Gerald E. Marsh

GAZA & THE BOMBING OF CITIES AND CIVILIANS

Posted on Posted in General Interest, Politics

Before the beginning of WW-II, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain said in parliament that it was “against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks on the civilian population.” U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt called civilian bombing “inhuman barbarism.” How cities and their populations during WW-II became military targets in violation of international conventions is explained in this essay.

In has been claimed that the high level of civilian deaths in the 2024 Gaza war is due to Israel dropping some five hundred 2000 pound “bunker busting bombs” in Gaza. It is shown hthat this is not the case.

The number of civilian deaths in Gaza is not exceptionally high in comparison with past wars, and the number would be significantly less if it were not for the well-known Hamas policy of deliberately placing military facilities in high population density areas.

http://www.gemarsh.com/wp-content/uploads/Gaza-the-Bombing-of-Cities-and-Civilians.pdf

A FORCE-FREE MAGNETIC FIELD SOLUTION IN CYCLIDAL COORDINATES

Posted on Posted in Physics

There are no known analytic solutions to the force-free magnetic field equations in coordinates representing Dupin cyclides. Here it is shown that force-free fields can not only have solutions for toroids, as was shown in an earlier paper, but also for cyclides. The fact that the curvature lines of Dupin cyclides are all circles is used to derive a force-free magnetic field on the surface of an elliptic Dupin cyclide.

The paper is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17673

OPPENHEIMER

Posted on Posted in General Interest

A LETTER TO SCIENCE MAGAZINE IN RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY ADRIAN CHO IN THE 21 JULY 2023 ISSUE

To the Editor,

In his article about Oppenheimer Adrian Cho interviewed David Cassidy about Oppenheimer and in his final question stated that “Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in part because he opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb”.  This is incorrect and probably comes from the transcript of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, published by the Atomic Energy Commission, of the hearings that led to Oppenheimer’s clearance being revoked. 

K. D. Nichols, then General Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission surely new that Oppenheimer never opposed the hydrogen bomb, only Teller’s Super.  He did so because he thought that the Super would divert valuable resources away from fission weapons development.  After a meeting of the GAC held at Princeton during June of 1951, Oppenheimer changed his mind and enthusiastically supported Teller’s new “technically so sweet” approach.  This was when he was first exposed to the Teller-Ulam idea for the hydrogen bomb. 

It was David Rosenberg, who is now one of the country’s foremost historians of the nuclear age, had succeeded in obtaining a declassified copy of the AEC Thermonuclear Weapons Program Chronology, which gave a clear description of the Super.  It was nothing like the description of the hydrogen bomb.  I subsequently learned from I. I. Rabi that there had been closed secret sessions during the Oppenheimer hearings where Oppenheimer could well have defended himself against Nichols’ charge by drawing the necessary distinction between the classical Super and the hydrogen bomb.  I have no idea to this day whether he did so or not.

USA Today Magazine Articles 2001-2023

Posted on Posted in Books, General Interest, Global Warming, Nuclear Policy, Politics, USA Today Magazine

This book gathers together the articles I published in USA Today Magazine. They cover a large variety of topics and the book contains a commentary, sometimes giving history and technical details that could not be included at the time.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/gerald-marsh/usa-today-magazine-articles-2001-2023/paperback/product-em22p8.html

A FORCE-FREE MAGNETIC FIELD IN TOROIDAL COORDINATES

Posted on Posted in Physics

While there are no known analytic solutions for force-free magnetic fields in toroidal coordinates, with a reasonable boundary condition it is possible to find a solution for the surface field and, with a restriction on the form of the field, to the interior of the torus as well. Published in Physics of Plasmas (vol. 30, Issue 5); online 17 May 2023.

Here is the link to the paper:

http://www.gemarsh.com/wp-content/uploads/POP23-AR-00182.pdf

QUANTUM FLUCTUATIONS, THE CASIMIR EFFECT AND THE HISTORICAL BURDEN

Posted on Posted in Physics

It has been argued since 1948, when it was experimentally demonstrated, that the Casimir effect— where two non-charged conducting plates have a weak but measurable force on each other dependent on the inverse fourth power of the distance between them — shows the reality of vacuum zero-point fluctuations. This “proof” of the reality of vacuum fluctuations has been repeated in many quantum field theory books and papers subsequent to 1948. The attractive force is generally ascribed to the difference in zero-point energy of the electromagnetic field between the plates and the vacuum external to them. As is well known, zero-point vacuum fluctuations are incompatible with relativistic physics and are at the root of the “cosmological constant” problem. Most texts on quantum mechanics and quantum field theory eliminate the vacuum energy by normal ordering or some other mechanism. These issues are explored in this paper and it is pointed out that a means to resolve them already exists.

QUANTUM-FLUCTUATIONS-THE-CASIMIR-EFFECT-AND-THE-HISTORICAL-BURDEN.pdf

THERMODYNAMICS AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

Posted on Posted in Biology, Physics

Modern developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have significant implications for the origins of life. The reasons for this are closely related to a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics recently found for entropy production during irreversible evolution of a given system such as self-replicating RNA. This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to these developments.

To Appear in the Canadian Journal of Physics. DOI: 10.1139/cjp-2020-0013

http://www.gemarsh.com/wp-content/uploads/Thermodynamics-The-Origin-of-Life.pdf

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