Magnetic field researchers target 100-tesla goal

Los Alamos National Labs ^ | Saturday, March 24, 2012 | Staff

[AFPhys]

“Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don’t understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don’t understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn’t bother you any more.” - Arnold Sommerfeld

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WOW! Spectacular quote!

I absolutely agree with that, although I really was not very confident even the second time through, and by my fourth course I was as baffled as ever. I worked on items having to do with thermo (P.Chem, Heat flow engineering, Plasma phys, cosmology, etc.) at least a dozen times over the years. I have never gotten any smarter, it seems.

Recently there is a small group of people who are saying CO2 can not cause Greenhouse effect (as far as I can see their argument) and who have become known as the (sky-)dragon slayers, or some such. They claim to rely on 2nd Law as their support. First sight, it seems their arguments ought to be easy to refute, and though I actually agree with them that CO2 will not cause CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) it seems they go too far. However, with their invoking 2nd Law arguments, I have to get very skittish about saying either yea or nay. What makes it worse, I have to say that other scientists who I usually respect completely (Lindzen, Spencer, non-PhD Anthony Watts, etc.) make arguments against I consider not 100% convincing. Of course the usual CAGW crew is all against them, but they can be discounted out of hand.

I really need someone who actually understands thermo, someone who is truly knowledgeable in the field, to address their argument convincingly. The last phrase of the quote needs some modification for me: “... it doesn’t bother you any more” + UNTIL you actually try to apply it rigorously.

I am hoping some serious physicist (Shaviv, etc.) chooses to address this issue some day. Otherwise, I fear it will take me months of study of thermo yet again to untangle the argument one day.

[AFPhys]

I should have pinged you to my reply#41 ...

[Carry_Okie]

WOW! Spectacular quote!

It was quoted in my Thermo text at Harvey Mudd. I read it once, laughed until my guts hurt, and never forgot it.

I worked on items having to do with thermo (P.Chem, Heat flow engineering, Plasma phys, cosmology, etc.) at least a dozen times over the years. I have never gotten any smarter, it seems.

I feel your pain. :-)

As I raised my small children, I emphasized heat transfer and control boundaries over and over, so that they would learn to "see" heat flow even as pre-schoolers. I did experiments with exothermic and endothermic processes, so that they could see it. I beat my brains out looking for examples around them.

They've had far fewer problems with it than I had.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks brityank.

...producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth's magnetic field... There are higher magnetic fields produced elsewhere, but the magnets that create such fields blow themselves to bits in the process. The system at Los Alamos is instead designed to work nondestructively, in the intense 100-tesla realm, on a regular basis.

Superconductivity ping.

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[Paradox]

Whoa! As a former engineering student, we learned that we really were never a master of Thermo, we just could convince it to give us the right answers, most of the time anyway.
Great quote!

[TheOldLady]

Thank you for the nice link, Orgie. It’s very interesting that lightning occurs in a definite pattern rather than being evenly distributed across the globe.

[wxgesr]

“Isaac Asimov’s short story, The Last Question.”

Loved it, thanks!

[KC Burke]

Thanks for the link. Good read.