The US also tested burying nuclear waste in a salt mine with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), though with less success.

The salt worked well to contain the waste. The issue they wound up having was a barrel burst from pressure (Los Alamos National Laboratory incorrectly used organic kitty litter as an absorbent material). The radioactive contamination leaked slightly because the ventilation system failed to close fully when the radiation monitors triggered. Turns out the salt had deposited in the ventilation shaft and blocked the vents from closing.

So historically the US government has been a dominant source of funding for basic science. Various government agencies offer grants to scientists to study things that are very “pure science” like the example you gave, to very “applied science” such as ways to use that basic science info to aid national security. The US government funding of basic science grew out of the manhattan project (an example of basic and applied science serving a national security application).

Vannevar Bush, who helped initiate the manhattan project, advocated for a significant role in funding science by the US government after WW2. He’s the reason the US has historically been a titan in scientific research. PhDs from other countries wanted to move to the US because that’s where the best opportunities to continue their research were. This was true even just a few years ago.

The current overhaul and politicization of basic science and the government organizations that fund it has significantly damaged that strength in the US. There have been catastrophic funding cuts in basic science. Many young researchers are looking for jobs in private industry (non research) or moving to other countries. We will suffer the consequences of these cuts for years at a minimum.

Though I know in real life that wouldn’t be possible because entanglement still can’t be used to transmit information faster than light.

The entire point of it, is that it can…

I want to push back on this - quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. The entanglement effect does allow for instantaneous correlations, but you can’t use those correlations to transmit information on their own.

For example, imagine Alice and Bob have a pair of entangled particles. The spins are anti-correlated, so if one is spin up the other is spin down. Alice measures the spin of her particle and sees its spin up. She now knows that Bob’s is spin down. She can learn this even if he is many light years away, without needing to communicate with him.

But what information was sent? If Alice or Bob wanted to communicate a simple “yes or no” to each other, how does knowing the spin of each others particles help?

What could happen is Alice and Bob could agree that spin up is yes, down is no. And Alice could measure her particles spin, then call Bob and say “my answer is the spin of your particle” to communicate “no”. This would be physically secure encryption of her answer which is a big advantage, but it is still communicated at classical speeds.

Actually methods of quantum cryptography are more complicated and involve measuring many entangled particles to prove that no one is intercepting the information.

A nuclear reactor produces both energy and neutrons. With the right conditions, those neutrons can be used to produce new isotopes.

In a thorium reactor, 232Th absorbs a neutron to become 233Th. This has a 22 minute half life, decaying to 233Pa, which itself has a 27 day half life, decaying to 233U. 233U is fissile and can be used as fuel for the reactor.

235U is also fissile and can be used for fuel, but this is generally obtained by processing natural uranium to select the <1% of the material that’s 233U. This process is called enrichment.

Plutonium breeder reactors make 239Pu by irradiating 238U to capture a neutron. This undergoes a similar decay process as in the thorium fuel cycle: 239U -> 239Np -> 239Pu.

Well let’s do some math and see.

By “disintegrate” I’m assuming that simply breaking them into small pieces doesn’t count, you don’t want any residue left after. This means at a minimum you need to break the bonds between the atoms in the body. This is called ionization and would turn the body into a plasma.

The ionization energy varies by element, but for both hydrogen and oxygen(the main elements in the body, as it’s mostly water) the ionization energy is roughly the same at ~12 eV (eV are electron volts, a unit of energy).

You would need to heat the body to a temperature such that 12 eV is the typical energy of a molecule or atom. Assuming a black body radiator, Temperature = Energy/ Boltzman constant. So 12 eV corresponds to a temperature of 140,000 Kelvin (which is also about 140,000 C or 250,000 F). That’s pretty hot!

Raising the temperature of a body to 140k K would understandably take a lot of heat or energy. It takes about 4000 Joules to raise temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree C. Assuming a 100 kg body that is pure water, getting to 140k C from room temperature (27 C) takes about 5.6E8 Joules.  Fun fact, Wolfram Alpha tells me that’s about one third the energy in a typical lighting bolt. I should note I’ve assumed the energy goes to raising the temperature of water, but the body would quickly turn into steam before reaching the plasma phase. So there’s more energy needed for that phase change but we’ll neglect it.

I assume you want this to be instantaneous, and not you sitting there with a blowtorch slowly vaporizing a body bit by bit. In that case you need to consider how to couple the energy to hearing the body. You’d want some form of radiation that is highly penetrating, so it goes throughout the entire body all at once. But if the radiation passes through the body easily, then it can also escape and not deposit all its energy. There will be a lot of inefficiency in order to ensure the body is heated uniformly.

