Talk about timing... the announcement that gravity waves have successfully been detected coming on the 100th anniversary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
I'm neither an astronomer or astrophysicist but both areas have always fascinated me; so the past few months (thanks to the Pluto photos and the comet landing) have been a real hoot.
I'm not a physics nut, but my other half is. I still feel the sheer excitement about this discovery. It's fricken huge! But to understand how huge this discovery is, forget about General Theory of Relativity.
Gravity is the Holy Grail of physics.
Why? Simply because no physicist ever has been able to figure out what gravity is. You might start to argue about Newton and such, but NO. Newton only said that there IS gravity. Everyone agrees that there is gravity. We sometimes call it "gravitational force" simply because it's a way to describe it. A great way to say you don't know what it is, but you know it exists. You know... gravity is a kind of force that.. "blah blah blah", things fall down, are drawn to each other, small things pull on big things too - like, earth pulls at you to stay on earth, but you have gravity too that works on earth and on everything near you; yours is just so much smaller, that it can be ignored.
Anyway, you might think that "Hey! I calculated stuff with it!", as in how quickly will that apple smack down into ground if you throw it off the Eiffel Tower. But NO! It's NOT gravity you are calculating with, but the constant acceleration that is the result of gravity, and not the gravity itself. (Yes, your teachers lied to you, it wouldn't be the first time. They oversimplify things to make life easier.) What causes that acceleration? Nobody knows! They know that something does, and they call it "gravity".
So, Newton, Einstein and Hawkins, and all the countless physicists before them - none of them have figured out what gravity is. And boy, they want to figure that thing out, and it has felt rather hopeless. Where do you even start, right? Where do I stick my measuring equipment? And what equipment should I use?
And this is here, where Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity comes in. Basically in it he has predicted that gravity might be a form of wave. You know, the old discussion of wave vs. particle vs. both at the same time.
and Wow! LOOK, we have measured gravitational wave after a collision between two black holes, for eh... very very very long time ago.
This is head explode huge! One tiny step towards maybe one day figuring out what gravity is!
I had lunch today with a very old friend and his wife. This pair had a trip through parts of Europe last year, including a tourist visit to the CERN LHC. Because the LHC was operational (in the midst of an up-cycle) at the time, they weren't allowed near the collider itself (the tunnels, control room, etc.). Still, I've got piccies (I'm not sure I'm allowed to post them but I'll check with my friends) of what they did get to visit.
Now, for you real geeks out there, here's the best news. My friends are planning a return trip in 2018 because there will be tours through the tunnels, etc of the LHC as the collider will be "down" for a scheduled upgrade. I've been invited along; if my health will (for once) play nice, I really want to be there. If, as I said, you're enough of a geek and can afford the money and the time, go for it! Book your tickets!
The main hurdle is proving that textured glass surfaces can provide the mandatory traction for vehicular traffic. Beyond that, this is really the way to go, the benefits are staggering.
Salina Pandora - Making evil fun again! Rolf Battlehammer - Meditatin' an' skull bashin' Cat'lyn Stillwater - Treehugger with an axe to grind Hannah Novato - Dedicated to the cause
And solar roads melt the snow, so you shouldn't need chains.
Salina Pandora - Making evil fun again! Rolf Battlehammer - Meditatin' an' skull bashin' Cat'lyn Stillwater - Treehugger with an axe to grind Hannah Novato - Dedicated to the cause
This Wednesday, few of us at work had a meeting with a representative from Altera about OpenCL for FPGAs (Field Proglrammable Gate Array).
Altera together with Xilinx have about 90% of the FPGAs's market. Interesting is that recently Altera has been purchased by Intel, and while Altera has already been producing cards that for example contain both ARM CPUs and FPGAs, Intel is releasing a Xeon CPU with an FPGA accelerator.
I'm quite excited about this, because OpenCL on an FPGA can both be used for the accelleration of vector calculations and other parallell computing, but also to a quick & dirty hardware logic design. You only need one (V)HDL designer who provides an SBU for the OpenCL, and then all you need are C-guys who understand parallell computing/Open CL.
The technique is quite popular in big servers, and Microsoft is using something similar for Bing Search Engine (even though I don't use Bing).
Post by styxxbone1 on Feb 19, 2016 19:44:49 GMT -5
In Alberta tire chains are standard kit on all but a few long haul trucks. We use them not just in winter but also for mud. Oil field and logging trucks carry them year round.
The solar panels might melt some snow, but when it hits -40? We can't keep the frost heaves from breaking asphalt roads apart. Glass tiles would be futile.
Here is a fairly typical oil field winch tractor. You can see the tire chains hanging in front of the first rear axel.
