Recent content by Robert Lucien Howe

Sadly another space company fails to learn one of the basic lessons from Kerbal Space Program. Tall top heavy landers fall over. I've had it happen to my own lander on the Mun so many times.. The big problem is simply finding and steering to a flat debris free piece of ground to land on. Not so...

Hmmm.. The interaction of photons.. There is a rather neat explanation for a lot of the behaviour of photons including wave interaction - using FTL physics. The basics go that speed is always a vector quantity and therefore the speed of light at 90 degrees to the motion of a photon is...

I think in this case the two are directly equivalent - they produce the same result. Choosing both mechanisms together would add the two together producing a wrong result. So it could be said that in either you get the other for free - but I may be wrong.

The result here is interesting but not really a surprise.. At speeds slower than light Special Relativity passes every test. Its predictions for physics at speeds faster than light are a very different matter but there is currently still no real way to test that..

There are so many errors in this post that I wouldn't know where to start.. Well maybe. - Cold fusion isn't real. - Humans first achieved controlled nuclear fusion in the 1960's with so called Fusor reactors. They work but are useless for power generation. - Humans do understand atoms, protons...

I don't think any. It was a temperature test not a fusion test.. Getting to the working temperature is the first and hardest step in achieving fusion.. An estimate for working temperature (quoted) is around 150 million degrees Celsius.

Two very brave people.

Worked that out myself once. Realized that with neg mass we could have a universe with a zero net mass. Never had or found a way to prove it or test it though. Dark matter could be neg mass maybe - would be fascinating..

This is a question where we get a reverse Dunning Kruger effect - it is beyond the region of physics that science really knows or understands and everything said ends up being essentially speculation. What everyone does know is that mass dilation increases the effective mass of objects near...

Oh dear the anti-humans in space 'Luddites' are out today. A basic fact is that for the big things like space colonization you can never succeed if you never try. A big criticism of robots and automation is that they introduce a lot of extra points of failure. Probably over half the space...

Quite a good list - a lot of the movies I would choose as well. One omission is Star Wars, R2D2 and C3PO. Not because they are particularly accurate or anything but because the series has been so massively influential. (over robot design & research) I might be more cynical about the modern...

While the idea of interstellar probes visiting us is intriguing given current 'known physics' and predicted & known statistics about the universe the possibility of it being true is virtually zero. Given the size of space and the time window for meeting humanity it is somewhere less than one in...

Was expecting the article to fall into one of Special Relativities catch pits, but everything said looks correct. It still has to be said though (and its not said often enough) that all predictions made by the theory about physics above the speed of light are still basically speculation. There...

That certainly makes sense. It can be seen as adding a margin to allow for potential structural degradation over the lifespan. Adding a margin to survive a certain level of impact in case of collision also makes total sense.

Doesn't 182.4 psi seem an insanely high pressure to need to reach? Over ten times atmospheric pressure. Some 128 tons per square metre. (sorry for the mixed notation) Of course a woven inflatable structure can be designed to do it and did - very impressive test..