Bob Lazar and Element 115

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
You can discuss a wide range of topics intelligently without a lot of education, but I don't think nuclear physics is one of those subjects. It's a lot easier for people who just don't know any better due to their LACK of education to believe wild statements about element 115.

Guess what, in my opinion you are one of the brightest people on ATS because you've come up with just such a statement.

I took my classes in nuclear physics roughly 25 years ago and some if it is rusty. Things is, if you just postulate that our knowledge is severely lacking, then of course you can make all sorts of wild claims. If, however, you believe in the knowledge we have, which enables us to produce nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, accelerators and study nuclear matter in bulk (cf RHIC), then Bob Lazar is one peanut short of a fruitbar (as somebody said in a different thread).

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double post


[edit on 21-8-2009 by buddhasystem]

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
You can discuss a wide range of topics intelligently without a lot of education, but I don't think nuclear physics is one of those subjects. It's a lot easier for people who just don't know any better due to their LACK of education to believe wild statements about element 115.

Amen.

Finally someone with common sense.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan


Yes I understand they're not your "fish"

Nature never ceases to amaze me, and sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, and there are many things we don't know, including what is going on behind the wizard's curtain as you put it. But it's interesting you should choose that analogy, because what we thought in the movie was an almost Godlike omnipotence turned out to be an ordinary man behind the curtain just pulling levers.

We all know there are secret projects going on but only the people directly involved know the details.

Actually I kind of like Bob Lazar and might have even found his story somewhat credible, except for the element 115 part, that really blew it for me and that's why much of my commentary referred to that and not the rest of his story.

Yes I'm aware we can create physical environments other than ordinary earth physics in colliders etc, but I'm not sure if I get the point you're making, are you suggesting element 115 was kept stable by bombarding it with lasers or something? Because I thought some of it was out in the open, an arrowhead sized piece that Bob and another guy were conducting experiments with, and it didn't sound like they were bombarding it with any lasers while they were testing it.

I think one of the most difficult judgments all of us faces is to decide where we draw our probability curves for the likelihood of certain events or possibilities we don't have any evidence for. If someone tells me "hey a pink elephant just flew over the top of your house, you missed it", is that possible? Am I not being open-minded enough by at least acknowledging the possibility that it could have happened? How do I know there's not an advanced race of aliens who have genetically manipulated the elephants to give them anti-gravity capabilities. Well, I don't know any of that. If they are advanced in genetic engineering making an elephant pink should be no problem for them, or maybe some elephants are born pink naturally ( though I doubt very many).

I guess we all make a lot of assumptions to create our own filter on reality.

We can talk about what we know exists, and can be duplicated with verifiable, repeatable experiments or observational evidence. And we can talk about what we don't know but think may be possible as an extrapolation of our current knowledge. And we can even speculate on things that we may have absolutely NO understanding of.

As it says in my signature, it's good to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. One thing I like about ATS is that there are lots of open minds, that's good. But I have also observed that not everyone's brain falls out at the same level of open-mindedness. And I guess that's to be expected, many of us have different backgrounds, experiences, and views, but it's nice we can discuss these topics with each other to try to gain more understanding and learn from each other.

I'm open-minded to many things beyond our current understanding, time travel, faster than light travel, aliens, and many other things that are far from proven. I like topics like Michiu Kaku's "Physics of the impossible". But he does have enough of an understanding in physics to extrapolate some of these possibilities from our current knowledge.

But before I can assign a 90% probability to anything beyond our known understanding as you apparently have on this topic, I need a lot more than what I've got to extrapolate from our current understanding, especially with respect to the stability of element 115.

Could Bob Lazar be completely telling the truth? I suppose there's a small chance of that, I can't prove he's not.
Could there have been a pink elephant that flew over my house? I suppose that's possible, I can't prove it didn't.

But to be open-minded enough to accept either one of those based on one person's word and no evidence would make me feel like that's so open-minded my brain falls out.

So your 90% probability could be right and I could be wrong. I may be drawing my boundaries on the limits of perceived reality too tightly. But at least I ask myself the question if I'm doing that or not, and try to expand my thinking if I'm not being open-minded enough. I just wish Bob hadn't mentioned 115 or I might be a lot closer to your thinking on this.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur But Friedman had this to say about Lazar:

Well I could find a few people who have equally nice things to say about Friedman

What makes him so special, any more than all the other story tellers out there?

Believe what you like... Bob has been out of the circuit so long its moot anyway.. and he is not selling any books, just uranium and hydrogen fuel kits

Originally posted by buddhasystem
I took my classes in nuclear physics roughly 25 years ago and some if it is rusty.

Well you can't produce papers to prove it any more than he could, so I see just as much peanut butter from you And its the 'crunchy' kind

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I understand what you are saying about the 115 being the deal breaker.

I have heard of some pretty exotic things happening in those labs. Some of the things i have heard i completely dismiss. But there are some pieces of information that I gather that come from a source that is highly reliable.

Then you add in the "hidden in plain site" exotic projects that are all over the archives of places like DTIC, LANL, LLNL, ARL, etc, and it makes for a situation where i have to evaluate all reports against a very wide and varied array of possibilities.

Consider the handling of 115 in the context of Shiva Nova. What kind of environment could be created. How about in the context of Undo's Stargate thread?

