How are you defining “without science”? If you have constructed a model that allows you to predict eclipses, then that is science. The test of the model is its predictive power - if it works well enough for your purposes, then you use it. The ancients and medievals were scientific - just lower tech. Hell, if you work out anything for yourself based on observation/experiment then you’re being scientific, even if its burning the cores out of logs to make canoes.
Asimov wrote an essay called “The Relativity of Wrong” in which he showed how models become increasingly predictive, and in that sense closer to “the truth”. One example he mentioned was the nature of the Earth. A Flat Earth model is fine. Works for short range navigation, lets you make simple maps that you can roll up. We still use it for streetmaps, trekking etc.
For longer range navigation, the Flat Earth model falls down. So you notice the differing path taken by the Sun as you move north or south, and conclude the Earth is a ball. Which is good enough for crossing the ocean and hitting the right continent, but you still don’t bother compensating for the curvature on your streetmaps.
A spherical Earth rotating on its axis has a lot more predictive power than a Flat Earth , but it still leads you navigational problems on long sea voyages. You have to compensate for the southern hemisphere being slightly larger than the Northern. So we have a further refinement on the spherical Earth.
With further refinements, we will gain an increasingly accurate model of the shape of the Earth. But we ever won’t switch to a cubic Earth, or a tubular Earth. And previous models of the Earth that were observation-based and predictive were scientific, even if they were held by Neanderthals.
It’s models that aren’t based on observation/experiment which aren’t scientific. A Flat Earth on elephants on a turtle isn’t scientific unless you’ve peeked over the edge and seen the things. Epicycles are predictive - you can tell what path Mars is going to take. Casting the runes to determine whether Mars will go forwards or backwards during the next full Moon is not.
Why do you deny mystic quality to these experiences? These are the very mysteries of life. I don’t feel sorry for you because you are feeling the mystical but limiting it willfully. For many of us, the sun that we play under is not only a composite body :
Mass (kg) 1.989e+30
Mass (Earth = 1) 332,830
Equatorial radius (km) 695,000
Equatorial radius (Earth = 1) 108.97
Mean density (gm/cm^3) 1.410
Rotational period (days) 25-36*
Escape velocity (km/sec) 618.02
Luminosity (ergs/sec) 3.827e33
Magnitude (Vo) -26.8
Mean surface temperature 6,000°C
Age (billion years) 4.5
Principal chemistry
Hydrogen 92.1%
Helium 7.8%
Oxygen 0.061%
Carbon 0.030%
Nitrogen 0.0084%
Neon 0.0076%
Iron 0.0037%
Silicon 0.0031%
Magnesium 0.0024%
Sulfur 0.0015%
All others 0.0015%
…but also Ra, Helios, Apollo, and the last of ten sons. The same eternal that lights the potters work and thumbprint then and now, that which also baked the clay. The same lifegiver that the potmaker and you your children play and toil under… owe all sustenance to. Fire! The same sun that reaches out to us in coronal magnetism and influences our very biosphe3re. The sun that we turn our faces away from, or alternately bask in according to how much it hurts our eyes or burns our skin… In likeness, the meaning and great psychic impact of the sun sometimes makes me avoid it metaphorically because of its great luminosity. It is a pure and real thing and that is where its mystery and mysticism lie. Why must what it is be premiere to what it means? Why the great fear of its symbolism? …Why the denial of experience?
Again I am not trying to be contentious but rather understand… I had hoped this thread to be different, again a collection of experience rather than explanation.
How do you extract the energy from the reaction to generate the electricity?
What roles do iron and indium play in thermonuclear fusion?
Current research envisons using deuterium-tritium as a fuel mix, being fused to helium 4 + neutron. Are you saying we’re going to move to hydrogen-deuterium, fused to helium 3?
What did you want to hear? How is your experience of the Sun as Apollo different from my experience of it as a life-giving star?
I’ve watched the Sun rise across a sea of clouds from the top of a volcano in Java. I got up in the small hours and slogged up loose shale for hours in the dark just to see it. It was awe-inspiring, soul-expanding. The effort involved in getting up there was part of it. I’m not too sure what “mystical” means - if it’s a combination of joy and awe and appreciation and connection, then I felt it then, and feel it often.
I regard this experience and similar as things in themselves - they have nothing to do with science, or scepticism, or mythology. I enjoy and seek out such experiences. But what do you want from me? Tears? Poetry?