Land Trucking used to be based in northern British Columbia Canada I think.
I hope they stop sounding like vacuum-cleaners or motorcycles before that. It would drive me crazy. And funny how we can feel empathetic towards a thing, because that's still just a thing.
Last Edit: Feb 24, 2016 11:02:15 GMT -5 by mandene
Post by maeglhachel on Feb 24, 2016 14:44:08 GMT -5
Before that we will have robotic cheetahs armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and acting autonomously. And because a human having to push the kill button would be too slow to stop such a thing, everybody will want/need to get autonomous armed drones/robots. Skynet, anybody?
I'm not a physics nut, but my other half is. I still feel the sheer excitement about this discovery. It's fricken huge! But to understand how huge this discovery is, forget about General Theory of Relativity.
Gravity is the Holy Grail of physics.
Why? Simply because no physicist ever has been able to figure out what gravity is. You might start to argue about Newton and such, but NO. Newton only said that there IS gravity. Everyone agrees that there is gravity. We sometimes call it "gravitational force" simply because it's a way to describe it. A great way to say you don't know what it is, but you know it exists. You know... gravity is a kind of force that.. "blah blah blah", things fall down, are drawn to each other, small things pull on big things too - like, earth pulls at you to stay on earth, but you have gravity too that works on earth and on everything near you; yours is just so much smaller, that it can be ignored.
Anyway, you might think that "Hey! I calculated stuff with it!", as in how quickly will that apple smack down into ground if you throw it off the Eiffel Tower. But NO! It's NOT gravity you are calculating with, but the constant acceleration that is the result of gravity, and not the gravity itself. (Yes, your teachers lied to you, it wouldn't be the first time. They oversimplify things to make life easier.) What causes that acceleration? Nobody knows! They know that something does, and they call it "gravity".
So, Newton, Einstein and Hawkins, and all the countless physicists before them - none of them have figured out what gravity is. And boy, they want to figure that thing out, and it has felt rather hopeless. Where do you even start, right? Where do I stick my measuring equipment? And what equipment should I use?
And this is here, where Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity comes in. Basically in it he has predicted that gravity might be a form of wave. You know, the old discussion of wave vs. particle vs. both at the same time.
and Wow! LOOK, we have measured gravitational wave after a collision between two black holes, for eh... very very very long time ago.
This is head explode huge! One tiny step towards maybe one day figuring out what gravity is!
Best Gravity Rant ever. Well done!
I had a friend who worked at Brookhaven. I asked him "WTF, Gravity?" He had one of the best replies I've gotten:
"It was like that when I got here."
Here's an XKCD which does a great job of explaining the fundamental forces:
The hover text on that comic says this: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the stro-" "It's Gravity."
I was, until recently, a proponent of gravity being an emergent phenomenon, similar to the nuclear force binding protons and neutrons. Gravity waves tend to squish this idea. Like anything else in science, gravity is simple, except when it's not. Here are the issues currently challenging our math...
Extra-fast stars: Stars in galaxies follow a distribution of velocities where stars on the outskirts are moving faster than they should according to the observed distributions of normal matter. Galaxies within galaxy clusters show a similar pattern. Dark matter, which would interact gravitationally but not electromagnetically, would account for the discrepancy. Various modifications to Newtonian dynamics have also been proposed.
Flyby anomaly: Various spacecraft have experienced greater acceleration than expected during gravity assist maneuvers.
Accelerating expansion: The metric expansion of space seems to be speeding up. Dark energy has been proposed to explain this. A recent alternative explanation is that the geometry of space is not homogeneous (due to clusters of galaxies) and that when the data are reinterpreted to take this into account, the expansion is not speeding up after all, however this conclusion is disputed.
Anomalous increase of the astronomical unit: Recent measurements indicate that planetary orbits are widening faster than if this were solely through the Sun losing mass by radiating energy.
Extra energetic photons: Photons travelling through galaxy clusters should gain energy and then lose it again on the way out. The accelerating expansion of the universe should stop the photons returning all the energy, but even taking this into account photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation gain twice as much energy as expected. This may indicate that gravity falls off faster than inverse-squared at certain distance scales.
Extra massive hydrogen clouds: The spectral lines of the Lyman-alpha forest suggest that hydrogen clouds are more clumped together at certain scales than expected and, like dark flow, may indicate that gravity falls off slower than inverse-squared at certain distance scales.
Power: Proposed extra dimensions could explain why the gravity force is so weak...10-38 times that of the strong force.
