Interesting if true: fuel from air

[james_davis_nicoll]

A British firm based on Teeside says it's designed revolutionary new technology that can produce petrol using air and water.

Seriously, BBC? "It's" for possessive it? Never snark before coffee.

Presumably there's some kind of energy source, assuming they have not gone the heart of a forsaken child route. Also

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced 5 litres of petrol since August, but hopes to be in production by 2015 making synthetic fuel targeted at the motor sports sector.

it's not quite ready for prime time.

This is a way of moving energy from energy rich regions to energy poor ones.

(usual bbc & technology disclaimer: they still do puff pieces on Moller)

Comments

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

Coal is solidified air.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Today's xkcd is apropos.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

But it's wrong. At no point was the universe composed only of hydrogen.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Hmmm. To quote Wikipedia, "A few minutes into the [post-Big Bang] expansion, when the temperature was about a billion kelvin and the density was about that of air, neutrons combined with protons to form the Universe's deuterium and helium nuclei in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis.... After about 379,000 years the electrons and nuclei combined into atoms (mostly hydrogen)."

Is there some reason to believe that the condensation of matter happened perfectly simultaneously throughout the universe? If it was not simultaneous, then one atom was the first to be formed. Statistically, it is very likely it was a hydrogen. Thus there probably was a time when all matter in the universe was hydrogen.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Matter and atoms are not congruent; the wikipedia quote mentions neutrons and protons existing a few minutes after the expansion started and they are matter.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Why should the first atom to recombine matter? Most of the universe at that point wasn't in the form of neutral atoms. Ions, electrons and photons are "stuff" too, not to be demoted by some odd sense of neutral atomic chauvinism.

BTW, when the temperature of the universe was a billion degrees, most of the mass-energy was in the form of radiation, not matter (and this remained true for the next 50,000 years). But even ignoring that, at no time was the universe "only hydrogen", even if you count an electron + a proton as a dissociated hydrogen atom.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think I am chauvinistic enough to call inflationary false-vacuum energy "not matter", so I suppose the first matter as we know it would be whatever mix of particles spewed forth when that decayed.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...discrimination by the diagonal elements on the stress-energy tensor, that's as good as anything. If it hasn't got a rest frame I don't call it matter, I think.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I'd classify stuff on a sliding scale. If the particles have such low rest mass that they're moving close to the speed of light, they count mostly as radiation, not matter. If the particles are much heavier than the temperature and so are moving slowly, they count more as matter, less as radiation.

I don't think you want a classification scheme to have discontinuities. Rest mass zero, radiation; rest mass an epsilon higher, not radiation isn't kosher, since one can never confirm a physical value is precisely zero.

All an argument for Fuzzy Logic, I guess.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ah, but vacuum energy (or false-vacuum energy) is a different animal entirely, since it's actually Lorentz invariant: it looks the same no matter how you're moving, without even Doppler-shifting... as long as you're not accelerating or looking at an event horizon, which is a whole other confusing kettle of fish.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I remember when beamjockey was posting about the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper, we were lamenting that nobody used the wonderful old word "ylem" any more. The early papers on Big Bang nucleosynthesis assumed that ylem was all neutrons, which worked pretty well for a first approximation. I suppose the first stuff that condensed out of the quark-gluon plasma was probably some brew of assorted mesons and baryons, with leptons mixed in to approximate neutrality.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Well, Stockhausen fans might use the word. He wrote a piece with that name. Short clips from it here:

http://www.stockhausencds.com/Stockhausen_Edition_CD21.htm