11/16/2000

Chancellor's Holiday Open House: Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and Professor James K. Whitesell cordially invite all NC State University faculty and staff members to a Holiday Open House at the Chancellor's residence, 1903 Hillsborough St, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Friday, December 7, 2001.

Congratulations to Robert Nemanich, elected Vice President and President-Elect of the International Union of Materials Research Societies.

Breaking scientific news of the worst kind. The world's largest neutrino detector, SuperK in Japan, suffered a catastrophic loss over the weekend when thousands of photomultipliers imploded in a chain reaction. The detector normally contains 50,000 tons of water viewed by 11,000 twenty inch PM tubes. Each tube costs about $3000. Over the summer the cavity was drained for repairs, and the detector was in the process of being refilled. The water level was close to 2/3 full when the still unexplained implosion sequence took place, apparently destroying all the tubes below the water surface. Replacement cost is close to $20-30M. Diane Markoff (NC State research assistant professor and part of the TUNL group working on KamLAND) was in Kamioka at the time, working in an adjacent cavity on the smaller but similar KamLAND detector. Jason Messimore leaves for Kamioka next month to help continue the commissioning work on KamLAND. So far, KamLAND is unaffected by the accident. The Japanese spokesperson for SuperK is committed to rebuilding the detector, which is critical as a supernovae monitor and as the target in the K2K experiment in which neutrinos are fired from the KEK accelerator, 200 km away.

Reception for December Graduates. There will be a Department Reception for students graduating in December at 11:30 AM, December 9, in the Patty room, 200 Daniels Hall.

The Department Christmas Party, sponsored by the Graduate Students, will be Friday, December 9 at 3:00 PM in the Patty Room, Daniels 200.

Possible meteor "storm" on Sunday. The Leonid meteor shower, which occurs as the Earth passes through the orbit of the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle on November 18th, has the possibility to provide a spectacular show this year. Predicting the number of meteors per hour is an endeavor full of uncertainties (to say the least!), but this year looks pretty likely to produce a good many meteors. Depending on whose estimate you'd like to believe, there may be 800 to 15,000 meteors per hour, peaking about 5:00 AM on the 18th. They should appear to come from the constellation Leo (that's why they're called the "Leonids"), which will be well above the eastern horizon (about 45 to 55 degrees) at that time.

Dennis Lee vs the Laws of Physics

(Editors note: Tonya Coffey, Steve Reynolds, Bill Robertson and others were able to attend the Dennis Lee "Tesla Electric Show in the McKimmon Center Monday. Tonya Coffey wrote this opinion piece for the NC State Technician. It is reprinted here in a shortened version, with her permission. Note: Opinions expressed are those of the author.)

Dennis Lee is a man on a mission. In his presentation, "The Tesla Electric Show," at NCSU's McKimmon Center on Monday night, he expounded on multiple inventions sold by his company, Better World Technologies. His explanations and claims about his products, however, are in direct contradiction with several laws of physics and chemistry.

Mistake #1: "I have never said I had a perpetual motion machine," said Lee. "But anyway, what's wrong with perpetual motion? Your car is a perpetual motion machine if you keep gas in it." It's hard to tell if Lee is simply incompetent at science or competent at lying. A perpetual motion machine is not a machine that makes motion perpetually. It is a machine that does external work without being supplied with energy. Your car is not a perpetual motion machine precisely because it needs to burn gas for energy.

Mistake #2: Lee claims to have made a water torch. His water torch burns "water gas." An apparatus attached to the torch converts the ordinary water into "water gas." Once the gas is made, you can dispense the water gas from a nozzle, and light the water gas with an ordinary striker. To the skeptics that think that water doesn't burn, Lee says, "Can you burn hydrogen? Can you burn oxygen? If both things in water you can burn, why can't you burn water?" It's important not to confuse Lee's water gas with steam. "Physicists will tell you that the gaseous state of water is steam. The gaseous state of water is not steam. That's vapor. The gaseous state of water is water gas," Lee said.

Lee went on to explain that ordinary water has the chemical formula HHO, while his unusual water gas has the formula HOH. Unlike steam (HHO), water gas (HOH) is apparently highly flammable. Lee demonstrated his water gas blowtorch by burning or melting copper, tungsten, and steel. One of the audience members pointed at his water torch apparatus and asked, "Isn't that a tank of oxygen hooked up to your torch?" "Oh yes," Lee said. "We need the compressed oxygen to push the water gas through. You can use any sort of compressed air to do this."

Mistake #3: Mr. Lee also sells a device that will eliminate all nuclear waste problems. He claims his device can neutralize radioactive materials. The device he showed to the audience was a small metal cube (about 4 inches on a side) with a glass window. Inside the cube is a chamber with a pure zirconium crystal. On the outside of the cube, he has attached some electrical terminals. You hook electricity up to the terminals and "cook it [the radioactive material] for 30 minutes." He claims that his chamber will reduce the radioactivity of material by up to 80%. Lee put a mixture of thorium and water into the chamber. He measured the radioactivity of his sample, and then began to "cook it." He claimed that when the sample had cooked long enough, that you would find very little thorium left in the sample. The thorium would be "transmutated" into inert metals like copper and titanium. How does it work? "The alchemists were right," Lee said. "You can transmutate the nucleus of an atom and turn one element into another element."

Transmutation? Well, the only way to "transmute" a nucleus is via fission or fusion. Since he's changing the thorium (thorium has 90 protons in its nucleus) into copper (29 protons) or titanium (22 protons), he must use fission.

Mistake #4: According to Lee, all the companies that manufacture motors are ripping off consumers. How? They purposefully design engines that get hot as they work. Apparently, the engines are designed to draw more energy than they need to run. All this extra energy is dissipated as heat in the motor. This serves two purposes. First, it drives up your energy costs (the motor manufacturers are in cahoots with the power companies and OPEC). Second, all this extra heat damages your motor and shortens its life, so you have to buy more motors. Lee says they teach all engineers this concept of "planned obsolescence." According to Lee, "Electric motors shouldn't get hot. Any electric motor that gets hot was built to get hot." Lee's solution? His power controller. The power controller will measure how much energy is dissipated in the windings of the motor. It then lowers the input voltage and current until the motor only pulls the energy that it needs to run. Then this "extra energy" isn't dissipated as heat in your motor. Lee's device will make your motor completely efficient. Unfortunately for Lee, there's a little problem called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law states, ""It is not possible to change heat (energy) directly into work, with no other change taking place." Or put more simply, "There are no perfect engines."

Back to Physics Department home page.