Commentary
Commentaries for 2008
- An Implausible Light Thrust (October 10, 2008).
- The Chinese government is investing in a rocket engine called the Emdrive that generates thrust with microwaves. There appears to be a slight problem, however, with this engine: it violates conservation of momentum.
- No Bang from the Big Bang Machine (September 17, 2008).
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a machine that accelerates protons to very high energies and then bangs them together, began operating on September 10, 2008. Some believe this machine threatens Earth. They need not worry, because the particle collisions created in this machine occur daily when cosmic rays strike Earth's atmosphere. Man can't rival nature's extremes.
- Spotting the Minimum (September 3, 2008).
- Recently some people have claimed that the Sun is entering a new Maunder Minimum—a decades-long period of no sunspot activity, and that this will cause the Earth's atmosphere to cool. The sun is certainly quiet in 2008, but this is the normal quiet of a minimum in the 11 year sunspot cycle. Clearly the tendency to interpret normal variations as fundamental changes is not confined to the global warming alarmists.
