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GalacticEmperor
Murdock
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Imperial Palace, Coruscant
Posts: 272 |
 Theoretical Physics (Warning! Weirdness within)
I attended a lecture by Brian Greene the other day; he wrote a book called "The Elegant Universe" which you may have heard of. Anyway, here's the quote from the Lucifer Shields thread I wanted to discuss.
quote:
Originally posted by Jokoto
The average distance of the Sun from the Earth (one AU, astronomical unit) is 8.3 lightminutes.
Correct--and this is what disproves Newtonian motion.
Suppose, at this instant, the sun vanished. How long would it take for us to notice it? We would continue to observe light from the sun up to 8 minutes after the vanishing, becase that's how far away we are. How long would it be before we felt the disappearance gravitationally? According to Newton, gravity affects all things instantaneously and so we would feel the loss of the Sun's gravity as soon as it disappeared, before the light went out.
This, in fact, isn't true. Lots of experiments have been done, and it turns out we would feel the loss at the same time we saw it--gravity is not instantaneous, but propagates at the speed of light. It's like dropping a pebble in a pond- light, matter and gravity all ripple outwards at lightspeed, no faster. This conclusion is part of what led Einstein to come up with his laws of relativity describing celestial motion.
The maximum speed at which matter and energy propagate at is the speed of light, the discovery of which eventually led to Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2, which states that energy can be converted to mass and vice versa. This is the principle on which nuclear weapons and reactors work. Atomic nuclei are torn apart resulting in the release of tremendous amounts of energy.
Einstein predicted that energy can also be converted into gravity. Imagine you're in an elevator in outer space; you're weightless and you float around. Now imagine that the elevator is accellerating upwards. You would fall to the floor and be stuck there. If the elevator was accellerating at 9.82 meters per second per second, it would feel like Earth gravity. (On a related note, accelleration and inerta forces in airplanes and rides are called G-forces, according to what multiple of earth gravity it feels like.) Thus the theory that gravity = accelleration.
Gravity also moves at lightspeed, but there are questions as to what exactly gravity is. Currently gravity is classed as a form of bonding- like the weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and electromagnetic force. I can't remember the details now (I'll look it up and post it later) but there's the possibility that since matter can be converted into energy, and energy into gravity, that gravity, energy and matter are all one and the same, and they can all be converted into one another.
Later- we have some problems applying General Relativity to subatomic particles, however, where Quantum Mechanics is applied. Black Holes and the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang have incredible amounts of matter in a very tiny space, and the two theories have problems with eacho other in these areas. Unifying these two fields of physics is the main goal of Superstring Theory which I will post about later. There's also some interesting things with antimatter I want to share.
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03-07-2003 09:02 PM |
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kode
Face
Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Sweden
Posts: 121 |
Isn't g ~9.82m/s^2, not 32?
well, anyways, yes. gravity travels with the speed of light (light in vacuum). It's been proven.
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03-07-2003 11:15 PM |
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GalacticEmperor
Murdock
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Imperial Palace, Coruscant
Posts: 272 |
My bad... I was thinking 32 feet/s/s. Had that drilled into me at an early age, was never able to adjust to metric fully.
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03-08-2003 12:17 AM |
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kode
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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Sweden
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never got the imperial system myself... but then again, I grew up with metrics...
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03-08-2003 02:02 PM |
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ns33
Murdock
Registered: Feb 2002
Location: Nowhere, Nowhere
Posts: 423 |
I think the "WARNING: weird stuff inside" scared off all readers. If you had put something like "ultimate fighter!" or something, half the people would probably be fixed to the computer trying to figure out this stuff (as in us ruining their lives). But nooo, you had to make it obvious and warningful...  
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03-08-2003 10:28 PM |
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GalacticEmperor
Murdock
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Imperial Palace, Coruscant
Posts: 272 |
More weirdness on the subatomic level
Here we go again.
Now, the reason why these two theories don't get along is because when things get really really small, they get very turbulent and bumpy, and Einstein's laws of smooth curvature don't work. Superstring theory can work this out, but to understand it, we need to go deep into the smallest things you can imagine.
We all understand atoms, right? They make up the elements, and consist of a cloud of electrons spinning around a nucleus made from protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of quarks. There are a few varieties of quarks, including Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, and Charm. But the next question is, what are quarks made of? Greene says that all varieties of quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and every other sub-subatomic particle are all made from the same thing- tiny little rubber bands of energy called strings.