The reactor was a tungsten tube, about 4.5” in diameter three quarters of an inch thick and a quarter mile in diameter, nano polished on the inside , it was inside a super heated steam pipe that was in turn wrapped in the super conductors. The energy was extracted from additional super heat to the steam. The super conductors had to be jump started, they were not super conductors at zero gauss, they were wrapped in huge copper bars 0.7 “ square over the liquid nitrogen cooling jackets.
The Iron and Indium mix, 70% Iron 30% Indium acted as a catalyst matrix that held the hydrogen nuclei in place so they would not bounce away when impacted with deuterium nuclei and got the reaction to proceed at a lot (damm it’s been too long, I can’t recall off the top of my head now) less energy input and lower temperature than the non catalyzed deuterium-tritium reaction.
The Iron Indium was first accelerated and compressed using the magnetic fields to about 0.00000225 of it’s rest volume, to form what was referred to by “me “ as NM Nucleus Matter, where the nuclei are in fairly close contact with each other. It was then seeded with hydrogen nuclei that mostly sat on the surface in little nitches of just the right size to contain them, which was the reason for the particular mix, to form the correct size interstitial gaps. The deuterium was accelerated linearly into the side of the main reactor at almost a right angle, 97.something degrees (man, I used to know all these details) and impacted into the seeded NM thread.
The best run got a 14.7% reaction rate of the deuterium
A torus, then. What’s the nano-polishing for, given that nothing should actually touch the walls?
“High temperature” superconductors, I take it!
Muons can do that, so I’ll run with it…
Having trouble visualising this. The iron indium forms a “thread” in the centre of the tube, held there by the magnetic fields, yes? Is it solid, or plasma, or what? That compression you mention - if that’s w.r.t. its solid state then you can colour me bemused. (If you can achieve and hold that kind of compression, you should be well beyond the experimental stage, and fusing deuterium with helium 3.) If that’s w.r.t. a plasma state, then okay, except a plasma doesn’t have interstitial gaps.
So you have deuterium bombardment of hydrogen held in some kind of exotic matter, and you get around 15% of the deuterium flux resulting in fusion. So now you have a load of helium 3 in the NM thread, and a high gamma ray flux from the fusion events. How does the energy get from the thread to the steam pipe? Steam isn’t a very good interceptor of gamma rays. Why steam, and not water (far better capture density)?
The super gauss superconductors were the major breakthrough that was allowing all this to happen, they remained superconductors from 4 to 17 megagauss. (I am sure of the numbers not so sure of the units. Keep in mind here I am not a physics major )
The nano polishing was for reflectivity so the Tungsten didn’t melt. I believe it was also vapor deposited with Platinum on the inside for additional reflectivity on some runs.
I had the impression the thread was mostly a solid, it was not very hot comparatively 300,000 deg C or so.
Yes that compression is with respect to the solid.
The Tungsten intercepted many of the fusion products and gamma rays and heat through plain old radiant transfer and heated up. Not water because the Tungsten was up near it’s melting point.
“I” was not involved in the removal of the fusion products, there was another group on another part of the reactor working on that, generally not at the same time as “my” runs, so “I” was limited in run time by buildup of fusion products.
“I” was not in charge of the project “I” was more of an operations person, doing the dirty work at night and actually performing the runs and collecting data for others to analize. While “I” had a physics degree “I” was not in on all the details or reasons for particular runs.
Such experiences have everything to do with the science, skepticism, and mythology. In that science and skepticism deny and devalue these experiences of greater meaning or import within their realm. It makes these disciplines partial rather than whole, they are reductionist and incomplete and IMHO, limited in their usefulness because of this tendency.
…and Mythology? Are you kidding? Mystical experience is the heart of and reason for Mythology. It’s the why of the what.
No, I don’t want tears and poetry. I would like to hear experiences much as you have described, that’s all. I refuse to believe that there is no mystery or mysticism in the life of even the sceptic’s sceptic. They may not even know they are experiencing the mystical because of their prejudice in words and in many cases dismissive denial.
Fair enough, but the myths are abitrary. Ra and Apollo are different myths. Mystical experiences may give rise to mythology, but does that mean I have to embrace mythology to have mystical experiences?
Parsimony and pragmatism win out for me as a scientist. I know others have said it here, but here’s my two bits.
The world is a complicated place. I look to simplify it. That means discarding stuff from my world view that is nonessential. The supernatural happens to be one of those things.
If there were any physical evidence for anything mystical or supernatural, it would immediately cease to be supernatural or mystic and become natural, and hence part of my world view.
