I got a tour of the lab during construction. As a software engineer, what I found most incredible about the project was how well they stuck to their delivery proposal and timeline over the course of five years of development.
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Oh,my.
> "The crystal that we’re going to get in the summer will get us to 3 petawatts, and it took four and a half years to manufacture"
This entire thing is beyond cool. I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for the teams involved!
https://theconversation.com/unprecedented-cuts-to-the-nation...
This is the only example in the article.
"Okay, hold really still..."
I don’t know if they are using laser scalpels in surgery. My medical fascination mostly ends at diagonostics and experimental procedures. If I don’t know anyone with a disorder I tend not to hear about new procedures. My friend in college was helping a prof work on picosecond violet lasers and now we are on femtosecond.
So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2].
So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w...
[2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...
Bigger problem I suspect is children with white coat syndrome. When I was a kid doctors got away with being monstrous to children.
And: the article itself puffs about how this is attracting physics research to the US; how can contradicting claims the article makes be off-topic to discussion about self-same article? It can't be a "they're allowed to speak but we're not allowed to contradict"—this is HN! Discussion is the whole point!
If you’re interested in the most energy per pulse, you want the “most energetic” laser, which is the NIF at LLNL. That’s about 2 megajoules per pulse or half a kilowatt hour. Definitely enough to kill a mosquito, but it doesn’t even register on the scale of Death Star style lasers from fiction.
And if you want the most destructive power, those are all military lasers. Which can absolutely destroy things science fiction style, but on a fairly small scale and with some important limitations.
It’s possible that Tricia McLaughlin is just lying, but Philippe Baptiste’s comments come across as grandstanding:
> “Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values that we will continue to proudly uphold,” he added. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law.”
Do you have any other examples? Most of the stories I have read about researchers having trouble with immigration have involved Chinese nationals who frankly never should have been allowed near public research facilities in the first place.
I think this is the crux of the assumption right here. It sounds like this is apply for well under a nanosecond.
I think we're closer to maybe killing a mosquito than "half way to building a Death Star on a log scale" (which, I guess is already much closer to a mosquito than a planet).
That's about the amount of power used in your phone's flash when taking a picture, not a few seconds, but the LED being on for about 50-100 milliseconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
Once upon a time we tried developing a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser for use in strategic defense, which if my napkin math is correct was probably in the neighborhood of NIF in terms of energy output (despite the conversion efficiency being terrible). Notable is that NIF continues existing after it fires.
Measured in simple joules, mosquito is .04, earth is 10^32, and this laser is 50.
If we make a joules version of the 1-30 scale, the laser in the article would only score a 4.
"Look at the facts. Very high power, portable, limited firing time, unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space."
Having classified information from a laboratory that was given to you by that laboratory on a device that was not sanctioned by the lab… and he was hesitant to let anyone have access to the device (because it contained classified information) and should not be given to someone else… this is not a crime. Just a low level breach of a civil agreement, and rightfully hesitant to share with others.
A person who was at a Hezbollah funeral (like thousands were because they are among the leaders of the country) is not a ground for deportation.
When laws are not followed as they should be, and law enforcement makes their own judgment, this is the outcome: an unpredictable behavior of people who are simply looking to get offended.
Written text accuracy took a nosedive in the early '00s as newspapers couldn't afford to hire journalists with a scientific background, followed by universities not hiring scientists to write press releases any more. GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.
Not sure you can move NIF like you would move excalibur
Say your "endstage" goal is GPU with 200 billion transistors. Using linear scale, the current biggest GPU is only halfway there, and it took all of human civilization to get this far, and it will take another civilization to get to 200b. In reality, we'll have that in a couple years with our current civilization.
A hypothetical "death star" project like this would require improvements in energy generation/storage capacity/etc., which haven't improved in nearly the way transistor production has (and are also much more limited by physical realities, such as the specific heat, enthalpy of combustion etc. of materials).
Technically the budget has not been cut, and there is enough time for Congress to rescue it - but only if they believe the interest of the responsible public outweighs the risk of being seen to defect from Trumpism that would face them in the upcoming primary election.
Unlike the NIH situation, people are not directly dying from cancelled trials and perishables aren't being tossed out of refrigerators. There is still time to save American hard science from Trumpsim, if Congress could have a little pride and stand up for themselves. Otherwise the attack on our chemistry and physics laboratories will be a lot bigger than anything that has ever happened in a war.
The students were dutifully copying the lecture while I was sitting there with my mouth agape realizing that he was working through a simplified example of what energy storage was required for the X-ray laser. IIRC Those guys had their own substation, and would charge the capacitors. The switch would get thrown and the sublasers would shoot at the molybdenum target, which would laze in the X-ray spectrum (and the molybdenum would vaporize, I think.)
Afterwards, I asked him how on earth the energy was transferred from the caps to the sublasers: He just smiled and said "very carefully".
That’s why it’s very tricky to find materials for mirrors and lenses when working with these short pulses: they must work well over a large range of frequencies. If they happen to absorb some more than others not only they would burn, but they would also change the temporal profile of the pulse.
Let’s say the mosquito is 1 again, so Death Star is 34. Tsar Bomba would be about 17.3. Over halfway again!
It’s kind of surprising that our max power output and max energy output are about the same on these scales.