Physicists just looove a hot shower
Gotta go fast
Submitted 21 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5f155fbe-0f24-443a-b931-920c5a9e1946.jpeg
Comments
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
They have (had?) one of these outside of Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see it dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn’t look directly at it.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
It’s so crazy that we’ve found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You’d think there’d just be two or three
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 3 hours ago
It’s going to be boiling water again… Isn’t it?
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~^superscript^
Akh@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe
BC_viper@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 17 hours ago
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
wewbull@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn turbines.
Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we’re pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Hey man I just want warm noodles
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Cantaloupe@lemmy.fedioasis.cc 3 hours ago
Turbine go brr
Fabrik872@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
It’s more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial’s) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it’s something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.
We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can’t buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn’t live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren’t even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.
Even now, when we’re coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it’s just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it’s the fucking 1800s.
Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.
Narauko@lemmy.world 18 minutes ago
Another way to look at it is comparing water to electricity itself. No one is complaining that going from the electric light bulb to vacuum tube logic gates to semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just “using physics to direct electrons again”.
Boiling water is just the layer 1 physical transport, all the cool stuff is happening at layers 2-7. The real mind blowing breakthrough would be if they finally did something to fix layer 8, but I ain’t holding my breath.
bananabenana@lemmy.world 42 minutes ago
Great comment!
I’m optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We’ve got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that’s trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that’s decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.
It’s an insane time in biology right now, and it’s the current frontier along with computer science/ML.
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 3 hours ago
Its more a commentary that most “new electricity source!!! Amazing!” Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
It’s incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can’t seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it’s hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
Fair point magnets are basically a superpower by themselves.
MML@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Fair point it’s been so long since I last took a chemistry course that if I knew anything cool and hidden about water, I’d have trouble resurfacing it. I do know they call it “dihydrogen monoxide” in some reports tho.
anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
Photovoltaics
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Guess what I’m boiling with the power from that solar panel
Infamousblt@hexbear.net 9 hours ago
Actually if you look inside the cells it’s just a tiny little pocket of boiling water
synapse1278@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I learned the other day there is a nuclear reactor in development that will use as primary coolant…molten lead.
Still use to boil water then, but pretty freaky still.
eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Water is a fucking insanely awesome material.
Dippy@beehaw.org 8 hours ago
Wind and photovoltaic have nothing to do with water
apotheotic@beehaw.org 8 hours ago
Mfw they use wind and photovoltaic energy to pump water to a high place so they can put it through a turbine later
Teppa@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’d guess because its all heat energy in the end, so you need something that expands and compresses. The alternative I suppose would be like sound waves, or mechanical energy, or whatever a battery does.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
That does make sense, but then again, it’s been 2000 years and we can’t find something that boils, expands and compresses better than water? Or is t just because water is commonplace enough in comparisoan?
Lydia_K@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Good news!
rayyy@piefed.social 11 hours ago
Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
The thing is: transforming into a solid is usually caused by removing energy from matter. The real reason steam is so great is because we put energy into it to make it steam and when the steam turns a turbine, we are converting that chaotic energy into directional, controlled energy.
megopie@beehaw.org 4 hours ago
I mean, it… does expand when freezing… so maybe?
_stranger_@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
brown567@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
I knew what video it was before I clicked, love that guy XD
snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I’m presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
RedSnt@feddit.dk 3 hours ago
Yeah, you can store the molten salt and its heat for when it’s needed even at night. But it is used to drive a turbine hehe
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
I mean, is there a more efficient way to take raw energy and spin a turbine with it?
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
The issue is more the cost. For this you need lots of mirrors and a tower. Solar panels are just cheaper.
usrtrv@sh.itjust.works 41 minutes ago
This has the benefit of not needing batteries since the molten sand stays hot long after the sun is down.
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 3 hours ago
Photosynthesis?
LSNLDN@slrpnk.net 18 hours ago
I have a theoretical degree in physics
bananabenana@lemmy.world 38 minutes ago
You activated ARCHIMEDES?! What the hell are you thinking?!
Blackmist@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
Welcome aboard!
psoul@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Supercritical CO2 is entering the chat
altphoto@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
Compressed air…turbines still going burr this whole time! Gravity pumping… Turbines!
ascend@lemmy.radio 21 hours ago
Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
BluJay320@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
ascend@lemmy.radio 19 hours ago
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
inari@piefed.zip 20 hours ago
Moths must love this shit
Wakmrow@hexbear.net 20 hours ago
For like… 0.002 seconds it’s gotta feel real great
errer@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable …pantheonsite.io/…/california-shuts-down-its-sola…
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I love how fucking biased that article is. It mentions Obama like 10 times, including this gem:
Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.
Thanks for the hindsight. Now how about we replace all those heliostats with modern solar panels? Sounds like a great opportunity…
drath@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Yeah, they do, and get incinerated, unfortunately. A few every day, actually. Which is one of the reasons those never took off. Besides big upfront costs for the tower generator, there are additional costs for maintaining the generator with moving parts, and then for scraping the dead birds off the mirrors to top it off. All just to save a few pennies on mirrors instead of just chucking a bunch of solar panels into a field and mostly forgetting about them.
fullsquare@awful.systems 12 hours ago
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
nexguy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s just used to scroll social media again isn’t it?
Sektor@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Porn.
RedSnt@feddit.dk 3 hours ago
It’s technically illegal in China, but I don’t know how illegal.
Aquilae@hexbear.net 13 hours ago
Philharmonic3@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Sahara?
eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Don’t we try this every few decades and realize it’s not as great as it seems? There’s one of these in the American Southwest that wasn’t worth the trouble to operate.
In terms of badass things to build your civilisation around, though, every single bit of me wants to live in a city constructed around one of these bad boys.
Hell yeah I’ll get in a parade to worship one of those things, they’re insanely fucking cool.
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 52 minutes ago
The only problem being you shouldn’t look directly at it…
Napster153@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
MA! NEW ACE COMBAT BOSS JUST DROPPED!!
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 7 hours ago
Was gonna say. I definitely blew this thing up in AC4.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
Meh, it works.
einfach_orangensaft@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
fun fact, u can also boil opposed spy satelites with that setup
comfy@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Hopefully this one directly shoves the electons. I’m scared of society’s DHMO dependency.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 20 hours ago
Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
How else are you going to make your tea?
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 19 hours ago
USSR also built an experimental power plant of this type. Sadly, it was closed and disassembled after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
The movie Sahara did it.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 19 hours ago
Wot if instead of boiling water, we boiled CO2, and instead of boiling CO2, we kept it at high pressure so that it never quite reached boiling or condensation?
Tronn4@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Boiled water gang
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 47 minutes ago
There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren’t much of an issue.