So you need much more radiation energy than my estimate. Let’s assume 1% efficiency for a rough estimate - this would mean the energy deposition throughout the body is very uniform, and it vaporizes all at once. Now you need 5E10 joules, which Wolfram alpha points out is about the energy release from fissioning 2/3 of a gram of uranium (foreshadowing!).

The amount of radiation energy we’re discussing would be difficult if not impossible to focus or direct, especially if you want the energy to be delivered in a fraction of a second (quick disintegration vs slow boiling). So if you create a source of energy with sufficient power, it will radiate in all directions. Only a small fraction will hit the body. I’ll assume a solid angle of 10% (90% misses the body). Now you need 5E11 Joules, or fission of 6 grams of uranium.

If you have a device that can fission 6 grams of uranium in a fraction of a second then congrats on becoming a nuclear armed state.

In summary, vaporizing a body would require placing it within the fireball of a nuclear detonation. While that is technically possible, I don’t think it fits the spirit of a “disintegration gun”.

No.

Micronovae are a recent theory for explaining observational data, having been suggested only a few years ago. So it will be difficult to make specific predictions about whether they will occur for a specific star system.

That being said, they would occur in a binary star system (2 stars in a gravitationally bound orbit) when a white dwarf accretes matter from the other star in the pair. Our sun is not in a binary system and isn’t a white dwarf, so a micronova can’t happen.

I haven’t watched the videos you linked but I would caution against listening to someone making that sort of claim. They aren’t operating in evidence based science.

That’s correct, but I wasn’t implying the opposite; I hope my comment doesn’t read that way.

A fraction of the vaccinated population will not have 100% immunity. Even among healthy, non-immunocompromised people vaccines generally don’t have a 100% efficacy. For example, annual flu vaccines vary in efficacy, but are often around 50%.

As I said in my comment, herd immunity is a form of indirect protection. Keeping a disease from being able to spread prevents people from being exposed at all, regardless of their immunity status. If enough people are unvaccinated and there is no herd immunity, then that increases the risk for the whole population - even those who were vaccinated since generally that doesn’t guarantee immunity.

There are certainly arguments to be made about bodily autonomy and weighing individual rights against those of society. However, the idea that “the decision to not be vaccinated is an individual choice that doesn’t harm others” is incorrect, and therefore not a great argument against vaccine mandates.

if they don’t want to get vaccinated then it still won’t affect vaccinated folks.

This is actually not true, since enough people being unvaccinated can prevent herd immunity from protecting everyone.

Herd immunity is an indirect protection from an infectious disease that occurs when enough of a population has immunity (either from vaccination or prior infection). When enough people are immune, infections are unable to spread and outbreaks naturally end. This protects people within the population who don’t have immunity (unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, vaccinated but didn’t get complete immunity, too young for the vaccine, immunocompromised, etc). It also protects those with some immunity who might still have a less severe infection.

The vaccination rate required for herd immunity depends on how infectious a particular disease is. Measles is particularly infectious, and a 95% vaccination rate is considered necessary for herd immunity. Many parts of the US have rates lower than that, which is why measles outbreaks are becoming common after the disease had basically been eradicated for decades.

That’s a good question - I hadn’t considered the size of the interaction region. It’s actually really big!

These high energy neutrinos produce particles like muons that can penetrate pretty far through the detector. IceCube is a 1km cube of ice (with light detectors throughout) and if you look at images of events, many of the detectors will light up along the muon track length. So that’s hundreds of meters long. I think that would appear as a large and faint blue haze.

The Cherenkov light is pretty directional though (in the forward direction) so it won’t necessarily be a uniformly bright glow. It’ll depend somewhat on your viewing angle relative to the incoming neutrino.

image source

I imagine it would be visible under the right conditions. It’s been demonstrated that the human eye can detect single photons. The Cherenkov photons follow an energy distribution, but for simplicity we can assume they are blue light (450 nm), which is 2.7 eV per photon. IceCube is designed to detect neutrinos with energies greater than 1 TeV. Assuming full conversion of neutrino energy to Cherenkov photons, that’s 370 billion photons per detection event. Pretty good odds on seeing that.

I’ll start off by noting that papers on the arxiv aren’t published, they are generally preprints of papers that the author intends to publish in a journal elsewhere. (Sometimes this doesn’t happen and the arxiv is as far as they get).

The arxiv does have some rules to get a paper posted but they are only intended to prevent spam and complete gibberish.

arXiv requires you be endorsed/recognized as a member of the scientific community with like a college email or written recommendation by someone already known.

