Utopia, you are standing in it!

BUILDING THE BOMB

Albert Einstein signed the letter. Years later he would regret it, calling it the one mistake he had made in his life. But in August 1939, Adolf Hitler’s armies already occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria and his fascist thugs were arresting Jews and political opponents throughout the Third Reich. Signing the letter seemed vital. His friends and fellow physicists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, had drafted the note he would now send to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The scientists had seen their excitement over the recent breakthrough discoveries of the deepest secrets of the atom turn to fear as they realized what unleashing atomic energies could mean. Now the danger could not be denied. The Nazis might be working on a super-weapon; they had to be stopped.

In his famous letter, Einstein warned Roosevelt that in the immediate future, based on new work by Szilard and the Italian…

Nazi Germany

In 1938 Otto Hahn, a German chemist, was the first to succeeded in breaking up (fissioning) a uranium atom into lighter, atomically speaking, elements by bombarding it with neutrons. At the time, the idea seemed preposterous, even to him, and he doubted his own test results, but after overcoming his reservations he published it in a scientific journal. It was soon realized that this process could yield enormous amounts of energy. Leo Szilard, a physicist of Hungarian descent, already considered this possibility while staying in London in 1933. Hahn’s discovery, however, clinched the argument for Szilard, now working in the United States, and he was horrified by the possibility that Nazi Germany could develop such a bomb. He then convinced Albert Einstein to approach President Roosevelt to initiate an American atomic research program.

The American scientists were sure from the start that they were in a race against…

Chancellor of Germany Joseph Wirth (2.from left) with Krassin, Georgi Chicherin and Joffe from the Russian delegation.

The Rapallo Accord

In April 1922, long before Hitler and the Nazis, another treaty was signed between the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic in which both countries gave up any territorial and financial claims against each other. The treaty also contained several secret clauses that dealt with cooperation in the fields of armor, military aviation, and gas warfare. Both countries were to benefit from this arrangement. Germany had the capability to develop these fields on its own, but it was impossible to do this in Germany itself, under the nose of the observant Versailles Treaty’s overseeing committee. The Soviet Union was remote enough for this purpose, and anyway there were no foreign forces on its land to report what really went on. Among other things, German engineers worked in the Soviet Union…

Credit: NASA
Looks like game over for the Planet Nine idea. Unavoidable observational biases may be at least partly to blame.
– – –
Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system, says The Conversation (via Phys.org)

The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.

But does Planet Nine actually exist?

(0) Israel today celebrated its first day with zero new cases.

(1) Via Instapundit, SSRN (Social Science Research Network, a preprint server similar to arXiv.org, medrxiv.org, biorxiv.org and chemrxiv,org) has a article in press about the Swedish COVID19 epidemic. 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3609493

Their per capita death rate is an order of magnitude larger than neighboring Scandinavian countries. It is tempting to attribute all this to Sweden’s Sonderweg (“road alone”) — but this article makes a case that at least part results from factors unrelated to Sweden’s decision not to go on lockdown.

Not only is half of Sweden’s mortality concentrated in just the capital city Stockholm, but over 70% of Sweden’s mortality is in nursing homes. As the article explains, in Sweden the elderly tend to stay at home for as long as possible, assisted by home helpers assigned by the public healthcare system. (Independent assisted living facilities do exist, apparently mostly…

Producing hydrogen gas using chaotically intermittent wind and solar is only the latest hoax being peddled by renewable energy rent seekers and other crony capitalists.

The majority of hydrogen available on the market (around 95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming or partial oxidation of methane and coal gasification with only a tiny fraction produced by way of biomass gasification or the electrolysis of water or solar thermochemistry.

Steam-methane reforming, the current leading technology for producing hydrogen in large quantities, extracts hydrogen from methane, usually in the form of natural gas; the process releases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Which, of course, doesn’t wash with the climate cult.

Another method of creating hydrogen is electrolysis, which involves chewing up enormous volumes electricity that gets passed through a volume of water to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The big plus attached to this method is…