Hyperloop Lie From Ukraine Enabler

Elon Musk proposed to send people in evacuated tubes at more than the speed of sound. The idea is not new… it was proposed for Switzerland long ago… And it was used in pneumatic systems all over major cities, a century ago. Strictly speaking the accelerations would be unbearable, and Musk obviously knows this, so, as it exactly stands, the idea is a lie.

Already 40 years ago, French high speed trains could induce nausea for the reason of acceleration as they crossed gentle mountain ranges such as the hills of the Morvan. They now go at 350km/h. If the speed of an object around a curve of radius R is V, the acceleration goes according to VV/R

In Europe 400km/h very high speed lines come with vertical radius of rises of 56 kilometers (35 miles). Such is the case of (under construction) High Speed 2 in the UK, At three times the speed, that is, the speed of sound, the radius would be above 500 kilometers (as the square of 3  is 9…) In other words, Hyperloop as proposed would have to tunnel from San Francisco to LA, all the way… A strange experience at great cost necessitating a minimum of three tunnels, with the maintenance tunnel, etc…

Thus the natural domain of hyperloop would rather be subway systems… But then people want to be able to come in and out… Etc. But then again, accelerations would be unbearable if speeds were much higher than present systems… Plus air would come in…

The reason for evacuated tubes, or fast planes flying high, is to reduce air resistance. At 11 kilometers high, flight level 360, air pressure is a fourth of that at sea level. But there are other methods to reduce air resistance, including forward spikes used by French and US sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles… This is an active field of study, to reduce the shockwaves of supersonic jets…

Could evacuated tubes still be used for merchandise, say between the port of LA and Las Vegas? Of course…

New style TGV reduces aerodynamic drag by 20% relative to preceding versions (red thing behind is an original TGV from 1980). A deployable spike in front may do better…

Musk is a great engineer, and inspirational. But he is also a great businessman: both Tesla and SpaceX have leveraged government financing… Perhaps the best thing Obama did… Here it is, from six years ago:

“Tesla, the poster concept of present-day American mercantilism. It is flooding the world with luxury electric car of dubious ecological merit. All the way to Norway, huge government subsidies are piled up on it (and I would be very interested to know the details on the mortgages and conferences various officials involve take). Thanks to well-organized propaganda and financing by the US government. In truth, Tesla and the other companies of Elon Musk (Solar City, Space X) are companies massively financed by the US governments“

Now SpaceX provides with (not enough!) secure links for the Ukrainian military, which has serious communication problems…New York Times in “On Front Lines, Communication Breakdowns Prove Costly for Ukraine. The Ukrainian Army has tried to modernize, but still falls short in coordination among units, so they often fight independently of one another — with sometimes deadly results.”…

The General faced similar issues during the defense of Sievierodonetsk when his platoon was on the front line near a small river. On the opposite bank was another platoon with which he had no way to communicate. So almost every time the enemy attacked, the other unit would not just shoot at the Russians but also, unknowingly, at the General’s men who were in the line of fire — with everything from rifles to heavy machine guns.

“Nobody knew how to connect with them,” the General said. “Every day as we were standing there, for over 20 days, as far as I understood, nobody could connect to that unit next to us and let them know they were firing on their own.”

Ukraine needs plenty of Musk wares. “Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they’ve received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.” High output encrypted US military radios’ locations get detected by the Orcs (who are busy destroying just arrived US howitzers, and their crews; so far the French CAESAR guns, which are highly mobile, shoot and scoop, have escaped lethal battery counterfire, but there are not enough of them…).

The tech supremacy successfully achieved by business men is not to be frown on: tech supremacy is how civilization is saved, and progresses, time and time again…

So Musk knows what Musk is up to with Hyperloop… besides gathering money from gullible investors… But it’s hyperloop is not for transporting people.

Patrice Ayme

TIME DILATION

No subject is more important than time. Time rules the universe, thus wisdom. Just announced research breakthroughs in rejuvenation (at least in cells and mice) give hope to those who view aging as the disease it is. Eternal life, will, no doubt, make higher wisdom more precious.

About a century ago, the Theory of Relativity caused a huge ruckus, mostly because of its prediction of TIME DILATION. Now we got used to time extension from fast motion: it has been thoroughly checked experimentally, big time. Yet, it is important to understand that Time Dilation is NEARLY A TRIVIAL OBSERVATION, once the correct axiomatics is in.

Light Clock, Universal Clock

[The picture above, going back conceptually to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 CE, also basically holds during acceleration: then the straight lines just become stretchy and curvaceous!]

