OMG! Julian Assange has finally been arrested! I can hardly contain myself.
Read closely, and you'll see all the hallmarks of a political pawn being fought over by at least two powerful foes.
One thing you can count on is that this is all political theatre. He exposes war crimes, and is suddenly accused of sexual assault ... IN SWEDEN! (Currently the rape capital of the world, thanks to African and middle-eastern immigration.) He surrenders, and someone posts his bond. Then he flees, but only to the Equadorian embassy in London. They grant him asylum ... FOR SEVEN YEARS! And now, all of a sudden, they expel him?!
You can't make this stuff up.
And just look at all the police!
This isn't an arrest; it's witness protection. After all, Sweden dropped their charges, but he still wouldn't leave the embassy. The UK backed off, but he still wouldn't leave the embassy. Why? Because his real enemies have no formal name that they'll admit to, but they want him dead, and that in a very dramatic way. They want an example made of him. Why? Because he knows the truth about Seth Rich and HRC's 'missing' e-mails, Russian (non) involvement, and a good deal more.
This is entirely the US in action, and the UK is dutifully complying with the wishes of our own Department of Justice. And that's currently headed by whom? That's right. Our very own, blood in his eye for BHO, WJC, and HRC, the one, the only, William Pelham Barr.
Oh, it's on.
Trust me.
It's on.
05:41 EDT
And in other headlines ...
Matt Gaetz is gunning for Adam Schiff, and is almost certainly going to sink his battleship with a single shot.
Nancy Pelosi has finally figured out that the fire department doesn't serve her neighborhood any more, and is now trying to wave a white hanky at President Trump directly. But is he ignoring her? Did he mean what he said when he said there would be no deals? You can soften your tone all you want, Pelosi; the things you've done are unforgivable.
John Brennan is trying to keep a calm demeanor as he expresses 'disappointment' in Barr's portrayal of his actions as 'spying'. OH, Johnny. You've heard the words 'treason' and 'death penalty' on the wind, and you're sweating. I can see it from here.
The Mueller Report continues to be a bone of contention, especially with Jerry Nadler, who, as Rudy Guiliani says, suffers from diarrhea of the mouth. I'm still convinced that Trump is letting Barr dangle this carrot in front of Nadler until the entire DNC is begging to find out that they just got hit in the mouth with an orange baseball bat. Well, Jerry is a New Jersey politician, long on corruption, short on smart.
Alec Baldwin seriously thinks he could beat DJT in an election ... and it's actually being considered by some DNC types!
Gee! Nothing from Alyssa Milano? I'm suspicious.
Whoa! And Ken Starr is now chiming in that Hillary Clinton drove Vince Foster to kill himself?! What's next? The revelation that she loaded the gun, cocked it, and handed to him?
Former Obama counsel, Greg Craig, apparently just got caught in the Mueller Report, too?! What is going on around here? Whose side is Mueller on?
12:34 EDT
Wait! Stop! You don't want to read this. It's just more of my physics ranting.
Some background is warranted here.
Various nations and organizations have been trying to build a working fusion reactor for decades. I recall first reading about the 'promising' Tokamak reactor about 40 years ago. And it kept popping up in the news ... well, the science news anyway. And I recall thinking then that this is pretty curious (that it kept popping up as if new), so I started digging around some, and was surprised to learn that things like magnetic bottles were more than mere Stark Trek fantasy. They already existed. Well, sort of.
As with our own DoE labs, these experiments are often subject to patents and/or security classifications, so whatever information we get about them is filtered, if not distorted. And this is really remarkable to me, considering that it's mostly tax-payer money that funds them, so all the information ought to be readily available to us.
What information I've been able to gather, though, indicates that the chief problem hasn't been what size, shape, or intensity of bottle to contain the plasma in, as they discuss here, but how to feed the thing once you light its fire. It can consume a pretty huge amount of fuel in under a second. And, if you think about their example ... ok, this is where it gets weird ... They think they're trying to model a star like our own sun. And you're probably pretty familiar with the idea that our sun is supposed to be some huge ball of mostly hydrogen and helium. And that the hydrogen, under the heat of the pressure generated by its immense gravity, spontaneously fuses into helium and a lot of left over energy.
Never mind for now the obvious thermodynamics issues there. They sure have. And they've invented every imaginable mathematical explanation for why those rules don't apply. But look at it from their perspective. Where's the fuel supply? The sun itself! All the fuel it would need to burn for billions of years was already there from the beginning. And, so the theory goes, it will continue burning, going through various stages of life, until it eventually burns out.
