Big step especially as it looked as if it was going backward a few days ago.
Only if the charging infrastructure improves - my mum and her BF have an electric car, and every long journey has to be meticulously planned. They also have to hope the charge points they are aiming for aren’t full or broken.
5 years might take care of that let alone 10.
The existing franchisees of petrol forecourts are going to need income streams and providing high speed charging and a comfortable refreshment area would appear to be the obvious replacement?
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Isn’t the generation infrastructure (or the lack of capacity) going to be the thing that slows all of this?
No. See many discussions with Graeme Cooper on things like Fully Charged for why not.
True, it will improve though. There is money to be made. We are just starting the exponential element of the s curve of uptake of new tech. It always happens faster than people imagine.
I’m thinking that electric cars will be a passing phase and that hydrogen will rapidly become the dominant fuel.
Might go that way, but storing bulk hydrogen will mean pumping it back into empty gas fields (being planned up my way), then taking it as needed, pressurising and coolng it etc. You also have the debate around fuel cells or direct into IC. I think it’s running behind batteries in Europe, but is a stronger tech in countries like Korea and Japan.
The production - transport - storage phase of hydrogen is very inefficient. It will be useful in the future for commercial and mass transit vehicles, but highly unlikely for passenger cars.
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This is cool
Three polarising filters. The two opposing ones are enough to black out light completely, but if you insert one at 45 degrees between them, some light gets through.
Why? It’s a quantum effect. Going through the second polariser resets the wave, and it ‘forgets’ that it went through the first.
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Actually I think it’s entirely explicable using classical EM theory. You’re right about the second polariser resetting the wave though. The polarisation direction of light leaving a (sufficiently thick) polariser is determined only by the direction of the polariser. The amplitude is determined by the polarisation direction of the incoming light.
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There was an interesting documentary on bbc4 the other night about the experiment done to demonstrate entangled pairs by splitting a laser beam, then using two detectors while randomly applying one of two polorisers to each. Although this demonstrated Bohr’s was correct and Einstein wasn’t, there was a question about the randomness of the application of the polorisers, ie the conduct of the experiment affected the randomnes.
30 years later the experiment was repeated. This time the randomness of the application of the polorisers was dictated by the variable light from two different quasers some 6 billion light years away, ie could not have been influenced by the conduct of the experiment. Two huge telescopes were employed on the same mountain top, and the split laser sent a few hundred metres to a detector. Fascinating. The result was the same as the previous experiment.
Yes, that’s to do with quantum ‘entanglement’ though. Entangled photons are weird and wonderful things.
But there’s no entanglement going on in Adam’s Polaroid sheet experiment. You can analyse that 100% successfully in terms of Stokes parameters which were first set out in the 1850s, long before anyone knew about quanta.
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Interesting little scientific ‘hiccup’ - a useful piece of work languishing for nearly a century. Not so rare an occurrence in science in general IME.
I get it’s not the same, it was just of interest. The whole lot based on a paper that had languished in some backwater, later unearthed by a scientist who had the light bulb moment for the experiment.
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New Autechre is a banger 
Audiophiles retinas stiffen to this - ‘Mixed with other data’.
‘Interpolation Is Your Friend’