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

[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.