"Bob La Londe" wrote in message
...

On 2/17/2020 9:23 PM, James Waldby wrote:
I noticed some annoying bait-and-switch in the article https://

http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...object-vacuum-
friction/.

The first paragraph talks about balls of silicon dioxide that
rotate
300 billion times per second, which would be 1.8 trillion RPM.
Imagine my dismay at finding out, a couple of paragraphs later,
that the author had mixed up RPS and RPM; the particles actually
are spinning at only 5 GHz (5 billion RPS), or 300 billion RPM.

Dang-it... and I was fantasizing about swapping out the 24K Spindle
on the machine I primarily use for engraving to a measly 60K
spindle. Now my plan is all shot to heck. My brains is going 1.8
trillion miles a second dreaming about a 300 billion RPM spindle. 4
minute engraving jobs could be done in a .0001 seconds. Hmmm.... I
guess I'd have to upgrade the lead screws and ways too.


You need an X-Ray Laser.

https://owlcation.com/stem/What-Can-...xtreme-Physics
"When a target is hit by the pulse, it is simply obliterated into its
atomic parts with temperatures reaching millions of Kelvin in as
little as a trillionth of a second. Wow. And if this weren't cool
enough, the laser causes electrons to be cast off from the inside out.
They are not pushed out but repelled! This is because the lowest level
of electron orbitals has two of them which are ejected courtesy of the
energy the X-rays are supplying. The other orbitals become
destabilized as they fall inward and then meet the same fate. The time
it takes for an atom to lose all its electrons is on the order of a
few femtoseconds. The resulting nucleus doesn't hang around for long
though and decays fast into a plasmic state known as warm dense
matter, which is mainly found in nuclear reactors and the cores of
large planets."

In other words, we have created Star Trek's Phaser.