(I started writing this December 1 of last year and never got back to it - seems interesting enough on its own...)
I have a fascination with theoretical physics (as mentioned previously) and there have been a couple things recently that got those particular juices flowing.
The latest issue of National Geographic has a story about the latest information from Saturn, along with some phenomenal pictures taken by the Cassini-Huygens probe. (this isn't technically theoretical physics, but interesting space stuff nonetheless) One of the truly mind-blowing things in the article was a hint at how big the solar system is. The two Voyager probes (1 and 2) are on their way out of the solar system. In the almost 30 years since launching Voyager 1 has traveled to a distance of 100au (100 distances of the Earth to the sun - each 93,000,000 miles or 9,300,000,000 miles from earth). The Oort Cloud, home to most of the leftover debris from the formation of our solar system, and source of comets starts at 55,000au (512,000,000,000,000 miles) It has taken V1 30 years to travel 100au although by a meandering path. It will take it 55,000 years to reach the Oort Cloud, and will still be technically within the solar system. Damn Andy! That sort of stuff really blows my mind.
The other really wild stuff relates to black holes and alternate universes. PBS had a show recently about black holes and specifically the super massive ones often found at the center of galaxies. NPR had an interview with Brian Greene about the possibility of creating man-made universes. There were a couple of wild things from the interview. One, black holes can be pretty much any size, from the super-massive ones down to microscopic. One need only compress a particular amount of matter small enough and voila! Within the next couple of years, courtesy of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, it may be possible to create them ourselves.
Once you have a small black hole, the way you make a universe is to inject another sizable chunk of matter into it in order to spur its expansion, for in addition to the attractive force property, gravity has a much stronger repulsive component (the force responsible for the never-ending expansion of the universe). This repulsive force blows that initial matter into a small (though presumably ever-growing) universe within the universe we currently inhabit.
6 comments:
Mind-blowing stuff.
I've always found the fact that our distant future involves an ever-expanding collection of utterly dead matter rather depressing. Maybe these eggheads can figure out a way for us to artificially compact.
Actually, I should not say "fact" in any of my statements regarding the cosmos.
Sure...
If you didn't listen to the RadioLab episode about space from early May 2006, there's some good stuff in in there.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/05/12
Things like if you could travel at 1,000,000 miles per hour it would take you 1200 generations to reach the 4th most distant star (30,000 years).
Also on commercials for PBS' Nova Science Now they mention that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the world's beaches. Also more molecules of water in a cup of water than cups of water in the ocean.
The scales of these things are humbling beyond all comprehension.
Yup. If we want space travel, we gotta focus on wormholes, rather than this bullshit warp speed.
I just found out that cicadas don't start in until it hits about 80 degrees, and then the hotter it gets, the louder they get.
It's not cosmically astounding, but it makes sense and kind of answers a question that I've kind of always had without specifically seeking out the answer.
Excellent.
One more tiny piece of the puzzle locks into place.
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