  
What makes an up-quark different from an electron, however, is the way in which the string vibrates. A string that spins this way is a pion, a string that wiggles that way we see as a muon. The wonderful thing about superstring theory is that not only does it work with relativity and quantum mechanics, it requires them both to make any sense at all. There's plenty of heavy math that goes along with this, (most of which I have trouble understanding myself) but I'll skip over that. If you're interested, read the book.
With this in hand, we can look at the densist places in the universe- black holes, and the Big Bang- and see how they work. Black holes, in fact, may be where a string got wrapped around something which expanded, blowing the string up to macroscopic levels. Very neat.
Now, who's up for some antimatter?
Brief overview- antimatter is the opposite of matter. When a particle of antimatter comes in contact with a particle of matter, they annihilate eachother completely in an incredible release of energy. At the beginning of time there was slightly more matter in the universe than antimatter so nearly all of the antimatter was obliterated, and matter got the upper hand. Richard P. Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan project and was a very interesting fellow, showed that antimatter is in fact matter that is travelling backwards in time. The diagram looks something like this:
And you can do some more research if you want. (Hey, this is supposed to be quick and dirty. I'm not qualified to teach. :P)
I'll see what I can find on multidimensionality for the next lecture.
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03-10-2003 06:02 AM |
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Goober5000
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Re: More weirdness on the subatomic level
quote:
Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Richard Feynman... showed that antimatter is in fact matter that is travelling backwards in time.
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03-10-2003 11:30 PM |
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GalacticEmperor
Murdock
Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Imperial Palace, Coruscant
Posts: 272 |
Re: Re: More weirdness on the subatomic level
quote:
Originally posted by Goober5000
Perhaps I should elaborate.
quote:
In 1949 Richard Feynman devised another theory of antimatter. The spacetime diagram for pair production and annihilation appears to the right. An electron is travelling along from the lower right, interacts with some light energy and starts travelling backwards in time. An electron travelling backwards in time is what we call a positron. In the diagram, the electron travelling backwards in time interacts with some other light energy and starts travelling forwards in time again. Note that throughout, there is only one electron.
A friend of mine finds the image of an electron travelling backwards in time, interpreted by us as a positron, to be scary.
Feynman in his original paper proposing this theory wrote:
"It is as though a bombardier flying low over a road suddenly sees three roads and it is only when two of them come together and disappear again that he realizes that he has simply passed over a long switchback in a single road." (Physical Review 76, (1949), 749.)
Note that Feynman's theory is yet another echo of the fact, noted above, that a negatively charged object moving from left to right in a magnetic field has the same curvature as a positive object moving from right to left.
Feynman's theory is mathematically equivalent to Dirac's, although the interpretations are quite different. Which formalism a physicist uses when dealing with antimatter is usually a matter of which form has the simplest structure for the particular problem being solved.
Note that in Feynman's theory, there is no pair production or annihilation. Instead the electron is just interacting with electromagnetic radiation, i.e. light. Thus the whole process is just another aspect of the fact that accelerating electric charges radiate electric and magnetic fields; here the radiation process is sufficiently violent to reverse the direction of the electron's travel in time.
Nambu commented on Feynman's theory in 1950:
"The time itself loses sense as the indicator of the development of phenomena; there are particles which flow down as well as up the stream of time; the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation or annihilation, but only a change of direction of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past." (Progress in Theoretical Physics 5, (1950) 82).
-University of Toronto
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03-11-2003 06:37 AM |
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kode
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Location: Sweden
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hmm... I was a crewmember at a 5000 person big LAN 1½ years back or so. On the way back, we somehow got into the topic of quantum physics and so on... kinda funny how one does that when you've been awake for about 5 days or so...
they haven't proven positrons yet, have they?
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03-11-2003 07:30 PM |
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Mr. Vega
I'm New! Laugh At Me!
Registered: Sep 2002
Location: The Ouchenizer
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Re: Re: More weirdness on the subatomic level
quote:
Originally posted by Goober5000
That's just one interpretation...I prefer Dirac's idea that a positron is a "hole" left when a electron is excited out of a negative energy state.
And since gravity only moves at c, scratch one FTL travel idea. 
quote:
they haven't proven positrons yet, have they?
Well, we've been able to make them, which I think counts as proving them.
