The Genius Behind The First Force Field

I planned the whole time to use a clip from Dune of the Holtzmans shields. 100% the best visual of an energy shield - other than I guess being able to make a real one...

Star Wars and Star Trek fans rejoice

-What were you working on in NASA, dad? A CREW-HAT. But they rejected the design.. -How hard can it be to design a new "NASA" cap.. Why did they reject it? It turned out too big and heavy.. -How heavy? 25'000Kg, but still a huge improvement..

I'm not sure it'd stop a photon torpedo, but it's a step in the right direction... 😄

A science channel that isn't clickbait? Subscribed.

I think there may be an active shielding application for reentry vehicles. Watching starship form a plasma sheath made me think we could try deflecting the plasma as a way to heat shield the vehicle. May also apply to hypersonic aviation

At 4:21 you said 99.99 times the speed of light instead of 99.99 percent the speed of light and I was like hold up 😂 The graphic has the % though so it's o

You know I've been working on my first science fiction novel for well over three years now, and its yt channels like this that genuinely help me ground some of my absurdly fictional concepts in at least pseudo plausible science.

Any astronaut caught in the blast would, of course, develop superpowers.

I'm sure it's covered in more detail in the actual paper, but it feels like th shadow would be offset by the increased brightness when the protons are deflected into the unshaded areas; a shadow doesn't provide 'shade' if most of the light is still reaching the surface. This feals more like it creates caustics, like light ripples on the bottom of a pool. Sure, the dark areas are darker but the light areas are brighter leading to the same overall radiation exposure. I'd be happy to be wrong.

If you're merely deflecting the particles, then aren't you just concentrating them into the non-shielded parts of the pattern? I suppose if you stacked enough layers of this matrix, then the " tortuous path" you created would have equal probability of reflecting or letting through any given particle?

I think that to test this shield around the earth, there are enough radiation belts, inside which satellites like SUBESAT can be launched, which can then be returned to the ground and their surface examined under an electron microscope for radiation damage.

Ideally, we'd want to "capture" these particles, and translate their energy to into usable power for the craft.

"Crew-hat" makes sense because you wear a hat to protect yourself from the sun. This hat protects the whole crew at once. 😂

You should check out the Boeing patents for the plasma shield. Pretty cool way to tank particles and all kinds of stuff. No details but I think it uses lasers to create a plasma and devices to control the magnetic fields to form the plasma into a shield. Stops bullets and even photons.

Not enough people talk about this major roadblock to space travel...👍

Another reason for discounting the electrostatic approach, even for energies that are doable, is that some particles have the opposite charge.

"It will be an exciting FIELD to watch for the next few years" I see what you did there

@DrBenMiles as an accelerator physicist, by and large I liked your video. However, I do have a comment about you saying what is achieved by old school particle smashers only being in the MV range, especially when showing what appears to be a synchrotron animation. What you said was true about electrostatic fields ie Van de Graaf accelerators, etc. However cyclotrons and synchrotrons are not limited to the MV range. Otherwise we wouldn't have TeV protons at LHC at CERN. The difference is time dependent fields in microwave cavities, that can get up to TeV energy gains with a closed loop or GeV energy gains in linear systems like SLAC. If you were, however, talking about accelerating gradients, in units of energy per unit distance, MeV/m, for example, you would be roughly correct. Our best microwave accelerators still only have gradients around a few 100MeV /m. Luckily we have plasma acceleration, dielectric accelerators, etc, which push the gradient up to GeV or even TeV per meter. It may be possible, with enough plasma density and energy in a laser pulse or particle beam, to get up to EeV or ZeV / m gradients before the high energy density physics gets so interesting that the plasmas are too unstable to provide that gradient over an appreciable distance. Good luck out there!

Thank you, Dr. Miles you are an incredible teacher. Thank you very much for bringing this.