Slashdot Mirror
Star In A Jar
hyehye writes: "Discover magazine's current issue has a fascinating look at the first astrophysics experiments. By 'experiment,' they mean that actual experiments are being conducted in a lab, rather than just taking observations. What's basically occuring is a ton of lasers are being fired at very tiny objects, producing heat, pressure, and shock waves very similar to the ones produced when stars explode, i.e. go supernova. This is exciting stuff -- producing miniature supernovae in a lab! Take a look!"
A few scientists decided it would be cool to split atoms a while ago... Look where that got us.
Now we're learning how to make a supernova. I have a feeling nukes will look like firecrackers compared to these things.
Has anybody really thought about the weapon possibility of this? It would take alot of nukes to destroy our planet. I'm guessing one of these could take out our planet, and really screw up the moon at the same time.
Even if nobody uses one as a weapon, what if somebody screws up? Oops there goes earth. Remember early on in the nuclear experiments they were afraid the chain reaction would spread through the earth and destroy it the first time they set off a bomb. That's why they had them explode a bit off the ground. We got lucky then and it turned out it didn't work like we were afraid it would. What if we're not so lucky this time?
I really wish discover wasn't getting slashdoted so I could read more.
Sounds like someone is replicating the Krone Experiment (from the Clancy-esque thriller novel of the same name)
:)
I'd say more, but I don't want to give away the ending. But trust me, it's on topic.
Not a bad read. Not Great Literature, but a good beach book - if you can find a copy.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Enough dispersely one-line quotes from me and I would even be called an atheist. Its evident that Einstein believed in an intelligence behind the universe and its construct. In a half-empty half-full debate one could sat that it was enough God for him, or that it *was* God for him. But not that there was no God.
This will explain that Eisteing jew connection a bit better, I think.
~^~~^~^^~~^
On a simular note, I heard once that Germany was named after the Roman General who couldn't conquer it. Wait thats not true at all becuase it is called Duetchland(sp). Wait, no thats not right either because we are talking about a country that conquered its neighbors all the way until WWII on the right that it was the self appointed capitol of the Holy Roman Empire. What strangeness is this?
More to the point, The Arabians were very good at astronomy, but so was Egypt thousands of years before as well as China and others contemporary to Aristotle if not before. (e.g. I heard that China could predict the occurance of Haley's commet in the B.C. era. Yet, and this is what ties in the stuff on top its named after Haley.)
So he is right, we owe much to the Arabians. One could also argue that although the greeks were polytheistic they believed that the world was created with intelligence and purpose.
Eh, enough spouting. I'm just bored anyway.
~^~~^~^^~~^
Not quite related, but here's how to create a one-atmosphere plasmoid.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Baby black holes (a theory based on the potential revision of the plank length) would not suck up anything except tiny things near by, and would very quickly decay.
Hmm...what if there was a way to sustain them? Even the tiny ammount of gravitational force produced by one of these "Baby black holes" could potentially be very useful...
IANAS (I'm not a scientist) - so thake this with a grain of salt - I'm just theorizing here...
If a "Baby black hole" is functionally identical to a "real" black hole, only scaled down, what would happen if you put 3 of them in the same (tiny) area, and set them to rotate around one another? Would it be possible to get their combined gravitational forces to negate at the center of the rotation? What kind of EM variance would such a combination create? How could it be harnessed? Would physics (as we know it) change at the center of the rotation?
Fun stuff =)
Excellent account. I thought there was one more detail which brightened up the explosion quite a bit. When the core collapses into neutronium, and cools by radiating off a very bright neutrino flash the rest of the star, which is still mostly hydrogen and helium, implodes and heats dramatically. This causes a fusion explosion in the remaining hydrogen, above the collapsed core and that is the source of most of what we see.
One more thing -- this is a type II supernova. A type I (more common, I think) occurs when a white dwarf in a close binary system acretes enough mass to do the catastrophic collapse into neutronium bit.
Large black holes evaporate too. It is just that at the size of a star the amount of energy being radiated (evaporated?) is less than the cosmic background radiation. Therefore, all large black holes have a net influx of mass/energy.
Dastardly
It all depends on your frame of reference. From the sun's frame of reference, the earth goes around the sun. From a reference of person on the earth's surface, the sun goes around the earth.
Had Galileo used this line of reasoning, he would have saved himself a whole lot of trouble you know.
DON'T FEED THE TROLLS, DAMMIT!
Give your heads a shake, people. Recognize a joke when you see one. "Curiousity Killed the Cat" is a blatant chain-yank, and a half-dozen of you were dumb enough to fall for it.
How To Recognize The Troll
* there are lots of adjectives: "once lush planet," "reckless desire," and the like.
* there's a personal disclaimer: "don't get me wrong."
* there's often a reference to religion: "[better to] study scripture."
But the biggest indicator is that it's every damn sentence is over-the-top hyperbole.
Don't get me wrong: I appreciate a good luddite-like troll. But, please, don't feed the trolls!
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's called fusion. And don't worry about it. It's still 50 years in the future. Ask again in 30 years, and I'll tell you again that it's 50 years in the future.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I still have the newspaper clipping in my bible about the Vatican letting Galileo off the hook "359" years after he was declared "guilty" - just thought it was interesting being 1 year shy of the majick "360" number of the old cosmology.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
No no no, you're thinking of ice-9.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
No no no, you're thinking of ice-9.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
>I suspect that this is why SETI has been so unsuccessful - most alien civilisations have performed expirements such as this and then been promptly destroyed.
Oh, please. Stop watching Star Trek.
If another civilization, one advanced enough to have advanced radio telescopes, were to start THEIR SETI program, they'd have around 50 years of our transmissions. Which means, they'd have to live in a 50 light-year area around us. The cosmos is, to quote Douglas Adams, "really big". A few thousand intelligent civilizations near the galactic core - what, 30k light years away? - would be sufficient to explain SETT's "failures". We can't hear them because their signals haven't reached us yet. The light we see today is often (said in a Sagan-esque voice) billions of years old, some of it left its star before the earth existed. A million intelligent civilizations can't overcome the speed of light and the time at which they become capable of radio astronomy.
While I'm at it, could you provide any pointers to data that says we're all going to die in this manner? Outrageous claims require outrageous evidence, after all...
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
so, does that mean your not a Solaris sysadmin?
buh dum bump ching!, thank you, I'm here all week, remember to tip your waitress!
---
I post links to stuff here
Great, so now scientists are going to produce supernovae in the laboratory?
.. just keep the face-huggers away from me :D
...
But there's a big difference between tinkering with transistors and unleashing natural forces that Man was never intended to experiment with.
Whee!!! Half-Life!!
--
Delphis
Delphis
As you say, it's easy to "arbitrarily believe", but it doesn't mean that it holds any weight in the real world.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
You just don't get it do you! There are more kinds of truth than the scientific or historical. The purpose of the Bible is not to relate historical truth but spiritual truth and philosophy. Would you not agree that philosophy holds truth beyond the scope of science?