Simple rules, when reiterated and combined, produce unimaginable beauty. We can see this in the Grand Canyon, in the tree of life, in the structure of the observable universe, in the music of Bach. There is no greater or more beautiful accomplishment than discovery of these rules and their application and enumeration.
I never did address the OP. I think it is worth exploring why some people seek to pin personal experiences in the “mystic” or “supernatural” when they are much more easily explained by natural phenomena. It all comes down to your world view, your belief structure. I’ve had these kinds of experiences that others may consider mystical or supernatural, but it is more sound to explain them using natural phenomena than to radically change my world view to accomodate them.
I cannot discount faith, nor will I ever attempt to tell those who have strong spirituality that they are wrong. For all I know, it would be like if I was anosmic (no sense of smell) and trying to deny that smell actually existed. The human experience does differ from person to person. But I demand that respect from the faithful as well – they cannot tell me that I must have faith simply because it is something that they believe. Certainly, they cannot impose their unobservable and unprovable faith onto my parsimonious world view.
Mysticism was man’s first attempt at science. Now we know better. Well, some of us.
Occassionally I just have to pull the car over to observe an exceptional sunset.
The splendor, the immensity, the awe. I don’t have to associate it with magic to be blown away. The emotional response is real. Seems like if I weren’t connecting on a “spiritual” level, that reaction would be absent.
Well, obviously, they work on squirrel-sized vehicles. There is a documentary series demonstrating squirrel-sized creatures doing work along these lines, though it applied more to chipmunks and mice than squirrels. I believe this documentary series was called “Chip N Dale’s Rescue Rangers.”
I am a skeptic, and I have had a few “inexplicable life experiences”. I just chalk them up to “Hmm, I don’t know what caused that. Likely something explainable by science.”
The majority of the fusion energy is going to be emitted as gamma rays. Reflectivity doesn’t help one way or the other. Might help a bit against the radiant heat from your 300,000 deg. C solid thread.
Ye gods!
In contemporary fusion experiments some pretty hefty temperatures are quoted - 100,000,000 deg. C or so. But that is the temperature of a low densityplasma - there’s almost nothing there. Close to a hot vacuum. To raise a solid to that temperature and keep it solid with pressure is really pushing it. But I don’t understand why all this is necessary - if you can compress a solid with magnetic fields into a 440,000 times smaller volume, you can do plain old hot fusion no sweat.
As I’ve said, most of the fusion energy is going to come off as gamma rays, which’ll pass clean through your tungsten, steam pipes and out the other side, only a fraction of their energy going into the pipes as heat.
Extracting the energy from a fusion reaction is something of a problem. If you’re fusing deuterium-tritium, much of the energy is emitted as high K.E. neutrons, and most schemes propose capturing these in a thick lithium blanket which both produces new tritium and converts their K.E into heat. But deuterium-hydrogen fusion produces no high K.E. products, only gamma rays. You need a thick blanket of metal to turn them into heat.
Your dream experience appears to be vivid and is technically interesting. The biggest difficulty I have with it is the “nucleus matter” - it seems to me that creating this stuff is technically much more challenging than fusion itself, and if you can get even halfway to making “nucleus matter” you should be able to do fusion without it. Still, 27 years to go and we’ll know for sure!
Much of this thread is dealing with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge. In short, epistemology attempts to answer the question, “How do you know that you know?”
For some it is faith in the bible.
For others, it’s feelings.
For the select few, it’s a direct link to God.
For some (philosophers call these people skeptics - not the same use of the word found in this thread) nothing is knowable. Man’s mind is so deeply flawed that it cannot understand anything, and the world is an illusion.
I think all of these epistemological persuasions are flat wrong, and I prefer *reason *as the only means by which man can find knowledge. The predictive ability of science mentioned in a previous post is both at the heart of its usefulness and its persuasiveness.
That said, I do have my own odd tale to tell. When I was a child one night about to fall asleep, my sister called my name and told me to look at something. Annoyed, I turned my head and saw two small, completely black (as in the absence of light) men standing in the doorway to our room. They were wearing fedora-like hats and appeared to be connected in the middle. They waddled into the room, and my sister said, “They’re coming in.”
The next thing I remember, my sister and I were downstairs, crying on our mother’s lap. I recall wondering how I had gotten there, as I had no memory of coming down the stairs.
The next morning, my sister and I told our friends we had seen a ghost. My sister described what we had seen as worms, which enfuriated me as clearly they were little men. I remember staring at the ground and staring at the floor telling myself “Don’t ever forget that this was real.”