Claims

It would be near impossible for a locomotive to pull an entire train at once from a dead start because the combined static friction would be too great, but if the locomotive starts by pulling just one car at a time and gradually adds weight, then a single SD40-2 locomotive can pull miles worth of rail cars.

A truck trying to pull a million pounds of semi-trailers would fail because the static friction between the trailer tires and the road would be too much to overcome due to excessive contact area, whereas an electric F-150 successfully pulled a million pounds of railroad auto racks because rail cars have minimal friction.

The ability of locomotives to pull enormous loads is a combination of: overcoming static friction by adding weight gradually, taking advantage of extremely low rolling friction, and using exceptionally powerful traction motors.

The contact area between the top of the rail and the bottom of train wheels is only about the size of a dime, creating a very low friction environment that allows locomotives to pull massive loads.

Draft gears are located behind each coupler on a train and allow weight to be added gradually by letting the coupler slowly move in and out of a large sleeve, enabling locomotives to overcome static friction one car at a time.

A person can move a single rail car or locomotive nearly unaided due to the extremely low friction between rail equipment and rails, though this is dangerous and should not be attempted.

A typical SD78s locomotive weighs 428,000 pounds with 12 points of contact with the rails, meaning each wheel's contact area bears approximately 35,500 pounds of weight.

Locomotives are equipped with some of the most powerful traction motors on the market, which provide immense torque necessary to overcome friction and pull trains.

Static friction is the force that opposes the potential momentum of a stationary object, and any stationary object will remain in place until the static friction is overcome.

When a train comes to a complete stop, the static friction from hundreds of wheels makes it extremely difficult for locomotive engines to get everything moving, despite the extremely low rolling friction between cars and rails.

Draft gears can be audibly heard in action when trains are accelerating and decelerating, as the coupler slowly moves in and out of the sleeve.

On exponentially long trains, the engine might be moving at a couple miles per hour before the end of the train even starts to move due to the slack created by draft gears gradually adding weight one car at a time.

Draft gears allow locomotives to overcome static friction one car at a time, which is why a single locomotive can pull thousands of tons of rail cars as if it were nothing.

Proximity to light source dramatically affects light penetration depth and intensity according to power laws—moving from 1 inch away from skin means roughly half the light, 2 inches away means roughly one-tenth the light—so whole-body professional red light therapy beds with adjustable light intensity as distance from body increases are superior to personal portable devices.

Peltier elements are technically heat pumps and can be measured with a coefficient of performance, but their COP varies dramatically with temperature difference and current applied, and in practical operating conditions the COP is between 0 and 'very bad' (approaching 0), compared to vapor-compression heat pump COP of 1-3, explaining their fundamental unsuitability for general cooling applications.

A Peltier element has two sides: one cold side (which provides cooling) and one hot side (which becomes very hot), and both effects exist simultaneously—the device moves heat from the cold side to the hot side, concentrating heat energy in a small space.

The more electrical current driven through a Peltier element, the more internal heating it generates in the semiconductor material, which degrades efficiency independent of the temperature difference effect.

Peltier elements are semiconductor junctions that produce cooling when DC voltage is applied across them, a phenomenon called the Peltier effect discovered by Jean Charles Athanase Peltier in 1834.

A vapor-compression refrigeration cycle operates by circulating a refrigerant (such as isobutane) through repeated cycles of compression (raising boiling point), condensation (releasing latent heat to ambient air), expansion (lowering boiling point), and evaporation (absorbing latent heat from the refrigerated space), with the compressor as the only component doing mechanical work.

For a pad at 25 milliwatts per square centimeter applied directly to skin for 1 second, the dose is 25 millijoules per square centimeter; for 10 seconds the dose is 250 millijoules per square centimeter; for 60 seconds the dose is 1,500 millijoules per square centimeter; and for 10 minutes (600 seconds) the dose is 15,000 millijoules per square centimeter or 15 joules per square centimeter.

Approximately 90% of light is lost after the first centimeter of tissue depth due to reflection and scatter; only 10% of light penetrates past the first centimeter, and only 10% of that 10% (or 1% of original) penetrates to the third centimeter of depth.

To calculate approximate irradiance at the device surface, add the power of all bulbs together and divide by the total surface area in square centimeters. This calculation is relatively straightforward for rectangular devices but more complex for circular or irregularly shaped devices.

Wavelength is measured in nanometers and determines the color of visible light; 660 nanometers produces red light while 450 nanometers produces blue light, and wavelength is the greatest variable in determining penetration depth into tissue.

Near-infrared wavelengths of 810 nanometers penetrate deeper into the body than 660 nanometer red light, even if the 660 nanometer light is given more power output and longer exposure time.

Photons are small packets of light created when an atom is excited and its electrons release excess unstable energy in the form of light; each atom releases a specific wavelength corresponding to a specific color, and when multiple wavelengths are combined, the perceived color is white (as with sunlight and household bulbs).

Power is measured in watts or milliwatts; a milliwatt is one-thousandth of a watt. Companies often tout total watts by summing the wattage of all bulbs on a device, but this total number is not meaningful without considering the area over which that power is distributed.

Irradiance is the amount of power per specific area (typically per square centimeter) and is a more appropriate measure than total watts for comparing photobiomodulation devices. If two panels of equal size and power per bulb are compared but one has twice as many bulbs, that panel will have approximately twice the irradiance.

In a worked example, a panel with 100 bulbs at 2 watts each (200 watts total) and dimensions of 45 cm × 25 cm (1,125 cm²) yields an irradiance of approximately 0.178 watts or 178 milliwatts per square centimeter at the device surface.