Loria: "I do so envy you, having someone like me to admire" Sylya'na'lith: you can take the elf out of the jungle... Vynxinakya Shatterwall: part honeybooboo, part Rosie the Riveter, all Dwarf
"The hell of it was that a nineteenth-century musketball, or even a Neolithic spear, could still kill a twenty-third-century marine. It shouldn't, damnit. It should not be allowed. But that was just it...they never really did...it was your sense of superiority that killed you."
Post by styxxbone1 on Apr 27, 2016 18:04:47 GMT -5
Another thing recently observed that questions the long held belief that the speed of light is a "constant".
Inconstant Speed Of Light May Debunk Einstein
The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object, had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth.
Davies said fundamentally Webb's observations meant that the structure of atoms emitting quasar light was slightly but ever so significantly different to the structure of atoms in humans.
The discrepancy could only be explained if either the electron charge, or the speed of light, had changed.
IN TROUBLE EITHER WAY
"But two of the cherished laws of the universe are the law that electron charge shall not change and that the speed of light shall not change, so whichever way you look at it we're in trouble," Davies said.
To establish which of the two constants might not be that constant after all, Davies' team resorted to the study of black holes, mysterious astronomical bodies that suck in stars and other galactic features.
Another thing recently observed that questions the long held belief that the speed of light is a "constant".
Inconstant Speed Of Light May Debunk Einstein
The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object, had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth.
Davies said fundamentally Webb's observations meant that the structure of atoms emitting quasar light was slightly but ever so significantly different to the structure of atoms in humans.
The discrepancy could only be explained if either the electron charge, or the speed of light, had changed.
IN TROUBLE EITHER WAY
"But two of the cherished laws of the universe are the law that electron charge shall not change and that the speed of light shall not change, so whichever way you look at it we're in trouble," Davies said.
To establish which of the two constants might not be that constant after all, Davies' team resorted to the study of black holes, mysterious astronomical bodies that suck in stars and other galactic features.
What they are saying is that the fine constant might have been different in the earlier universe than what is seen now. The fine constant depends as they say on the speed of light and properties of the electron charge. It has been established that the value had not changed over the last 2 billion years. Based on radioactive decay products from a uranium mine in Gabon. So was the speed of light slightly different in the early universe? Possibility after all could be after effect of inflation but in this time 2016 nope sorry the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. As they say in the article other observation are require to establish that the findings are not an artifact of that particular observation.
Post by styxxbone1 on Apr 29, 2016 18:59:57 GMT -5
"Observations of over 300 distant celestial bodies show that the strength of electromagnetism may change at different places in the universe."
The science show I watched a couple nights ago also mention these observations of a variable speed of light. So it is still being observed and tested.
There are some skeptics who question these observations and rightly so. It is likely why the story heading used the word "May" Debunk... I do not disagree that more observations and testing is in order. That is how science is supposed to be done. I'm not really advocating one way or the other, I just found the topic interesting.
Some of the greatest leaps in science have emerged from findings that contradict current understanding. Maybe this is not one of them. Time will tell.
So, when a girl meets a boy, and they really really like each other... .... ...
Fireworks really DO happen!
For the first time ever, scientists have captured images of the flash of light that sparks at the very moment a human sperm cell makes contact with an egg.
For the first time ever, sages have captured images of the flash of light that sparks at the very moment a elfish sperm cell makes contact with a nest full of eggs.
So now we know where all those blinking lights and glowing orbs in the Hullack and Kings forests come from?
styxx
Last Edit: May 9, 2016 18:25:18 GMT -5 by styxxbone1
Post by smacrasmacrasmacra on Aug 31, 2016 9:56:48 GMT -5
Coming in after the fact, but I'm pretty pumped there were also pumped up people here about the LIGO results. I went to school with Amber Stuver--she's good people.
What she said at the end is the legit hawtness of this. We're opening the door to an entirely new sense for humanity to experience the universe...and with it we can see INSIDE dying stars. That's gonna be some serious new stuff for physics. There's some crazy things that only happen inside a dying star. There's some fundamental questions like "where's tin come from?," something so simple yet we have only theorized about it. More complicated neatness is about all the different and exotic types of basic matter you get in that process, in the transition from one material to another and the stages between.
Also, she's STOKED about LISA, the space version of LIGO. Also, her husband is jealous because as one of the engineers who fixed the mirror rigs so that they actually worked...he had nothing else to do on the project and had to get a new job. Heh.
Anyway, figured y'all might enjoy some of that.
Oh! If you have any questions about it, from as mundane to as technical as you can imagine, shoot 'em my way and I'll relay to Amber. If you wanna get the straight dope, she's more than happy to blab on and on about this. It'd be like some random coming up and asking you about your main's 3rd love affair from 4 years back...how could you resist?!?
Dude what used to once upon a time play and now won't leave the forums...