Dr. Robert (Bob) Novella

speaker

1,941 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 19 Sep

Dr. Robert (Bob) Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #827 - May 15 2021 podcast

Now, Kareem Ahmed said, I mentioned him before, he said that this is the first time a detonation has been shown to be stabilized experimentally. matched

We are finally able to hold the detonation in space in oblique detonation form. matched

It's almost like freezing an intense explosion in physical space. matched

Now, you think, oh, three seconds, big deal. matched

I mean, that's nothing. matched

But this is impressive because before that, I think it was milliseconds. matched

Researchers were able to do this for milliseconds. matched

So this is many hundreds of thousands of times better than previous experiments. matched

And the reason why this stopped, not because everything ended, they stopped it on purpose because they were afraid that the quartz windows were going to melt. matched

Because in order for this to be optically observed and studied, they had a section of it that had these quartz windows, and they stopped it because it wasn't strong enough to withstand this to continue more than three seconds. matched

So the next step then would be to replace these quartz windows with metal ones and see how long it lasts. matched

Maybe it lasts four seconds. matched

Maybe it just keeps going and going and going for minutes. matched

To me, that seems to be the next big step that they would need to do. matched

The other one would be they need to figure out how to alter the parameters like the fuel mix and the flow speed in real time so they could see how this would work in real-world conditions, which of course is obviously very different than in the lab. matched

But there's still – matched

is a really amazing milestone and really exciting. matched

So, all right, what if this all works? matched

What do we have? matched

Well, this would be so dramatic that I would actually classify this as a disruptive technology. matched

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