Well, obviously they can't do that here on earth. (That's one of the reasons behind the ever bigger, badder magnetic bottles.)
So, feeding the thing through those bottles is the corner they're still painted into. You may or may not glean that little fact from all the material written about them, but that's what's really confounding them. And that's why Pons and Fleischmann's cold fusion had every body so excited. You could actually sustain a cold fusion reaction with no magnetic bottle at all. Or, rather, you could if it actually worked. But it doesn't appear to have worked. Like I said, a lot of this information gets locked up by the DoE/DARPA, the trail gets covered with some vague disclaimers, and a dash of disinformation, and the whole thing gets forgotten.
Except by people like me. This kind of thing is always processing quietly in the back of my head.
By the way, far from being embarrassed into obscurity by this apparent fiasco, Messrs Pons and Fleischmann moved to France, and did very well for themselves. Now what does that tell you?
Now, recall what I told you about the very nature of matter: That physicists the world over (save a few) (like Max Planck) see matter as intrinsic in nature, rather than as extrinsic. Well, that paradigm holds for such minds in every respect. This is, by the way, where the entire notion of evolution comes from. And it actually goes all the way back to the great nature vs. nurture debate, and ... wait for it ... pantheism vs. panentheism.
Add to that this little twist: They don't understand the atom.
WHOA! Hold it right there, Rhodes! What are you talking about? I took chemistry in college. I know something about this. And just look at all the medical and engineering marvels we benefit from today because of all our wonderful science. Are you seriously going to tell me that all this could have been achieved without understanding the atom?
YES!
And it's not really all that remarkable; we have plenty of examples to draw on. Just look at the internal combustion engine that's given us so much. You may think it's well understood, but, the fact is, new discoveries are still being made that reveal just how little we understand this tool that exists in billions of working examples. And, yet, several years ago, a mere mechanic in India showed the entire world that they were doing it all wrong, that they had failed to understand what was really going on in the very hearts of their marvels.
As real as Boeing and the FAA are, flight is still just a theory.
Likewise the atom. The image you have of the atom is probably the famous Rutherford 'model' (an important word) that has been around for over a century now. But, if you've studied chemistry or physics in even your first year of college, then you'll certainly be aware of s and p orbitals. What your professor may not have explicitly told you about this though is that they pretty much exclude the Rutherford model. And yet, the Rutherford model remains in use.
How can this be?
Recall what I told you yesterday about the tools we've developed to see what just can't be seen. And how that is augmented by mathematics in an attempt to predict what we think we should be 'seeing' at those minute scales of existence.
At some point in all this, you have to create a model. And the model does not have to be perfect, or even accurate. It just has to help you ... visualize, just as a graph help you visualize equations, and much as a map helps you visualize the larger landscape you're trying to navigate. You don't see contour lines on the ground. That's just for the map. But it does help us visualize what a flat piece of paper would otherwise be unable to portray: The actual topography of the terrain.
Likewise our models of the atom.
Take, for example, spin. The fact is that we can't see this. The linked article even says that this property is inferred. But there's a bit of a problem with this because of duality. How would a wave ... even if frozen into a standing wave, as I believe these particles really are ... spin? This is really just a name we've given that property.
And we're running out of names, by the way. Just look at the names of the quarks. Up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top? Where's Sneezy? They even assign them colors. THESE THINGS CAN'T HAVE COLORS! It's just another label we ... ok, not 'we' ... they apply to help them sort all the myriad properties of these things out. But those labels don't really reflect what they seem to. It would be like me talking about your personality in terms of points on a compass. It's just a model, just a way of recording and communicating because, not only has visible light failed our eyes, science seems to have failed our common sense, too.
Anyway, just as with the quantum computer, I predict that none of these fusion attempts will work.
Wait, what?! Quantum computers have failed?
Suffice it to say for now that, no, they do actually have a computer that appears to work along the lines we ascribe to quantum mechanics. But what's actually going on down at that level? Do we actually understand the atom that well? Or, just as with the internal combustion engine, has trial-and-error gotten us close enough for all practical purposes? Time will tell, but I'm expecting someone to eventually let the cat out of the bag that the whole q-bit thing was actually a brilliant smoke-screen to prevent anyone else from stealing and copying the real science behind these new machines. After all, we've seen this kind of thing before.
But back to fusion.
All these reactors will fail, and they'll all fail for the same reasons, but it won't be the feeding problem. I predict they'll eventually overcome that, but they won't be able to feed the things for more than a few minutes, if that long. While they're struggling to break that barrier, though, I predict that an entirely different problem well end it all. The problem will be that the atom just isn't behaving as their math predicts. And their math is wrong because their model is wrong. It's like following a street map for Chicago in New York City. Sure, there are streets, and they have names, so it may seem to fit at first, but nothing else will make any sense, so you throw the map out and ask directions.
