Physics, PowerDNS, life

Posted by bert hubert Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:48:00 GMT

Ok, this blog is not all about PowerDNS. Seriously. So, first some Physics. I used to be a physics student at Delft University of Technology, but I dropped out halfway through. That doesn’t mean I lost interest in hard science though.

I have a strong interest in ‘fringe science’. In my not so humble opinion, quietly shared by scientists I know, physics is focussed too much on confirming current ideas, whereas doing research into ‘interesting’ results is frowned upon.

I previously wrote a bit about this here.

Some of the things I keep an eye on are

• “Cold fusion”
• The gravity anomaly described in the link above
• Gravity shielding

Cold fusion

The cold fusion bit is interesting enough. There are literally thousands of results but none of them has proven able to convince mainstream physics. Partially this has been due to the experimenters, which have sometimes made huge fools out of themselves, or have even committed fraud.

However, even when people do come along with solid results, they are faced with incredible amounts of criticism. You might as well try to convince people child pornography is art. The results on your career in physics are highly similar.

I’m currently of the opinion that there is so much smoke surrounding cold fusion that there is bound to be some fire.

Gravity shielding

Has been interesting too. Realise that nothing, and I mean nothing affects gravity. It goes through everything. We can’t create it, we can’t stop it. The saga started out with measurements by the secretive Evgeny Podkletnov, who claimed to have observed a slight decrease in the force of gravity above a rapidly spinning superconducting disk. High temperature superconductors are excellent at conducting electricity but their mechanical properties are somewhat lacking, and people have had a hell of a time getting such a disk to rotate at speed without disintegrating.

NASA sunk a lot of effort in trying to reproduce his results, but sort of failed. The guy in charge, David Noever is currently nowhere to be found, after he also researched gravity anomalies during solar eclipses.

Then another scientist, Ning Li studied the effect and vanished, as far as I understand it. Popular Mechanics ran an article on her. In the mean time, Podkletnov is now supposed to be part of secret military research in Russia. The stuff of conspiracies!

This strand of interest appeared to be slowly dying off though when suddenly ESA and US Air Force sponsored scientists presented this paper, on the ESA website no less.

In this paper, they report finding a 1-in-10000 change in gravity above a ring of niobium or lead when, cooled to liquid helium temperatures, it is rapidly spun up or down.

They mention that they’ve spent three years trying to spot errors in their experiment, which has been run 250 times.

Well, why is this important? As I described in my own page linked above, quantum mechanics and (general) relativity collide. Gravity is firmly in the relativity domain, superconductivity is as quantum mechanic as it gets. Also, nothing else has ever changed gravity.

This discovery could quite literally put physics on its head - which is high time, things were getting decidedly boring.

PowerDNS

Ah, that thing. Well, not a lot to report. Everything ticking over just fine. Did discover that an important part of DNS, the ‘any query’ is completely unspecified by the RFCs. You can try to read what you have to do into the ancient writings of Mockapetris & friends, but I’m not to sure. Decided to emulate BIND instead, which is also the easiest thing to do.

I’m trying to double the recursor performance (again), but this appears to be hard work. Perhaps DTrace on the Niagara can be of some help.

Life

Trying to relax a bit, worked too hard on PowerDNS and other projects. Working too hard makes me unfriendly and irritable, which is not a pleasant thing.