Large Hardon Collider

[Talka]

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/2706/spaceb.jpg

^ Basically what Max posted, but with less detail and only one pic.

Also, what's the status on the collider? Is it running at full capacity yet?

[Pirian]

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/2706/spaceb.jpg

^ Basically what Max posted, but with less detail and only one pic.

Also, what's the status on the collider? Is it running at full capacity yet?

great picture! Just making it an actual picture for people who don't want to click the link

Spoiler: show

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/2706/spaceb.jpg

[Khamsin]

In 1759, before the American Revolution, the light that has crossed this region left the sun.

Wouldn't the light illuminating objects 250 ly away have left the sun 500 years ago?

250 years to get from the sun to the object, and another 250 to get back so we can see it?

[Eliseos]

Wouldn't the light illuminating objects 250 ly away have left the sun 500 years ago?

250 years to get from the sun to the object, and another 250 to get back so we can see it?

That picture is just a boundary, not saying we're seeing light reflected from the sun from there back to us. That boundary is where light that left 250 years ago, now is. The light we are seeing from there is also 250 years old. If the only source of light were the sun, then yes, you would be correct.

[Max™]

That is really amazing Max. What are the current theories (or is there one accepted theory) about why matter in the universe forms those structures? Why do we have everything forming into thread/web like formations? Why is there empty space in the middle? If you went out far enough would the universe look like it was solid? (in the similar way that atoms and molecules look solid when zoomed out on a large scale far enough)

You wouldn't be able to see from the outside, most likely, light is a property of this Universe's spacetime. No reason to expect physics to operate in the same manner outside of it.


The structure occurs because of a few effects in the first few moments of time.

The Universe was in a more ordered state, the very spacetime we are sitting in was in a different state.

Think of the transition from ice to water.


Does an ice cube melt all at once into a glob of water, or does it start melting at different points, producing boundary regions of ice between pockets of water.

Those regions in spacetime form what would be called cosmic strings, domain walls, monopoles, textures.

They would appear to be incredibly massive objects with strange gravitational behavior (as they would be distorting the familiar spacetime we normally deal with in a severe manner), and would seem to contain huge amounts of matter and generate strong magnetic fields.

As the primordial matter flowed and moved around these structures in the first few moments of time, they would generate electric currents, attracting matter into clumps and stirring it up.

When these structures finally "melted", they would decay into more heavy particles, and pump more energy into their environment.


The gravitational effects of these processes would have induced some structure on the clouds of dark matter filling the Universe. If this hadn't occurred then those clouds would have remained smoother, as dark matter cannot shed heat and collapse through gravitational cooling.


The lighter wispy stuff we are composed of fell into the gravity wells of these dark matter clumps and began to form galaxies and stars.

As the Universe underwent these phase changes, it was unfolding from a highly curved and ordered state to a flatter more chaotic one.


This caused it to accelerate dramatically when the first bits of the vacuum we find ourselves within formed, as it is a very flat state.

This pulled the clumps along with it, stretching everything apart much like a big wad of bubblegum you had cupped in both your hands, then when you spread your fingers and pulled your hands apart it broke apart into webs and strings and clumps.


That structure is a sign that everything was once gathered together, and a sign that it did not come apart evenly, as the traditional description of the big bang event implies.

[Seraph]

Max, officially requesting the pictures you posted in the Random Image Thread about the location of galaxy clusters in the Universe, so I don't have to search for it there at work and potentially see a penis.

[Max™]

The Milky Way.

The Galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

The Local Group.

The Galaxies within several tens of million light years or so of us.

The Virgo Supercluster and the Galaxies within 100 million light years of us.

You are here.
The sides of that image are half a billion light years long.

Another view of the local superclusters on roughly the same scale.

Out to 1 Billion light years now.

Our 2 Billion light year neighborhood.

14 Billion light years worth of the Universe.

Each of the purple dots composing this structure is a galaxy.

Large picture here, but it shows a zoom/zoom/zoom in of the structure, the closest zoom resolves galaxies as fuzzy points of light.

A fairly accurate simulation of the largest scale structures in the Universe, that weblike shape is composed of superclusters of galaxies.

Three Dimensional representation.

That's them.

The bottom three are the millenium simulation ones, the rest provide a sense of what you're seeing.

This is my favorite, set it as my desktop.

