Confusion in Boston; payoff at Cal Tech; no feathers in JP4

View 770 Wednesday, April 17, 2013

As usual the breaking news is so contradictory as to be worthless. They have or have not arrested a suspect who may or may not be in custody, perhaps by the US Marshals but it might be someone else. Doubtless the authorities will get it sorted out. At least we can certainly hope so. The last official news is that no arrest has been made, and there seems to be no follow up to the story that a suspect placing a black bag on the scene was identified from a department store video.

Meanwhile here is some information on bomb making.

Dr. Pournelle:

I note that Russell Seitz has changed his estimation from TATP to smokeless powder. I don’t doubt it, it is lots easier to buy a can or keg of Unique than to run a synthesis with strong acid and oxidizer. But I have not seen it discussed elsewhere except for fears that it will be applied to demonize gun owners and hobbyist reloaders.

The advantage of TATP to the terrorist is that it is not a nitrate compound, which is the basis for instrumental explosive detection and bomb dog training. But you don’t have to go through a sniffer to watch the Boston Marathon, as you discussed.

Anyhow, as a handloader of some experience and having worked on a study related to bomb making, I will provide some details.

Modern smokeless powder is predominantly nitrocellulose. Call it guncotton, although a lot is made from cheaper wood pulp. Some are straight nitrocellulose with minor additives, some are "double base" with appreciable nitroglycerine content. I have a chart of 300 brands and grades of smokeless powder. I don’t know just how many of them would make a serviceable bomb, but it would be a lot. The video I saw was of a pipe bomb filled with one called Blue Dot, suitable for heavy shotgun loads as for goose hunting. It pretty thoroughly demolished an automobile.

Cordite is a specific chemical formulation and physical configuration of double base smokeless powder. The formulation, if not the rope-like shape, has been used in everything from pistol and rifle ammunition to solid fuel rockets to demolition charges. Obsolete now.

Smokeless powder is a propellant, not an explosive. Ignite it in the open and it just burns briskly; deflagrates.

The galvanized steel of the pipe bomber and the pressure cooker of the Boston Bomber are not primarily to generate fragmentation, they are to let pressure build up to a destructive level and then rupture, releasing it in a blast which appears an explosion.

I am not qualified to speak on bomb deployment, and all I can say about the social and government developments is that I fear they will not be good for the American lifestyle.

Regards,

Jim Watson

Thank you. I have not paid much heed to handloading equipment and supplies since I was an editor of SURVIVE magazine and did my monthly column on survival activities and essentials. I doubt it has changed much. In those days we could rationally discuss such matters as stockpiling supplies for reloading ammunition: safe storage and handling, amounts, shelf life, and such, but even then one wanted to take care given the caricatures of survival groups that were popular with the media.

No one has taken credit for the Boston Marathon bombing. Note that delays of days and even weeks between an event of this kind and some organization coming forward to take credit for it are not unusual.

Meanwhile, physics remains confused. Not only is our theory not unified — http://www.rockol.it/testo-3784077/Jordin-Kare-Unified-Field-Theory — but some well established theories contradict each other. Stephen Hawking famously relented on his view that black holes destroy information. He even paid off a bet with Cal Tech’s John Preskill with a copy of a baseball encyclopedia – it’s heavy and it takes work to get information out of it. (Note that Kip Thorne, also of Cal Tech, who supported Hawking’s side in the bet has refused to concede.)

Dark energy may comprise 70% of the mattergy in the universe, or it may not, and dark matter may take up 20% more, and antimatter half of what’s left, leaving us “normal matter” beings a distinct minority. The universe may not be the same depending on which direction we look in. And so forth. The trend is toward increased complexity, with elusive tracks of even more elusive new particles leading to theories of even more new particles that may or may not leave tracks in the normal matter – which is, by definition, all that we can observe. A long time ago Larry Niven, Bob Forward, and I heard Stephen Hawking tell an invited Cal Tech audience that Einstein was wrong – not only does God throw dice, but sometimes He throws them where they cannot be seen even though the result is important. Hawking was only half joking.

Dr. Pournelle,

Roger Penrose says the one thing we know about Dark Energy is that it is not energy. By E=mc2 energy should have mass and slow the expansion of the Big Bang. The more Dark Matter there is the more of a discrepancy there is.

I just keep remembering that Fred Hoyle and the Steady-State folks predicted an acceleration pushing Galaxies away from each other. A negative gravity if you will.

The idea was that virtual particles arising out of the quantum froth or vanishing back into it would have a gravitational effect. In places were there is much matter there would be more vanishings than appearances. Particles cannot vanish where they do not exist When a particle vanished there would be an effect we call gravity. . And in places were there are no particles they could only appear with an effect of negative gravity. The empty cells between super-clusters would be an ideal place for such a phenomenon. Negative Gravity would seem a candidate for Dark Energy.