Telling us to study scripture instead of working on science has nothing to do with the qualities (or lack thereof) of philosophical truth in said scripture. Instead, it expresses the backwards attitude that "There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know", which honestly I just don't agree with. It was a troll, of course, but it was written as a dismissive statement that implied that one couldn't study scripture, or have any kind of "relationship" with the "true" God and still want to know how these things worked. Which is utter BS. There *are* religious scientists who study all kinds of interesting things (aside from the fact that the examples given weren't really representative--Einstein was NOT an Orthodox Jew, for example), and I have no problem with that.
What I "don't get" is why ignorant people have to try to act as if religion and science oppose each other--they only do so inasmuch as the ignorant members of a religion fear challenges to that ignorance.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Bullshit. Einstein was in religious terms an atheist, and insofar as he said things like "I don't belive God plays dice with the universe" etc. he was not talking about a "personal God" in any religious sense. I suspect the same is true of Galileo. As for Sir Isaac, he was well known as a mystic and dabbler in secret societies, so his views were certainly not "orthodox", protestant though they may have been.
Here are some quotes to make my point about Einstein:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
[Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press]
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
[Albert Einstein]
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religiosity of the naive man. For the latter, God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands, so to speak, in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation... There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection... It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
[Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934]
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
[Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism. Article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
[Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]
The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
[Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946]
I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
[Albert Einstein, as quoted in a memoir by Life editory William Miller in Life, May 2, 1955]
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
[Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, and published by Princeton University Press.]
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
[Albert Einstein, The World as I See It]
http://atheism.about.com/religion/atheism/library/ quotes/bl_q_AEinstein.htm
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Even better, get them all running SETI@HOME
It about stars in the sky. My first reaction to the story title was that our favorite hanky-panky investigator Ken Starr, at least his head, was making an appearance on "Futurama".
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I love how the media says that, as if it's some kind of quantity.
Say 10 billion watts of power.. or compare it to how long it could light up a city.. but don't just say '15,000 volts of electricity'. People have that in their TV set.
Mr. Roboto :
/., users brought to this common tech watering pool were self-selected geeks/technophiles/scientsts. Granted, there is always a fair portion of bad apples in the mix, but it was quite reasonable to base a moderation system on that group. I can't imagine, for instance, Yahoo (whose user population today largely reflects the computer-using society as a whole) ever managing to successfully accomplish anything similar.
/. grows, I believe the inevitable outcome is that the moderation system will falter and perhaps eventually fail as well, unless further safeguards are put into place.
I wanted to drop you an e-mail to thank you for the kind comment on the post. Your e-mail isn't publicly posted, so I am posting here hoping you will get a chance to read this post.
One crucial aspect of any moderation system is to obtain a reasonably well-informed and intelligent group of moderators. This is the basis of all peer-reviewed systems; while still far from perfect, one would prefer to have, say, a knowledgeable group of medical doctors review the results of clinical tests of new drugs, rather than the population as a whole.
In the early days of
As
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
This is very cool stuff -- people often believe astrophysics is either observational or theoretical. The ability to do experiments is important in verifying the validity of theoretical models and computer simulations.
HOWEVER, note that these experiments are largely concerned with a limited set of physics -- basically radiation hydrodynamics (under the conditions tested, the plasmas are so hot that the radiation pressure is comparable to the gas pressure). Supernovae are essentially hydrodynamical phenomena because the time it takes for a highly supersonic shock to pass through the supernova progenitor is much less than the time it would take for gravity to collapse the progenitor. In astrophysics, many processes (such as star and galaxy formation) are crucially linked not only to radiation hydrodynamics but also to other physics including, critically, self-gravity. It is MUCH more difficult to include self-gravity, because the real self-gravity of the system is totally negligable, and the plasma is charge neutral on a whole (charge densities obey Poisson's equation, just like self-graviting mass densities do).
So this is a very cool start, but it will remain to see if we can ever construct experiments for other kinds of astrophysical systems in the lab.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
well the deutrium and tritium based approaches to fusion in the lab generate alot of fast neutrons which tend to make everything they come into contact radioactive, moreso than the tritium itself. coupla grams of tritium you can deal with it's the 30 ton magnet array for the tokamok that's hard to dispose of ...
use Signature::Witty;
U-235 is not "highly radioactive" - if it were, then we wouldn't have any left around. Highly radioactive sources quickly decay. The problem with fission is more the neutrons which hit all the surrounding equipment; that all then becomes radioactive.
John 17:20
Not at all, it mentions many things that we have later discovered, like cities, etc.
But that just means that like all enduring works of fiction, it has a grain of truth at the center.
Overall though, yes, it's untrue.
The proof for it is that it's supposed to be the guided word of god, and yet even the old testament is internally inconsistent.
Other than that, just for the point of view of a bookmaker, what's the odds? That's just one god out of hundreds, why is it likely that it's the christian god which exists?
If it was one of the others, one of the non-exclusive gods, then the odds would be better because it could be any number of them. But the christian mythos can only be true if their god exists and no other do.
No matter which way you look at it, it's a losing proposition.
Hmmmm... it's too bad someone hasn't thought up a process to quickly (probably at femtosecond speeds) *alternate* between fission and fusion.
Tritium seems to be the key, since, being radioactive, it can either spontaneously emit a neutron and become deuterium *or* be compressed by the laser pressure into the fusion process with deuterium.
Use the spontanous tritium radioactivity -- fission -- to keep sending energy back into the fusion process, thus generating a nearly constant heat flow from the fusion process and thus making fusion feasible. (I guess you'd need about twice as much tritium as deuterium.) Except for the minor engineering problem of keeping the high energy particles trapped inside the system long enough to be re-routed back into the fusion process, it seems doable. (IANANP, obviously.) Any nuclear physicists out there want to explain why this *can't* work?
Perhaps this is part of the key to how "dirty" palladium jump-starts the so-called 'cold-fusion' process. Again, IANANP.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Somebody moderate this guy up. The original poster that he is debunking is pure flamebait.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
i assume you've heard of cosmic rays? Higher energy than anything we can create in the lab. Please extend your disseration to explain why they haven't caused this 'dark matter accretion' and whiped us out during the last, oh, 5 BILLION years or so.
Oh yeah - I forgot. You're a troll. nice try. Too bad the mods are smoking crack today.
>>Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
>>spacetime by studying Scripture.
Yup - but lots of nice people burnt at the stake.
Good thing the catholics finally worked out that whole 'sun round the earth thing'. Only took em 300 years.
