Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2018 January 9

= January 9 =

Recommendations for non-science books by High Energy physicists
This is a question I could not easily find a good answer to on Google. I am looking for recent books by physicists, in particular physicists who work on fundamental research (as opposed to applied or e.g. condensed matter physics), on topics that range beyond just science to general cultural topics. An example would be Lake Views by Stephen Weinberg, or for older examples, The World as I See It by Albert Einstein or many books by Richard Feynman. Something written since ~2010, and by a well respected physicist, preferably. Any recommendations? 72.221.65.122 (talk) 03:50, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Two recent books come to mind:
 * The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean M. Carroll
 * Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
 * Gandalf61 (talk) 11:24, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks! 128.148.63.187 (talk) 23:23, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Just to be clear, I assume you're excluding fiction (for which Gregory Benford or Robert Forward would be good examples)? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.41.3 (talk) 14:46, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Yes, I'm excluding fiction.
 * Any other suggestions? 128.148.63.187 (talk) 23:23, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
 * John Gribbin has some popular science/history of science books which are easy reads, such as In Search of Schrodinger's Cat and Schrodinger's Kittens. Brian Greene has also written some good, easy reads on similar subjects, such as string theory and the like.  -- Jayron 32 20:15, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Supercritical power plants
General James M. Gavin Power Plant is a 2.6-gigawatt (2,600 MW) supercritical coal-fired power station in the village of Cheshire, Ohio, United States.

What does "supercritical" mean? Does it mean that this power plant operates by means of Supercritical steam generators, or something else? Nyttend (talk) 04:49, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Presumably? I find multiple sources that simply call these "supercritical coal power plants" . Someguy1221 (talk) 05:03, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
 * See Supercritical steam generator and Superheated steam. --Kharon (talk) 07:40, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * This term has nothing inherently to do with superheating or superheaters (NB the WP article is at superheater, not superheating), although it would be unheard of for such a plant to not also use superheating.
 * WP needs work on the supercritical and steam generator articles. They're mostly not inaccurate (but superheater is), but they aren't complete and they fail badly in explaining why a supercritical steam generator is useful. The term "steam generator" also has several meanings and the articles keep getting messed with and confused.
 * There is an inherent problem with steam boilers - steam is hard to transfer heat to. It is much easier to transfer heat to water (which is a convenient dense liquid) rather than steam in the low density, high volume, gaseous phase. The goal of any "boiler" is to transfer heat to a mass of water. This is so much easier when that mass of water is dense, i.e. liquid. The transfer can be done with a smaller area of heating surface, and the denser water can be moved around within a smaller boiler. Allowing the water to actually boil, although the ultimate goal of the boiler, is strongly unhelpful!
 * So a supercritical steam generator keeps the pressure high enough to avoid any boiling. It's arranged as a small number of long water-filled tubes before this (sometimes just one), wherein the water is heated. This hot, high pressure water is then allowed to expand (it may pass through a nozzle) and the drop in pressure allows it to boil immediately, without adding any further heat to it.
 * Most designs now avoid any single nozzle and instead use a long pipe the steam is allowed to boil gradually over a section of this pipe, but this is after most of the heating has taken place (using the efficient supercritical water phase). Lengthening the pipe after this allows superheating, where more heat is added, raising the temperature of the steam but without increasing its pressure in the normal equilibrium.  This is useful because steam engines (steam turbines and a few of the later and more efficient piston steam engines) operate from heat energy within the steam predominantly as temperature, not just as pressure (as is usually thought).
 * As far as WP goes, WP should not be used as a source for this topic. It's nowhere near good enough, and (like electrical engineering) it keeps getting worse as a target for bad university projects encouraging first year students to trash articles. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:06, 9 January 2018 (UTC)


 * To be very basic, this refers to a supercritical fluid, which is denser than a vapor but hotter than a liquid. And typically hotter and more pressurized than the critical point (thermodynamics).  That means that above the critical pressure, water can be "boiled" without ever boiling; it is simply heated up until it is a super-dense sort of steam (well, critical fluid) whose pressure could be reduced to form ordinary steam if desired, still without ever boiling.  As the article says the lack of boiling means that there is no need to separate the steam from the boiling water with a big chamber prone to explosion; there's only one phase.  The previous poster appears to know far more about this than I do, so I'll merely wonder out loud whether supercritical liquid–gas boundaries have any practical effect on the design of these generators. Wnt (talk) 22:10, 9 January 2018 (UTC)