Nuclear Explosion [weapon] in Space - result?

[Umbran]

That's is why the movie 2012 made me laugh.

The best laugh we got out of 2012 was my wife watching me squirm at "the neutrinos are mutating". So close, but yet so far.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Shouldn't you switch the polarity instead?

I think that was for neutrons. But ultimately, I make my own techno babble.

Amusing fact: In an episode of Deep Space Nine, there was a "probability altering" device inside a portable game. When its size was increased for a gambling house, it affected the entire station and created strange accidents and flukes. To locate these items, Dax scanned for Neutrinos - near the device, their spin was always in the same direction, which shouldn't happen if the regular probabilities apply.

Well, except that's false. Neutrinos spin only in one direction. There is no even spin distribution for Neutrinos. Or so at least I remember reading in a book comparing Startrek "science" with real science...

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think that was for neutrons. But ultimately, I make my own techno babble.

I think Joker was referring to the Doctor Who paradigm of "Reverse the Polarity" - an expression which was introduced with the 3rd Doctor IIRC.

Cheers

 

[Umbran]

Well, except that's false. Neutrinos spin only in one direction. There is no even spin distribution for Neutrinos.

That's incorrect. Neutrinos are spin 1/2 particles, just like electrons, protons, and neutrons, and they'll have spin distributions like those other particles do.

 

[TanisFrey]

As an example... One the primary experiments at the lab I work at is shooting a stream of neutrinos underground from Chicago through about 460 miles of dirt and rock to a detector at the bottom of an old iron mine in northern Minnesota.

That's is why the movie 2012 made me laugh.

But yeah, the one thing Armegeddon got right is... Bury the nuke. More energy transfer, more ejecta as propellant, and a more directed blast.

Nukes would probably be best used on smaller asteroids (or larger meteoroids, depending on how you look at it... the line between them is a little blurry). The ones that could feasibly be blasted into gravel with a few subsurface nuclear blasts. As Umbran said, millions of 1 ounce meteors are practically harmless. A single 31 ton (1 million ounces) meteor can be pretty dangerous.

Unfortunately there is a treaty banning any nuke being used in space. It needs to be amended for some limited testing to see how one can be used to sift a asteroid and emery usage in the event of an actual close call.

Besides ALL the ICBM rockets are insufficient to actually deliver a nuke to an asteroid. They are only designed for a suborbital flight of the nuke to a target on the surface of the earth.

 

[Pbartender]

Unfortunately there is a treaty banning any nuke being used in space. It needs to be amended for some limited testing to see how one can be used to sift a asteroid and emery usage in the event of an actual close call.

Not especially difficult, if they really wanted to, or needed to...

Article XV

Any State Party to the Treaty may propose amendments to this Treaty. Amendments shall enter into force for each State Party to the Treaty accepting the amendments upon their acceptance by a majority of the States Parties to the Treaty and thereafter for each remaining State Party to the Treaty on the date of acceptance by it.​

Besides ALL the ICBM rockets are insufficient to actually deliver a nuke to an asteroid. They are only designed for a suborbital flight of the nuke to a target on the surface of the earth.

Who needs an ICBM? There's a lot of other ways to deliver a nuke to an asteroid, if you wanted to.

To a large degree, it'd depend on how much advance warning you get, and how much advance preparations you make.

 

[freyar]

Well, except that's false. Neutrinos spin only in one direction. There is no even spin distribution for Neutrinos. Or so at least I remember reading in a book comparing Startrek "science" with real science...

That's incorrect. Neutrinos are spin 1/2 particles, just like electrons, protons, and neutrons, and they'll have spin distributions like those other particles do.

Depends what Mustrum means by "spin only in one direction" I think. Umbran is right that neutrinos are spin 1/2, but they're also sort of like "half" a particle. Normal fermions (spin 1/2 particles) like electrons, etc, that Umbran mentions are based on complex numbers. As best as we understand, though, neutrinos are based on real numbers (I'm simplifying the math somewhat), so they have half as many degrees of freedom. In particular, neutrinos only spin one way relative to their direction of motion and anti-neutrinos spin the other way. So you're both right.

You might ask, "what if a neutrino isn't moving?" Well, we've never seen one that isn't moving essentially at the speed of light. But this is changing because we have good evidence that neutrinos have mass, meaning that they can't move quite at the speed of light and can in fact stand still. So somehow our understanding of neutrino spin will change a little in the future; this is related to our understanding of neutrino mass, which is still in the area of speculation at the moment.

 

[Umbran]

As best as we understand, though, neutrinos are based on real numbers (I'm simplifying the math somewhat), so they have half as many degrees of freedom. In particular, neutrinos only spin one way relative to their direction of motion and anti-neutrinos spin the other way. So you're both right.

Except that in all likelihood, neutrinos are their own antiparticle.

Helicity is the component of a particle's spin in the direction of its motion. The distribution of helicity is dependent on the particle's mass. If it were a massless particle, it would always have positive helicity (spin always aligned with the direction of motion). Neutrinos are not massless (this has been fairly well demonstrated), but the mass is very, very small.

If neutrinos are their own antiparticle, then we've seen loads of negative helicity neutrinos. If they aren't their own antiparticle, then we would not expect to have seen many - but the distribution would exist regardless.

My doctoral thesis work was on spin propagation in high energy jet formation. My early work used a flat positive helicity for all neutrinos in the simulation, but then I had to go back and make corrections for the rare other case.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Depends what Mustrum means by "spin only in one direction" I think. Umbran is right that neutrinos are spin 1/2, but they're also sort of like "half" a particle. Normal fermions (spin 1/2 particles) like electrons, etc, that Umbran mentions are based on complex numbers. As best as we understand, though, neutrinos are based on real numbers (I'm simplifying the math somewhat), so they have half as many degrees of freedom. In particular, neutrinos only spin one way relative to their direction of motion and anti-neutrinos spin the other way. So you're both right.

You might ask, "what if a neutrino isn't moving?" Well, we've never seen one that isn't moving essentially at the speed of light. But this is changing because we have good evidence that neutrinos have mass, meaning that they can't move quite at the speed of light and can in fact stand still. So somehow our understanding of neutrino spin will change a little in the future; this is related to our understanding of neutrino mass, which is still in the area of speculation at the moment.

I think that was meant by what I read. Unfortunately I read it before I learned more about spins at the university - and I have to translate it from German.

 

[Joker]

I think Joker was referring to the Doctor Who paradigm of "Reverse the Polarity" - an expression which was introduced with the 3rd Doctor IIRC.

Cheers

Close. IIRC Geordi from Star Trek often fixed things by switching the polarity.