So how are things in Kansas?
a co-worker of mine and i were discussing this story and he pointed out something i thought interesting.
small supernovas are known as novas. so wouldn't something on this scale be a piconova or maybe a femtonova?
chris
WILL YOU BASTARDS LEAVE MY POOR SIG ALONE!!!! ;)
Lameness filter my ass, i AM trying to yell.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
What the hell is a jigawatt?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Jiga what? Jiga who?
S.t.e.v.e.
I'd hate to see their electric bill. :)
ender
Nothing to see here
But, IIRC, this comes out of fusion research. Surround a pellet of deuterium with lasers and blast it. Watch it fuse. Everybody gets their name on the paper. They've been doing this for years.
Best Slashdot Co
Yeah ! More ideas of nice hacks for Xscreensaver !
{{.sig}}
I'm glad slashdot decided to post on this. I read the article in Discover, and I was like, wow, 60 trillion watts? As much power as the US uses, eh? Wait, power is Joules per second... it's an instantaneous measure. Power's magnitude means nothing if it happens for only an instant. I couldn't help but feel that Discover was pumping up the facts a lot by using this huge number to wow readers, but not saying for exactly how long the pulse goes on.
Given that amount of time (I think something in the nanosecond range was mentioned), we could see just how much energy was involved. If I recall, I did some calculations, assuming a nanosecond, and came up with a decently large amount of energy to concentrate for such a small time (and in a small space), but nothing quite as surprising as the article seemed to want to make readers believe. It was something like the amount of energy a 100 watt bulb uses in a month, I think.
I mean, I had to wonder, if they're only taking 1 hour to charge the capacitors, and they are, after all, getting their energy from the US power grid, isn't it a little misleading to try to imply such a huge amount of energy by throwing around terms like 60 trillion watts, and the power consumption of the United States? It just seems like an attempt to play on the fact that lots of people don't understand instantaneous measures like Wattage.
No, the united states power use is NOT doubled in that instant. Some power (not that incredible an amount, but a fair amount for a building) is drawn off over the course of an hour, charging the capacitors, and then that power is all discharged at once. So, the US power use equals the power delivered by those capacitors. A far cry from doubling the US power consumption in that instant.
Just what the heck is a "square foot of compressed anti-matter"? You measure mass in *area*?
One more point -- the sun is powered by fusion, the combination of light nuclei to make heavier ones, not fission, the splitting of heavy atoms into lighter ones (like we do in atom bombs). Fusion of hydrogen into helium releases more energy than fission of uranium, plutonium or the like.
Straight fusion can produce elements as heavy as iron. Anything heavier than that requires a supernova.
One of the funniest things I'd seen on the web in a loooong time. Check out the comments, they're very helpful.
Etc... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The latest String Theories, some of which I have been analysing at the Neils Bohr Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany, show that at high energies and in phasic light, such as produced in an intense laser, normal matter can transmute into dark matter due to resonances.
Washing machines turn socks into dark matter in a similar way, using high energy washic water.
In fact, I studied high energy washic interactions and resonant sockal transduction at the Maytag Repair Guy Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey. Unfortunately, long-term exposure to sudsions has left me impotent.
Unless I'm missing something, energy and mass can be converted back and forth (in some instances). They're related by, like I said, E=M*c^2, so factoring for Mass, you get M=E/c^2. High-energy photons do decompose into particles, after all... Given enough energy, you certainly can create a black hole.
This type of article might get more children interested in science. Who needs Quake when you can, in reality (what's that?!?), blast things with multiple lasers into oblivion. Just tell them only scientists are allowed to do it.
:)
Maybe someone can make a Heathkit out of it.
This is not quite true. Matter can occasionally escape from a black hole because the uncertainty principle will allow faster than light speeds for very short periods of time ( dt*dE <= hbar/2 ). I don't know what Hawking radiation is, but maybe this is what you're talking about.
Has anybody given any thought to the safety of these experiments, and the hazardous effects that they might have on our environment?
Yes.
Baby black holes (a theory based on the potential revision of the plank length) would not suck up anything except tiny things near by, and would very quickly decay.
Isn't there any accountability anymore? Why has the pursuit of science been pervaded with a reckless desire to perform useless experiments that could obliterate our civilization?
Yes there is still accountability. There is no reckless desire in the persuit of science. Nobody is doing any experiments that could result in the obliteration of our civilization.
Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of spacetime by studying Scripture
Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of spacetime by doing anything. They should aim those lasers at your head and do society a favor.
Someone you trust is one of us.
This is /.
I couldn't get the propper figures through the lameness filters so I had to FUD them.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The pressures and densities of the sun are so great, that photons (released as byproducts of fission in the sun's core) takes on average about 10 million years before they reach the surface (10 minutes to get to the earth from there). This is because of the random Brownian motion of the photons route.
Someone you trust is one of us.
It was thought by some that setting off the first atom bomb would ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone. Same kind of annilation predictions for when supercolliders have come online.
As we all know, it takes 1.21 Gigawatts to travel trough time.
60000 / 1.21 = 49586
So you could activate a Flux Capacitor 49,586 times. Beats Mr. Fusion any day!
--
Just wait till a laser goes awry and one of the scientests goes supernova. That'll kill the project real quick.
My guess is that if you explode something a jar, it will become "rapidly expanding." Right before it becomes "flying shrapnel."
Zzzt! BOOM! AIEEEE!
Apu: Today, I am no longer an Indian living in America. I am an Indian-American.
Lisa: You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of course Native Americans.
Homer: Yeah, Native Americans like us.
Lisa: No, I mean American Indians.
Apu: Like me.
I hate to be one of these guys, but...
What is with the low s/n ratio at slashdot these days! It used to be, when a scientific story was posted, we'd get at least a few informed comments, sparking interesting discussion. These comments would always float to the top of the moderation pool. As I post this comment, however, the top rated comments on this story are either ill-informed speculation about the "dangers" of this research or bad jokes. The one exception, as far as I can tell, is the parent of this comment.
My girlfriend, who mocks me for reading a "news for nerds" website, was doing a web search for some info in her field (astrophysics) last week. She pulled up a related slashdot story, and read the comments. Trust me, the mockery only got worse.
I lost suck just last week; I don't want to have to stop reading slashdot, too...
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
There's quite a few web sites up about the "Farnsworth Fusor" (Google search top site yields http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~kronjaeg/hv/ fusor/construction) which apparently is an electric-field tube created by Philo Farnsworth (invented most of the fundaments of the tubes used for CRTs) which could actually cause real, measurable fusion reactions (measured through neutron flux).
He died before he could get something sustainable and past the break-even point (if it were possible). The theoretical physics of the device is pretty cool - apparently, his "tube" creates concentric electric field "shells" of increasing strength, which concentrate & pinch the fuel to fusion-density. After the setup, the field apparently gets its strength from the reaction itself.
From what I read, the main reason it that the reaction isn't sustainable is because once the field becomes strong enough to initiate fusion, it also completely prevents any NEW fuel from entering the fusion area.