How are they wrong?
As I said, duality is part of the problem. These particles are extrinsic in nature, so they can stop right now trying to break them up so they can see inside. That rabbit hole has no bottom.
Another problem is with the very idea of orbitals. You can't orbit right through your own nucleus. As I said, that's just a model, but it's a bad model. It confuses rather than enlightens.
Yet another problem is the nucleus itself. Those neutrons are pretty evidently not what we ... they have been thinking the are. They have structure, after all. Supposedly they're a positively charged 'nut' with a negatively charged 'coating'. But, if we separate them (and we 'think' we can) from the atom's kernel, they spontaneously decay into an electron and a proton. Spontaneously. No nudging required. Looking at Hydrogen we see ... NO NEUTRONS! Hydrogen IS a former neutron. Or maybe a future neutron. And that makes Helium, not the product of fusing two hydrogen atoms, but FOUR.
And this changes everything.
There is another model. You won't hear much about this, and for reasons I've detailed before, all of which can be summarized as 'investment'. And that model is called the electron-proton model.
It sure took me a while to come around to that.
So what's it got to do with that article?
They're already making progress in that they're looking back to the Z-pinch. But what does the Z-pinch really do? It compresses. It can fuse protons and electrons into what we've mistakenly thought were neutrons. And maybe we can continue calling them neutrons, but, as was recently discovered, their curious structure will let them settle down together in a way that protons can't, and electrons can't. And that is, I believe ... this being my opinion ..., the key to the problem: Charge separation.
Birkeland currents flow throughout the universe like twisted wires, with positive and negative channels what never cross because the mere fact that charge is flowing surrounds each channel with a magnetic field, the same sort the fusion reactor guys are trying to use, which keeps negative from meeting positive. Charge Separation. It's a thing. And it's a thing all the way down to sub-atomic particles. But what would cause that charge separation in particles, where there's no current flow?
This charge separation is what causes like charges to repel, and opposite charges to attract. The problem is that, in an atom, something is defeating this. Otherwise, the protons would fly away from one another, and the electrons would get sucked into those protons, canceling each other out.
But they don't. Nuclear physicists scratched their head over this, and concluded that there must me some force holding the protons together with the neutrons (after all, as far as they could tell, the electrons weren't invited to this party), and named it the Nuclear Force.
But that's not all, folks!
In order for spontaneous neuclear decay to happen, as it does in radioactive materials, this nuclear force had to disobey the inverse-square law (making it no longe a law, I guess). What this means is that the force holding them together is non-linear. That is to say that, within a certain range, that force actually INCREASES with distance. Can you image two magnets that got harder to separate as you pulled them apart? It's kind of like stretching a rubber band. But, at some point, this rubber-band pretty much snaps, but it doesn't just let go. Now, it turns into a spring, and drives the two like charges apart like we're accustomed to.
No. Don't argue. We measured this. It's empirical. Fact. You're just a denier. And don't question our tools, either. We've got buildings full of mathematicians crunching numbers that prove we've built our tools right, and are interpreting the data correctly. You just don't understand these things like we do.
So, how does this make charge separation the key to the problem?
Easy. Simple. Like charges repel. Opposite charges attract. Right? Right! So, why then do we have to force an electron and a proton together into a neutron? Moreover, why do they remain still separate even then, with the positive charge in the middle, and the negative charge on the outside? How does that happen? What exactly is this 'negative particle' that it can even open itself up and swallow a positive particle? Or wrap itself around a positive particle?
Charge separation is the key. Something is sustaining it, even when it seems to us that it should be canceled out, and neutralized.
But a Z-pinch can push that proton nut into that electron shell. Moreover, this might just reveal the true nature of the whole atom to be the proton-electron model, where 'fused' protons and electrons we'll call neutrons all huddle together in the heart of the kernel, while the unfused electrons and protons shift and slide around it, all wanting to be fused, too, but, because they aren't, they're up for grabs, so to speak, the electrons first, but then the protons, too. And this is what creates all of what we understand about chemistry, including acids and bases.
But, until physicists start looking to the ether (and correcting their model of the atom), they'll only ever achieve halting success with their fusion reactors, even the Z-pinch-based versions.
Maybe they'll even figure out that we don't even need any reactors at all. Just as we once threw our sheets to the wind to drive our ships, we'll figure out what Nikola Tesla meant about attaching our machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.
So, just file this one under, "When will they learn?"