From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 21:10:24 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> Now this is pretty cool. Physics News Update is reporting
> that Brookhaven & Argonne labs have managed to develop an
> actual "force field". (If you had asked me a few years
> ago whether this was possible I would have looked at you
> like you were crazy for even asking the question....
> But hell its probably a simulation so all bets are off.)
>
> See:
> "A Plasma Valve"
> http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2003/split/640-2.html
I liked this part:
"Housed inside a hollow copper cylinder, the plasma reaches a temperature
of 15,000 degrees Kelvin (about 50 times greater than room temperature)."
This sentence, of course, makes *absolutely no sense* to anyone who does
not already know exactly what the Kelvin scale is. So much for popular
science.
Editor: "Er, you say it's 15,000 Kelvin... what's that?"
Scientist: "It's a temperature."
Editor: "Ah."
(Editor corrects the sentence to read "15,000 degrees Kelvin".)
Editor: "And, um, about how hot is 15,000 degrees Kelvin, then?"
Scientist: "Very hot. Room temperature is just 300 Kelvin, for example."
Editor: "So it's about 50 times greater than room temperature, then?"
Scientist: "Exactly! Why, you must have a very good understanding of
heat to phrase it that way."
(Proud of himself, editor inserts the phrase verbatim.)
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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