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

re 255: if the sun, the earth and the other planets are all from the same nebular cloud (which most of us believe atm) i think you can trace that cloud back to the big bang, no?

and btw: isn't matter the same as energy? if so everything is indeed 'solar powered' in a way, isn't it?

Cripes! I think I'll stick to poetry, good, bad or indifferent. If I stick my head up here it will likely be knocked off by flying protons. Or neutrons. Or Higgs Bosons. HELP!!!

don't forget the vogons!

and the spanish inquisition

I shall open a thread later - for the universe - serious and the not so serious(and then my level)

Paul - please don't let me put you off. Your postings are always interesting and therefore welcome - as far as I and, it seems, other people are concerned.

Pierce - Energy and matter. A good analogy here is that matter is to energy what ice is to water. Plus the Higgs boson, which they hope to discover is a relatively massive particle which glues it together. For instance into stars, galaxies, planets.

Jab

And Paul - [I think you can trace that cloud back to the big bang, no?]

Yes.

I have and are still learningfrom all who write here - if you stop! I don't learn

If you learn, I learn too, Prof.

Me too. I learn when I write as well as when I read. Putting thoughts in order and all that.

Jab

Wouldn't it be hilarious if, after the billions of dollars and Euros and whatveer they've spent, the tiny particles that are racing around sneak through some crevice and go off for some sightseeing?

look at it this way(47%slant)they didn't need CERN etc, all they had to do was ask uswe'd have told them

That's right!

on our teletext news pages, a judge in Hawaii has dismissed a lawsuit trying to stop the large hadron collider, he ruled that the federal courts do not have justification over it

Traveller in Time re 261
"The dust cloud forming our solar system is the remnant of a supernova or several of them.

Trouble with starcheology is we only have indirect evidence of traces of matter. No hard digging in the dirt will reveal any more info "

yup, , but still: if you trace even further back you will se that the seeds for those supernovas also were children of the big bang - as we all are. as everything is. according to theory, anyway (and what else will we have to go by, for now?)

by the way, friends, i have to say that even while you learn from this thread there is absolutely no guarantee that i will

()

those working on the collider are going to be supping loads ofwith nowt't do till its fixed

"Traveller in Time re 261:
'The dust cloud forming our solar system is the remnant of a supernova or several of them.' Trouble with starcheology is we only have indirect evidence of traces of matter."

I read a book in which the earlier star that went supernova was called "Tiamat" (aunt and mother). Having a large star spew its heavy metals into space would be a logical way to get those elements out of the center of the star, and out into space where they can form planets capable of developing and sustaining life. If there hadn't been a spewing or a collision between two stars, how would plkanets have had anyhting to form out of? The original particles that made up the early universe would have been simple elements like hydrogen or helium. It would have taken long periods of reshaping of these elements into carbon and silicon and iron and uranium etc. in the high heat of the center of a large star.

Jabberwock,

Item 1, absolutely correct, a black hole is a region of time-space so compressed that its gravitation is such that the escape velocity equals the speed of light at its event horizon. The distinction that I'm making has to do with the means producing that compression. In the most conventional case, a cepheid variable runs out of nuclear fuel, so that the expansive force opposing its gravitation disappears and it collapses inside its event horizon on account of the sheer magnitude of its intrinsic gravity (emitting a pair of coherant streams of gamma rays from its rotational poles in the process), forming a stellar collapse black hole, one step further off the main sequence than a neutron star, or pulsar, formed by a typical supernova. (Nothing mysterious about the 'event horizon', that's just the distance from the center of the black hole where escape velocity equals the speed of light.) There are a number of recognized black holes in the astronomical catalogues.

There are several other classes of black holes that cannot be accounted for this way, among them the galactic core (and other) supermassives and the 'ultralights', which have less than stellar masses (or masses below Chandrasekhar's limit[1], inclusive).