Pretty darn interesting stuff, and done a long time ago. I'm assuming that the electric & magnetic field "pinching" technologies are probably based on much more sophisticated approaches than this.
Things like femtosecond laser pulses can produce conditions MUCH hotter than in our sun, but on a time and length scale that is very tiny.
Obviously we don't have the tech at this point to do this on a larger scale, aside from ground zero of a hydrogen bomb.
With that much wattage you could power the Intel Pentium V.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That sounds like a pretty accurate description of what posting that article on Slashdot is doing in discover.com's server room...
The radiative energy transport *can* be described by a random walk process. Photons are repeatedly absorbed and re-emitted in random directions.
Consider random walk in plane:
If theta_i is the re-emitting angle at step i, after N steps the coordinates of a photon are:
x = sum_over_N{ d cos(theta_i) }
y = sum_over_N{ d cos(theta_i) }
since he directions are randomly distributed and independent:
r = sqrt(x^2 + y^2) = sqrt(d^2 * [(sum...)^2 + (sum_y...)^2]
-> r = d*sqrt(N)
photon mean free path: d = 1/(kappa * density) = 10^-4 m.
r ~ 10^9 m
number of steps: N = (r/d)^2 = 10^26
total path travelled: s = Nd = 10^22
total time: t = s / c = 10^6 year.
although my feeling is that this actually should be a little bit higher.
conclusion: 10^7 years is just fine.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
Directions:
Make Sea-Monkeys® in Zooquarium (throw away "Ocean of Light" instructions). Play Jar-Jar Binks *jibberish* thru 60,000,000,000,000 watt stereo -- full blast -- while using magnifying glass to focus sun's heat on single Sea-Monkey®. Hold focused sunlight on Sea-Monkey® until heat and sonic vibration pressure from Jar-Jar Binks *jibberish* converts Sea-Monkey® into a #4 Plasma II Sea-Monkey® Star!
Repeat with additional Sea-Monkeys® to make galaxy.
<---[singularity sig]
12-13 years ago, or so, Lawrence Livermore Labs was playing with some really powerful lasers in the pursuit of sustainable fusion energy. At the time, they had the most powerful laser in the world. Many of the technologies required to create and focus multiple streams of laser light came out of those experiments.
Peace,
Marty Halvorson
http://www.discover.com/june_01/featstar.html
-ted
That's a better line if you can spell "Planck"
Oh, and you're probably a bit out on the value, but then you're probably an American and quoted it in slugs/cubit or something
SI for h (not h bar) is 6.626 E-34 J s (for from-memory accuracy).
BTW, I hope you are not insulting roughly 40% of the world population by implying that the Torah (a.k.a. Old Testament), attested to by over three Hundred original copies and the writings of Babylonian, Persian, and Greek historians and record keepers, is 100% fiction
Well, let's see...if you take away the mythology, political propoganda, and various nuttiness, there really isn't much left that is historically accurate. Just because it names places that actually exist does not make it historically accurate.
You'll also find that just because original copies and writings agree with each other, that does not show that they are historically accurate.
Evil Overlord X
Coming to a third world country near you
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Of course, after two or more milennia, after everybody who saw or wrote about the supposed event is dead, it's fairly easy to arbitrarily believe or disbelieve anything.
Oh, very nice. Unfortunately for your argument, reputable scholars are not being 'arbitrary' when they are sceptical of what is written in the Torah/Old Testament. While I grant you that some of the events that are mentioned are essentially correct, many are clearly mythological.
The other problem is that eyewitness testimony is very unreliable, which has been known for some time in the legal profession (IANAL).
Evil Overlord X
Coming to a third world country near you
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
But there's a big difference between tinkering with transistors and unleashing natural forces that Man was never intended to experiment with. One thing I can guarantee you is this: Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of spacetime by studying Scripture.
Ahh yes. I just love anti-science fundie types. Fear, hubris, and a call for 'scripture'. Yes, instead of finding out how the *real* world works, let's just sit around and read bad middle-eastern fiction.
Evil Overlord X
Coming to a third world country near you
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
The fundamental idea that the behavior of everything in the Universe is determined and dictated by laws and principles falls directly from the philosophical assumption of Western religion that a purposeful, powerful, organized diety ordained such principles to govern the realm of nature.
Apparently you failed your history of science, because these ideas actually came from the Greeks, who did not believe in a single law-giving deity.
As for your examples, none of them were closed-minded fundamentalists. And your inclusion of Albert Einstein is disingenuous at best. He did not believe in a personal god, and stated that several times.
I would say that this latest attempt to blend science and religion is nothing more than uninformed philosophical sophistry.
Evil Overlord X
Coming to a third world country near you
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
If we blew up the earth, what would happen to the orbit of the moon? Would it necessarily stay the same (relative the sun) ? Or is it possible that based on it's position relative to the earth when it exploded its velocity vector would be going out of the solar system or crashing into the sun?
So, for a brief instant, the power usage of the United States DOUBLED.
Woohoo, so let's not wonder why NY is about to follow California.
Why are you apologizing to Heisenberg? It was Schroedinger's cat, poor thing.
JohnnyB - johnbowman.net
Actually, from the article:
;)
The power concentrated on that pinhead-sized spot, about 60,000,000,000,000 watts
That's 60 terawatts, or 60,000 gigawatts, no? Easily more than enough...
> Creating a black hole the size of an atom has little to no effect on the planet because its
;)
> mass is meager compared to everything else around it
> Remember: gravity doesn't change just because you're a singularity; a kilogram with no volume
> is still a kilogram, still a negligible factor
Well, that's the thing about a singularity, isn't it? It has no volume, no matter how much mass it has. It _may_ not decay or it may continue to gain mass.
As far as consuming small, nearby objects...
That's one thing babies (of all sorts) are very good at, and just look at how big most of them get. It would kinda suck (no pun intended) if junior ended up having our planet as a mid-morning snack.
That is, assuming that we are talking about a baby "typical" black hole, as opposed to an adolescent hybrid miniature black hole
John
Yes, Denmark is a part of Scandinavia, as it is a part of Europe. I'm wondering if you think Scandinavia is a country, because it's not.
Anyways the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics is in Copenhagen Denmark.
(If there are any nuclear engineers in the audience, please feel free to correct me as this is from memory)
Ordinary nuclear reactors are fission reactors -- they split heavy nuclei into two lighter nuclei and a bit of energy. The most common fissionable material is Uranium-235, which as you might expect is extremely radioactive, and the "nuclear ash" (the lighter elements which result from fission) are also typically radioactive.
Nuclear fusion is the opposite process -- combining lighter nuclei into heavier ones. The sun produces its energy by fusing four hydrogen nuclei (otherwise known as protons) into a single helium nucleus (otherwise known as alpha particles: two protons and two neutrons). The four constituent protons are just a tad heavier than an alpha particle, and the extra mass is turned into energy.
