Sunday 28 April 2013

core values or everything counts in large amounts

There was an interesting pairing of news items this week under the category of very hot and extremely dense. Geophysics researchers concluded that the temperatures at the centre of the Earth are greater than those on the surface of the sun, and subjecting samples of iron to this higher threshold, learned more about how the internal churnings of liquid and crystal iron might regulate the Earth’s magnetic field. Previously scientists had discovered a curious property of these extreme conditions down in the underground, where molten iron took on new characteristics, insulating or conducting electro-magnetism, but without also undergoing the expected structural changes—think the phenomenon of super-conductivity attained when some materials are super-cooled but without being obliged to rearrange their configuration.
With more accurate soundings, we have a better understanding of the transition zones that may hide within uniformity as we burrow deeper to an inner realm that is re-frozen somehow.
The other milestone comes from an enormous international effort, that had its origins in the glasnost of the mid-eighties, when the Soviet Union offered to share its secret technology called the tokamak—think containment field, a magnet to suspend the plasma components of the fusion reaction since no physical substance could handle such heat—and proposed international cooperation on a project to find peaceful uses for nuclear fusion. Decades later, with construction plans finalised in 2007, the programme ITER, Latin for “the way forward” but a backronym of the original French designation for the facility that had the dreaded “thermo-nuclรฉaire” as part of its name, the research is moving at a good clip with the fist plasma injections to take place in six years or so. Allowing the plasma to be heated basically without an upward limit will eventually coax over-excited atoms into fusing, producing a surplus of energy to capture in the process. The fuel in the case of fusion, proven feasible by many university reactors throughout the world (there’s even one in Greifswald on the Baltic Sea and a veritable Fusion Valley in the area in south France that hosts the ITER labs—who knew?  Maybe in the not too distant future, if this demonstration project is successful, generators will be miniaturised for domestic-use, like Mister Fusion from Back to the Future II), is hydrogen with the by-product helium, but could happen with any element up to the iron, making up the nucleus of our planet and revealing unexpected lines of force. I wonder when the studies will coincide.