This would seem silly moonshine to me. But:

Fred Hoyle and the Steady-State people were bright and accomplished.

Between Inflation, Dark Energy, and large scale structure the Big Bang is looking creaky.

A prediction with an unexpected suggestion of verification after forty or fifty years arrests my intention.

I know ‘Sir Fred is off his rocker." And I am not too up on defunct physical theories from before my birth. But there is the proposed explanation for both Dark Energy and gravity. And a reinterpretation of the 2.7K background may be easier the the ediface it has created.

DAB

I have not conversed with Sir Fred in a decade, but the last time I did he was unrepentant. So far as I know he died believing in some form of ether, and in rejecting much of what is considered standard physics; and in a fairly extreme form of panspermia, in which an intelligent race sent evolutionarily active probes to plants which might have life. As I have said before, he believed in a form of intelligent design, but the Designer would not have been familiar to religious believers in Design. And he rejected the Big Bang. It is not considered good form to reject the Big Bang, hence Adrian Berry’s remark that Sir Fred is off his head, but apparently there are others questioning the short “inflation” period of warp 10,000 movement required to get from a tiny point to something that could start evolving as the universe.

Dark matter, dark energy and Size of Universe

Doctor Pournelle, you wrote:

This is a very half baked idea, a cocktail party theory on the order of my view of the influence of dogs on the evolution of human intelligence, but the more I keep turning it over and over the more I wonder. Dark matter would be thin between the galaxies. And I think I’d rather believe in dark matter than dark energy.

My understanding, via some shows on the Science Channel, is that dark matter works as a gravity brake on the galaxies and that dark energy works as an accelerator and that currently it is believed that there is more of the accelerator than the brake. Would your idea of the speed of light going through thinner patches of either DM or DE, and thus changing the constant for the speed of light in thinner and thicker patches, also mean that the size of the universe is smaller than currently believed? If the speed with which light crosses local cluster space, inter-cluster space and inter-supercluster space changes would that not mean that we are wrong with the Doppler values as currently assigned for distances to the most distant reaches we can see? Might this not also change the perceived age of the universe? To borrow an old tabloid phrase, "Enquiring minds want to know!"

David Crowley

I am trying to make something consistent out of my cocktail party theory – which is loosely based on Petr Beckmann’s alternative view of the meaning of the Michelson Morley experiment – but that may take a while. I keep trying to focus. For a reasonable presentation of the alternative to Einstein theory see Tom Bethell’s account. http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Einstein-Relativity-Tom-Bethell/dp/0971484597 There apparently are ways to explain the experimental evidence without giving up ether or imposing an absolute velocity of light without regard to the motion of the observer. Whether doing that will cover some of the problems for which dark matter and dark energy were invented is nothing like clear (and certainly not accepted by the vast majority of physicists), but here and there a few dissenters, appalled by the increasing complexities, stop tearing their hair and go back to fundamentals – the observed evidence from which both general and special relativity were derived. It’s still pretty well at the cocktail party theory stage,

And now it’s time to go clean up the back yard from wind displacements…

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New Scientist for April 6, 2013 has an article called “Ring of Fire” speculating about the collision of grand theories. Is a Black Hole surrounded by a ring of fire? If not, why not?

Everything is based on theories with very little experimental evidence, and there seems to be no rush to do crucial experiments regarding relativity vs., ether and other such fundamentals. Of course as Bob Bussard used to say, the easy stuff has already been done. But as far as I can see we are no closer to an understanding of fundamentals than we were when Richard Feynman used to say that we would not understand gravity in our lifetimes, but he hoped that one day someone would. I gather that he said that fairly often; certainly he did so at a lunch with me. John McCarthy, and Marvin Minsky. Marvin and I are still around, but I don’t think we’re much closer to understanding gravity than we were then. It still looks like spooky action at a distance. And reading Feynman’s QED doesn’t really help a bit: as it shows. we know how to make spooky things happen, and we have no idea of why they work.

If you don’t follow the rapid developments in paleontology you might have missed the fact that the raptors in Jurassic Park 1 were all wrong: current evidence says they had feathers. Indeed, even Tyrannosaurus Rex may have had a good coat of feathers. Alas, the director of Jurassic Park 4 has recently signaled NO FEATHERS #JP4.  CGI is capable of putting feathers on the dinosaurs, but apparently the human programmers aren’t ready for such a change.

A large fertilizer plant just north of Waco, Texas has exploded. It had earlier reported a fire and fire fighters were in the plant when it blew up.