Starship Asterisk*

On gravity being a force or geometry I have been reluctant to return to this board. I do not need the fighting, and yet that is what is going to happen if I return. Ok. First, the 92-year-old geometric description of gravity does explain the extra 43 arc seconds per century precession of the perihel...

Hey guys, let's be careful about being too aggressive. I attend another board where watching the personal attacks have become unpleasant. It is much worse than here, and yet it started much this way. We don't need to go there. Nereid You raised some good objections to my comments. More than good act...

Either way, it sure is a gorgeous image. I am only guessing here, but I think the consensus is right. Those bright spots are stars in our own galaxy, and not part of M-81. Again, I am guessing, but I figure that Holmberg IX would be similar to our Magellanic Clouds.

Nikki, there may well be value in what you are saying. Right now though I am working on the relationship between time and gravity with different frames of reference.

Yes they can, because those gravitational waves in a sense define the exact limit of the event horizon. Those distortions at a distance, like Earth is away from a nearby star, becme so tiny though that we are still struggling to even be able to see them at all. Near the black hole they might be pret...

I am going to assume that you are speaking of how the two frams of reference, one and two, see this oscillator. The outside observer, 1, will see the inbound traveler near the outside of the event horizon, 2, as having a slowing oscillator. Two will think his oscillator is running normally. If you a...

a-scientific. Let's not go there before we have a post to evaluate, Ok? Ok. I'm home. 25 minutes ago. I'll take this one at a time. What really draws me though is exploring how the intense gravity of a black hole bends the shape of distance and time. . . I see perhaps five frames of reference, maybe...

Interesting, kovil. While Einstein was Jewish culturally, he did some speculating that Buddhism was closer to the way he viewed God than other religions. That's not too far from Hindi. I have access to a little Sanscrit. Reviewed a book written in 171 AD in India which used some Sanscrit. Then read ...

Nereid I have not been ignoring you. I have been in the hospital for the last three days. Before I went in, I had been composing a response. That information is on my flash drive, which is attached to my home computer. I came here for a check-up, and the daggone doctor said, "We're keeping you....

Thank you Nereid. On another board that uses this software, administrative types have the capacity to move threads around. I would be happy to see this one go to the Physics Forums.

I'm interested to see just how interested the readers of posts in the Cafe are in either trying to answer these questions, or (more pertinent, to this thread) Nereid. When I first came here a few days ago, I thought you were an administrator, so I sent you a private message. You either did not see ...

I wonder what the Milky Way would look like from a planet in the Large Magellenic Cloud? That was a fascinating question, so I spent some time looking it up. I wanted to know the diameter of the LMC because I already knew the diameter of our own galaxy, and could therefore get the relative size. In...

in 4 words: wrong place to ask. Ok. I'm open to suggestions. Where should I have asked this? kovil You give me the impression that you have considered this issue long before I asked it here. Thank you for your response, by the way. It's going to take me a while to sort through what you said, but it...

I have been trying to understand why physicists do not like information being destroyed when a black hole evaporates. The limit of what I have gleaned so far is that quantum mechanics forbids it. The logic is not much above saying that the ball is red because light reflected by it has that color. It...

Cripes. There are so many factors controlling whether there is life outside out solar system. Are we the only ones? Is it common instead? Did it originate here or get transported here somehow? There are 10^22 stars or thereabouts and all the time in the universe, and yet is that enough? Could random...

Is it possible the predominant force is not gravity, but something else?

I've been wondering exacly that for some time. It would be an alternative explanation to the Dark Matter Tooth Fairy.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... -fire.html

National Geographic had a fairly straightforward answer that didn't need interplanetary war to explain fire rainbows.

That would be an image with a lot of red and blue in it, and more detail than was shown in the Hubble image of the Sombrero. That one was mostly grey.

581 has three known planets, the lightest of which is 581c. Surprisingly one of the others, about 50% heavier, is even closer to the star. 581c orbits in 12.9 days, and this other one orbits in something like 5.4. I'm running from memory; I'd have to look it up again to be certain of the number.

My desktop currently shows the Trifid Nebula, M-20. I really like it because it shows an eye-catching background of stars and all three main types of nebulae.