Hawking first described the latter class, the ultralight black holes, in a paper in which he demonstrated that the gravitational and compressional forces of the big bang itself could compress regions of space-time with burdens of matter of only planetary size inside the critical radius of the event horizon despite the fact that the intrinsic gravitation is too low for the conventional gravitational collapse described above to occur. He also showed that black holes of the type, called 'Hawking black holes', decay over time on account of loss of gravitational energy to the surrounding plenum and will eventually drop to a critical mass equivalency insufficient to sustain the gravitational closure at the event horizon and either 'evaporate' or explode. The time it takes the decay process to operate depends on the mass equivalency of the black hole and operates more quickly with smaller ones than with larger ones, so that if one has observations of them over cosmological space and time, the smaller they are, as a rule, the farther away they must be. The gravitational decay process (loss of mass equivalency to gravitational interaction with the larger plenum its embedded in) operates with all black holes irrespective of type, but for the conventional and supermassive black holes takes times greater than the age of the universe to produce a decay.

...which is where one can go to mechanics that may produce a black hole at CERN.

An analogous case, suppose one had an ideal photon drive space vehicle that operated by 'burning' liquified electrons[2] and anti-electrons to produce an 'exhaust' in the form of a coherant gamma ray stream, and one were to use this system to accelerate a payload to a speed such that its relativistic mass increase produced a gravitational closure, so that its escape velocity exceeded the speed of light at a critical radius around it. One could call it a 'relativistic mass increase black hole'. It would be rather one-sided, and it would not be possible any longer to accelerate it by means of a reaction engine like the photon drive described, since its 'exhaust' itself would be gravitationally bound, though external gravitational acceleration would still be possible. No longer under acceleration, its speed and relativistic mass increase would decline with passing time and eventually it would pop back into normal space-time. If one wanted to produce a 'permanent' positive rest mass black hole (actually, probably an ultra-light) one would have to slam a couple of them (more probably four[3] than two) together and any difference in their momentum would be manifested in the intrinsic velocity of the resultant positive rest mass black hole, suitable for orbiting by means of that difference around any convenient primary object.

The principles that might result in formation of a black hole at CERN are rather similar to that, but involve relativistic acceleration by means of external application of electromagnetic force to sub-atomic particles, producing a black hole (if one is produced) in a class referred to as a 'quantum black hole'.

[1] Chandrasekhar's limit is a critical limit bounding the HR diagram main sequence stars from the Cepheid variables. When a star very near the limit runs out of nuclear fuel, it goes 'supernova', leaving a 'pulsar' or 'neutron star' as remnant. If markedly smaller, the 'nova' remnant is a degenerate matter white dwarf. If it is markedly larger, the remnant is a black hole. Some people, these days, are calling nova incidents in the last case, giving rise to a black hole, 'hypernovae'. Hypernova mechanics can account for at least one class of gamma ray bursters. If the Cepheid variable giving rise to the black hole is very near Chandraskhar's limit, the resulting black hole can be significantly below Chandraskhar's limit in mass.

[2] Liquified electrons were first produced in the laboratory at Stanford University back in 1975. Their behavior more closely follows the solid state model than the high energy particle physics model. A great deal of the work done at CERN may eventually be developed into engineering information allowing creation of engines and vehicles like those described.

[3] Gravitation is tetrapolar, not dipolar like the electromagnetic field, which is what gives rise to Einstein's 'gravitational cross' effect, the gravitation of a supermassive star (or black hole or other object) acting on the photons of the stream of light produced by a star occulted behind it similarly to the way a magnet acts on iron filings sprinkled on a screen over a magnet, producing the electromagnetic dipolar field. The effect has been photographed with distant objects with the Hubble space telescope and can also be seen in the corona of the sun, producing the native American "solar cross" effect depicted in the New Mexico state flag and traditional native American folk art of the precolonial era. One can actually see the effect with a casual glance at the sun in the American south west, given good viewing conditions, but its symmetry varies seasonally, depending on the stellar (and galactic) backdrop. The tetrapolar nature of gravity is among the reasons its still considered improbable than CERN may generate a quantum black hole, since the forces being brought to bear are founded on electromagnetic dipoles and the directionality of the forces generated follows from that, though the magnitude of the forces (barely) brings this into the realm of the possible.

