01-27-2011, 10:22 PM
Hi,
When I was working at the Georgia Tech library, we had an 'inventor' come in to search the patents (the GTL is one of the regional patent depositories). His idea was to find or make a lake up on a mountain. Then using the water from the lake, spin three turbines at the foot of the mountain. Two of them would be used to generate electricity and the other would pump the water back to the lake.
At first, I thought he was pulling my leg. That someone had set me up. But it soon became obvious that he was serious. And when I tried to explain the conservation of energy, his counter arguments were all about efficiency and flow control, etc.
There are things that are limited by technology. A good example of that is aircraft power. While vast improvements in the technology increased the speed of aircraft, it took a change to jet propulsion to eliminate the propeller whose tip Mach number was a physical limitation. Other things are limited by nature, by science. Faster than light travel relative to the local space. Conservation of mass-energy.
Orthogonal thinking has to be based on the possible (possible in the sense that conservation laws, etc, are not violated). Once a situation has been analyzed and an optimal theoretical solution has been found, it is senseless to push that technology any further. For instance, there is nothing you can do to improve the efficiency of a gas/coal/wood based heating system beyond its chemical and thermodynamic efficiency. But if you change it to a heat pump system, you can get a lot more for your energy input. And if you do it acoustically, you could (at least in theory) do even better. Not by miniaturizing the fire box or by improving the air flow, or other tweaks to existing technology which only get you closer to a poor theoretical maximum, but by changing to a technology that has a better maximum.
Really, the best suggestion in this thread was naquada. In the sense of a totally unknown (at this time) technology. Perhaps from the high energy work done at CERN and elsewhere, perhaps from string theory, perhaps from the mind of a yet unknown genius, we may one day learn how to manipulate the sub-atomic in a non dangerous, non destructive way. But, always keep in mind, we are of and we live in a sub 10eV world (molecular binding energies, a couple of orders lower for thermal energies). Dealing with high energies is the difference between being patted on the head and being hammered on the head.
--Pete
When I was working at the Georgia Tech library, we had an 'inventor' come in to search the patents (the GTL is one of the regional patent depositories). His idea was to find or make a lake up on a mountain. Then using the water from the lake, spin three turbines at the foot of the mountain. Two of them would be used to generate electricity and the other would pump the water back to the lake.
At first, I thought he was pulling my leg. That someone had set me up. But it soon became obvious that he was serious. And when I tried to explain the conservation of energy, his counter arguments were all about efficiency and flow control, etc.
There are things that are limited by technology. A good example of that is aircraft power. While vast improvements in the technology increased the speed of aircraft, it took a change to jet propulsion to eliminate the propeller whose tip Mach number was a physical limitation. Other things are limited by nature, by science. Faster than light travel relative to the local space. Conservation of mass-energy.
Orthogonal thinking has to be based on the possible (possible in the sense that conservation laws, etc, are not violated). Once a situation has been analyzed and an optimal theoretical solution has been found, it is senseless to push that technology any further. For instance, there is nothing you can do to improve the efficiency of a gas/coal/wood based heating system beyond its chemical and thermodynamic efficiency. But if you change it to a heat pump system, you can get a lot more for your energy input. And if you do it acoustically, you could (at least in theory) do even better. Not by miniaturizing the fire box or by improving the air flow, or other tweaks to existing technology which only get you closer to a poor theoretical maximum, but by changing to a technology that has a better maximum.
Really, the best suggestion in this thread was naquada. In the sense of a totally unknown (at this time) technology. Perhaps from the high energy work done at CERN and elsewhere, perhaps from string theory, perhaps from the mind of a yet unknown genius, we may one day learn how to manipulate the sub-atomic in a non dangerous, non destructive way. But, always keep in mind, we are of and we live in a sub 10eV world (molecular binding energies, a couple of orders lower for thermal energies). Dealing with high energies is the difference between being patted on the head and being hammered on the head.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?