Spoiler: show

http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galfo..._063a_half.jpg

[Seraph]

That's them.

The bottom three are the millenium simulation ones, the rest provide a sense of what you're seeing.

This is my favorite, set it as my desktop.

Spoiler: show

http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galfo..._063a_half.jpg

You are the man, thanks. Been a busy day, I didn't honestly click the ones you posted here, thinking they were different than the other ones.

[Max™]

WELL LET THAT BE A LESSON TO YOU!

[Eliseos]

Instead of making a new thread, I'm just going to ask this here. It's a homework problem for my modern physics class, we're doing waves right now. The problem is "The profile of a transverse harmonic wave, traveling at 1.2 m/s is given by y=(0.02m)x sin(157m^-1)x). Determine the amplitude, wavelength, frequency, and period." My professor is teaching this stuff out of his own notes, so we don't have a book or anything to look at for examples. I'm assuming (hoping) that 157m-^1 is just (1/157m).

The values I have so far are .02m for the amplitude (this is the obvious one, I hope anyways), 1200 m for the wavelength, 986 s for the period, and 1/986 for the frequency. Period I got from 2pi x 157, frequency would be one over that. Wavelength I got from v/f, or 1.2/(1/986). When I graph this on my calculator, all of these values seem correct, but when I think about it, it doesn't really seem all that correct.

A new wave every 986 seconds seems ridiculous to me, given that it's only 2 cm high. The wavelength being over a kilometer also seems ridiculous to me (I know radio waves can be a km and much higher, but I'm assuming this problem isn't about light since it's traveling so slow). Did I mess up my math somewhere, or did my professor just give silly values for this problem?

[Max™]

Lemme think...

angular frequency should be 0.0076433121019108280254777070063694 rad/s *x
frequency should then be that /2pi, 0.0010137257521776772978909793845383 *x
period should be 1/f, 986.46009322719507687727002234976 *x
wavelength should be 1.2m/T, 1183.7521118726340922527240268197 *x
Amplitude should be 0.2m *x

Still not sure what the value x was supposed to be, but I got the same you did otherwise.

[Eliseos]

Ah sorry, the first x is just signifying that the .02 is being multiplied by the sin function. Thanks for the help, I had spent a couple hours on this last night trying to figure out if I made a mistake lol. I'll probably be posting more homework/concept questions here as the semester goes along.

[Neosutra]

Still very busy, so Ill have to reply to your posts one at a time, as you've posted a plethora of stuff over the last week and I dont have time to get to it all.

I'm saying spacetime is all there is, that particles are a silly idea.

The Universe is a body of spacetime and nothing else.

I may be disagreeing with your wording here, rather than your model. No model (including my own) holds space-time as a substance (let alone a universal medium), or the ubiquitous foundation for the universe. Space-time is an observable reaction in the 3D realm that allows us to understand better the temporal implications of a relativistic universe. It is a way for us to visualize a physical universe whose size/shape/behavior changes based on the relative mechanics of each observing object.

I would agree that our current particles are merely a results of these relativistic expansions (that our bosons and leptons are merely energetic reactions that we label as particles), but Im pretty sure that any quantum physicist would tell you that the word "particle" is just a way for us to label and categorize such reactions.

All the interesting little things we observe, all the interesting little things we're made of, should be resolvable as nothing but different states of the fundamental structure of spacetime itself.

Again, not really space-time, but resolvable as an expansion of the base properties of the universe (in my model the universe is a single point, you get the 3D particle interactions when you expand the universe in each causal dimension outward.). It may be a single point of energy that exists only because when you expand its temporal value in 2 directions it exists as its particle state and anti-particle state simultaneously, but in different locations/times.

The shape of the spacetime making up the quarks and electrons making up your hand is in a (most likely for the time being) stable series of knots.

The topological changes which would be required to untie those knots are more expensive than simply maintaining the knots themselves in their current state.

Tying them is an expensive process, pretty sure it requires a black hole to actually tie new knots btw, but leaving them tied is not.

This gets into some more detailed discussions of what model you chose to represent these expansions, but most of what you are discussing is purely hypothetical, and not really supported by even the current mathematics (not saying it bad/wrong, just currently disagree with that theory). Though some of the math you are discussing gets pretty gnarly for a simple physics debate on a forum like this.

