I should point out we actually do use the weak force for energy production, that is what is going on in the curiosity rover, radioactive decay of Pu238...but it is one of the lowest power conversion ratios that you can do for electricity production (thermocouple). They are just really simple with no moving parts, but it ain't going to solve no energy crisis! We actually have infinite gravity wells via black holes, @maestro156, but you still can't generate perpetual motion from it. I would like to hear your idea on how you could, though.

>> ^Kalle:

One serious question that bothers me is.. why isnt it possible to use gravity as an energy source?
Would such a machine be a perpetual motion machine?


Gravity is REALLY weak. Like 36 orders of magnitude less than the electromagnetic force. 36 orders of magnitude is massive...larger the the total number of stars in the known universe. For instance, a fridge magnet is defeating the ENTIRE gravitational force of the earth AND the sun. Gravity makes for a great way to bind the macro-universe together, but it is shit as an energy source.

Also, gravity has only one polarity...and it doesn't turn off. So for the EM force, we have 2 poles that can be switched around via electrical current to make lots of different energy related things. But for gravity, you just have one ground state, and once you are there you need to input energy to get away from that ground state...no way around that. However, what has been done and is done in certain areas is to have a closed system where you apply energy at certain time and store that energy for later. The example most commonly used is in dams, where the will pump a large volume of water back up stream (potential energy) and store it (a gravity battery if you will) and release it as a later time when demand is high. This is always a loss based way to make energy; your going to spend more pumping it back up (heat loss and other losses including evaporation) than you will when you get it back...so it is just a way to cause demand shifting towards other hours with additional entropy.

You have 4 fundamental forces to draw energy from; and 3 of those are the only practical ones. Strong (nuclear) force, the EM force, and the gravitational force (the weak force is actually the force that powers the earths core, but isn't useful to use in power generation for a similar reason gravity isn't).

The EM force is what we use in internal combustion engines and electrical motors. Chemical reactions are rearrangements of the electron structures of molecules, which makes gasoline engines possible via liquid to gas expansion pressures. Generators deal with EM fields, polarity and current which is what drives thermal reactors like coal or can drive a car with a motor via conversation of stored electrical energy(just a backwards generator). Nuclear reactors deal with the strong (nuclear) force, and combine that with kinetic/thermodynamic forces of same flavor as coal and other thermal plants.

Even gravity isn't perpetual, the orbits of ALL celestial bodies are unstable. Gravity is thought and reasonably well satisfied to travel in waves. These waves cause turbulence in what would seem calm orbits, slowly breaking them down over time...drawing them closer and closer together. Eventually, all orbits will cause ejection or collision.


As to what energy is best, I personally believe in the power of the strong force, as does the sun . When you are talking about the 4 forces and their ability to make energy for us, the strong force is 6 orders of magnitude greater than other chemical reactions we can make. The EM force is not to much weaker than the strong force, but the practical application of chemical reactions limits us to the electron cloud, making fuels for chemical reactions less energetic by a million to a billion times vs strong force fuels. Now, only fission has been shown to work for energy production currently, but I doubt that will be true forever. If you want LOTS of energy without much waste, you want strong force energy, period. That and the weak force are the 2 prime movers of sustained life on this planet. While the chemistry is what is hard at work DOING life, the strong and weak force provide the energy to sustain that chemistry. Without it, there are no winds, there is no heat in the sky nor from the core, no EM shield from that core. Just a cold, lifeless hunk of metals and gases floating in the weak gravitational force.

Sorry for the rant, energy is my most favorite current subject



(edit, corrected some typos and bad grammar)

^ Will a poem do?

The standard model of particles, founded 50 years ago,
By abdus salam, steve weinberg and sheldon glashow.

They theorised three new forces, through which we used to find.
That gravity isn't the only all pervading influence of its kind.

The strong force exchanges gluons, of nuclear design.
Forgive the sense of humour, science needs a focused mind.

Before that comes the weak force, which must be overcome,
To fuse elements together and create a heavier one.

