A less than practical way to harness vacuum energy

In June of 2008 I wrote a post called “A “practical” way to harness vacuum energy”, in which I described the creation of near Planck’s length quantum foam as a way to harness vacuum energy. Firstly note that practical is in quotes, since it is not actually practical at all, but people love the concept of tapping vacuum energy. In the nearly 5 years since I wrote the post I have learned much about physics and quantum mechanics, and I realize that I am both right and wrong, but mostly wrong about what would happen.  There would be a huge number of particles and antiparticles created and destroyed, and a massive burst of energy, but the neutrinos would escape and for all practical purposes the system would be a spectacular experiment but highly endothermic and self quenching.   If someone could find a way to control the weakforce and capture the energy from neutrinos, and put it back into the system that could make it sustainable or even energy positive. However, if we had the technology to control the weakforce, we could do much cooler things than make a tiny quantum foam.

Future battleships

I toured an aircraft carrier and while it was an awesome experience it made me sad to think about the demise of the battleship. However, aircraft carrier based navies, largely aren't compatible with a battleship-centric projection of national power. Aircraft carriers aren't going anywhere, but with unmanned aircraft being used more and more, the role of the super carrier will decrease and smaller more numerous carriers built to support primarily helicopter and UAV operations will become key to supporting the distributed battlefields of the future.  We cannot as a nation afford 12 Ford class carriers but we cannot afford not to have a large number of carrier groups.

However, it was not my goal to armchair QB Naval policy; I wanted to talk about the return of the battleship. The battleship of the future will not have 18" gun batteries. It will have massive reactors to feed banks of rail guns or other kinetic projectile systems, firing rounds several hundred miles, at the cost of a few grand per shot, with a sustained fire rate of less than minute between rounds. (Right now the Army is using artillery rounds that cost over a hundred grand each, and they do not fly several hundred miles so this would be a bargain.)

To create a low pressure atmospheric conduit for the rounds from the guns to ride in without melting or decelerating, the future battleship will have to have batteries of high power lasers. The lasers will fire before and during the acceleration of projectiles in the gun to heat or convert the air in the rounds projected trajectory to plasma. It is reasonable to think that with lasers this powerful they would be great offensive weapons, but lasers are line of sight weapons and that is very limiting for a weapons system. Lasers are perfect for defensive purposes, the lasers will fire at or around the incoming missile creating super heated air pockets and shockwaves to destabilize or damage it. A direct hit while preferred would be unnecessary, since an object traveling fast enough and low enough to avoid radar guided autocannon fire would be unlikely to recover from a large loss of stability event caused by a big change in air pressure on the control surfaces. Aircraft which are larger and slower could be destroyed as soon as they crossed the horizon. Ballistic objects would be easy prey too, since some of the laser energy would be used to destroy the incoming object and rest would steer the debris away since the energy of impact would still be very damaging. (The laser thing might seem farfetched, but the Navy is currently deploying lasers on ships to destroy ships and aircraft.)

The role of the future battleship would be similar to their role in WWI and WWII bombardment of land targets and the destruction of mobile targets. The difference would be that the ship could sit 200 miles off shore and the shells can still impact 100+ miles inland. When/if such a battleship can be built it would be a second golden age of navel warfare.

You might be thinking why not just build the same kinetic impactor/laser based system on land but make it super powerful? Super powerful rail guns would probably be built, but they would be used fire bulk cargo (water, food, raw materials, etc) into space to support a moon base or other extra-orbital missions. The reason land based rail guns wouldn’t be built as military weapons is the same that land based superguns always fail; they aren't mobile so they can be overwhelmed and destroyed at the enemy’s leisure.

 

The MBA bubble and the future educational derivatives market

I had a chance meeting with a top professor in finance and we had a very interesting discussion about market and capital modeling. The most important thing I learning is business schools have a very interesting mechanism for funding itself, since they have to compete against Goldman Sachs, and other investment firms for talent and that got me thinking.

First some background in graduate school for the hard sciences and other areas the mentor is training their replacements, and they invest huge amounts of time and money into their students, and initially get very little in return. In effect the mentor is reproducing academically, and so they must be selective since the student’s future successes are a reflection of their training. That is to say if a student becomes a star that reflects well on their mentor, and the converse is true as well. Lest any one think is the same altruistic relationship as parent/child it is not the balance is still in the favor of the mentor, since the students give more than they get for the opportunity to learn. The relationship is critical for the funding model; since it is the combination of the professor’s prestige and guidance plus the student’s work that creates the work product that justifies ongoing funding. But since the student and mentor will likely share similar interests once the student has completed their education they will compete for resources against their former mentor and their former peers. This situation is one of the reasons the funding model for the hard sciences is becoming untenable, too many smart people competing for the same resources, and to run a productive lab to get enough funding mentor’s have to train too many students. Even if many of the students don’t go into academia, you still end up with a glut of people who do and the funding can’t keep up. (Crafty mentors will even take largely unsuitable students just to have the labor force.) This is the cause of Ph.D. bubble, but that is not my point.

However, business schools are smarter they do things like create models of optimal utilization in a resource limited environment, so they can see that the Ph.D. model at the scale needed for the hard sciences is untenable. So, they created a way to fund themselves using students without the possibility of over reproducing and depleting the available resources, the MBA. The MBA is a degree that is mostly about book learning, “branding” and making connections with current and future leaders. (That might be an overstatement, but I think there are many that would agree with me.) However, to get this degree the student spends enormous sums of money with minimal material gain, but the anticipation of a higher earning potential. In the “Business School model” a mentor can churn through hundreds or thousands of MBA students, getting money or money and labor. Since an MBA isn’t a terminal degree none of these people actually go into academic finance, so the mentors can support their research and salaries without ever actually reproducing academically. Occasionally, someone will want a Ph.D. in finance, but that isn’t an issue since it is a rare event compared to the number of MBA, and even the occasional doubling of the number of people in the field won’t dramatically reduce the funding. You might think that that is counterintuitive, but as with pyramid schemes as long as the base grows faster than the top the situation is stable. Unlike a pyramid scheme the MBA’s coming out of a Business School don’t expect to rise higher at the Business School they go back to the commercial sector, so the base is constantly renewed. When the market can bare new Ph.D. graduates expands the top, which creates capacity and widens the base. It is truly a brilliant model, I bow to their brilliance!!!

The only issue is that this model is solely dependent on the community valuing the MBA and its brand. While the top schools have little to worry about since their brand is secure and they remain very selective, the “MBA” itself is becoming devalued. People can get MBA’s online, the lower and middle tier schools are being undermined as the value of the letters after people’s names become less valuable. Sometime there will be a tipping point, (I am sure a modeler at a business school could determine at what percent of the workforce having an MBA, the ROI of an MBA is no longer worth it.) Once the MBA bubble pops, for Business Schools to sustain their financial model, they will have to invent a new product to offer to keep the cash flowing (like the emergence of exotic derivatives). The MBA will be obsolesced as the hot degree at the base of the pyramid and replaced with more specialized educational products like a Masters in Business Statistics or Masters in Commerce Analytics.  I expect to see these educational products come out at the top schools first as a way for their graduates to distinguish themselves from all the other people out there with MBA after their name on business cards. (Thus sustaining both their brand and revenue stream.) As is traditional when an over hyped market collapses, the people who most recently shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to get an MBA, in order to have an opportunity for future gain, will be left holding the bag…