You can have black holes and big bangs without singularities, singularities only arise in point particle models, they're a sign that you fucked up somewhere, just like infinite results from finite calculations are in mathematics.

Actually, black holes require singularities and we are just learning/postulating what kind of physics would allow for this type of phenomenon. I wouldn't be so quick as to label it as a "fuck up" in the calculations. Big bangs however is anyone's guess at this point.

[Max™]

Still very busy, so Ill have to reply to your posts one at a time, as you've posted a plethora of stuff over the last week and I dont have time to get to it all.



I may be disagreeing with your wording here, rather than your model. No model (including my own) holds space-time as a substance (let alone a universal medium), or the ubiquitous foundation for the universe. Space-time is an observable reaction in the 3D realm that allows us to understand better the temporal implications of a relativistic universe. It is a way for us to visualize a physical universe whose size/shape/behavior changes based on the relative mechanics of each observing object.

One way to think of it, but I've had good success with modeling spacetime on a more substantialist level than merely "where things occur".

If spacetime is merely the degrees of freedom which events can happen along, then I contend that particles are merely knotted portions of those "directions".

I'm not elevating spacetime, just reducing particles.

I would agree that our current particles are merely a results of these relativistic expansions (that our bosons and leptons are merely energetic reactions that we label as particles), but Im pretty sure that any quantum physicist would tell you that the word "particle" is just a way for us to label and categorize such reactions.

This still holds true as I'm describing it.

Again, not really space-time, but resolvable as an expansion of the base properties of the universe (in my model the universe is a single point, you get the 3D particle interactions when you expand the universe in each causal dimension outward.). It may be a single point of energy that exists only because when you expand its temporal value in 2 directions it exists as its particle state and anti-particle state simultaneously, but in different locations/times.

I'm working from an extended object starting point, on the most fundamental level, so that would be a disagreement of the interpretation of the models at least.

From the perspective of a beam of light though, you would get the sort of dimensional reduction you describe, but this is less of a literal effect as it is a statement on the broadness of the interactions which occur for massless structures.

This gets into some more detailed discussions of what model you chose to represent these expansions, but most of what you are discussing is purely hypothetical, and not really supported by even the current mathematics (not saying it bad/wrong, just currently disagree with that theory). Though some of the math you are discussing gets pretty gnarly for a simple physics debate on a forum like this.

Actually, as I was able to tell, and had been working on trying to deduce, all of the mathematics of the gauge theories of particle physics, as well as general relativity, emerges from the topological interactions of these extended structures and their knots.

Prof. Schiller worked it out quite well, though he and I still have different ways of working time into the models.

1. Classical electrodynamics and photons in flat and curved space-time deduced from extended entities

2. General relativity, gravitons and cosmology deduced from extended entities


3. Quantum theory and quantum electrodynamics deduced from extended entities



4. Deducing the three gauge interactions from featureless strands


The math works quite well, and as I said is in fact emergent from this model and topological knot logic.

Actually, black holes require singularities and we are just learning/postulating what kind of physics would allow for this type of phenomenon. I wouldn't be so quick as to label it as a "fuck up" in the calculations. Big bangs however is anyone's guess at this point.

A singularity is an unrealistic solution, they emerge when you push the incomplete equations of GR beyond their bounds of application.

There is no reason to assume a black hole continues collapsing to an infinitely dense point.

[Neosutra]

Why would there be no reason to assume the infinitely dense point? There are plenty of models to show how this is possible and probable. Even the einstien-bosen state models for low temperature particle reactions show how states can stack ontop of each other when the conditions are right. It just goes back to that matter breaking down from its 3D form in these cases, but still representing the same "mass" for that location in space-time.

As for Prof. Schiller's paper's you quoted, they made a lot of suggestions and potential "what ifs", but I didnt see anything solid to back them up. Pretty pictures though.

From the perspective of a beam of light though, you would get the sort of dimensional reduction you describe, but this is less of a literal effect as it is a statement on the broadness of the interactions which occur for massless structures.

It is a literal effect. And we characterize these massive structures via their waves, they aren't mutually exclusive properties.

[Max™]

I mean as I'm modeling it.

As for stacking states, a black hole is what happens already when you attempt to locate too many "objects" in the same location. A major portion of my drive to study physics was disbelief at the idea of point particles, and the obviously infinite results you get if you begin to stack them.