E-M forces follow; with yet a greater range,
"Quantum electrodynamics" uses photons to exchange.

Gravity we discovered first, Newton lead the way.
Applying it to the planets to map the celestial ballet.

From the smallest to the largest, we arrive at the present day.
The "Theory of Almost Everything"; so close yet so far away.

(Needs a bit of work!)

What is particularly interesting, and new science to me is that the majority of the heat that keeps the core molten is just decay heat from Thorium, Uranium, and Potassium. Only 20% of the heat that drives the internal dynamo is believed to be primordial, most is from the decay of mainly these elements. This, coupled with our crust layer which forms a heat retaining blanket, has enabled the heat of our core to live much longer than otherwise. Predictions for core solidification without radioactive decay is on the order of a couple hundred million years. Every major thermodynamic system on the earth is powered via some form of nuclear; be it fission (well, decay, which isn't usually called fission) keeping the core molten, or fusion keeping the sun burning...we owe a lot to the strong and weak forces!

Refreshness on theoretical physics should be always welcome , however to be technically careful with new proposals is mandatory !
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 6:02PM GMT 14 Nov 2007
Comments 596 | Comment on this article

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
• Garrett Lisi: This surfer is no Einstein...
• Test tube universe hints at unifying theory
• Surfer Dude's Theory of Everything - The Movie
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

Related Articles
• 19 March 2007: Is this the fabric of the universe?
• College course to learn surfing
• Large Hadron Collider: What will it find?
• The Big Bang: what will we find?
• Tree man 'who grew roots' hopes to marry after 4lb of warts removed
• Monty Python theme tune: music to madness
In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
• Is this the fabric of the universe?
• Are we missing a dimension of time?
• Quantum genesis: How life was born on Earth
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
• The answer to the universe and everything?
• Trapped rainbow heralds computer revolution
• How About That: Unusual, funny and bizarre stories
What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

>> ^deathcow:
Gravity is such a weak force that the electromagnetic force in a tiny magnet can lift up a paperclip, far overwhelming the gravity from the Earths entire 6,600 _billion_ _billion_ _tons_ of mass.


Actually... the magnet can do that only because its dinky.

Gravity is such a weak force that the electromagnetic force in a tiny magnet can lift up a paperclip, far overwhelming the gravity from the Earths entire 6,600 _billion_ _billion_ _tons_ of mass.

The Elegant Universe - Part II - String's The Thing

This one-hour episode includes the following topics in modern theoretical physics: ... all » 1. Two Conflicting Sets of Laws In order to solve some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, the rules that govern large objects like galaxies must be combined with the rules that govern small objects like subatomic particles. Running time 8:26

2. One Master Equation Many physicists now believe that strings—miniscule vibrating strands of energy thought to make up all matter—hold the key to uniting the world of the large and the world of the small in a single theory. running time 4:40

3. The Birth of String Theory In the 1960s, physicists caught a glimpse of what appeared to be strange, string-like objects hidden beneath the abstract symbols of a 200-year-old equation. Running time 4:12

4. The Standard Model Meanwhile, mainstream science was embracing particles as points, not strings, and the Standard Model was born, uniting the strong force, the weak force, and electromagnetism. Running time 6:36

5. Wrestling with String Theory By the 1970s, a few young physicists worked on taming the unruly equations of string theory and succeeded in describing how gravity works in the subatomic world, a key element missing from the Standard Model. Running time 7:18

6. The Theory of Everything A revised version of string theory, free of mathematical inconsistencies, seemed capable of describing all the building blocks of nature, and it launched a hot new field of physics. running time 5:29

7. Multiple dimensions Despite our perception that we live in a universe with four dimensions—three spatial and one temporal—string theory demands that our universe has 11 dimensions. Running time 6:57

8. Five Flavors of String Theory By the mid-1980s physicists had developed five different versions of string theory, raising the question of whether it would prove to be a theory of everything or a theory of nothing. Running time 4:59