons found specific neurons which only lit up when the subjects were shown images of a particular persons face. the binding problem is only a problem when you try to relate a brain to a computer. the brain is stroage and processing all in one. a stimulus will fire specific neurons to work out what it is, those neurons will go about looking at the relational netwoks to find the most appropriate course of action. theres some info on a thread called "reversed visions"

i agree that a photon has no rest mass, it's pure energy and the energy is stored in the speed, but a photon is energy, energy has mass and it has a distorted form of momentum, so a photon with 90penta-joules would impart a lot of momentum, 90 penta joules =1kg, otherwise it would violate momentum laws so a photon must have mass when it's moving. you are right to say a photon has no rest mass but the energy in it weighs something take away the speed, you take away the energy, you take away the mass. this site discusses it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon also this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas if it has pressure, the individual particles must have momentum, momentum is a property directly related to mass

well, you can reflect radio waves off the ionosphere, radios have a deadband between the line of sight and the reflection angle off the ionosphere so for a radio there is such a thing as too close. radiowaves are electromagnetic, so you can tap energy off radio transmitters, it's how a crystal radio works. but to run even a small device requires substantial power. tesla managed to power lightbulbs 100 miles away from a tesla coil via voltage between ground and air, reflecting it off the ionosphere and resonating it there to boost efficiency isn't entirely mad, but it's pretty ambitious. there are theories that Mr Tesla blew up tunguska with a big tesla coil and the ionosphere (probably crackpot conspiracy theories though)

the coils use electromagnetic harmonics to generate teh high voltage, they're basically transformers designed to give power at optimum (dynamic) efficiency. so yes, they do produce quite a substantial magnetic feild but it oscillates at very high frequencies so there is no real force involved in that however, the electrostatic forces combined with the possibility of RF burns are pretty dangerous.

a computer making music is like the proposition of having an infinite number of monkeys on type writers and finding the script for hamlet among the nonsense. highly improbable to get some coherent music from a random tone generator. however there may be certain algorithms that might make decent patterns.

a cocroft walton mux is relatively simple to get a lower voltage out of. if you can, find a junction lower down on the ladder and divert the stabilising circuits to there. the diode array is VERY important, inductive kickback will FRY anything! the cap matrix is just to smooth out the oscillations under high load. grounding is unneccesary for this i think, try it, if it doesnt work you can rig your CW to ground, depending how you CW is set up you can link one of the HV lines to ground. if the 3.6kv is from a transformer, you can run a step down transformer before it. do you think the lifters will run on static electricity? foil over a CRT delivers a fair bit of juice, enough to spin a ion wind rotor.

a pneumatic rocket can be modified to go further, a nossle will do wonders! but if you really want to make a better one, use hydrogen peroxide (100% if you can get it) and a silver oxide catalyst, it's what makes the bell jetpack fly. if thats not possible, you can run it on electrolysed water, use the electrolosis to pressurise the bottle and a small spark gap in the air space at the top.

you can weigh a photon by taking it's frequency, multiplying it by plancs constant(?) to measure it's energy, and running it through E=MC^2 now supposing you had a single photon into which you impart 90 penta joules. it would weigh a respectable 1kg. The only thing i would question is how does it react when it strikes something? (momentum wise) would you be able to work out the resultant motion using newtonian dynamics and treating the photon as a mass? and would it have a gravitational feild? or is that something reserved for matter?

i read that protons and anti protons, it's the quarks that have the anti particles. up-quarks react with anti-up-quarks, down-quarks react with anti-down-quarks. most particles including leptons have anti particles except photons. you can make anti matter with light but you need to produce normal matter in the same quanities. slam a gamma ray with the same mass energy as the sum of the pair's mass into an atom, you get pair production. (add some extra energy to the photon to give the particles momentum away form each other so they dont react again) CERN had an antiproton decellerator, did a few experiments too, but this wasnt even 1% efficient, about 100 atoms per day. not enough to do anything though. i did some math, via E=MC^2, 1 kg = 9*10^16 joules. this much energy from grid power would cost about $25M

if the system runs out of available energy, that means that there is no heat to produce IR radiataion ie the system reaches 0 kelvin and the matter might begin to disintegrate/form a bose condensate. mass energy seems unavailable at the moment, but low temperatures might say otherwise. merits research.

