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Science is Drokking Fantastic Because...

Started by The Legendary Shark, 21 July, 2011, 11:05:57 PM

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Mardroid

Quote from: pops1983 on 16 September, 2011, 09:37:38 PM
It's to do with nomenclature and atmospheric pressures. A Hot Gas Giant emits more heat than it recieves from its sun by a process called the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism. Jupiter and Saturn are hot gas giants.

A cold gas giant absorbs most of the heat from its suns. That doesn't neccessarily mean the surface temperature is cold.

Gotcha. Thanks for the reply.

Definitely Not Mister Pops

You may quote me on that.


Mardroid

Quote from: Richmond Clements on 21 September, 2011, 09:18:25 PM
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14998679

I know of the Aurora Borealis (although i haven't seen it outside the television) but I didn't know there was a Southern equivalent!

Definitely Not Mister Pops

Tonight, I have mostly been reading about Foldit

There have been other examples of Scientist using Internet Communities for research (like the Hubble Galaxy Zoo Project), but this takes thing to another level. I think there's a lesson in this; you should approach a challenge as you would a game.

Quote from: Mardroid on 21 September, 2011, 11:26:02 PM
Quote from: Richmond Clements on 21 September, 2011, 09:18:25 PM
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14998679

I know of the Aurora Borealis (although i haven't seen it outside the television) but I didn't know there was a Southern equivalent!

Sometimes, if there's a big enough Solar Flare, a clear night and no light pollution, you can see a faint Borealis effect over the British Isles. So effectively, you'll probably never see a Borealis over Britain. But it's possible.
You may quote me on that.

Richmond Clements

QuoteSometimes, if there's a big enough Solar Flare, a clear night and no light pollution, you can see a faint Borealis effect over the British Isles. So effectively, you'll probably never see a Borealis over Britain. But it's possible.

I seen it once while in NI many years ago, but up here in the North of Cal Hab, we get them from time to time during the winter.

Proudhuff

Saw it on Skye once, outside looking up at the light polution free sky and innocently(drunkenly) wondered what city the lights to the west were from  :-[ 
DDT did a job on me

Dandontdare

Seeing the Northern Lights is definitely on my "things to do before I die" list.

On another matter - was Einstein wrong? http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos?newsfeed=true

Mikey

Probably as wrong as Newton. Interesting stuff alright!

M.
To tell the truth, you can all get screwed.

ming

I've been lucky enough to see the aurora borealis a few times - but the first time was the best.  In a fairly out-of-the-way spot in Alaska (a small town you can only get to by boat or plane), middle of the night, pinks and greens rippling across the sky at mindblowing speed, with mountains silhouetted against the light show...

I'd seen pictures and videos before but thought that some of what they showed was exaggerated (speed, intensity of colour) but no - the real deal will leave you speechless.

The times I've seen them since have never quite matched the first show, although seeing them from a charter plane somewhere over middle-north Canada was pretty damn cool.

I know there's science behind what's going on but to be honest there's no room in my brain for thinking while watching stuff like that.  Just staring and drooling a bit.

Dandontdare

Quote from: ming on 23 September, 2011, 01:11:39 PM
I know there's science behind what's going on but to be honest there's no room in my brain for thinking while watching stuff like that.  Just staring and drooling a bit.

I know exactly what you mean - me and a bunch of mates went to Cornwall in 1999 for the total eclipse, and even though we knew exactly what was happening and were expecting it, when the darkness suddenly descends, you can't stop that primitive monkey bit at the back of your brain screaming "ARGH! The sun's gone out! ARGH!". It was a very spooky feeling.

paddykafka

Star Trek here we come!

(from Yesterday's Washington Post)

The speed of light is broken! CERN has just measured subatomic particles traveling at faster than the speed of light ! Or, in non-English: CERN (that's the European Organization for Nuclear Research to you, American) has just measured a neutrino (that's a subatomic particle to you, uh, Multicellular Organism) that traveled from Geneva, Switzerland, to a destination in Italy and managed to exceed the speed of light by 60 nanoseconds — with a margin of error of only 10 nanoseconds.

