Physics anyone?

[alphacat]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cri ... f-reality/

[kay]

[SignalRecon]

Proper, +1

[d-T-r]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 111154.htm

Speed of Light May Not Be Fixed, Scientists Suggest; Ephemeral Vacuum Particles Induce Speed-Of-Light Fluctuations

Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate.

Meanwhile, in another study, Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, suggest that physical constants, such as the speed of light and the so-called impedance of free space, are indications of the total number of elementary particles in nature.

[jorge]

sorry if its been mentioned but has anyone read the tao of physics?

about how relativity and quantum physics imply the same things that eastern philosophies, hinduism/buddhism, have been saying for millenia. He compares writings by people like heisenberg and feynman to old buddhist and hindu texts and they talk about reality in very similar and poetic ways. Highly reccomended and doesnt require much physics knowledge to read most of it.

the writer also did the web of life which is kind of similar but focuses on biology and hows systems thinking is becoming the new paradigm

[d-T-r]

sorry if its been mentioned but has anyone read the tao of physics?

about how relativity and quantum physics imply the same things that eastern philosophies, hinduism/buddhism, have been saying for millenia. He compares writings by people like heisenberg and feynman to old buddhist and hindu texts and they talk about reality in very similar and poetic ways. Highly recommended and doesnt require much physics knowledge to read most of it.

the writer also did the web of life which is kind of similar but focuses on biology and hows systems thinking is becoming the new paradigm

I'll check that out. The phrase "tao of physics" sound familiar.

Those guys have known that everything consists and originates from energy behind the persistent veil of matter for countless millennia. The just arrived to their conclusions tgry different methods to that of the scientific method.

Even Carl sagan recognized there might be something more to Hindu cosmology;

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”- Sagan

[kay]

Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate.

I don't think that's a new idea. Read a similar postulate sometime last year, so its probably been kicking about for a while.

[SignalRecon]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 111154.htm

Quality linkage as usual. Thank you!

[rickyarbino]

You make a lot of clutter on the internet.
That post makes absolutely no effort to contribute to the essence of this thread.

[alphacat]

Purely speculative and entirely in the realm of the theoretical, but an interesting concept:

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/201 ... s-one.html

Something like this I can't see an easy way to prove in the course of a lifetime let alone 1000 years, but... yeah.

[SignalRecon]

Astronomy/Astrophysics
"Tidal disruption of a super-Jupiter in NGC 4845," by M. Nikolajuk and R. Walter
Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, April 2013.

BLACK HOLE DESTROYS ORPHAN PLANET


A black hole in galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, has ‘awoken’ from 20-30 years of inactivity to consume an object of 14–30 Jupiter masses (a brown dwarf or large gas planet) that strayed too close. The sneaky snack was observed by ESA's Integral space observatory, with follow-up observations from ESA's XMM-Newton, NASA's Swift and Japan's MAXI X-ray monitor on the International Space Station.

Astronomers were observing a different galaxy using Integral when a bright X-ray flare was noticed, coming from a different location in the same field-of-view. The astronomers then used XMM-Newton to confirm the origin confirmed as NGC 4845; a galaxy never before detected at high energies. The emission was traced back from its maximum in January 2011; this was when the galaxy brightened by a factor of a thousand and then subsided.

The astronomers were able to determine the source of the emission by analysing the characteristics of the flare: it came from material surrounding the galaxy’s central black hole while it tore apart and consumed an object with 14-30 Jupiter masses. Though this size range matches brown dwarfs, it is possible the object could have had a lower mass of just a few times that of Jupiter. Recent research suggests there may be many ‘orphan’ free-floating planetary-mass objects in galaxies, ejected from their parent planetary systems by gravitational interactions to wander alone.

The black hole at NGC 4845’s centre is estimated to have a mass around 300,000 times that of the Sun. The way the emission brightened and decayed showed that the orphaned object did not have a quick ‘death’: there was a delay of 2–3 months between the object being disrupted and debris heating up in the vicinity of the black hole. The astronomers estimate that only the external layers of the object were consumed by the black hole, which amounts to about 10% of the object’s total mass. A denser core was left orbiting the black hole.

This feeding event can be seen as a precursor to a similar event expected in the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. This time it is not likely to be an ‘orphaned’ planet, but a compact cloud of gas amounting to just a few Earth masses; it has been observed spiralling towards the black hole and is thought to meet its doom soon, maybe even this year. Events like these aid astronomers in understanding how different types of objects are torn apart by black hole of various sizes.

The image is a still from the video. Watch a reconstruction of the object being consumed slowly here:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space ... ight_snack
Image and video credit: ESA

[kay]

Been looking forward to the gas cloud getting shredded by the milky way's supermassive black hole.

[SignalRecon]

Been looking forward to the gas cloud getting shredded by the milky way's supermassive black hole.

A spectacular event that will sadly go unnoticed by most.

