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The Cool Science Stuff Thread

rosco rathbone said:
Why We Should Embrace The End Of Human Spaceflight
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Exactly right. I've been making the same argument about colonizing the moon and other planets for the past year or two.

In the end, it's not about ending manned spaceflight altogether as much as it is accepting the rather harsh limits man's presence imposes on ANY mission as well as a careful pre-flight examination of the mission's objectives with reference to a compelling reason to include man at all.
 
It seems that Iain Banks was actually on to something...

We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.

An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are talking about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.)

Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.

As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn...

Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)
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--A Few Notes On The Culture Iain Banks


Using these tools, [the researchers] have discovered that black-hole collisions can produce vortex lines that form a doughnut-shaped pattern, flying away from the merged black hole like smoke rings. The researchers also found that these bundles of vortex lines—called vortexes—can spiral out of the black hole like water from a rotating sprinkler.
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Visualizing Warped Spacetime
 
rosco rathbone said:
War Nerd Deflates Cool Navy Laser Concept
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As I recall, gatling guns where very glitchy when they first came out. But the modern, improved versions are doing quite well, thank you. Greater range, greater cycle rate, greater magazine capacity, and almost no jams.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the laser weapons. Not the least of which is they are a long way from perfected. But the Navy thinks they are obviously getting up in the useful range, and they want them.

Nobody, that I know of, in or out of the Navy, is proposing to use them exclusively. That would be idiotic currently, and possibly forever. Weather (rain, fog, snow) and smoke problems, no over-the-horizon capability, possible counter-measures are all known drawbacks. And they are working on at least some of them.

They also like the advantages of low cost per shot and a practically infinite magazine capacity. Missiles are mondo expensive and you can only carry so many of them. A mix could be more combat effective while improving the budgetary constraints. We recently fired more than $100 million of cruise missiles into Libya. Think the Libyans will pay us back for them? I'm not holding my breath.

If the lasers are good enough for tactical use, go for it. They will only get better in the future.
 
"Pioneer anomoly" might be explained...

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Since 1980 there has been an interesting anomaly in the trajectory of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. Astronomer John Anderson had studied the effects of gravitation in the outer solar system using Doppler studies of radio transmissions from the spacecraft.

A very small but real anomaly in the data showed that Pioneer 10 was slowing down (due to the gravity between it and the sun) a tiny bit more than expected. The anomaly amounted to only 8.74 times ten to the minus ten meters per second squared. However it was there and needed explanation.

Various theories were proposed, from a modification of Newtonian gravity to the drag caused by dark matter. Heat from the spacecraft (from its on board plutonium reactor) was also considered. The idea was that if as little as five percent more heat was being radiated away from the sun, compared to the amount of heat being radiated towards the sun, this would account for the anomaly.

An earlier assessment of the heat difference couldn't account for the anomaly. But a new assessment says that it can.

http://news.discovery.com/space/oh-pioneer-mysterious-anomaly-may-finally-be-solved-110414.html

If confirmed, this will be a great example of how an apparent anomaly in data can be resolved by straight forward means rather than relying on ad hoc assumptions about untested theories.

Further info...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10

BTW...the Pioneer 10 spacecraft is now about 15.4 billion kilometers from Earth, heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, at approximately 2.6 AU per year. If no interstellar collisions destroy the craft (a highly unlikely possibility) Pioneer 10 will reach Aldebaran in about 2 million years.
 
I still do not see a working nuclear reactor on a Jap. fault line here.
 
U.S. Collider Offers Physicists a Glimpse of a Possible New Particle

Maybe...

"Physicists sifting through data generated by the Tevatron particle collider in Illinois have uncovered a signal that neither they nor the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics can explain."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fermilab-new-particle

An unexpected "blip" in data suggests a new subatomic particle with a mass of around 150 Gev (giga-electron volts).

Further analysis of the data will determine if the particle is real or just a glitch. So far, analysis shows only about a one percent possibility of it being a glitch but that's not good enough. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so for now, the number crunching continues.
 
stephen55 said:
Maybe...

"Physicists sifting through data generated by the Tevatron particle collider in Illinois have uncovered a signal that neither they nor the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics can explain."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fermilab-new-particle

An unexpected "blip" in data suggests a new subatomic particle with a mass of around 150 Gev (giga-electron volts).

Further analysis of the data will determine if the particle is real or just a glitch. So far, analysis shows only about a one percent possibility of it being a glitch but that's not good enough. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so for now, the number crunching continues.
Click to expand...

Funny how that particle turned up--needing more research---right when they were about to be defunded.
 
110420-coslog-righthanded-2p.nv_nws.JPG


Thorg's theorem of isoclastic dualist incompatibilities borrows heavily from Drog's postulate of the Toro-neurotic postmodern. But he did give proper credit in his thesis.
 
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