I cannot dismiss someone's story so easily. Like you say, there is nothing else in his story that lacks credibility. The 115 piece is the only piece that is contended. Yet he worked in a lab that is rumored to experiment with the very fabric of reality itself. In this context, the 115 piece of the story, while not proven, becomes much, much more possible. It goes from being a Pink Elephant to something more like a Thylazine.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by zorgon

Originally posted by metricmaker
Makes no sense. Bombardment from what?

Cosmic Rays... from space

Everything on the surface of the earth is under bombardment of cosmic rays from outer space, in fact that's one reason they put ECC (error correcting) memory in servers, so a stray cosmic ray won't crash the system due to a memory error. If you have 4 Gigs of RAM in your PC and don't have ECC memory (almost nobody does) then you probably get several crashes a year due to cosmic ray bombardment.

But still I don't see the relevance of any of that to element 115.

Saying element 115 is under that kind of bombardment is nothing special when so is everything else, (except for things deep in a bunker where the cosmic rays can be reduced) so what's the point in even mentioning that?

I think he does not mean bombardment from cosmic rays. Beneath other impossibilites, recall the cross section for cosmic rays is much too small.
When I heard that for the first time I found this remembers me of alpha beta decay bombardment...

Originally posted by jkrog08
It also shows some types of relativistic properties(public knowledge) so I can believe that indeed 115 could possibly be able to manipulate gravity waves as is claimed by Lazar.This is a great thread, excellent discussions guys.

What are these types of relativistic properties?

According to a review from a scientist (I posted earlier) there are almost no real clues to convince an aquainted scientist...

reply to post by metricmaker


I think it was mentioned that the Uup (element 115) isotope is supposed to be stabilized for storage by continuous neutron bombardment.
I don't know; I actually read most of E Halerewicz Jr.'s 'A Physical Review of the alleged propulsion system...' referred to by poster metricmaker. I found that article very interesting, with the author going into a lot of depth and detailed speculation about Lazar's claims. While some of it was above my head, I found most of it quite readable.
For me, the thing that stands out of all this is one big technical detail: Where, in Lazar's scheme, is the energy being generated from? Lazar claims that El. 115 is converted to El. 116, which is then supposed to spew out anti-protons?! How? Nuclear fission just doesn't work that way. You can't just create anti-matter. You could create proton/anti-proton pairs, if you had the equivalent rest-mass energy. But that's a huge amount of energy that you first need to have. If Lazar's reaction works the way he says, it breaks conservation of mass-energy. Not to mention electric charge conservation.
I find Lazar's story interesting and entertaining. Aspects of it are intriguing. But the closer you look at the details, the less likely it seems.

duplicate

[edit on 22/3/2010 by softbeard]

reply to post by Diplomat



i find bush is similar with obama,they are all tall and thin,who is hansoner?

What do the facts that Lazar said that element 115 "cannot be synthesised" and the fact that it HAS been synthesized do for his credibility?


www.phils.com.au...

reply to post by Springer


Are you saying--certainly it seems implied--Lazar took Knapp into the highly secure Area 51 and met real scientists that were working on the captured UFOs? This is an incredible assertion that I find harder to believe than Lazar's tales.

Wiki:

Ununpentium (Listeni /uːnuːnˈpɛntiəm/ oon-oon-PEN-tee-əm)[1] is the temporary name of a synthetic superheavy element in the periodic table that has the temporary symbol Uup and has the atomic number 115. It is placed as the heaviest member of group 15 (VA) although a sufficiently stable isotope is not known at this time that would allow chemical experiments to confirm its position. It was first observed in 2003 and only about 30 atoms of ununpentium have been synthesized to date, with just 4 direct decays of the parent element having been detected. Four consecutive isotopes are currently known, 287-290Uup, with 289Uup having the longest measured half-life of ~220 ms, although the isotope 290Uup may well have an even longer half-life (only a single decay has been measured leading to poor accuracy).

4 isotopes so far. Uup may well have and even longer half-life?

Don't believe the fat lady has been able to sing yet on this issue..

reply to post by plumranch


I think UUP 299 was the theorized stable range....

I think they should name it Lazarite

Originally posted by Aliensun
Are you saying--certainly it seems implied--Lazar took Knapp into the highly secure Area 51 and met real scientists that were working on the captured UFOs? This is an incredible assertion that I find harder to believe than Lazar's tales.

Isn't this more likely to mean Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where Lazar said he had worked? LANL finally admitted that Lazar had been there but not as an employee of LANL but as an employee of a subcontractor.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by GeorgeKnapp
After I sent them a copy of the lab phone book containing Bob's name, along with a front page Los Alamos newspaper article that described him as a physicist at the lab, Los Alamos relented and admitted that Bob had, in fact, been there, but as an employee of a subcontractor, Kirk-Mayer, a scientific and technical headhunting firm. They also coughed up an employee i.d. number. I had already initiated contacts with Kirk-Mayer. They told me right off the bat that Bob had been recruited and employed by the company, but that changed in a hurry. They subsequently told me that they could not find any records about Lazar, and then they stopped responding to my inquiries altogether. It didn't matter. I found and interviewed several people who worked at the lab with Bob.

Lazar wouldn't be taking Knapp to area 51 but from my perspective that's not even implied in Springer's comment.

Originally posted by bigfatfurrytexan
Like you say, there is nothing else in his story that lacks credibility.

Except where and when did he actually get his degrees from...