Item 2, the "big bang" is the moment in time the Universe began expanding. The explosive force required can be accounted for by means of postulating a (momentary) contracting phase[4] immediately before the 'big bang' on account of the fact that our conventional relativistic and quantum physical laws operate in their reciprocals in a contracting universe. Its a controversial point even Einstein had misgivings about, causing him to delay predictions of an expanding universe founded in his relativity until after Hubble's discovery of cosmological expansion. Conventional matter is only stable in an expanding universe.

Item 3, yup, and the impact experiments are designed to convert the relativistic mass increase into exotic particles.

Item 4, ...the boiling point of water..., just indulging myself in some free associational drift, playing with verbalisms, different ways of describing the effect or posing the question. Interpolation of 'pressure' into the diagram converted it 'temporarily' into a 'why' question (which was considered a revolutionary insight back in Robert Boyle's time)[Z], but once the point is accepted, its just one more 'how' formulation; nuances of humor on the cosmic (and epistemological) comedy intended. I don't mean to be irritating. I often warn people not to take me too seriously, I don't; on the shape of the Universe, the spherical model is equally speculative and current evidences from the anisotropy observations of the universal microwave background suggest it may be illusory, an effect of c-theta sector mechanics[5]. The best current maps of the universal microwave background show a distribution which is consistent with a toroidal shape for the universe, but the jury is still out on that one; one of the stated purposes of the current round of CERN experiments is reproducing the conditions of the big bang on a small scale in order to better understand the origins of the universe.

[4] ...hypothetically, a substantial number of immense supermassive black holes (as many as there are cosmic voids, along with miscellaneous other clutter) drift inside a critical radius such that a secondary event horizon closes around them, while they are still gravitating toward their common center of gravity. Contracting phase mechanics kick in, their event horizons collapse on account of inversion of the sign of the propagation of gravity (etc.), cosmological expansion begins, still confined inside the secondary event horizon.

[5] c-theta sectors: best illustrated by means of a thought problem. One selects a couple of distant galaxies about half way to Hubble's limit (or the Wilson-Penzias threshold} in opposite directions, from our point of view, and poses a question: How much of the universe that we can see from here will be visible from the point of view of an observor in either of those two galaxies?

Your answer is that an observor in either of those two distant galaxies will be located at Hubble's limit (or the Wilson-Penzias threshold) from the point of view of an observor located in the other and that neither will be able to see anything beyond that antipodal galaxy that we can see from our position half way between. This produces an optical illusion that the universe is spherical inside our local c-theta sector, but says nothing about its geometry beyond the physical limit to which we can make observations. Current observations on this suggest that c-theta secors are not gravitationally bound beyond their limits, which in turn implies that g-theta sectors (and the speed of gravitatational propagation) are respectively smaller and lower than c-theta sectors and the speed of light. (The 1986 supernova in the Magellanic clouds registered on a Japaese neutrino observatory 27 minutes before the light burst arrived, implying that the speed at which neutrinos propagate is significantly faster (on account of the much lower impedance affecting neutrinos on account of local mass density) than the speed of light. Indications are that almost the entirety of that difference in speed was a consequence of the passage of the neutrino and light burst from the supernova through the body of the exploding star itself.)

Fine-tuning the measurements of the quantum constants against the context of the cosmological is a part of the reason for the current rounds of CERN studies.

[Z] ...Macbeth's three witches cackling in the background...





...woefully behind on all manner of thing, other cares taking up considerable time.

ITIWBS:


I believe in keeping explanations clear, brief, and central to the matter at hand, especially in an open discussion. That is my philosophic training. I do not claim to be an expert on the fine detail - in fact on more than one occasion I have pointed out publicly that I'm not an expert, merely an 'umble philosopher. So please forgive me if I do not enter into a debate at the level of detail you offer, except to congratulate you on your long and detailed posting.



Jab

I'm usually very brief and to the point myself especially verbally and at the level of the interpersonal. Writing allows people a little more time to absorb an informational overload more comfortably.