09-18-2008, 03:15 PM
| #81 | |
| Senior Member  Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 2,144
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Eh...I have hobbies. Astrophysics is one of them. Yes, you can be a hobbyist. I like picking up interesting skills and knowledges, but when I do I'm serious about it, so I got a few good books by physicists at home, a little denser stuff than say, A Brief History of Time. It's a great book, but it's entry-level stuff. In October will be when the real fun comes. Once they do a full-power collision we'll see if we get a Higgs boson and then we'll know if Standard Model needs revising or not. Gonna keep a lot of researchers in funding, at any rate. This stuff may not be super-useful right now, but later on, we'll need it. - Coeloptera | |
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09-18-2008, 03:25 PM
| #82 |
| Senior Member  Join Date: May 2008 Location: rural, farm
Posts: 145
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ok, that's my absolute gotta have it next warning sign on the farm: "Warning: Bear Eating Singularity!" Why have I been wasting my time looking for a cow crossing sign w/ a ufo over it? How prosaic I have been... OK, so the question of the hour is, what future uses are you referring to? |
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09-18-2008, 07:15 PM
| #85 | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 2,144
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It's way weak compared to the other three fundamental forces, as I've said, and we don't yer know why. We don't understand the mechanism for "transmission" of gravity. We understand how electromagnetism works, we manipulate it all the time, from radio waves to lasers. We even have functional theories for how the two nuclear forces work, we can overcome them in reactors and bombs, we can knock electrons off of atoms with photons. But we can't manipulate gravity. All indications are that it should be potentially possible. But why is it weak? Is it "extending" into a higher spacial dimension? Why do some things have mass and some don't? A proton has mass, a photon doesn't. Understanding these things will let future humans learn to manipulate the final fundamental force, that's going to be important if we want to leave the Earth, and we have to. If our species is going to have a long-term future we need to spread out. Knowing how to manipulate gravity will help us not only travel, but also get power. Kip Thorne, astrophysicsict, actually came up with a plan to draw power from a rotating black hole. It'd be enough to power a civilization practically forever. But we can't yet do a few of the necessary things to make it work. There's also the whole lightspeed barrier thing. Gravity functions across space almost instantaneously, but why? There's also the whole "wormhole" deal. A full understanding of gravity and how it changes space is needed for that to be even potentially possible, to "cheat" and move "around" space faster than light could travel through it. We'll need this basic info now so that we can use it later. - Coeloptera Last edited by Coeloptera; 09-18-2008 at 07:27 PM. | |
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09-18-2008, 11:30 PM
| #86 |
| Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Las Vegas
Posts: 2,144
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Update...aw crap: Collider's transformer breaks, halts experiment - CNN.com "A 30-ton transformer that cools the world's largest particle collider malfunctioned, forcing physicists to stop using the atom smasher just a day after launching it to great fanfare, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Thursday. The faulty transformer has been replaced and the ring in the 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border has been cooled back down to near absolute zero -- or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit -- the most efficient operating temperature, said a statement by CERN, as the organization is known." "Now that the transformer has been replaced and the equipment rechilled, a similar attempt is expected shortly to tighten the clockwise beam and prepare experiments in coming weeks, it said." You gotta admit, they fixed a 30 ton problem pretty damn quickly. They replaced it. Their maintenance crew is good. - Coeloptera |
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09-19-2008, 10:30 AM
| #87 |
| Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2006
Posts: 1,916
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See, I knew it. The black hole just happened to fade under Wall Street yesterday too. Don't turn it back on! |
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09-19-2008, 10:56 AM
| #88 |
| The ol' Coot   |
Black holes and worm holes, will they help me fill my freezer this season? Sorry fellas, it just got a bit science fictiony, there for a minute. I heard the theory, that worm holes couldhelp us travel faster, but black holes are like celestial reefs, tobe avoided, if we ever get that far. Way beyond this old man's life cycle.
__________________ Adapt, improvise, overcome.-Gysgt Highway, Heartbreak Ridge |
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09-19-2008, 11:09 AM
| #89 | |
| Conservative in Exile  | Quote:
I don't know if I'll live long enough to see any of this either. Maybe. I WILL still have my guns though 
__________________ Old fighter pilots never die.....They just wind up in Texas | |
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