Physicists Find More Precise Gravity Number

DM writes "Physicists establish the most precise measurement ever achieved of Isaac Newton's gravitational constant and use this information to recalculate the mass of the earth. Check out the article at ScienceDaily." Now if they could only recalibrate to make me really buff, that would be nice.

Comments

Females

[CAIMLAS]

Ah, nuts! Now we're going to have millions of American females even more obsessed with their weight! We men will hear no end!

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CAIMLAS

is this retroactive?

[levl289]

now if I can only convince my professors that it was this number that I was using when I was doing my calculations on my exams!

Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.

moving the world on hold

[chowda]

And I was just about to use this 16,000,000 mile lever to move the world and NOW its 20 feet to short... damn scientists!
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www.chowda.net
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Gravitational life

[roman_mir]

It was suggested that life in the Universe may take on many different forms and shapes. There are theories (hypotheses) of having life on neutron stars (the left overs of the star cores that collapsed on itself to produce a remnant size of earth and mass of 2-3 Suns that due to its huge mass and small size spins at almost the speed of light.) Life on such an object would not be supported by chemical reactions since no molecules not even atoms can withstand enormous temperatures produced on the neutrino stars. Still, we should not lose all hope, for life based on strong forces remains conceivable there.

Strong forces hold together the nuclei of all atoms more complex than hydrogen. Suppose a proton some 10^-13cm in size travelling at speed of 1000kilometers per second (average speed for a proton) at temperature of 1million K. It would cover a distance of 2 meters in 10^-21 of a second. Human would cover this distance in about a second. So for a proton 10^-21 second means the same as 1 second for a human.
Collisions of many elementary particles on a neutron star could produce massive nuclei, each made of thousands and tens of thousands, of elementary particles. They would last for 10^-15 of a second and then decay. In other words, a massive nucleus might have a million different collisions or other interactions before it decayed.
So if these particles could produce some equivalent of a structure capable of storing information and of replication by selective copying (like the DNA or RNA) star might produce forms of life. Individuals that interact with their environment and with other individuals in an organized way.
If this really happened, the development of life would happen much faster than what we observe in our solar system.. 10^-21 second is one billion-billionth of the thousandth of a second then the origin of life would require not about 1 billion years (our planet: ~600million years) but about 1/billionth of a year, of 1/13 of a second! It may seem short to us but it might exist on the surface of a neutron star. (too bad we could not interact with them)

On the other extreme end of this is the type of life we could call a "Gravitational Life" based on Gravitational forces. A typical subunit of life would be so large that gravity would be the dominant force for it, not electromagnetic force, a star would work in this case as a base unit. Individual stars would play the role of atoms (or molecules) on Earth. An organism so large that its basic building units are stars and galaxies (maybe even multiple universes) could in principle be possible. Would you like to think about yourself as of basicly microorganisms living in a huge super organism? Of-course star and galaxy interactions are upon scale of millionth of years, so if life originated from repeated effects of such interactions (like molecule interactions) then there is a long way to go before a living organism based on this interactions could develop.

And you think the mass of earth is important :)