h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As we understand it at this point in time.

Iron cannot float on water because it is too heavy, but it does. Man cannot fly, but he does. You cannot harness the wind, but we do. The atmosphere will prevent Man from ever leaving earth (and even if he did he could never get back because he'd burn up), but he has been off and back again many times. The cell is the smallest.. no, the molecule.. no, the atom.. oh forget it.

Do you see what I mean yet?

'Nonnie

There was a documentary on UK Channel 4 last month entitled "Einstein's biggest blunder". (or something very similar)

The thrust of the argument, as far as I could follow it (it's not that the argument was particularly complex; it's just that I was watching it at a friend's house and there were many distractions) was that for the Universe to be the shape it is now, one of two things had to be true - either there were multiple simultaneous "Big Bang" singularities which became merged, or at the time of the "Big Bang" the speed of light was significantly different to what it is now. The consensus seemed to be that at any given instamt the speed of light anywhere in the Universe is a constant, but that overall the speed of light has been slowing down continuously since the formation of the Universe... This apparently solved a lot of questions about the stability of the universe without resorting to factoring in an arbitary "universal constant" into the calculations.

Discuss.

To put it simply, "The sun and stars revolve around the earth. It's a proven fact!" For how many centuries? I am not so arrogant that I believe science has progressed so far that we now know all the answers at this point.

'Nonnie

Anybody ever heard of the correlated lightbeams? (Or was it photons? My memory is failing...) Supposedly ol' Bohr (friend of Einsteins) said something about that, and I've heard rumors that the hypothesis has been tested and "proven" right (strengthened). Does anybody know anything about that?

This effect is also known as "spooky action at a distance", Einstein's name for it. Einstein was constantly trying to find a way of disproving Quantum Mechanics, although he had got a Nobel Prize for his contribution towards it. (The Photoelectric Effect). He tried to disprove it by making predictions using Quantum Mechanics which produced ridiculous results. Unfortunately for him, experiments went on to show that all the ridiculous results were true. Action at a distance was one.

I can't remember the details, but basically, you can link two light particles (photons) so that what happens to one has an effect on the other. You then send them off in different directions. When the two are light-years apart, you can do something to one. The effect will be observable instantly on the other (even though it is light-years distant). This was so obviously ridiculous that Einstein concluded that Quantum Mechanics must be wrong. Recent experiment by Bell in Queen's University Belfast and others seem to show that this effect is genuine. The Universe is stranger than we had imagined.

This doesn´t just work for the photons, it can also be done to quarks. Two quarks that have been together are seperated. One of them is manipulated so the spin goes the other way, and in that instant the other changes it´s spin too. Personally i think it could give rise to a sort of faster-than-light telegraphy.

Hmm, tell me more about that Einstein blunder, I´ve never heard of it before and also a bit doubt the programme was serious.

The programme was totally serious...

The basis of their argument was that, based on the current knowledge of the speed, direction and mass of distant galaxies, if you were to try to identify the centre of the universe by "playing time backwards" in a computer model to see where they converged there would come a point where you would have a number of seperate, disconnected spheres of space-time. Followed back far enough, this gives a "multiple big bang" picture, with different groups of galaxies converging into different singularities. With some form of "decelleration constant" applied to lightspeed, they all converge in a single point. (It's a decelleration constant when time is being viewed in the conventional direction, with the speed of light accellerating as it is played back towards the "big bang".)

Basically, it was the work of two young American physicists, published earlier this year in "Nature" (or was it Scientific American? I forget. It was a mainstream US magazine, anyway...) which, if it holds together may lead to a joint Nobel nomination.

There's a chance that the programme notes are still available - I'll have a look next time I'm at the Channel 4 site, and post a link here if they are.

I´ll look up what the two magazines have in their archives. but to me the whole thing seems kinda conspicuous. Saying there are several Big Bang places, wasn´t that solved with that inflatable balloon model?

I think I might have read about that in Popular Science...

'Nonnie

Programme summary at:

http://www.channel4.com/equinox/ein_summary.html

Oh.. So we're really riding on one of those re-igniting fireworks thingies. Kewl!


'Nonnie