Purely speculative and entirely in the realm of the theoretical, but an interesting concept:

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/201 ... s-one.html

Something like this I can't see an easy way to prove in the course of a lifetime let alone 1000 years, but... yeah.

"When we asked Smolin about these objections, he said that many of these concerns were addressed in his book, The Life of the Cosmos, and that his upcoming book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, will also tackle many of these questions (the book also dispels the idea that time is a kind of illusion). "

Alphacat, absolutely enjoyed this. I will be on the lookout for a copy of his books.
Heres a great read I thought of sharing with you instantly when reading this:

Brian Greene - The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
If you cant find it I have this in pdf and audiobook.
http://www.amazon.ca/The-Hidden-Reality ... 0307265633

[HamCrescendo]

So I was reading an article a while ago in Philosophy Now that was investigating the idea that our universe is just a simulation, apparently the probability of it being so is higher than it not being so but hey we'll leave that for another day.

One of the rebukes was that if another universe wanted to create our universe as a study of variable physical laws etc. it would be much easier to simply create a black hole and study what happened within. Something that apparently we're relatively close to be able to do ourselves.

So is there anything to this idea that black holes contain alternate universes, and that its perceptible to ours, or is this just a heap of mumbo jumbo? And if so, would the laws that govern such a universe really be that different? Can they be different?

[SignalRecon]

So is there anything to this idea that black holes contain alternate universes, and that its perceptible to ours

There are theories that point to black hole being a complex and form of computing, storing all the matter (information) stripped from one universe in its simplest form and then projecting it elsewhere. An attempt at explaining our universe and reality as a projection of matter destroyed and stored in a black hole somewhere in another universe. Check the book I linked above

[Phigure]

it would be much easier to simply create a black hole and study what happened within. Something that apparently we're relatively close to be able to do ourselves.

blatantly untrue if you ask me. the singularity of a black hole cannot be observed from the outside because of the event horizon. there are theorized "naked" singularities, where the angular momentum of the black hole is so high that the event horizon effectively shrinks and allows the singularity to be observed (hence the "naked"). but this has been pretty much disproven because in order to create a naked singularity, a black hole would have to absorb a particle with such a high angular momentum that it would actually be spinning too fast to even be absorbed. there's also a few general relativistic things that rule out the possibility of a naked singularity's existence

we're nowhere near "relatively close" to being able to do that, especially since, as far as we know, it's actually physically impossible

So is there anything to this idea that black holes contain alternate universes, and that its perceptible to ours

There are theories that point to black hole being a complex and form of computing, storing all the matter (information) stripped from one universe in its simplest form and then projecting it elsewhere. An attempt at explaining our universe and reality as a projection of matter destroyed and stored in a black hole somewhere in another universe. Check the book I linked above

stuff like this is sort of almost bordering on psuedoscience imo. it's totally incorrect to refer to it as a "theory". a theory is a "well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment." it's absolutely unsubstantiated, and not based on any sort of observational or experimentational data. it's not even a hypothesis since it doesn't really propose any sort of testable claims. it's just a supposition. and actually, it's refuted by what i talked about earlier in regards to the impossibility of naked singularities - since this singularity would need to be naked in order for information to be read from it



as for the idea of our own universe being the product of a singularity - i'm a bit skeptical but i feel like it's a plausible conjecture

[HamCrescendo]

Haha ok, shouldnt expect philosophers to be learned physicists. Too busy beard stroking and smiling at their own ingenuity to do hard mathematics.

[SignalRecon]

stuff like this is sort of almost bordering on psuedoscience imo. it's totally incorrect to refer to it as a "theory".

You're completely right, poor choice of words on my behalf.

[magma]

So I was reading an article a while ago in Philosophy Now that was investigating the idea that our universe is just a simulation, apparently the probability of it being so is higher than it not being so but hey we'll leave that for another day.

This is where the line between Philosophy's thought experiments and Physics' search for testables sort of crash into each other headlong. It may well be more likely that we're a simulation, but that doesn't have any bearing on the answer to the question.

I'm not sure how one would go about interrogating a black hole - how would you get information/data out of it once it's gone past the Event Horizon?

It's quite likely we've already created small black holes at CERN and almost certainly will when the powers are ramped up on re-opening - they're too fleeting to be useful for much (apart from confusing everyone over the nature of black holes and their ability to disappear) though. The problem with intentionally keeping one for any length of time even if we could is that it could feasibly swallow the Earth unless it was somehow shielded... black holes are probably the most dangerous phenomenon in the Universe - almost every way of investigating something that doesn't involve interrogating a local black hole is probably preferable!

On the "Other Universes/Other Laws" bit, this book is EXCELLENT:



Pretty much goes through all the constants that appear to set our laws and then explains what would happen if each of the numbers had come out differently from the Big Bang. Slightly head mangling at times, but a really good read.

[garethom]

That book looks interesting, might pick that up!