Distance from the light source is a critical variable: light power decreases substantially as distance increases because photons are deflected and scattered by molecules in the air. A 178 milliwatt surface irradiance drops to approximately 89 milliwatts at 6 inches away and further drops to approximately 45 milliwatts at 12 inches away.

A pad or helmet at 25 milliwatts per square centimeter placed directly on the skin (zero distance) loses very little power through air scatter and remains nearly as powerful as a 178 milliwatt per square centimeter panel positioned 6-24 inches away, despite the apparent 7-fold difference in surface irradiance.

Joules measure total energy delivered as the product of power (in watts) and time (in seconds): one joule equals one watt multiplied by one second. This metric is critical because photon absorption into tissue requires time.

For a panel at 178 milliwatts per square centimeter surface irradiance positioned 6 inches away (delivering 89 milliwatts per square centimeter to skin), the dose is 890 millijoules per square centimeter at 10 seconds, 5,340 millijoules per square centimeter (5.34 joules) at 60 seconds, and 53,400 millijoules per square centimeter (53 joules) at 10 minutes (600 seconds).

When light hits skin, reflection and scatter occur: some light bounces off the skin surface while much of the light that enters the skin quickly scatters in multiple directions. Surface scatter is beneficial for skin but is counterproductive for reaching deeper tissues like muscle, bone, and brain.

Fish move faster through water than birds move through air because water is denser and provides more resistance to push against; Leonardo investigated this through observation of bird wing flapping patterns and duck webbed feet, then experimented with flowing water—illustrating how observational curiosity leads to understanding physical principles.

Modern physics is a beautiful subject that includes concepts from Einstein's theories, such as relativity and time dilation, and is appropriate for undergraduate physics education.

Extrapolating current cosmological theories 10,000 years into the future to derive pessimistic conclusions about growth is absurd because fundamental cosmological theory changes on timescales of decades, and it is unknowable what physics will reveal about the substrate limits of computation at quantum gravity scales.

Physical constraints on exponential growth (e.g., the spherical expansion limit at light speed, the finite number of atoms) do not impose pessimistic bounds on civilization because growth is fundamentally about information and knowledge, not material consumption, and information can be rearranged without limit.

Tesla's wireless power transmission scheme involved placing high-voltage towers at strategic points globally to capacitively couple power up to the upper atmosphere, which Tesla believed to be reasonably conductive based on his work with rarefied gases in vacuum tubes.

The primary drive system for each tower includes 12 stations, each with an array of the largest 6,500-volt transistors available in order to produce the required aggregate primary drive currents, and these individual transistors are each the size of a phone book and are currently used to power high-speed electric trains.

In the 1960s at a high-voltage test facility in Siberia, a 90-foot tall Marx generator producing 5 million volts produced super long discharges that traveled hundreds of meters across an open field, crossing from the tower top to hit transmission lines and streetlights in a parking lot, despite classical theory predicting arcs should only reach about 2.5 kilometers at 2,000 kV/m but instead reached with less than 100 kV/m, only a twentieth of normal requirements.

Classical electrical theory requires approximately 2,000 kilovolts per meter to break down air and create an arc discharge, and modern electrical insulators depend on this value to hold off voltages.

You can make plasmas in your microwave oven by putting a carbon mesh (called carbon veil) strip on top of a ceramic cup turned upside down and running the microwave on, creating balls of plasma about the size of a fist that are orange-white, float around, and hum at the 60 Hertz frequency of the magnetron, eventually hitting the ceiling and peeling all the paint off the top.

Relativistic runaway breakdown, developed by Russian physicists Gurevich and Zybin, proposes that cosmic rays strike atoms in cloud electric fields at the right angle to knock off electrons at relativistic velocities, and these relativistic electrons shrink due to warped spacetime, significantly reducing their friction in air and allowing them to accelerate to near light speed and knock off more electrons in a chain reaction.

A number of groups have tried to answer the question of far-field ionosphere coupling using computer simulations to simulate the entire cavity between the ionosphere and the earth, but this is a huge problem presenting over 10 billion degrees of freedom, and nobody has quite gotten there yet.

Leyh witnessed a bizarre electrical accident he caused by leaving a clip lead connected across the primary terminals of a coil, which burned the clip lead, but the interesting part was that the coil was disconnected from everything and stored away in a corner of the lab, yet somehow energy transferred to it while another coil was running across the room.

NASA's Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope made an accidental discovery that about 1,800 thunderstorms are in progress somewhere on the globe at any given moment, and new observations show thunderstorms produce both terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) and antimatter through a process where relativistic electrons emit gamma rays that occasionally transform into electron-positron pairs.

In the late 1990s, researchers started searching storm clouds for telltale gamma rays that would support relativistic runaway breakdown theory, but for many years found nothing because they were looking from the wrong direction.

Modern structural plastics used for towers can only support about 7,000 volts per inch outdoors when well maintained, so a tower supporting 8 million volts requires a minimum of about 12 stories in height, which also conveniently places the runaway breakdown zone safely above the ground where it is easier to view with instruments.

For the full-scale experimental apparatus, the design target is about 20 percent higher than the minimum 16 MV required by the theory, because historically large electrical machines and large research machines always encounter intriguing corner cases just out of reach, and Leyh references many times including the Tevatron where they wished they could turn it to eleven.

Leyh has spent the last five years building a 40-foot tall fully functional scale prototype without funding, with even the scale prototype being more than twice as large as the largest operating Tesla coil ever built, and the design explores new construction methods including a fully collapsible tower design and modular massively parallel primary drive system to reduce cost and operation.