pulsed dc, use a relay if you can find one big enough. is your 36kv generator using a transormer/rectifier or is it a charge pump? you might acheive something by reducing the input voltage. i think 36kv might be a baseline voltage. if its current your worried about, get some 4w resistors. just a question about the construction. is the lower electrode grounded? the pictures dont have enough res to show the wires.

i dont know the model air craft terminology but when the low pressure reigion moves behind the wing, there will be a LOT of drag. the result will be a loss of airspeed, of course but when the low pressure (normally over the leading edge) migrates too far back (ie when the wing tilts too far up), there is a loss of the vacuum lift as well.

the only difference i can see, is that there are no surroundings for the universe to lose energy to. however, it may lose energy to radiated heat into the empty blackness this is my understanding and does not incorporate other phenomena like dark energy or vacuum energy

fractals are a pretty good example, there is chaos, but in the case of manelbrot, there are continuous bands surrounding other continuous bands this can be called a form of order a good book on the topic is "Chaos" by James Gleik. also, there is a recursive formula which creates a chaotic pattern when one of the input variables is higher than 3.5 or so, F(x) = a*x*(1-x) where a is the input constant and x starts out 0<x<1 i havent been able to get a contunuous sequence above 6 though. i have seen a dot diagram of it, at certain levels of a, x will settle into only a few possible values. if you program it, give it time to settle before taking an output also, the initial value of x is important, when it goes negatve, it wont come back. introducing a random element into a random system and getting order out? sounds like an infinite-number-of-monkeys moment. deserves some thought.

neat! you'd probably see it with polarising filters though, i'm thinking 90 degrees offset for each eye, you'd see slight differences between eyes and know something's there. still hard to spot. some of those images look like the're on boards, would they still work at angles?

i know, it not bioluminescent, nor is it plants, but these pigs are GM'd to fluoresce! (not just the skin either, cut one open and shine a blacklight and you'll be greeted with a light show) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4605202.stm im horrible at remembering sources, but someone has worked out that gold particles under a certain size can pass through the cell membrane and that genetic material can be attached while they do it, allowing the material to go in unrestricted.

a spark in air. this is basically the same principle as a flouro tube. an ac spark is easier to make, as you can step the voltage up easier. the main problem with ac though is the inductance of the plasma. as current travels it builds a magnetic feild. it takes a lot of energy to reverse it again so an ac spark is doomed to a maximum current. (still high tho) dc however, if you manage to supply enough voltage at a theoretically infinite potential curent, the current is not limited by an oscillating magnetic feild so the current will rise exponentially as the current path widens with the plasma. if you intend to make a high density plasma, you could try a noble gas, (low breakdown voltage so you can get higher currents) also, to direct a plasma, you can try a magnetic feild, it uses the lorentz force to make the plasma deflect from one side of a magnet, some people use it to make rectifiers in tesla coils.

i'm by no means an expert, but as for a "total vacuum" above the wing, this can occur at the speed of sound where the brownian motion cannot cause the particles to hit the top of the wing. the high pressure reigion under the wing is caused by the mass of the aircraft pressing down on a constanly replenished mass of air and the low pressure reigion above is caused by the same thing just inverse. the low pressure above the wing does account for a lot of the lift but uses the suction to produce a downward flow just as the lower surface deflects air downward. this downward flow is an acceleration of particles so it is a downward force, thus, newtons laws say that the particles are applying the same magnitude of force the the wing surface so the plane is held against gravity a stall occurs when the majority of low pressure moves beyond the wing and so the force is lost and the plane loses lift.

an explanation for the harrier fuel intake lies in e = 1/2 mv^2 and p = mv. the momentum applies force, so if you have a greater mass to push against, you require less energy to produce the same momentum, while a smaller mass requires more velocity, the velocity is the squared term so the energy requirement goes up. With a vtol, you only have the exhaust to play with, so it needs to go very fast using lots of energy. The wing causes a greater mass to move at a lower speed so using less energy, the engine is therefore pushing against less resistance than the 9.8ms^-2 so the engine doesnt need to overcome 9.8ms^-2 you might also want to look up the gossamer albatros, pedal powered air craft.

this web site may be of interest; http://www.amasci.com/wing/airfoil.html it describes how the bernoulli effect introduces unneccesary assumptions about the flow over the wing, the air doesnt often line up infront and after, the downwash behind the wing is what is keeping it up, yes there is a low pressure reigion on the top, but newtons third law acting on the downwash is what produces the majority of the lift.