Having the correct axiomatics is crucial, for further advances in philosophy and physics. Correct axiomatics allows to observe the true facts and the important theorems. Axiomatics is the metalogic: it is more important than the logic it gives rise to.

In both philosophy and physics, the understanding of time, even by supposedly top notch researchers, seems to be lagging.

When a train passes by at speed v, the time therein does not just appear slow, it is slow. It is easy to understand why. At least, so I claim, and I will demonstrate.

Suppose Alice and Sophia are on the ground (visualize a flat Earth of infinite extent, to simplify the context). They measure time, each with their personal light clock.

A light clock is an idealized clock consisting of two mirrors, between which light, a bunch of photons, is reflected. One simply counts the beat of reflecting photons, and call that time. The light clock is a time constructor. (See: Constructing Time, for the basics. Light Clocks are the conceptually simplest of the four known types of clocks.)

By letting some of the light leak, my style of light clock comes with a pulsating tail of light.

(It could be some sort of permanently pumped laser, at a fixed frequency, f. Then all can see the photon beats pulsate outside.)

Let Sophia take off for space. What does that mean? She accelerates (say with constant acceleration A). The light tail of her clock elongates, stretches. From Alice’s viewpoint, the beat of Sophia’s light clock goes down.

Why? Count the beats of Sophia’s clock: S0, S1, S2, S3, … Sn, S(n+1), … With S0 being take-off. The corresponding beats of Alice’s clock are every dt, with A0 = S0. When S1 occurs, Sophia’s clock is at distance (1/2) a(dt)^2. So the reception of the beat of Sophia’s clock is not instantaneous: it is delayed by the time light takes to cover that distance, namely:

(1/2c) a(dt)^2.

The situation is even worse with the next beat, at time 2(dt).

And so on and so forth. So, from Alice’s point of view, Sophia clock slows down ever more, as long as Sophia is accelerating away at acceleration A.

What happens when Alice looks within Sophia’s spaceship? The same situation exactly. As the photon bunch comes down to meet the on-rushing mirror, and it meets it early, the mirror it came from recesses, by as much (we assume everything in Sophia’s spaceship is hyper rigid). So when the photon bunch catches up with the starting mirror, to complete the beat, it has to cover double that, PLUS the supplementary distance covered by the initial mirror, due to the on-going acceleration.

So Sophia’s time, as observed by Alice, is slow and getting ever slower, as long as the acceleration A persists.

When the acceleration stops, Sophia’s time stops slowing down. It is now just slow. By as much as it slowed down during the acceleration (that’s why the usual approach of Relativity textbooks is dumb: they neglect the accelerative process, so students cannot understand how the slowing down arose).

Once Sophia has reached her cruise speed V, a precise computation (found in all serious relativity books) involving only the speed V, shows  that Sophia’s time is Alice’s time, multiplied by:

Square Root (1- VV/cc).

The effect has to do with the light in the moving frame having to cover a distance than is ever greater, the greater the speed V of the moving clock. The mathematics is Babylonian level (Pythagoras theorem was discovered earlier, in Egypt, and Babylon).

So when V approaches c, Sophia’s time slows down enormously.

The effect has been checked on elementary particles that decay after a set time. When they travel very fast, their lifespan augments by:

1/square root(1-VV/cc).

An arbitrarily large number as V approaches c.

***

Some may wonder: if Time Dilation is such a triviality, what the big noise about it, and where is the “Relativity” in all this?

“Relativity” is hidden below the surface in two ways:

1.In the fact that Henri Poincaré’ s law of the constancy of the speed of light was implicitly used during the computations… Which indeed had to do with relative speeds, or relative accelerations.

2.In identifying light clock time with time in general. Otherwise Sophia could tell, from within the spaceship, without looking outside, whether she is moving uniformly. That would violate the “Principle of Relativity” of Galileo according to which such a motion is not detectable (Henri Poincaré generalized to electromagnetism what he baptized at the time the “Principle of Relativity” in 1904, while he was lecturing among the savages of the New World; unsurprisingly, they don’t remember, and attribute the work to Einstein, ironically enough).

The direct approach above is primary school level. It also directly makes the so called “Twin Paradox” into an absurdity.  Instead, of just hand waving that said paradox is not valid, as Feynman does in his excellent Lectures on Physics, because one twin was accelerated, and the other not, I tackle that from the start, as it should be.

The simpler, the deeper.

Patrice Aymé