Such a paradoxical infinity, still pointlike, still indistinguishable from a single point particle other than by it's mass, yet infinitely heavy told me there was something wrong here. If you could have such a thing, then there is no reason for any point particle to have a particular non-infinite mass.

It is absurd that they might, in fact, as the possible non-infinite masses comprise such a minute range of states compared to an infinite range of infinite masses, that finding any non-infinitely massive point particle would be vanishingly unlikely.

As it stood at that point, I knew mass was nothing but interaction, so infinite mass implies infinite interaction. If it is contained within an event horizon then by definition is that not a limited interaction, and the hole itself obviously does not possess infinite mass. There is a black hole at the center of our own galaxy with a huge amount of mass, yes, but mere millions of solar masses is far from infinite.

I could deduce that there is an edge in space, that at least the portion of the Universe we can see does not contain infinite numbers of stars, a la Olber's Paradox.

So the idea of an infinity hiding behind each event horizon offended me.


I later learned that this results from applying the (incorrect) idea of point particles to the equations, leading to a runaway effect. Logically if you discard the point particle assumption, there is no reason to keep the runaway either.




Motion Mountain - Begin Downloading the Free Physics Files, the paper deducing quantum mechanics is the most interesting example, as it shows the natural way this sort of extended object model produces the work of Dirac, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, all from the postulate that crossings are observable events, and the various Reidemester poke moves. As well as showing the simple production of QED/Feynman Diagram's from the model.

[Neosutra]

It isnt infinitely heavy, it is infinitely dense, there is a huge difference between the two. Each black hole has a finite mass to it, which is proportional to the amount of matter it has absorbed. There is nothing paradoxical about it, it is just simply the way matter behaves under such conditions (probably).

No one is talking infinite mass here, at least not when talking about black holes.

The only time "infinity" comes into any of these singularity equations is the density equation, where as the equation is really irrelevant as we are talking about stacked waves (which dont really require a 3D "space" to occupy, and thus dont really follow the classical "density" equations).

[Max™]

Infinite density without other infinite attributes is nonsensical.

Attempting to apply known physics to a singularity is more than slightly absurd, it is bad enough that one can not show in any convincing manner that it is proper to extend the physical laws which operate within this Universe beyond the event horizon of a black hole... but to attempt to apply physical properties to something which is literally no longer part of the same Universe?

Nevermind that density is mass/volume, and you're not going to get infinity on one side of that equation without infinity on the other... on top of the absurd result that it has no volume at all!

Infinite anything, even discarding the classical issues, requires infinite information, yet a black hole can be shown to contain no more information than it's surface area can represent in planck values, convincingly.


No, my friend, I fear this is simply a place where logic has to step in and point out that we're pushing our workable theories and models beyond their limits, and producing invalid conclusions.

A singularity as a concept is fine, as a mathematical structure representing the incompleteness of a set it is fine, as a physical entity to consider as if it has real properties suggested by clearly overstretched equations?

I don't think so.

[Boyiee]

Question:

In the gif and pics with the hubble staring at a dark spot for 4 months and seeing the 10,000 galaxies; it states one has 8times as many stars as our galaxy and technically shouldnt exist according to current physics theories. Why, or why not?

[Neosutra]

It isnt nonsensical Max lol.

You are misrepresenting the physics of the situation. mass/volume = density. It isnt "infinity on one side of the equation", as the volume goes infinitely small, density goes infinitely large. But as I said these relationships dont really apply in this situation. A more realistic representation is mass/0 = indefinate. You are basing an entire physical assumption on an improperly defined (and scientifically incorrect) premis of infinite mass, instead of understanding the mechanics of the situation.

And a mathematical singularity isnt the same as a physical singularity. There are just too many plausible (and tested) theories that describe how matter/waves act in these types of situations to dismiss it as "nonsensical".

What you are saying really is a misrepresentation of the actual physics of the situation.

To Boyiee, galaxies' have their own balanced equilibrium like any massive object. Galaxies are (theoretically) supported by a super massive black hole in the center, which the rest of the galaxy's mass orbits around. Our current understanding of galactic formations show us that a galaxy of that size should have broken up into a few smaller clusters of galaxies, rather than take the shape of a smaller galaxy (spiral) with much much larger amounts of matter. There are a few good explanations for this, as this galaxy existed a LONG time ago, but for the moment it is a very interesting phenomenon.