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03-12-2003 01:29 AM |
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BananaOfTheNight
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Location: West Sussex, England
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I may have read this wrong, but if positrons can be 'created' by 'flipping' an electron, by drawing a photon out of it, then this could give an extremely high-density energy source - suck a photon out of an electron to turn it into a positron (energy source 1) and then 'react' the positron with an electron to release 2 more photons (energy source 2).
However, we need some way to 'suck' energy from particles first...
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03-12-2003 09:58 AM |
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ns33
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Location: Nowhere, Nowhere
Posts: 423 |
Read "Discover" magazine, April 2003 issue. "Was Einstein Wrong about the Speed of Light?"
Here we see Joao Magueijo try to prove that the speed of light is not constant, contrary to Einstein's theory that the speed of light is constant and can be equated as E=mc^2. One theory Magueijo proposes is that gravity and matter can distort light not only in the wat of bending it, but also changing its velocity.
Its an intresting article, the usual black-hole, faster-than-light travel, and more multidimentional stuff. 
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Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered." -Cicero
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03-12-2003 12:46 PM |
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kode
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I asked my teacher in physics to explain why the speed of light is constant. so he told me it was constant, but in other words 
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03-12-2003 10:12 PM |
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Jokoto
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quote:
Originally posted by ns33
Read "Discover" magazine, April 2003 issue. "Was Einstein Wrong about the Speed of Light?"
April 2003? I'll catch it as soon as it flows backwards in time near me (must remember to wear those anti-matter resistant gloves...)! 
quote:
Originally posted by ns33
Here we see Joao Magueijo try to prove that the speed of light is not constant, contrary to Einstein's theory that the speed of light is constant and can be equated as E=mc^2. One theory Magueijo proposes is that gravity and matter can distort light not only in the wat of bending it, but also changing its velocity.
Uh, are you quoting the article inaccurately or didn't understand what was in it? Speed of light is not constant in matter, it is c only in space (vacuum)! It slows down in matter, and has even been [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/655518.stm]slowed down[/url] to a crawl.
Last edited by Jokoto on 03-13-2003 at 09:22 AM
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03-13-2003 09:21 AM |
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kode
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Location: Sweden
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they've sped it up too, haven't they? I vaguely recall reading something about that. or if it was on the radio...
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03-13-2003 08:34 PM |
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Jokoto
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Registered: Dec 2002
Location: Finland
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Do some digging (googling) around before making such statements. I hope you know how Big that would be if it was true... Most probably it was just another teleportation experiment, transporting a single packet of information with a photon pair (instantaneously, thus 'faster than light'). But who knows... Light speed however is and will be the absolute limit for now, I'm not going to get excited about a vague memory about a maybe maybe possibly something etc you know...
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03-13-2003 11:06 PM |
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Bobboau
BWO Team Member
Registered: Jul 2000
Location: belleville IL USA
Posts: 1428 |
nope, the therory is that the speed of light in a vacume can change
seems interesting
http://www.msnbc.com/news/879464.asp
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03-14-2003 04:19 AM |
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Fetty
Murdock
Registered: Dec 2002
Location:
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ive given it a complete 1 ms runup in my brain
the term anti matter isnt fitting then is it
cuz if same amount of matter n anti matter collide that would result in 0
at least thats what my teacher has been trying to tell us with everything else
also on first post as we all should or shouldt not know gravity affects light black hole for example
now if you remove the sun/bringer of light wouldnt that also have an effect on the already traveling light ?
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03-14-2003 08:12 AM |
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shim
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Location: australia
Posts: 117 |
Re: Re: More weirdness on the subatomic level
quote:
Originally posted by Goober5000
agreed to that... only cause ima dead tired from clubbin all night and ima still up at 10:30am
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03-15-2003 01:04 AM |
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ns33
Murdock
Registered: Feb 2002
Location: Nowhere, Nowhere
Posts: 423 |
I think I interpreted wrong. You cant blame ME, it was seven in the morning. I was still desiring for while
Anyway, read the article for yourself. This kinda stuff always leads on new insight.
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Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered." -Cicero
"Comple others: do not be compelled by them." -Sun-tzu
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." -Steven Wright
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." -Napoleon
Leagacy at the [VBB] - October 2001 - April 2002 - 555 posts
[url=http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/the158th]The 158th[/url]
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03-15-2003 04:03 AM |
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