holes

We can collect light from a large but far away fusion reactor to generate electricity.
A better way could be to use the heat from the nuclear reactor we inhabit.
But in order to do this we would need to drill holes up to 10km deep through granite in many places and this is a surprisingly difficult problem.
Surprisingly, because we are able to dig tunnels through mountains and we can drill deep enough holes to produce oil and gas.
However, existing rotary drilling technology is not sufficient to unlock geothermal energy in most places.

A research project at the University of Leoben, Austria, investigates an alternative drilling technology using water jets, which looks promising.
But perhaps it will take a billionaire and plasma jets (YouTube, fwd to 43:30) to solve this problem: link.

learning and understanding

CIP asked "from what books did you learn QM, QFT, and GR?"
I guess it depends on your definition of "learning" ...

I read several pop.sci. books as a kid, including Misner, Thorne & Wheeler 8-)
So I had some idea what physics was about before I went to university.

But I would say I learned relativity from the books of two Austrian physicists, Sexl & Urbantke.
I learned quantum theory from the Berkeley lectures and Landau & Lifshitz.
And I learned QFT from xeroxed lecture notes and Ryder.

Of course there are many good books available now and some really good online lectures, e.g. Lenny Susskind.
Wald, Zee and Zwiebach are good books imho.

But I should also mention that I learned a lot about quantum theory in a seminar with Anton Zeilinger, which included eye opening interference experiments with slow neutrons at a research reactor in Vienna.
I think I really learned relativity during my master thesis, writing a program to numerically integrate the equations to simulate the gravitational collapse of a scalar field into a black hole.
And I really learned something about QFT by writing programs to simulate lattice field theories; including attempts to simulate quantum gravity. We did not really succeed, but I learned quite a lot along the way ... in some sense moving from Itzykson & Zuber to Itzykson & Drouffe.

Last but not least, I should mention that our best theories contain several unsolved mysteries: naked singularities, closed timelike loops, the 'interpretation problem' of quantum theory (*), Landau poles, the 'direction of time' etc.
They are ultimately incomplete and even inconsistent and therefore one might say that nobody really understands them ...


(*) Physicists cannot agree if quantum theory describes one or many worlds, while I prefer a zero worlds interpretation.

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