The most significant science and engineering advance in... Certainly my lifetime, and I would say... Probably the last 90ish years, if not the last 250 years... has just been announced.
Yes, really.
Here it is...
In a shockingly understated manner, almost deliberately minimizing the importance of the discovery, presenting it as important but limited to just the aerospace field (which it is absolutely not)... a team at the University of Central Florida, has announced that they have developed a way of shaping a lightweight, passive, reaction chamber, such that they can maintain stable control of hypersonic turbulent detonation of high energy explosive fuels.
This is potentially as significant a development as ANYTHING humanity has discovered or developed since the steam engine.... and may in fact be comparable to, and as significant as that.
Imagine that instead of powering your 4000 pound car with a 4 liter, 400 pound gasoline engine the size of a dishwasher, making 400 horsepower, with 400 miles of range, out of 14 gallons of petrochemical gasoline; that previously 4000 pound car is now a 3000lb car, with an 60lb engine the size of say... a toaster oven.... delivering that same 400 horsepower and 400 miles of range, out of 200cc displacement, and a single gallon of a self oxidizing synthetic liquid explosive.... Rocket fuel basically.
Yes, really.
I literally cannot describe to you, how amazing, important, fundamentally altering to human life and civilization, this development could be.
If it works as claimed... Even if the first few implementations don't work... or it takes the first few DECADES of implementations to get it right (as almost every other huge fundamentally transformative technology has) if the PRINCIPLE works... It COMPLETELY revolutionizes hundreds of fields, and categories, of engineering and science; and creates dozens of new offshoots of those fields.
This is not hyperbole... this discovery hhas the potential to radically transform almost every aspect of human life; as the steam engine, the electrical generator and motor, the internal combustion engine, the rocket motor,, and the steam and gas turbines have (including jet engines)... and in fact even more, because it can also be used for manufacturing and creation of new products and materials not previously practical or even possible to manufacture.
...The chemical processes alone... The mind boggles.
But the most important possibility?
This opens the way to controlling, and much more efficiently capturing, the energies released by fusion reactions.... More directly converting the heat energies of fusion plasmas (and other high energy heat fluids) into kinetic energy, recovering much more of that energy, than using it as waste heat to boil water for steam turbines... Because the heat bearing plasma.is the working fluid itself, without intermediate working fluids.
That is... So incredibly fundamentally transformative of our ability to create and exploit energy.... When I said it was the most important technological development since the steam engine, I may have been understanding it.
Yes... Really.
