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TerraWatt Power



Original poster: "Jim DeLillo by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimdel-at-bellatlantic-dot-net>

Terawatt -- If the time scales associated with femtolasers are ultra
small, the
intensity levels associated with the same lasers are ultra high. Pack a
puny
1-millijoule amount of energy in a one-femtosecond laser pulse and its
peak power
will equal one Terawatt. That's more power than consumers use in the
whole state
of California. Focus this pulse down to the micron spot and its
intensity will reach
1020W/cm2. Femtosecond is the land of extreme. 


This seems to imply that rather than trying to increase the joules input
into a
Tesla Coil that by increasing the BPS  DRAMATICALLY ;-) that a
substantial increase in
power could be obtained.  Can we make a TC operating at FemtoHtz
frequencies?


One millisecond -- one thirtieth of a second (i.e. 33 milliseconds) is
the time it
takes human eyes to react to light. Project each frame of a home movie
for one
thirtieth of a second, and viewers, unable to distinguish separate
frames, see
continuous motion. Light, during the time one frame is projected,
travels 6,200
miles. If you climb aboard a light beam in Chicago, you'll be in Tokyo
in the blink of
an eye.

One microsecond -- a millionth of a second is the duration of the light
from a
camera's flash. Light that short freezes motion, making a pitched ball
appear
stationary.

One nanosecond -- a billionth of a second is the speed at which
transistors in
today's computers turn on and off to represent the ones and zeros of
binary logic
and arithmetic. It's a time-duration so short that light, which can
speed seven
times around Earth in the second between our heartbeats, travels only
one foot.

One picosecond -- a trillionth of a second is a spot of time from the
domain of
period at the end of this sentence. Only with a laser that generates
picosecond
light pulses can scientists freeze the short-duration motion of
molecules and
produce images of what happens at the molecular level. Used in this way,
the
picosecond laser is comparable to a strobe, which can freeze the motion
of a
sprinter's stride in time-lapse photography.

One femtosecond -- is a quadrillionth, or a million billionth, of a
second. It's a
thousand times shorter than the picosecond snippets of time in which
molecules
react. Femtosecond pulses are the fastest man-made events. Nothing
happens in
a femtosecond.