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Comment Source term for Einstein's field equation (Score 1) 42

in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor

There most certainly is. Density-- mass per unit volume-- is the (0,0) term of the stress-energy tensor.

Comment Re:All for it, but would like to know the launch r (Score 1) 14

If the launch fails at a point where it is say 50 miles up, and the reactor has been turned on prior to launch.

The conops says that the reactor doesn't get turned on until after it's successfully placed in a high orbit.

A good feature of nuclear reactors is that they aren't dangerously radioactive until after you turn them on.

Comment Re: Lol (Score 1) 14

I even wonder why they haven't done it much sooner.

We didn't have good ion thrusters back in the 50s, 60s and 70s and after that launching nuclear reactors into space was considered a bad idea, not without reason. A nuke plus ion engines isn't a slam dunk either, ion engines produce very little thrust and reactors are heavy even if you don't have to bother shielding them much, so there's an efficiency threshold you need to hit before it's worthwhile.

NASA has realized that beating, or at least competing with, the Chinese to a moon base is probably going to require a reactor, so why not demonstrate it as part of a drive too?

Comment Re:Specific impulse (Score 1) 42

the original formulation of relativity and physics in general did not distinguish between rest mass creating gravitation and light speed particles generating gravitation

Maybe you have access to some early draft notes of Einstein's, but in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor, nor anywhere else in the Einstein Field Equation. Mass is not fundamental in relativity, it's a property of a system. That property is the product of energy and momentum (and the other stuff) in particular configurations within the system so in many situations it can be used as a surrogate for the underlying energy, momentum and other stuff.

Physics prior to relativity did indeed say a lot of different, confusing things about mass, gravitation and light speed particles.

Comment Re:Death by milestones (Score 1) 42

"Creating fusion" isn't hard. Kids do it for science fair projects. Here's a guy on Youtube making a fusion reactor.

Making a fusion reactor that produces more electricity than it uses is hard. That's what you're thinking of. Rocket engines famously do not usually produce electricity, and if they do they do it extremely inefficiently, so it's a completely different problem.

Comment Re:Specific impulse (Score 1) 42

we don’t have massless drives

Reactionless drives. A massless drive would be an engine that didn't have any mass, I guess. We have lots of drives that don't involve throwing mass out the back, including solar sails, magnetotorquers, electrodynamic tethers, flashlights, etc. Hard drives have a few. Your car has at least one big one and a bunch of others besides, as does your body. None of them are reactionless though.

Reactionless drives are called that because they violate Newton's third law, which is really a statement about the conservation of momentum.

Comment Re:Bye bye Wikipedia (Score 2) 31

Here's a case of a very experienced journalist getting caught by including made-up quotes that had been hallucinated by the AI he'd used to summarize research information: https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Vandermeersch added: “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.”

When even experienced journalists fail to find AI hallucinations, you really can't expect unpaid volunteers to do better.

Comment Re:Bye bye Wikipedia (Score 4, Insightful) 31

Wikipedia is choosing to die. There is a lot wrong with a lot of what people are doing with GenAI but it is also super useful.

Unfortunately, even the best LLMs sometimes make up information ("hallucinate"), and the stuff they make up is deliberately crafted to appear exactly like real information. This is simply unacceptable for an encyclopedia.

If Wikipedia were written by paid professionals, you could plausibly put in place protocols to check and verify, and fire the ones who fail to check properly, but even paid professionals have been seen to let hallucinations through. As it is, as an encyclopedia that it is put together by volunteers, forbidding AI is pretty much a forced choice.

https://www.evidentlyai.com/bl...
  https://arize.com/llm-hallucin...
  https://thisweekinsciencenews....

Comment Re:All copper is "oxygen-free" (Score 4, Informative) 69

Have you ever seen a shiny new penny versus an old tarnished one? Or the Statue of Liberty? Or an old building with one of those weird green roofs?

They're all copper, with varying amounts of oxygen. Oxygen free copper is expensive copper that's specially made to get rid of as much of the oxygen as possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If the article got something so simple as THIS completely wrong, one can easily presume that the REST of the article is incorrect gibberish.

"oXyGEn-fREE cOppER", lmao

Indeed.

Comment Re:So this is about AI slop spam from clankers (Score 0) 75

You aren't that interesting either and yet you found a way to look interesting with sock puppet accounts, maybe they'll just do the same.

The problem is that a sock puppet uses an actual human to operate it, while bots run with little or no need for human effort. So a human can turn out a handful of posts with sock puppets, while bots can be churn out thousands and thousands of posts, swamping any system with slop.

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