Nuclear fusion in the lab (which *has* been done before, many times) doesn't follow the exact same process. It typically uses deuterium and tritium, which are hydrogen-2 (a proton and a neutron) and hydrogen-3 (a proton and two neutrons), respectively. Tritium is radioactive.
So while nuclear fusion doesn't have to involve radioactive substances (as evidenced by solar fusion), so far I don't think anybody has gotten away from them. Admittedly, though, fusion will still be infinitely cleaner than fission once somebody manages to generate a useful amount of power from it.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
> Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
> spacetime by studying Scripture.
And nobody ever made Earth spontaneously explode by performing human sacrifices.
What's your point? I certainly expected to read more logical arguments on Slashdot.
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Slight correction.. from what I remember, a Watt isn't a measure of energy, it's a measure of energy in a certain amount of time, just like how speed isn't an amount of distance, it's an amount of distance per time unit. So saying "Watt per hour" is incorrect, because "Watt" isn't a measure of the magnitude of energy they used, you could say it's more a measure of the intensity. I believe a Watt is a Joule/sec, so if the bombardment lasted only one millionth of a second to get the explosion, the energy was only 60 kJ. If you took the same amount of energy expended and spread that over one second, that would be 60 kW - for one second.
So how long did the energy bombardment last? This original article didn't say. You don't know how much energy was used unless you have both time and rate. That's why electric companies refer to energy used in "kilowatt-hours".
Well, according to General Relativity, all frame of reference are good to do Physics in. Decribing the sun moving around the earth can be made as consistent as describing the earth moving around the sun. The problem simplification. Using a heliocentric model, you can descibe the motion not only of Earth, but other objects straightforwardly. If you use the Earth centred frame of reference, then the math gets very complicated.
I agree that science and theology would be at odds if you attempt to put them together.
The belief in Law of Nature is no more a supersistious belief than the belief in the hardness of rock. A law of nature is not a law like the DMCA, which had to be drafted by human beings. It is a description of how things behave, generalised, abstractized, and summarized. Thus making the inference from law to lawgiver is just misleading yourself with a false analogy.
That's the number of planks it takes to build your backyard deck, which is ALWAYS (that's why it's a constant) more than what you already bought, so you need to make ONE MORE TRIP to the home improvement store.
Same for nails constant and screws constant.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Right, but that's wrong. Lee-nux, on the other hand, is how it sounds in Linus' nifty sound clip.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
You say giga, and I say jiga, you say Linux and I say Leenux. Giga, jiga, Linux, Leenux oh let's call the whole thing off!
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
If this was true, why aren't all stars "dark matter"? Our own atoms (above Iron in weight) were forged in a supernova. By your "facts", we should all be dark matter now.
If you are really a physics major, Mr. "Physics Major", I would have expected you to know this.
Basically, for anyone else who's wondering, this is a load of pseudo-scientific garbage that is designed to sound realistic enough to alarm anyone reading.
Would a REAL physics major in the relevent area care to enlighten us further in this area? As I recall, this isn't too different than the techniques being used to try to initiate nuclear fusion, and I'm pretty sure that the sun is not "dark matter" (which I also recall doesn't really have an explanation, beyond being an unaccounted-for quantity of matter that must exist for the Hubble Constant to be accurate as it has been measured)
Has anybody given any thought to the safety of these experiments, and the hazardous effects that they might have on our environment?
Naw, scientists are notoriously haphazard. It must be that new 'Extreme nuclear physics'.
But there's a big difference between tinkering with transistors and unleashing natural forces that Man was never intended to experiment with.
What about electricity? Surely our attempts to utilize God's natural lightning will cause the Earth to magnetize and we'll all fly off it!
Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of spacetime by studying Scripture.
No, but the Crusades sure were fun, huh? Oh and the Spanish Inquisition.
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
General Electric did the "star in a jar" thing at the 1964 World's Fair. They actually had a working pulsed magnetic fusion system on display. Nowhere near breakeven, but real.
Is this the same experiment?
What you're reffering to is the process of nuclear FUSION. Modern nuclear reactors are based on the concept of nuclear FISSION, which is a process where energy is released when a large atom is split into smaller atoms (and a few neutrons). Fusion is where two small atoms are fused together to get energy (and no, this isn't a conservation of energy problem). Much work has been done in the area of nuclear fusion, but as of yet a commercially viable fusion reactor has not been created.
However, a supernovae is not just any fusion reaction. All stars go through fusion their entire lives. It's what keeps them heated. But a supernovae happens when a star starts running out of fuel. I don't know the exact process (I'm sure someone around here does).
So while this supernovae-in-a-can is very cool, it's separate from energy generation as a whole.
Save a life. Eat more cheese
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/ 06/04/stifgnusa01007.html
You can't handle the truth.
The idea is that you take these radioactive atoms and fling them at other radioactive atoms, to simulate collisions with the sort of energy you'd see in a supernova. This lets them study reaction chains and rates and stuff. Very cool.
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
This is exactly what they are doing! They just described inertial fusion. The big picture is that a pellet on Hydrogen/Dueterium/Tritium (Hydrogen Isotopes) in the form of a hollow sphere is instantaniously heated by high power lasers from all directions. The outer surface, being superheated and vaporized explodes outward and is lost. Because of equal and opposite reaction, the inner surface explodes inward resulting in very high compression and temperatures. If the pressure and temperature is high enough, the hydrogen (and isotopes) are fused into helium and release lots of heat and a few extra neutrons. The heat makes steam and drives generators to power the fusion plant and hopefully more for the power grid. I suspect that the extra neutrons can be used to transmute hydrogen into dueterium/tritium (more easily fusable fuel). Imagine - A fusion breeder reactor...
Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of spacetime by studying Scripture.
Nobody will invent paper and ink by studying Scripture.
(Take that, recursive fans!)
SEX!s.e.x.Sex.53X!sex.Si-Ee-Eks
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Indeed. I am shortcutting. But usually when I say "interact", I mean there exist a coupling constant with ordinary Standard Model stuff that we know and love. Gravitational "interaction" is a big harder to picture, since the standard model picture of gravitons mediating the force doesn't really work.
SEX!s.e.x.Sex.53X!sex.Si-Ee-Eks
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Thanks. The Enrico Fermi Institute is actually 20 steps from my office.
Einstein though, was never American. He was German, became stateless, then got a Swiss citizenship, which he remained till his death.
Yes, I don't know why, considering that he wrote a letter to FDR that started the whole A-Bomb thing.
SEX!s.e.x.Sex.53X!sex.Si-Ee-Eks
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
sucks. Well done, Physics Major, you have scored a perfect coup! You should apply for a job with writing the new Star Trek series.
Here is the corrected version :
(a) Most of the Universe (if you believe in General Relativity) is composed of Dark Energy (70%), not Dark Matter (about 30%). Normal stuff like us is less than 1%.
