Utility fog

Post Reply
User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 1:59 am


Utility fog

Utility fog (coined by Dr. John Storrs Hall in 1993) is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.

Hall thought of it as a nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts. The robots would be microscopic, with extending arms reaching in several different directions, and could perform three-dimensional lattice reconfiguration. Grabbers at the ends of the arms would allow the robots (or foglets) to mechanically link to one another and share both information and energy, enabling them to act as a continuous substance with mechanical and optical properties that could be varied over a wide range. Each foglet would have substantial computing power, and would be able to communicate with its neighbors.

In the original application as a replacement for seatbelts, the swarm of robots would be widely spread-out, and the arms loose, allowing air flow between them. In the event of a collision the arms would lock into their current position, as if the air around the passengers had abruptly frozen solid. The result would be to spread any impact over the entire surface of the passenger's body.

While the foglets would be micro-scale, construction of the foglets would require full molecular nanotechnology. Hall suggests that each bot may be in the shape of a dodecahedron with 12 arms extending outwards. Each arm would have four degrees of freedom. The foglets' bodies would be made of aluminum oxide rather than combustible diamond to avoid creating a fuel air explosive.

Hall and his correspondents soon realised that utility fog could be manufactured en masse to occupy the entire atmosphere of a planet and replace any physical instrumentality necessary to human life. By foglets exerting concerted force an object or human could be carried from location to location. Virtual buildings could be constructed and dismantled within moments, enabling the replacement of existing cities and roads with farms and gardens.

Link


User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:00 am

Ice-nine

Ice-nine is a material appearing in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. Ice-nine is supposedly a catalyst of water (invented by Dr. Felix Hoenikker; instead of melting at 0 °C (32 °F), the result melts at 45.8 °C (114.4 °F). When ice-nine comes into contact with liquid water below 45.8 °C (thus effectively becoming supercooled), it acts as a seed crystal and causes the solidification of the entire body of water, which quickly crystallizes as more ice-nine.

As people are mostly water, ice-nine kills nearly instantly when ingested or brought into contact with soft tissues exposed to the bloodstream, such as the eyes or tongue.

In the story, it is developed by the Manhattan Project in order for the Marines to no longer need to deal with mud, but abandoned when it becomes clear that any quantity of it would have the power to destroy all life on earth. A global catastrophe involving freezing the world's oceans with ice-nine is used as a plot device in Vonnegut's novel.


User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:03 am

Strangelet

A strangelet is a hypothetical particle consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. Its size would be a minimum of a few femtometers across (with the mass of a light nucleus). Once the size becomes macroscopic (on the order of metres across), such an object is usually called a quark star or "strange star" rather than a strangelet. An equivalent description is that a strangelet is a small fragment of strange matter. The term "strangelet" originates with E. Farhi and R. Jaffe. Strangelets have been suggested as a dark matter candidate.

Strange matter hypothesis

The known particles with strange quarks are unstable because the strange quark is heavier than the up and down quarks, so strange particles, such as the Lambda particle, which contains an up, down, and strange quark, always lose their strangeness, by decaying via the weak interaction to lighter particles containing only up and down quarks. But states with a larger number of quarks might not suffer from this instability. This is the "strange matter hypothesis" of Bodmer and Witten. According to this hypothesis, when a large enough number of quarks are collected together, the lowest energy state is one which has roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, namely a strangelet. This stability would occur because of the Pauli exclusion principle; having three types of quarks, rather than two as in normal nuclear matter, allows more quarks to be placed in lower energy levels.

Strangelet link


User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:09 am

The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that states that two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. In the case of electrons, it can be stated as follows: it is impossible for two electrons of a poly-electron atom to have the same values of the four quantum numbers: n, the principal quantum number, ℓ, the angular momentum quantum number, mℓ, the magnetic quantum number, and ms, the spin quantum number. For two electrons residing in the same orbital, n, ℓ, and mℓ are the same, so ms, the spin, must be different, and thus the electrons have opposite half-integer spins, 1/2 and -1/2. This principle was formulated by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925.