"Something exceeds the speed limit in Italy, and somehow this is news?"

If true, this is huge. The idea that the speed of light is a constant, never to be exceeded, has been fixed since the time of Albert Einstein. It's one of those operating assumptions that underlie our every action, like "single men with cats are bad marriage material" or "if TV critics praise a show for being fresh, funny and insightful, it will fail." If this isn't true, nothing is true. All the rules on which I've based my existence — "Christmas calories don't count," "the Orioles will lose," "if you like a product or service, inevitably they will change it, start charging you more, or George Lucas will add new scenes and special features." Up is up, down is down, right is whatever position Ron Paul currently occupies, and the speed of light cannot be broken.

This is so huge that the Europeans are asking us to check it. They haven't done that since the rise of the Third Reich.

If we can verify it, then it's the only real news today. It will force us to rethink all our scientific assumptions. The speed of light was supposed to be an absolute limit, like the age of consent, not a guideline, like the drinking age.

Rick Perry was right. Science is wrong. "The Big Bang Theory" will have to go off the air in shame.

But on the bright side, now maybe we can visit Tatooine after all! We just discovered it . At the rate we're going this week, "Star Wars" will turn out to be a documentary.

Still, if true, this is huge. It undermines everything we've thought since 1905.

We'll have to rethink all our other assumptions. Maybe we don't need coffee to survive. Maybe shark attacks aren't more relevant to our lives than car crashes. Maybe we should trust Greeks bearing gifts.

I've had so many of my assumptions unsettled that I have this intense urge to become a Scientologist.

It's too much. Next time we see a particle do that, somebody ought to pull it over.


M.I.K.

Going back to the Northern Lights for a bit - I've seen it on the horizon a few times as a vague, barely discernible, green glow, but once, about ten years ago, they gave a more impressive showing.

It stretched across the entire sky from north to south in swirly green streaks with patches of red. The largest of these patches was directly overhead and (rather disturbingly), made it look as if the sky had cracked open.

It's very unusual for them to be as impressive as that around here (I'm pretty far down to the South of Scotland in East Lothian), but a facebook friend of mine insists he saw them one night way down in Derbyshire. I asked him when this was, and it was roughly the same time I saw them. Might even have been the same night.

Definitely Not Mister Pops

After much alcohol, I've decided to weigh in on this LHC-making-neutrinos-go-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-story.

It's early days, nothing has been published yet, so that frees me up to wildly speculate with Space Maths.

An unpredictable and immediately unexplainable result is the best possible result for any Scientific Experiment.

In 1905 Einstein got his Noble Prize for his work on the Photo-Electric Effect, he never got Lauded for his work on Relativity. The Photo-Electric Effect is a quantum effect. He was the Father of quantum physics. With quantum physics, comes uncertainty. At the quantum level, things can appear to simultaneously teleport to everywhere. There's a thing called the Correspondence principle, it basically means that the uncertainty in the quantum numbers is reduced to negligible at the Macroscopic scale.

The thing is, in the LHC, the energy levels of the neutrinos is easily 100 times greater than the natural energy states of the quadrillions of neutrinos that have passed through your body as you've read this. Energies as high as that are not natural. I would propose that; at Energy States this high, the correspondence principal is stretched. If there's enough energy, micro-scale quantum events can be observed at the macro-scale.

This is all just space maths, I can't propose a hypothesis to test these assertions.
You may quote me on that.

O Lucky Stevie!

Sounds reasonable enough Pops as the Cosmic Inflationary Period occured when the ambient energy levels in the Universe were a shitload lot higher than current except...

(draws a deep breath)


...this experiment was run for three years on CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. The power of which was exceded by Fermilab before it was even completed.

The UFOlogists are going to pounce on this like IDW on a crap 80s toy franchise but let's see if this result is replicable.

If so it may be telling us something more about neutrinos than the inviolacy of light speed.

"We'll send all these nasty words to Aunt Jane. Don't you think that would be fun?"