(b) Neils Bohr is Scandinavian, not German.
(c) Dark Matter accretes, and in current popular models, it does not interact with matter at all (else it won't be "dark")
(d) There is no chance of shooting lasers turning us into exotic matter. Though physicists might wish it does.
(e) What the heck is "phasic" laser beams?
(f) The SETI inference is what convinced me that you are writing a parody. Good job.
SEX!s.e.x.Sex.53X!sex.Si-Ee-Eks
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Hawking radiation doesn't "escape" a black hole, its particles that are generated right at the event horizon, and one anitparticle is absorbed by the black hole, and one regular particle is shot out into space. So it didn't really come "out" of the black hole.
There's a great novel about that, actually. David Brin's Earth. It's really an eco-alert piece (nasty near-future where the current generation's environmental fuckups have caused life to be pretty harsh on parts of the next generation [mine]) but the main storyline centers around a singularity that "falls" into the earth. Oops, right? You have no idea =) Read the book. It's slow, but a little over half way through it REALLY picks up pace, the plot twists... wow. Good book. Check it out =)
Forager
student of animation and the fine arts
Fusion is possible now, it is just not practicle. It takes more engery to sustain and contain it. And this supernova in a can thing takes about the equilvant of 1 years worth of energy the US uses for 1 millisecond. I'd hate that electricty bill. (and I bet he lab is in California)
An astro prof here (CMU) has a neat classroom demo that he does during the lesson on supernovae which he calls star in a jar.
He mixes a two compontent apoxy in a clear plastic cup using way too much hardener (i.e. 5 times what the directions say). Be sure to do this on a large piece of metal you don't care about and do it outside cause it makes quite a mess and smells.
Basically what happens is that the apoxy undergoes an exothermic reaction, but due to the excessive amount of catalyst present, more heat is created than can be dissapated through the viscous flow of the apoxy (don't forget the apoxy is hardening the whole while). Eventually the apoxy heats enough to melt the cup, crack the hardened apoxy, smoke, etc. This gets the entire class's attention because he mixes the apoxy at the beginning of the class and proceeds to lecture for a while before anything begins to happen. It takes a little while.
If only the entire article had been posted.
the_crowbar
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
Yeah, this guy may be a bit of a zealot, but I'd rather not find out how the "real" world works if that means I have to trust scientists to not make a cataclysmic blackhole or supernova on Earth. I think we've grown a bit too big for our britches when we think this is a good idea because we think we can do this sort of thing in a "controlled" experiment. My motto is "Just because we can doesn't mean we should."
Um, dude, this shit is safer then a normal explosive. This stuff is well known data their working with. The only reason the sun is a self-perpetuating reactor is that its so damn big that its got enough pressure and heat. Earth doesnt. So, no sun. Jupiter isn't big enough to start fusion. Dude, have you looked at mass info? You may or may not have noticed, there aren't any stars that small. Smallest stars still have 80x Jupiter mass.
Oh, and the black hole thing? Read your physics. Black holes radiate matter and antimatter off their event horizons, losing mass. Small black holes don't survive, as they aren't physically strong enough to pull mass up to the event horizon before they burn out. Hawking figured it all out. Still, this stuff is much less for certain. Still, the fusion sht is fact.
The point is nothing can propogate faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
The vacuum bit is quite important.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Nice attempt at a troll, but you should at least try to get your stuff consistent. There is no Neils Bohr Institute in Germany. It is the Niels Bohr institute (site is here) and it is in Copenhagen, Denmark.
-----
First thought this was going to be an announcement of upcoming Futurama cameos.
You have to do the experiment in a balloon if you want to simulate the universe; since the universe is expanding, only balloon can be used in this kind of experiment.
...most alien civilisations have performed expirements such as this and then been promptly destroyed.
No, most alien civilizations were destroyed by intercepting our radio transmissions. Specifically, those broadcasting the songs of Slim Whitman, the Yodeling Cowboy. And thank God for that too. I'd hate to have my town invaded by those little high pitched suckers...
-----
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
As well as the ultimate hazardous waste disposal unit. Because whatever goes into it doesn't come out. At least as anything close to what it went in as. Radioactive, chemical, it wouldn't matter.
Then again, you'd have to worry about how large the event horizon was. How fast could you feed stuff through the equivalent, of say, half a pinhead?
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
Couldn't find much info, but here is a reference saying pretty much the same thing. I'm sure someone will come up with something better.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
If most of the universe is composed of Dark Matter, and Dark Matter turns all normal matter into Dark Matter on contact, that would state that all matter is already Dark Matter.
Well, you can certainly define it as astrophysics, but I wouldn't. I would say it's physics.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Well, it is certainly a cool experiment, but I can't see what makes this so new. I mean, it's a physics experiment that draws inspiration from astrophysics. That's happened before. No, it isn't a new type of astrophysics in the lab, it's physics, but there is, and has always been strong interaction between astrophysics and physics. So they're doing a new physics experiment, and hope to achieve great densities. That's great.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Sooooomebooody! Please, be so kind.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
rofl, nice troll.
Thats 1.21 jigawatts! Not 1.21 gigawatts.
I assume your refering to Doc in the movie "Back to the FutureI ".
http://saveie6.com/
Ask the fish head anything you want to, they wont anwser they can't talk.
http://saveie6.com/
But how do you know that the cat is dead?
/tma
----
Actually, I don't think you can appeal to frames of reference here;
If I recall correctly, rotation is absolute. It has something to do with constant acceleration (change in velocity)...
If a person in outer space is in a closed box that is moving with linear motion, they will have no way of knowing whether they are moving or not. If they could see the universe outside, they could say, "The universe is going past me." But if the person in outer space is in a box that is spinning, they will know that the box is spinning, and they will not be able to [correctly] say, "The universe is spinning around me."
Someone who is good at Physics, please append a note to this.
Brain: Association search: "star" & "jar"
Results: Star War's Jar Jar Binks
Ugh! Thanks a lot, George Lucas.
No kidding: Try searching "star jar" in google: http://www.google.com/search?q=star+jar
Or even "Star In A Jar"
ALL matches are on Jar Jar Binks. Ugh.
How, exacty, do you propose that these scientists could create a black hole in the lab? A black hole, or a singularity, is an incredible amount of mass compressed to a single point- It would be akin to a star larger than our sun compressed to something the size of a ball bearing- or smaller. Only then would it be able to attract annything else into it. These expirements involve plenty of electricty, but little mass.
Also, Did you take physics? If you're from Kansas recently, I wouldn't be suprised if they took that out of the curriculum as well, but from anywhere else, you should remember the formula for the force of gravity (and singularities suck up stuff because of gravity, mind you) between any two bodies- GMm/r, where G is the universal gravity constant, M and m are the masses of the two bodies, and r is the distance between their center of masses. There is no reference here to the density of one of the bodies. Even if they compressed a couple hundred tons into a marble, you could still stand next to it, and the attractive force would be so slight, you wouldn't feel it.
