Large Hardon Collider

[Max™]

I'm hypersensitive to little cuts on my fingers, I should get one of those nerdy little thumb condoms, but yeah... overuse, that works too.


Do you know what the implication of this change I am suggesting is?

Do you know why Einstein would have put that value there of all places?


He specifically espoused that the Universe should be local and causal.


For various reasons I've covered in many different ways, and which anyone with any knowledge of the theory will agree with, GR preserves locality as a theory, by definition.


If that constant was not placed where it was, then the immediate implication would be to continue the progression.

If accelerating at 99.999999999999% c can be considered equivalent to having incredibly high mass, as mass is just interaction, and acceleration is interaction across space.

Then we know that you will be at R = 0.000000000000000001 or somewhere thereabouts, experiencing severe time dilation.

You would interact with less time than a resting observer, with a tiny little slice, 0.000000000000001 seconds per second in the rest frame.

Still with me?

As you slow down, your % of c goes down, your equivalent mass goes down, and your interaction with time goes up, right?


If you reduced your mass after coming into a rest frame, your interaction would go up more and more, eventually you may be sitting at R = .97 or so, with your motion through time limited only by the proportion of your energy locked up in your mass.

E = mc^2 and all.


If R = 1 was at a non-zero mass, then your motion, and thus interaction with time at that mass would be causal, and you could be considered an ideal clock.

If R = 1 was at zero mass, then no object could interact in anything but a causal manner, and nothing could even observe an ideal light clock accurately because all non-zero masses would be at R < 1.


If R > 1 were possible, then you would have a broader definition of simultaneity.

At R = 1 you'd see a cup fall off a table, fall to the ground, and then shatter, 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds.

At R > 1, you may see the cup fall off the table and to the ground simultaneously, then fall to the ground and shatter simultaneously, then shatter and come to a rest simultaneously. 1, 2, 3.

Broader interaction with time, loosened causality.

It obviously doesn't occur at day to day masses, so R < 1 holds true.

So between our mass, and zero mass, R tends the rest of the way to 1.


If it hits 1 at a non-zero mass, it could increase further as mass decreases, and anything below the R = 1 mass would behave strangely, illogically even, in manners which could satisfy the requirements imposed on any quantum theory by the Bell Theorem, while matching up with experimental results.


I've been thinking that you could describe this form by taking the arrows in Feynman diagrams and simply making them fatter.

I like to think that would have amused Mr. Feynman.

[Neosutra]

Assume for a second then that you can in fact set the R = 1 point at a non-zero mass. Putting aside whatever you think is wrong with the idea.

Let me replace this statement for what it actually means:

Assume for a second that you ignore the observable and testable relationship between gravity and time.

There are a lot of problems with what you are saying max, but the very founding premis is incorrect, so Ill leave it at that for now and not waste my time writing another book response.

[Woozie]

I'm watching last night's Colbert, and holy crap the helium part was so hilarious.

Edit: Hey that's the guy from the science channel.

[Max™]

Let me replace this statement for what it actually means:



There are a lot of problems with what you are saying max, but the very founding premis is incorrect, so Ill leave it at that for now and not waste my time writing another book response.

No Neo, it is not incorrect at these energy levels.

That is what I have been saying.

Let me roll it around some more and I'll dig up what you're looking for, I had someone else bring up this specific objection last year, but it turns out it's just an assumption after all.


You realize that if you're right, and we can unequivocally say how gravity and time work at these scales, then there is no issue with uniting QM and GR beyond non-locality, right?

[Neosutra]

No, you're misinterpreting what Im saying. Im saying that you cant set R equal to 1 in any system where there is -any- gravity. As for setting the Du to a plank length or plank mass (not sure what you implied you did) thats fine, but your R=1 value changes based on that change. Furthermore, you cant even use that curve once down to quantum levels so both of your assumptions are incorrect.

[Eliseos]

Here's the link to the Colbert Report from last night, in case anyone wanted to watch it http://www.comedycentral.com/colbert...isodeId=253942

[Max™]

Furthermore, you cant even use that curve once down to quantum levels so both of your assumptions are incorrect.

This is why I can adjust that portion of the interaction with time, it is not as though this is the realm where GR is obviously not broken.


As it stands now we have the entire range from ~infinite mass/0 distance from the acceleration horizon/light speed motion for a massive body, to our mass, and our relatively benign classical motion as the Earth whirls along through space, in the range from R = 0, to R = .9 or so, I forget the exact value, but at the Earths surface a clock which was identical to one 10,000 meters above it would lose something like a second every 29,000 years.

So we're clearly not too far from the Rate = 1 point.

Yet, in the range where GR doesn't work currently, from our experienced rate of time at the Earth's surface, to that experienced in flat spacetime at infinite distance from a gravity well, is 1.

This curve drops RAPIDLY from extremely high masses/small values of R, to masses on the order of stars and such/values of R = .5 or so, to the mass of the Earth, and bodies within it's vicinity, at R = .9~ something.


Then, in the entire difference between our mass, and the mass of a proton, and then an electron, and a neutrino... it reaches R = .999... only reaching R = 1 at 0 mass.

An observation which obviously can not have been made, because, well... we don't have any way of observing the Rate of time for a body at 0 mass in flat spacetime at infinite distance from a gravity well.


The curve doesn't work down there, Neo, this is what I am saying. It isn't extrapolated properly.


Perhaps something more like this would be appropriate:
http://i341.photobucket.com/albums/o...nteraction.jpg

[Max™]

Just had to say thank you to Neo btw, for making me doubt myself more than I have in a while, which is an important thing in Science. I had to actually go back and retrace my line of thought and determine where this idea emerged and confirm that I hadn't missed something obvious.

A bit of explanation of where this idea came from, with a tad bit of conspiracy thrown in:

Spoiler: show

That is a valid objection to make, and it would be devastating to the entire idea, except that it isn't experimentally validated, and the curve doesn't follow smoothly to that value, it was adjusted to reach that value at that point because it was decided, by Einstein mind you, that it should be there.

He didn't have any reason to do this based on experiment.

I know, I've checked, there is no weak field result showing the rate of time which would be observed by a massless clock in flat spacetime.

There are approximations, but there are also known experiments which show that a significantly non-zero mass can experience very near to Rate = 1.


So why would he have done that?


Whether my specific models and conclusions are right or not, one has to be aware that it is not as simple of a mathematical derivation as Neo is making it sound, the curve is not smooth into that point, plus if it's an edge, wouldn't it lack a derivative anyways?

There was no experimental result showing where this portion should be set.

There are experimental results showing that the values given for the significantly dilated portion, upper portion of the curve, are accurate to various degrees, in some cases to several orders.

I can not find one concerning the end where gravity, and thus spacetime curvatures such as those which would be expected of subatomic particles, were shown to have R = 1.

A little bit of philosophical reasoning about the nature of time:

Spoiler: show

My issue with that is in part because I am of the C-Series type philosophical line of thought regarding time.

A-Series is assuming that time is a process, that only the present exists, and the past and future are just extrapolations of it in our mind.

B-Series is assuming that time is ordered, but that the present is just something we insert after the fact, it isn't really an important part of time. Things simply happened earlier or later than other things did.

C-Series is assuming that time is ordered, and real, that the various times we label as the past and future exist, but that the arrow of time arises from something else, it is not a fundamental aspect of time that events only procede one way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time) is a decent explanation of the basic concept.


R = 1 as the highest possible rate of interaction with time is akin to saying that whether or not the future or past are real, they can not be affected in anything but a causal manner, and thus no time can be observed as anything but the present, or recalled as the past, or projected to be the future.

Presentism rears it's ugly head.

A better explanation of what the hell this silly Rate shit is anyways:

Spoiler: show

The Rate of time determines the angle at which you view the 4 dimensional structure of the Universe, a low rate of time leaves only narrow slices visible, with events jammed together, or outside of view entirely.

A broader angle lets you view a more causally accurate slice of time according to your reference frame, until at Rate = 1, you are viewing events as they exist in a purely causal fashion. This, leads to this, leads to this, and there's no confusion.


A still broader angle, which is directly implied by relativity if it is not limited (see above) would do what? Let you view events in several steps of a causal sequence simultaneously. This and it's effect, leads to the effect and another, leads to another and a conclusion, and the conclusion is left behind when it comes to rest.


Confusing as hell eh?

Totally fucks with causality if you have things zipping about interacting with time at these angles... and old Al... he was certain that the Universe was local and causal.


Relativity doesn't offer a way to get rid of this problem, it makes it implicit, so he tucked it away in plain sight, he butted R = 1 up against 0 mass, sighed and shook his head.

"That'll have to do til I figure a way out of this mess." I can imagine him saying.


He died without finding it, and we've been trying to fix the mismatch in physics for nearly a century now, the whole time never seriously considering the idea of loosening causality up a bit, it's just common sense that causes lead to effects, and not vice versa... plus that equation there shows you can't do that anyways. So why bother?


Why bother indeed.

Incidentally, I'm not trying to dumb anything down as if I don't think much of you guys, I'm trying to explain something which I'm terribly excited about with a group of people who I think can understand what I'm trying to say, and point out holes in it.

I wouldn't try if I didn't respect your intelligence.



Incidentally, ty again Neo, while I was looking around I noticed an article I had never seen before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronon, which is VERY similar to what I am talking about with, as I call it, extended temporal interaction.

I'm not sure exactly how he has it worked out, I think it's still a causal form, but it's very interesting nonetheless, I must go digest it.

Fascinatingly, he seems to have arrived a similar type of idea, from the non-relativistic quantum side of things, but I think he's still trying to preserve causality, rather than play with it.

P. Caldirola, never heard of him, still a good sign to find similar concepts from the "other side of the fence" so to speak.

[Max™]

One last thing on that subject: Backward Causation and the EPR Paradox

Then, for a twist, a change to another interesting subject:

Launch loop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Orbital ring - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have heard about these in various different places, but never really investigated them... but my god, while I've been fretting over the issues that would come with a space elevator, these accelerated mass supported structures could be built like...

Now, today.

Why aren't we doing this?

[Acturus]

Dark matter wrecking ball may have hit Milky Way - USATODAY.com

Dark matter "wrecking ball" may have hit Milky Way

Darth Vader's Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris?

Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years. The real explanation may be the power of an invisible wrecking ball made of dark matter — a cloud of the enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.

Left behind by this "Dark Matter Clump" cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the " Gould Belt," which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia's University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

In the study, Bekki offered a new explanation for the Gould Belt, which 19th-Century astronomers first noted. It circles more than 3,000 light years outside the center of the Milky Way (where a light year equals 5.9 trillion miles) at a 20-degree tilt from the galaxy's rotating spiral arms. In 1997, the astronomer W. G. L. Poppel pointed out that astronomers could not explain where all its young stars, perhaps 2 million of them less than 60 million years old, came from using common explanations of star formation.

"The point is that the sun is immersed in the Gould Belt," Poppel added, suggesting we might want to know how all these young stars came to surround our 4.6 billion-year-old sun.

Since then, Bekki notes, researchers such as Juerg Diemand at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have reported hundreds of dense dark matter clouds that may zoom near the sun's neighborhood of the galaxy.

So what is dark matter? Astronomers have only detected it by its gravitational pull on galaxies; it is literally dark, which makes it impossible to see with telescopes and leads them to believe that so-called "weakly-interacting massive particles" (WIMPS, in a bit of physics humor) — exotic physics particles much like neutrinos that only rarely electromagnetically interact with normal atoms — comprise the bulk of the stuff. Most likely, dark matter was cooked up and clumped together in the primordial chemistry of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Despite its darkness, the gravitational tug of dark matter suggests there is about five times more of it than normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people, in the universe.

"In the new scenario presented in the (study), the Gould Belt is one of the stellar substructures formed from high-speed, off-centre collisions between giant molecular clouds, which are believed to be the birth place for stars and dark matter clumps orbiting the Galaxy," Bekki writes. Using computer models to test a collision between a dark matter clump and a hydrogen gas cloud merely 1 million times heavier than the sun, he finds that within 45 million years the dark matter's gravity would have indeed spawned a tilted ring of infant stars looking much like the Gould Belt.

"This is a very promising result," says astrophysicist Varoujan Gorjian of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The Gould's Belt result gives a new tool to try to see if our idea of how dark matter may be distributed in a galaxy is correct," he adds, "since we can't actually observe dark matter itself we need to see the secondary effect that those clumps may have. The Gould's Belt model makes a good case that in fact dark matter may reside in clumps."

And what about those comets from the distant Kuiper comet belt beyond Pluto hurtling toward Earth? The study shows the distance between the sun and the massive dark matter cannonball could have been as close as 326 light years away, Bekki says by e-mail, so that the gravitational force of the Dark Matter Clump can be stronger than that of the sun in the very outer part of the solar system. The Kuiper belt would be significantly perturbed owing to this. As a result of this, a lot of comets would intrude into the inner part of the solar system (possibly to the Earth) after the dark impact.

Take that, Chuck Norris. Just imagine the sky lighting up with new stars more than 30 million years ago. "This is pure speculation," Bekki adds. But if the Milky Way has 20 dark matter clumps hanging around, he reckons that a Gould Belt-like star ring likely forms from dark matter collisions every billion years or so. And about 0.1% of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy started this way.

Concludes the paper: "The Gould Belt is not just a magnificent stripe of stars in the night sky but also a fossil record containing profound physical meanings of a dramatic event which would have happened in the solar neighborhood."

[Mizango]

Rut roh. Dark matter always is a touchy subject in the science community, this will be fun.

[Max™]

Gallery


Eh, no one can deny dark matter exists, we've seen the effects of it's mass shadows.

Just a question of what it is.


Those gallery pictures up there are great btw, very pretty stuff.

[Psion]

Yay, neo's back, maybe he can answer whether life forms with bodies made of energy, instead of matter, could theoretically exist.

Basically, since life as we know it is made of matter, but utilizes energy such as kinetic/thermal in it's buisness of living, do you think the opposite could be true, neo? could life exist with bodies made up of thermal/kinetic/electrical/etc energy, that utilizes matter in its buisness of living? I'm thinking if it was possible, they would be pretty huge, but i'm not sure if such a thing could exist, or if so, under what conditions. :s

[Max™]

Spoiler: show

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...r_msx_full.jpg

Spoiler: show

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/gal2cen.jpg

Images of the Galaxy core that were super epic.

The top one is FUCKING GINORMOUS!

Making a stable, self organizing, self replicating, long lasting form of life without "solid" matter would be... challenging. I guess if you had something like a solitonic "cell" you could work from there.

Matter IS made of energy though, but I know that isn't what you meant, I'm sure Neo would point that out as well.

[Kaylia]

If a physicist tell me they understand what energy is, I think they deserve to be slapped.

[Max™]

Energy is work done, or the potential to do work.

[Woozie]

Energy is work done, or the potential to do work.

True, but this is just a definition of energy, not an understanding of energy. Physics is similar to mathematics in the sense that the actual objects we manipulate in our equations are often too abstract to truly understand.

Edit: And anyways, your post doesn't explain what energy truly is, it just shifts the problem from "understanding energy" to "understanding work".

Edit2: Holy crap that second image looks so awesome (well if it wasn't for the borders). I'm talking about this one

Spoiler: show

http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/gal2cen.jpg

I need a new desktop. Do you have this image in a larger size, without jagged border thingy?

[Eliseos]

It looks like someone cut that picture out with those kindergarten scissors.

[Acturus]

It looks like someone cut that picture out with those kindergarten scissors.

NASA has to save money somewhere!

[Kaylia]

Energy is work done, or the potential to do work.

And what's your definition of works (make sure it doesnt involve energy!). Do whatever you want with your definition, but personally, I feel like energy is something more fundamental than works.


Well, Woozie worded it better already, oh well.