Starship Asterisk*

But a balloon has a surface and an interior. A singularity, from what I have read, has neither. Or am I wrong? Not that it matters, as IMOPO everything was made from nothing, according to (I hope I'm not wearing out his name) Pascual Jordan. It's good to bear in mind that the balloon metaphor is ju...

aristarchusinexile wrote:

makc wrote:

aristarchusinexile wrote:Perhaps, if we do, we will find the universe shaped like an oval with us located in one end of the oval.

Nah, I think it is dodecahedron.

How about a Dodocahedrun .. a bird running towards extinction.

Nah, its the seventeenth stellation of the icosidodecahedron.

Entropy and Uncertainty are the enemies of a true vacuum. If it were just entropy, a true vacuum would be possible, but hideously unlikely. Heisenberg completely rules out such a beast, though; truly empty space would be a violation of the Uncertainty Principle, and modern quantum mechanics, while i...

I believe that the 'sum of all integers' is one of those undefined values, since it doesn't converge to any particular value. You have something like this: 0 + 1 + (-1) + 2 + (-2) + 3 + (-3) +... The sum of the first two terms is 1, the sum of the first three terms is 0, the sum of the first four te...

Mathematically zero, being an even, unsigned real number, is most certainly finite. In the parlance of physics, 'finite' seems to be used to refer to any value that is not infinite or not zero, which I guess is their way of saying "a knowable, existent quantity of something". leave these l...

Hello Qev, I reread my post and feel that I should clarify that a zero mass particle traveling through a medium is moving at less than c even though generally c is the accepted representative of particle speed. That's why I misstated that c wasn't a necessary gauge for light/time. Gotcha, I see wha...

Hello Qev, I don't think photons, travelling at c, experience time at all, do they? No,I don't think so. Nor do I think that c is a necessarily a criterium for the statement to be correct. I am under the understanding that this fact would hold true for any other massless particle as well. I'm prett...

A vacuum with or without magnetic fields? Surely there is no place in the Universe without gravitational, magnetic, and electric fields. Equally sure, in most of the Universe all of those fields are very weak- especially electric and magnetic. But not zero. Our friend Heisenberg pretty much forbids...

If the pattern of photons doesn't change after hundreds of millions of years, has the pattern experienced 'Time'? Further - If there is no gravity in a void to slow time .. does time speed to infinite? I don't think photons, travelling at c, experience time at all, do they? From the Bootes Void dis...

Well, remember, gravity doesn't bend spacetime, gravity is the bend in spacetime.

All this tells anyone is that they need to learn the differences between melting and crystallization. Q - a movie of sublimation of an ice cube played in reverse might appear exactly to be be a cube crystal forming. It might appear the same in a simple video, but that would only be due to a lack of...

I don't really see time as any different than space, when it comes right down to it. Just as distance is an observer's measure of separation of position, time is an observer's measure of separation of occurrence. It's a direction, more or less.

harry wrote:G'day

Actual time cannot change.

Relative time can

Define "actual time".

All this tells anyone is that they need to learn the differences between melting and crystallization.

Any thoughts on how one would estimate how the temperature would change with depth on this Earth-sized water planet?

The advantage to solar sails is that they have no need to carry reaction fuel. That, and their relative simplicity.

There's also GIMP, which is the free open-source answer to Photoshop, though I'm not entirely sure how the two compare, feature-wise, having never used the GIMP.

My understanding of a black hole is something along the lines of space-time being so distorted beyond the event horizon that the direction in space that points toward the singularity stops being a direction in space, and instead becomes a direction in time (ie. the future). So, for any photon inside...

Before the tread is close here are the different phase for water under different temperature and pressure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid#Phase_diagram Enjoy. I found this one while stumbling around doing some water-planet research. It's delightfully detailed. :) http://www.lsbu.a...

This is probably a little off-topic for this thread, Chris, but do you know if anyone has modelled what the interior of an Earth-sized water planet would be like? I've been curious about such a thing for a while now. :) I don't know. But this discussion has made me consider giving it a shot. A firs...

Another problem is that you can't have a liquid water planet as you describe it. If the planet is large enough to be able to hold an atmosphere, you don't have to go very far below the surface before the pressure is above a few gigapascals. At such pressures, water only can exist as a solid. So wha...

Plasma is simply ionized (atomic) gas, and it still subject to the effects of gravity. Dark Matter is a name for a class of theories describing what appears to be a mass distribution in the universe greatly in excess of the visible matter. The leading theory is that it is composed of massive partic...

interstellaryeller wrote:...if it hits a 400km gravitational keyhole as it sling shots aroung us then it will return in 2036 for impact.

You're off by a factor of one thousand, roughly. The gravitational keyhole is only ~600m across.

Well, from the perspective of General Relativity, gravity isn't a thing that moves through spacetime , but is rather a change in the shape of spacetime itself caused by the mass of the black hole. That bending of space is what we experience as gravity. Gravitational waves apparently move at the spee...

Nereid wrote:OK, try now ... and let me know if it's still giving you problems.

It's working fine for my browsers now, also. Thanks, Nereid!