Of course, such a dense object probably couldn't be supported by the labs floor, or the bed rock beneath it, so it would probably fall to the center of the earth, where it would come nicely to a rest.
So, in essence, please take your head out of the sand. If God gave us such wonderful brains to be able to do these kinds of things, I feel it's unlikely that he'd want us to do anything less than use them to our fullest ability.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
umm... huh? We don't know of any dark matter. It doesn't say anything about dark matter in the article either. You're just as bad as the guy you were replying to. I can't believe that you got modded up to a 5.
Shave the Whales!
Wait...that's a galaxy, isn't it? My bad.
karma is for the weak >)
"New from Black & Decker the: 'Super Microwave 3000'!
The 'Super Microwave 3000' utilizes the same technology as stars in space use when they supernova, so you get the hottest food on earth.
Our team of engineers designed the 'Super Microwave 3000' for men like you. So remember, when it comes to cooking nothing cooks faster like the......"
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
Hopefully this won't fall in to the wrong hands....muahahahahaha! *cough* excuse me...
How Jaded Are You?
...is on Orion's belt.
And anyway, most mis-pronouncers say lie-nucks.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
When first I read the title I thought, "Natalie Portman in a jar?" Cool! Ah, astrophysics, oh well...
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, from webster.com:
Main Entry: giga-
Pronunciation: 'ji-g&, 'gi-
Function: combining form
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary, from Greek gigas giant
: billion
So apparantly both are acceptable...
Just replying to undo incorrect moderation
My other sig is extremely clever...
Unfortunately, the Discover article does not contain a link to the lab itself. Here it is: http://www.lle.rochester.edu/external_index.html. Just dont /. the site!
These are the times when I wish I had a motorcycle as fast as Keaneau Reeve's in
"Chain Reaction".... I mean, with these sorts of experiements going on, you never know when you're going to have to outrace some kind of explosion that can level 5 city blocks.
Also, I would like a few dates with that English woman he was running around with in the film.
(Ah, let's face it. I'd settle for a few dates OR the motorcycle).
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Tim
Tim
Tim
A supernova has sufficient mass to heat its core to roughly a trillion degrees as elements fuse through multiple stages. When the core fuses to iron, fusion ceases to be an energy-producing process, and the chain of fusion to higher elements stops. Within the course of a very short time, the iron core cools. The outward radiation pressure stops since the core is no longer radiating, and the outer layers of the star that had been held up by radiation pressure collapse onto the core of the star.
The energy of the impact smashes into the core of the star, compressing its degenerate iron into neutronium as protons and electrons join into neutrons. This phase shift is accompanied by an incredible wave of neutrinos. A neutrino is a kind of ghost particle that interacts weakly with ordinary matter. It would fly through light-years of solid lead without pausing, but there are so many neutrinos released in the phase shift that they form a powerful explosion and blow the collapsing outer shell back off the neutronium core. The turbulence in the exploding gas cloud is so intense that it can cause fusion to atomic weights even higher than iron's. The explosion, while it lasts, briefly outshines the entire rest of the visible universe.
Eventually the expanding gas cloud becomes a nebula and takes place in later generation star and planet formation processes.
Tim
Oh well. I guess they'd rather be pigs or fishes or something.
--Jo Hunter
--Jo Hunter
Smile! It makes them wonder what you're up to.
Rather than tell you everything you may or may not already know, I'll just give you a link to the main LLNL NIF(National Ignition Facility) website. Believe me, working at a DOE lab is pretty cool, especially since you get to see most of the neat gadgets first hand (Like the 10m diameter target chamber, and the tiny target cylinder).
So, for the latest in inertial confinement fusion: www.llnl.gov/nif/
If what you want to learn about isn't there, you're not allowed to know
Boycott
ahh dammit, I blew it
Copernicus developed the heliocentric model. Galileo was just persecuted for it.
For lots of info on Supernovae, see my Supernovae and Supernova Remnants FAQ here
Mod this post up!
Maybe I should go into astrophysics. Sure, sysadmining gives you godlike control over users, but astrophysics allow you to play with the power of suns.
Sorry to bother you with a personal pet peeve, but it's Isaac, not Issac. Thanks.
The "I" is for Isaacs ;)
- Dan I.
This is correct - Because the motion is not linear. The suns gravity creates a constant force on the earth, creating a constant inward acceleration. Acceleration breaks relativity. There is no frame of reference from which the sun travels around the earth.
Why?
Chris
Right on. An actual article about this subject is available for free here at echelon.com.
Interesting little teaser, but hardly worth a /. posting, let alone hundreds of comments. Echelon.com has a MUCH more informative and SPAM-free blurb about it.
Discover Mag is certainly a class act nowadays -- a credit card popup, a mini-webcam popup, and a phony message box saying "Click here to claim your prize!" Really inspires me to fling my dollars there way, by gosh.
Silly, curiosity didn't kill the cat -- that damn Shrodinger's box did!
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Reminds me of the Forsaken storyline, ever played? :-)
0 001 11 1
Has anyone seen my Mickey Mouse stamps? I think I left them in the lab, but they're missing. Damn Germans, always swiping my funny papers.
Dancin Santa
Acutally, quantam theory states that ALL black holes evaporate, large ones just evaporate so slowly, that it would take longer than the current age of the universe to completley evaporate.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light Your physics is rusty, or you'd remember that nothing can travel faster than light. You're right. This is a common misconception about black holes. The reason light cannot escape from a black hole, is because as light approches the event horizon from within the hole, the frequency of the light gets redshifted upwards to infinity, due to the time dialation effect. In some sense, the light trying to escape ceases to exist (it doesn't, really. Read "Black holes & Time warps", it's much to complex to explain here.)
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
Babies consume objects smaller than they are because there exist objects smaller than they are. Ain't much smaller than subatomic. And if you're a small black hole feeding on subatomic particles (just the ones with mass, mind you, and they have to get so close to you it's almost arbitrary), you're not going to grow very fast. Fact is, black holes and their event horizons are sized according to the mass going into their creation, and the only ones we've made so far have been due to the collision of subatomic particles -- meaning they're considerably smaller than even subatomic particles, and have a subatomically size E.H. A black hole this small couldn't even suck up one lousy atom -- it's be thousands of times larger than the E.H!
We're not talking about the "baby black holes" created when a medium sized star, such as our sun, collapses -- baby holes that may have E.H's the size of earth or smaller. We're talking abount something nearly infinitly smaller.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Um, yeah, lots of people thought of the consequences -- or else they wouldn't be doing it. This isn't the wonderful hodge podge corporate america pseudo science we're all used to, putting mascara on a cat's ass to see if it causes polyps. These are the world's greatest thinkers testing hypothesises. Are you suggesting they didn't consider the ramifications of their actions? Don't be naive.
Creating a black hole the size of an atom has little to no effect on the planet because its mass is meager compared to everything else around it -- meaning practically no gravitational forces. Find a way to contain it and its subatomic event horizon and you've got the coolest vacation home for your sea monkeys ever. Remember: gravity doesn't change just because you're a singularity; a kilogram with no volume is still a kilogram, still a negligible factor in the universe, and if you dropped it it wouldn't have much affect on the earth or the people around it.
As for creating micro supernovas...they're super small, dude, and only as powerful as the lasers involved. You'll see more possibility for an environmental disaster in your average Hollywood movie than in this experiment. I know, I know...your high school science teacher said that supernovas are bad. But this is a really freaking small one, controlled by people who know what they're doing and in an expensive experiment that had to be reviewed and rereviewed a dozen times over before it could be approved for the extensive grants and equipment could be divvied up. If a slashdotter can point out flaws that these eggheads can't find, well then I just lost my faith in the scientific method.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You don't like dark matter because you are trying to keep the black man down.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I guess /. has found their new revenue stream, selling magazine subscriptions.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
You mean Schroedinger.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Your physics is rusty, or you'd remember that nothing can travel faster than light.
any black hole will continue to collect matter and grow in size regardless of how small it is
The theory of quantum black holes states that small (very small) black holes evaporate, giving off hawking radiation. Go read "A Brief History of Time", by Stephen Hawking for a light intro to the subject.
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Do a search for sonoluminescence. This also produces very high temperatures on a small scale, but uses sound waves instead of lasers.
OOOOPS! "Doctor, I fear the rolling blackout hit us, the magnetic field wavered for a microsecond, and... well, to tell the truth, we are missing a black hole. There is a little hole in the ground, the size of a pinhead, and that's all"
"Well, son, don't panic and book me one ticket to the Space Station. I need a change of air, I've got the sinking feeling. You can say there is something gnawing at me, and at the Earth too."
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
No cosmic ray is phasic - they are just very high speed particles. The difference is important.
But how can you be certain?
Er. I mean, Schrodinger.
It's too hot today.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Curiosity placed the cat in a superimposed alive/dead state. (With apologies to Heisenberg)
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I had a star in a jar in my dorm room years ago, but had to get rid of it. Its gravitational pull was preventing me from moving around much. I did grow some nice muscles, but I'm also horribly disfigured. It was pretty cool though.
--
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
/. failed to directly link to (as I have just done!) clearly states that dark matter is at the core of the experiment! They have used lasers to compress dark matter to the point where it creates an anti-matter star. While there would certainly be disastrous consequences if this ball of anti-matter were to come into contact with real matter (my first rough sketch comes out to a 350 Megaton yield for each square foot of compressed anti-matter, but feel free to double check) it is made very clear that this pseudo-star (is that what we should call christina aguilera?) is safely contained by the laser containment field.
Um, are you really majoring in physics? Are you just spouting off the top of your head? I'm not sure you know what you're talking about when it comes to dark matter.
First off, the story which
The benefits of this research, namely determing the mass density of the Universe (from the Berkley dark matter paper: "A parameter known as the "mass density" - that is, how much matter per unit volume is contained in the Universe") is far more important than any possible laser containment field leak. Not that any such leak is likely.
Quit with your babbling and stick to the facts. If you want, you can learn more about laser containment fields here.
If I were you I wouldn't bother.
A back-up sun so when ours starts to get old and engulfs us, we can just blow it up and make our own.
Add a whole new sun, besides obvious gravity problems we'd deal with can you imagine how great things would grow?
Two-story target chamber lazer gun pointed right at, um, France! Come on, you can't say you didn't think it too...
spacefem.com
the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light
Your physics is rusty, or you'd remember that nothing can travel faster than light.
That's why nothing can escape a black hole (except Hawking radiation)
Reboot macht Frei.
My quantum physics is pretty rusty and it's possible that I didn't have a good grasp on it to begin with, but it seemed to me the black holes would continuously expand. Mathematically all you're talking about is a situation in which the gravitational pull is so great that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. This concept was one of the pillars of quantum physics, there must be a minimum distance that keeps atoms apart otherwise 2 particles could collapse together and form a black hole. Based on my understanding any black hole will continue to collect matter and grow in size regardless of how small it is. If someone has some better info, I'd love to hear it.
some /. post "a kid and his tool shed were sucked into singularity due to a faulty laser pointer pen in his home made star collapsing jar"
PLEEAASSEE. I am not going to waste my time correcting the ignorance of the participants on current cosmological theory and speculation. Most of what is being talked about comes from extrapolation and playing calculus origami, and is not conceptual insight.
There was a very good point made about the fears that the atomic bomb would create a plasma fire in the earth's atmosphere. Then the scientists who knew better, and the generals who didn't, actually set the damn thing off, and WOAH, MAN, WE'RE STILL HERE!!! The conditions created in the laboratory are neither as exotic, nor as dangerous, as the pop-science magazines and the press make them out to be. They are laboratories. Dangerous and unpredictable conditions are shunned in favor of something called the controlled experiment. And the idea that the experiment made in I-forget-which-particle-accelerator to create neutronic matter could potentially create a microscopic black hole was examined aforehand, and dismissed by those conducting the experiment. I have a letter to the editor in some issue of Scientific American (which I will not reproduce to save time and the copyrights of the editors) addressing that very concern, and the response was candid and informed, stating that the conditions of the experiment gave the best odds of a black hole forming in the cyclotron to be something like one in 1X10^60. You see, most scientists aren't power-mad Dr. Frankensteins trying to play God and create horrible monsters. They have careers, personal interests, personal beliefs, and generally comphrehend what kind of experiments they are rigging up.
Dammit, JigaWatt!!!
Just being curious, but is the laser containment field of the same type and design as the one used by the Ghostbusters?
There's a book, a SciFi novel, about a microscopic black hole that starts chewing up the earth, called "The Lazarus Effect", available at your local library (I hope).
First a bit of background. Commercial nuclear powerplants and naval propulsion plants operate on the principle of nuclear fission, the splitting of very heavy atoms to yield thermal energy, which heats steam, which turns an electric turbine or propeller shaft. What the_crowbar is talking about is nuclear fusion, the slamming together of very light atoms, i.e. heavy hydrogen or helium, in a chamber of superheated (in a star's case, superdense) plasma, thus heating steam and turning a turbine.
There was a major international experiment called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. A russian-invented device called a tokamak, or magnetic bottle, can be used to contain plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber. These are in use at several research labs and universities, including Harvard University and Lawrence Livermore Labs. The ITER was concieved as a prototype reactor to spearhead the way for commercially run nuclear fusion electricity plants, as proof-of-concept. The reactor was expected to cost over $4 TRILLION dollars. