Empress Josh asks
This wacky Lets Mine All the Asteroids scheme. Viable y/n.
Ah, a question where my answer isn’t immediately “That’s stupid” or “We couldn’t ever do that.” Mining asteroids isn’t stupid, and we probably will be able to do it at some point. The real question here is, can we do it today or (as I suspect Sergey Brin et al. damn well know) even fifty years in the future? And is it going to be worthwhile?
Horse Stability Enhancement asks
Superconductors are cool. And we already have Maglev trains. Why aren’t they going everywhere – is it just price or is there physics in the way?
Why aren’t we making maglev cars?
Where are all my superconductors?
How much do you know about Schrodinger’s Cat? Not his actual cat – I do not know if Schrodinger ever owned a moggy of his own, although his casual mental cruelty towards cats would probably mark him as more of a dog person – but his famous thought experiment. You have a cat locked in a box along with a vial of poison gas and a molecule of a radioactive isotope which has a half-life of t. If the isotope decays it will release a radiation particle which breaks the vial of poison gas and kills the cat. If we wait for a time t after the box has been shut then the chances of the isotope decaying or not are exactly 50/50, and consequently the chances of the cat being gassed or not are also exactly 50/50.
Jiiiiim asks
Hentzau a matter of utmost importance has arisen.
According to gentlemen like http://www.youtube.com/user/gorilla199 we are on course to be hit by the planet Nibiru early in the 21st century. Obviously the freemasons are hushing this up but you are a man of science and so I ask: why do you deny that extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system have warned us about this impending catastrophe? It even has a wiki page if that’ll help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm
THE TRUTH MUST OUT.
VivaVirago asks
Dear Dr Hentzau
What are your favourite books about SCIENCE (fiction or non-fiction) that are at least relatively accessible for us poor non-scientists?
This is a handy question because I’ve been meaning to make a post in this kind of vein for quite a while! What’s put me off is that most of what I read (or have read) are textbooks and thus not the sort of thing you can easily buy on Amazon – or if they are, they’re bloody expensive. Now that you’ve asked, though, I cannot help but answer.
Josh asks
String theory. What the very fuck is it.
I was going to chide you for swearing on this blog, Josh; it’s a family space and a small child could happen by and have their brain infected with that nasty language. Then I remembered that I fucking hate string theory – I truly detest it – and that a sizeable percentage of the next thousand words I write describing it are going to be swear words. On this one occasion, therefore, you are forgiven.
Radiation is an insidious thing. Take a massive dose and it’s very immediately lethal, and dangerous, and should be avoided. Take a series of smaller doses, however, and the consequences are less obvious. You might come out of it unscathed. Your cells might be able to repair the damage done by radiation particles slicing off bits of your genetic structure. Even if you get hit by an electron in just the wrong place the cancer this will cause won’t become apparent for a decade or two. This meant that it was quite a while before anyone twigged that radiation was actually dangerous, and this led to people doing some really, really stupid things with radioactive substances.
