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not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme

not sure why gamache deleted their reply, but it was absolutely correct as far as i could see. anyway, in my own words, and more perhaps taking a more extreme stance: this, like most modern high energy physics / astronomy has very little practical use because it only makes a difference at energies so extreme that they are difficult / expensive to reproduce.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
...so far. The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available. Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?
- cousin_it 17y ago
  Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the limiting factor now?
  - donaq 17y ago
    OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.
dkimball 17y ago
On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!") "The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  there's no obvious connection between this symmetry breaking (handedness) and faster than light travel. you could argue that limitations for ftl come from translational symmetry (conservation of momentum and energy), but that's not what was broken here, as far as i know.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago

...so far. The thing that occurred to me as I was reading this is how different life can be depending on how much energy is cheaply/freely available. Think back to within the last century: I have more horsepower sitting in my driveway than the average small village of 100 years ago (and that's not counting the actual horses in my pasture :-) . Kilowatts of cheap electricity are available at every wall socket. How has that changed our lives? How much different would life be if gigawatts of power were available at that same wall outlet at the same cost?

cousin_it 17y ago
Once electric power stops being the limiting factor for home tasks, further growth doesn't change your life much. Similarly with computing power: your PC is probably idling most of the time. The interesting question is, what's the limiting factor now?
- donaq 17y ago
  OTOH, we now have programs routinely run in homes (e.g. games) that occasionally require computing power orders of magnitude higher than what was available ten years ago. I expect that if we have orders of magnitude more power deliverable to our homes, innovative people will find uses for them.

dkimball 17y ago

On the other hand, difficult now doesn't mean difficult forever; an eighteen-wheeler would have been written off as requiring impossible amounts of energy to use, if someone had described it in the 16th Century. ("_How_ many horsepower?!") "The same day as an article on the subject" is probably a little premature for any theories about its utility, too, although I'll certainly be interested if anyone who knows what he or she is talking about with physics thinks that this could be used to build an ansible or something...

andrewcooke 17y ago
there's no obvious connection between this symmetry breaking (handedness) and faster than light travel. you could argue that limitations for ftl come from translational symmetry (conservation of momentum and energy), but that's not what was broken here, as far as i know.