A more rigorous statement is that the total wave function for two identical fermions is antisymmetric with respect to exchange of the particles. This means that the wave function changes its sign if the space and spin co-ordinates of any two particles are interchanged.

Particles with an integer spin, or bosons, are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle: any number of identical bosons can occupy the same quantum state, as with, for instance, photons produced by a laser and Bose–Einstein condensate.

The Pauli exclusion principle governs the behavior of all fermions (particles with "half-integer spin"), while bosons (particles with "integer spin") are not subject to it. Fermions include elementary particles such as quarks (the constituent particles of protons and neutrons), electrons and neutrinos. In addition, protons and neutrons (subatomic particles composed from three quarks) and some atoms are fermions, and are therefore subject to the Pauli exclusion principle as well. Atoms can have different overall "spin", which determines whether they are fermions or bosons — for example helium-3 has spin 1/2 and is therefore a fermion, in contrast to helium-4 which has spin 0 and is a boson. As such, the Pauli exclusion principle underpins many properties of everyday matter, from its large-scale stability, to the chemical behavior of atoms.


User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:16 am

Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons (the four force-carrying gauge bosons of the Standard Model), the recently discovered Higgs boson, and the hypothetical graviton of quantum gravity; composite particles (e.g. mesons and stable nuclei of even mass number such as deuterium (with one proton and one neutron, mass number = 2), helium-4, or lead-208[

Unlike bosons, two identical fermions cannot occupy the same quantum space. Whereas the elementary particles that make up matter (i.e. leptons and quarks) are fermions, the elementary bosons are force carriers that function as the 'glue' holding matter together.

n particle physics, a fermion (a name coined by Paul Dirac[1] from the surname of Enrico Fermi) is any particle characterized by Fermi–Dirac statistics. These particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include all quarks and leptons, as well as any composite particle made of an odd number of these, such as all baryons and many atoms and nuclei. Fermions differ from bosons, which obey Bose–Einstein statistics.

A fermion can be an elementary particle, such as the electron, or it can be a composite particle, such as the proton. According to the spin-statistics theorem in any reasonable relativistic quantum field theory, particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions.

As a consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle, only one fermion can occupy a particular quantum state at any given time. If multiple fermions have the same spatial probability distribution, then at least one property of each fermion, such as its spin, must be different. Fermions are usually associated with matter, whereas bosons are generally force carrier particles, although in the current state of particle physics the distinction between the two concepts is unclear

The Standard Model recognizes two types of elementary fermions: quarks and leptons. In all, the model distinguishes 24 different fermions. There are six quarks (up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top quarks), and six leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau particle and tau neutrino), along with the corresponding antiparticle of each of these.


User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:22 am

In science fiction, a planet killer, planet buster, planet cracker, planet glassing or similar variations on that meaning, is a fictional object or device capable of either destroying an entire planet or otherwise rendering it uninhabitable by a civilized species– a variety of a doomsday device. Examples of such devices include the Death Star from the Star Wars film franchise, the "Doomsday Machine" seen in the original Star Trek television series or the atomic-powered stone burners from Frank Herbert's Dune franchise.

The term "planet-buster" has also come into use with reference to major natural disasters such as significant asteroid impact events.

Planet Killers

Quark bomb

User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Re: Utility fog

Post by Pigeon » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:28 am

Sodium acetate

Sodium acetate is also used in heating pads, hand warmers, and hot ice. Sodium acetate trihydrate crystals melt at 136.4 °F/58 °C[11] (to 137.12 °F/58.4 °C), dissolving in their water of crystallization. When they are heated past the melting point and subsequently allowed to cool, the aqueous solution becomes supersaturated. This solution is capable of cooling to room temperature without forming crystals.

By pressing on a metal disc within the heating pad, a nucleation center is formed, causing the solution to crystallize back into solid sodium acetate trihydrate. The bond-forming process of crystallization is exothermic. The latent heat of fusion is about 264–289 kJ/kg.[11] Unlike some types of heat packs, such as those dependent upon irreversible chemical reactions, a sodium acetate heat pack can be easily reused by immersing the pack in boiling water for a few minutes, until the crystals are completely dissolved, and allowing the pack to slowly cool to room temperature


Post Reply