Being a student of physyics, I decided to join the Institute of Physics (IoP). Got a student membership which was dirt cheap

It also comes with a magazine (called Physics World) every month or three, containing book reviews, news and the odd paper.

The most recent issue was concerning the distribution of papers across the internet.

Up until now distribution of these papers has been via journals. Now, these are expensive, so usually you find them in a library (my university has a ridiculous amount of space for these journals). Theyre also expensive due to the peer review process - I dont fully understand how it works, but it involves other scientists going over your paper, your notes and repeating your experiment to confirm the results. Physics World reckons the cost per paper is ~£1500 to £2000. This cost is taken by the journal - so subscription fees to get these journals, and therefore the latest information on physics, is very expensive.

Which is where open access comes in. This is a method being proposed by many physisists, and a resaercher at CERN wrote a few pages on it in Physics World. It involves having work reviewed by other scientists, and then being published on the internet. The money for this comes from the author. The problem with this model is that only well financed researchers can publish their work. The big advantage of the open access model is being able to put up your raw data, lab notes, etc - there just isnt space for all that on paper !

Which is where my idea comes in. Open source.

Alot of papers and material is already available online, and theyre are also alot of blogs and pre-release (papers that have not undergone peer review) websites kicking about.

My idea is to have a website, (some sort of technorati, facebook, blog mashup), that takes full advantage of blogging. You have a blog for different journals (aka catagories), and each post is a paper. A PDF is available for download so you can download a post, or entire blog etc. Each post (aka paper) is tagged with relevant topics that it adresses. The technorati part of the system would keep track of these tags, allowing you to easilly search for relevant articles, or follow up referances.

Using the facebook part of the system, you can look at the publisher, have a discussion, or share relevant work with them. By using the facebook idea of only accepting people with certain email adresses (and email confirmation), you prevent people taking advantage of the system for advertising or spamming.

And of course, like the open access model you can put extra files up.

Peer review can still take place. There would be an isolated section for submitting non-reviewed work, where it would be emailed / RSS to relevant people to check over it. You could even have an option when completing the facebook-style section asking if the person signing up wants to do peer review (again, limited to active physisists by filtering email adresses).

That my two pence.

Technorati: physics open-access iop

SCRAM jets. A bbc artice got me thinking about them and just how practical they would be.

They work by taking in air, compressing it so much that it ignites, and throwing it out the back to create thrust. They only work after they have reached mach 5 therefore requiring a vehicle to accelerate them to such speeds.
The bbc website said that they could be used to get satellites into low orbits, which sounds like a good idea. However, I think that these will mainly in military applications, eg high speed interception / bomber aircraft.

The bbc website also says that it could be used in high speed passenger aircraft. I think theyre wrong:

• In order to make the SCRAM jet work, the aircraft needs to be accelerated to mach  5.  This would be incredibly uncomfortable for most people, and even dangerous. You would beed a health exam before you flew. Not going to happen.
• If you want to accelerate slowly up to mach 5, youre going to need a hell of a lot of fuel. This would make for a very big aircraft, which would have to be designed as none exist.
• Two new aircraft would be needed. After the accidents with concorde, which only did mach 1, I cant see many governments wanting to put up the money.

So SCRAM jets, good military and scientific use, but I cant see its commercial aspects.

Technorati:  SCRAM

I was reading a report on the bbc website about the startdust mission. The stardust mission was a probe launched by NASA 9 years ago. It flew off to a comet to collect dust samples. It is thought that these dust samples will show us conditions from the early universe.

However, I am slightly concerned by reading the bbc report. It appears that scientists are already estimating the age and to some extent the contents of the dust sample. I fear that results from the probe will be interpreted in suc ha way to agree with the scientists views, which is an incredibly unscientific thing to do. However, due to their status as scientists, people will accept their views without question.

This is what has happened with evolution. I am NOT a christian or a religious person, but I faili to see how people can accept evolution. Sure, from time to time a species will under go certain changes, for example, grow a bit taller over time. This is not evolution, one species does not turn into another with time.

Evolution states that we came from a chemical soup. A few atoms swirled together and we get some chemicals. A few chemicals swilr together we get complex compounds. etc until we get bacteria, fish, then humans.

Lets just assume that for some strange and wonderful reason, we mange to randomly get one bacteria. It is a basic cell, cytoplasm, no organelles. How can it evolve from here? It would need to have full facilities to reproduce.without those it is going to die. As evolution is gradual over time, even if our blob of cytoplasm had parts of the bits needed to reproduce, it wont be able to, because without a full set of tools it cant, so it will die. That ‘advance’ has been lost.

My arguments might not make too much sense, but I struggle to put into words what I think. Part of the reason I got a blog =)

However my argument boils down to this. Rather than accept what were told, we should look into what were told, and find out for ourselves what we think is fact and opinion.

Basically evolution is bullshit.

Planck was working on the problem of how the radiation an object emits is related to its temperature.
He made a forumula that only made sense if the enregy of the vibrating molecule was quantized, ie, could only take certain values. He thought this was a bit of a bodge job, but turned out to be very important.

Planck’s constant: 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s

To make the forumla work, he added a ‘fudge factor’ ie a constant. Plancks constant. This turned out to be a very valuable formula, rather than the bodge he thought it was.

The energy delivered would have to be proportional to the frequancy of vibration,
therefore, energy is delivered in chunks, multiplied by a constant. this is plancks constant.

Energy can only come in discrete lumps.

You could find all this information on the web, or in a text book.

Using what Planck discovered, could we use this to make atomic computers? (nanoprocessors etc)

I know nano processors are already on Intel’s hitlist, and theyre getting close. Theyre intending to build processors using 35nm thick materials .

However, if energy, like Planck discovered, is delivered in discrete lumps, we can use this a digital signal - on / off. Im sure theres a way to use energy emitted by one particle, and the way this energy interacts with surrounding particles, could be used as a processor. Information would be inputted as heat or a particle, and would come out of the other end as energy or a particle.

Mind boggling huh?

The miracle cure fure broken backs, new organs, and given enough time, I’m sure we’ll be bale to grow limbs. Sounds a bit optimistic, but giving enough time and resources I think humanity is capable of doing almost anything.

But at what cost?

“Most of the work on understanding the biology of these cells, how to use them, how to turn them into things and - I think - eventual applications, will come out of work on cell lines derived from surplus embryos not cloned ones.”

Surplus embryos? I almost find it amusing that scientists can be so blunt about this. Given time these ‘ embryos’ would have developed into humans, but they were not allowed to do so, because decided they were going to be used for stem cell research. Scientists are playing God and are doing nothing but cold - blooded murder.

Because that is all that it is.

Quote from bbc website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4578286.stm