From the paper: "Phenomena such as 'particle' tracks in bubble chambers, and the small spot appearing on a viewing screen when a single quantum interacts with the screen, are often cited as evidence that quanta are particles, but these are insufficient evidence of particles."
Really? Wave packets that are indivisible energy blobs, and that make individual "clicks" on my detector sure seem to act like particles to me.
I get that the math implies these bundles are waves - that's the duality part. I don't think any physicist thinks that there is a "particle" embedded in the wave packet, though, like this guy is arguing - the quantized wave packet is the particle!
Historically, warning labels on tobacco products were the first step in lowering smoking rates (at least in the US.) Then came advertising bans, enforced age restrictions, more and more taxes on the consumer, and finally heavy restrictions on smoking areas. Before smoking was banned in most bars and restaurants in the early 2000's, it had already become socially unacceptable to smoke in many places (in the 1970's and earlier you could smoke just about anywhere, just as scrolling on your phone anywhere is now acceptable.)
It was all of these things together that really lowered smoking rates. Algorithmic social media is following a similar path, this is just the very first step.
We also shouldn't expect the social media companies to change by themselves - their incentives, as with tobacco companies, are to make money. And nothing makes money like addictive drugs. Expect more testimony of social media CEO's like the famed 1994 Congressional testimony of the tobacco company CEO's: https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress. These guys outright lied to everyone's faces to protect their harmful industry. It was a joke even then.
It's not a breathless article - these advances are quite doable from an engineering standpoint (and going from 20-->25% is a HUGE deal - that directly reduces the number of panels needed, and so directly reduces overhead and labor.)
The more exotic designs which often are the subject of breathless articles (e.g. perovskite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell or other multi-junction cells) can get greater efficiencies (like up to 40% for quad junction) but are a lot more expensive from a lifetime cost perspective (they don't last nearly as long as silicon junctions and are much more expensive to produce.)
I don't know if it's that huge of a deal. The main challenges of solar are not the number of panels now. The incremental cost of installing an extra panel is quite low.
The biggest challenges are storage, and - in the UK at least - nimbyism. (Yes people really object to solar panels in fields.)
The other thing I would say is that the software for solar inverters is way behind where it could be. You could easily get a 10% improvement just by making them smarter - e.g. using time series prediction, day ahead pricing, etc.
Unfortunately they're stuck in the stone ages. I have a QCells inverter (rebranded Solax) - do not buy btw - and they directly told me they are not interested in any of this smart stuff.
They also do automatic firmware updates with no opt-out and no notification of changes. And the updates include removing features.
Do not buy QCells solar! (Hopefully Google finds this.)
Lots of people have limited roof space that isn't in shade for parts of the day.
If we're able to cheaply over-provision the panels on the roof then that mean less reliance on the grid (if you use batteries)
IMO with solar it makes the most sense to stick to high volume Chinese stuff. Longi/Jinko/Trina/CanadianSolar/whatever for panels and Deye for inverters. The Deye stuff is particularly good because of aforementioned smart features, especially if you are off-grid or operate on crappy rural power.
My favourite feature is called peak-shaving where it uses the battery to supplement said crappy rural power or a generator that is provisioned for average load instead of peak.
I haven't found inverters with similar features and configurability anywhere else thus far.
I will of course happily buy a 25% panel as soon as it is on the market if the price per watt for the total install is not soaked up by a multitude of other factors.
The lanthanide series of elements is interesting because the 4f levels that are getting filled are actually physically closer to the nucleus than the outer orbitals, so their chemical properties are very similar between elements. That also makes them hard to separate from one another.
Unless there is a special Norwegian process for this separation, I am not sure this announcement will mean much.
This is one of those weird narratives where you see stories about rare earth minerals are thought to be rare like gold, not rare as in practically everywhere but in very small quantities.
They used to mine rare earth metals in California. It's terrible for the environment and labor costs are high. But in an emergency you could do it there and many other places.
Yes, some ground is easier to process, but that isn't the limiting factor. But the real cost is the toxic waste created and labor and the ground is super torn up because you process so much. It helps if you can do it far away from people. Hopefully they have a better plan to clean up afterward.
Unfortunately this is also in pretty decent farming land. The land owners will be compensated, but I understand many don't feel too happy about leaving their farms...
Almost universally a hobbyist would purchase the RP2040 mounted to a pcb with other i/o components (e.g. the Seeeduino Xiao https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-RP2040/) There are other versions which bring out more lines to accessible solder points.
Of course you can design your own custom board, but I'd wager most people don't need or want to do this.
I went to a Rubio's a couple years ago - the quality was abysmal, nearly inedible, and prices were high. In the before times (before private equity took over), Rubio's was actually pretty good and quite affordable. It was clear the new owners tried to over-optimize their supply chain, because the food became hot (not even hot most of the time) garbage.
Hmm, no one is talking about the enabler for this - modern wealth. In the not so distant past, refusing to get up and face the world would result in starvation. Survival required people to be more social.
As a parent of two adult children who are both working, I can't imagine enabling this (even though I could.) Sure, if my kids were truly disabled that would be another story, but it seems the hikikomori are just unhappy with the world. Enabling them to spend their lives doomscrolling or playing games is actively harmful.
Modern wealth is potentially a double-edged sword.
There's enough of it that "hikikomori" is a viable strategy to stay alive.
Yet, "modern wealth" is also the reason many things previous generations took for granted such as housing are effectively unreachable for many people nowadays, plus inflation/cost of living.
This makes "hikikomori" the rational strategy for some people. Enough money to scrape by and live online, but not enough to actually climb out of the hole.
True, the internet is a cheap, endless, addictive supply of distraction that didn't exist until recently. But someone still has to provide it - a hikikomori staying in their room all day will not be able to pay the utility bill without an enabler...
This brings back memories of the 1980s. The Church Universal and Triumphant had posters plastered all over college campuses about their retreats. As I recall, according to the posters at said retreats one could "quaff potions created by Merlin" - yes, THAT Merlin from Arthurian legend.
The posters also, incongruously, had this androgynous-looking image prominently displayed:
I thought up until very recently that this was supposed to be an image of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (whose name I thought also was surely made-up), and always wondered why this woman had a mustache :)
It's a slow Saturday morning, so I actually watched most of his YouTube presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJjPi7uZ2OI&t=3696s I stopped at the Q&A where they started going off about UFOs...) He claims that the dU/dx in an asymmetric capacitor (a spatial gradient in internal energy) leads to a net overall force on the center of mass. If that were true in this system, then two different springs under compression would also have a net force on the center of mass. Or two adjacent, differently pressured vessels. It's just wrong. There is no net change in momentum happening in this system.
His "quantum" explanations are even worse (just some hand-wavy BS with the fine structure constant thrown in.)
I don't doubt he has managed to generate 1 g of electrostatic force on a charged object - but that force has to be reacted against something else. Otherwise Newton would be spinning at an ever-accelerating rate in his grave.
Really? Wave packets that are indivisible energy blobs, and that make individual "clicks" on my detector sure seem to act like particles to me.
I get that the math implies these bundles are waves - that's the duality part. I don't think any physicist thinks that there is a "particle" embedded in the wave packet, though, like this guy is arguing - the quantized wave packet is the particle!
reply