This is true - though just having a college/university email address is enough to meet the requirement.

Then whenever I look at the papers on arxiv they always look a very specific way I cant get with libreoffice writer. Theres apparently a whole bunch of rules on formatting and font and style and this and that.

As others have said papers on the arxiv are generally written using Latex, a typesetting language. The formatting comes automatically. It has a bit of a learning curve but it’s not too bad, and there are plenty of examples out there. Figuring out how to get something done in latex is something that LLMs are generally good at too (I don’t recommend their use in general, but solving specific formatting issues is helpful with them).

It’s overwhelming and kind of scary.

Welcome to the world of publishing and sharing your ideas! I wouldn’t get too hung up on formatting your paper yet - that’s generally the last step before publishing anyway. I second the other recommendation to try to get feedback from someone in academia who has the relevant expertise. If you’re concerned about your ideas being stolen, you can try to have your current paper saved somewhere with a time stamp.

Honestly though if you wind up emailing it to someone, then you have the sent email as proof. Getting caught stealing someone else’s work generally would be career ending for a professor, and it would be pretty easy for you to prove and file a formal complaint with their institution.

The hardest part is going to be getting someone to take the time to read what you prepared. Focus on having a short and descriptive abstract, and maybe a slightly longer summary of the paper. Then have what you’ve already written, without trying to reformat it.

Good luck!

Antimatter interacts with regular matter in more ways than just annihilation. Annihilation just happens to be a process that’s uniquely available to antiparticles and has a high probability of occurring. This is because antiparticles have both opposite electric charges to standard particles and opposite color charge, so annihilation between particle/anti particle pairs conserves these quantities.

It’s unlikely that there’s an anti-matter equivalent of dark matter. If there was, we’d expect to see annihilation radiation, such as the 511 keV photons emitted when positron+electron pairs annihilate.

Yep. In fact there’s a process called inverse Compton scattering that essentially works this way. In ordinary Compton scattering, a photon scatters off a stationary electron and typically leaves with less energy (since the electron gets a kinetic kick). In inverse Compton scattering, a photon collides with a moving electron which can cause the photon to gain energy.

One application of this is to produce gamma-ray beams. You take a beam of light (often from a laser) and collide it head on with a beam of relativistic electrons traveling in the opposite direction. In the electron rest frame, the photon has gamma-ray energy, while in the lab frame it might only be visible light. The back-scattered photon can then be boosted to the gamma regime in the lab frame, and now you’ve got a gamma-ray beam.

A black hole is believed to contain a singularity with all of the mass as a single point. So this is well past the point of baryonic matter and in a region where our physics models break down.

If you just take the total mass of a black hole and divide it by the volume of the Schwarzschild radius (aka event horizon) you get a density MUCH greater than a neutron star. This isn’t a useful measure of the black hole density though, since all of the mass is at a single point of presumably infinite density.

Neutron stars are the most compact form of matter that we know about; they’re even denser than the nucleus of an atom.

Neutrons, protons and electrons are fermions, meaning they must obey the Pauli exclusion principle. No two neutrons (or protons or electrons) can be in the same quantum mechanical state. If you take ordinary star matter (plasma made of dissociated protons and electrons) and squeeze it, eventually the electrons will nearly overlap in their states. You’d have two electrons with nearly the same energy, spin and location. They cannot overlap though, so this creates a repulsive force that prevents the matter from further compression; this is called the electron degeneracy pressure.

If the compressive force overcomes this pressure, then the electrons can capture on the protons to form neutrons. Neutrons and protons also have degeneracy pressures, but they can be packed much more densely than electrons. This is because their wavelength is shorter. The wavelength of a massive particle is inversely proportional to its mass, and protons and electrons are about 2000 times the mass of electrons. So compressed ordinary matter will inevitably become pure neutrons, simply because this is the most compact form.

A pure electron or pure proton star wouldn’t be as compact because both are charged particles so there would be Coulomb repulsion (this isn’t an issue in ordinary matter since the number of electrons and protons is roughly equal). You’d also need to somehow separate the electrons from the protons, and this isn’t a process that would naturally occur in a collapsing star.

They would die immediately.

Breaking atomic and molecular bonds is what ionizing radiation such as gamma rays or neutrons does to a human body, so this scenario would be sort of like an extreme, unrealistically high dose of radiation.

Immediately after all bonds are broken, atoms would react and start to form new bonds. In some cases these bonds would reform correctly- for example, water being remade as H2O. In many cases alternative bonds would form which could make substances incompatible with life- say H2O2, aka hydrogen peroxide. Basic cellular and nerve function wouldn’t work, hence the instant death.