Would You Like Your Space
Fried or Boiled?

When the Extreme Light Infrastructure Utra-High Field Facility is built scientists are gonna rip a new one in the fabric of space.

Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum.

A vacuum fizzles with mysterious particles that come in and out of existence but the phenomenon happens so fast that no-one has ever actually been able to prove it.

David Klaus asks, “I wonder if the article is referring to the “zero-point vaccum energy” that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about, and they also used in the Stargate franchise?”

The ultra-high field laser…. will produce 200 petawatts of power — more than 100,000 times the power of the world’s combined electricity production but in less than a trillionth a second….

The intensity of the beam is so powerful and will produce such extreme conditions, that do not even exist in the centre of the sun.

Will there be a few watts left over to zap the copyeditor of that last line? Anyway, you get the idea.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

One thought on “Would You Like Your Space
Fried or Boiled?

  1. It’s all “zero point” energy… but what scientists call it goes in and out of fashion, for some reason. They also toy with it being the mysterious “dark energy” in the universe, though its fairly obvious that if either exists, they must pretty much have to be the same thing. *Two* invisible, all-powerful, all-perfusive energy fields in one time-space continuum? That’s asking God for a bit much…

    I suspect the multiplication of names for similar ideas comes down to writing papers and getting your name on some scientific phenomena. If I write a paper in which I propose an invisible field of magnetic jelly beans controls the expansion of the universe, I’ll want to give it a name that I thought up, not the name some other professor thought up in his theory. You want the new idea to be the Your Name Here Theory, not the Somebody Beat Me To It Theory.

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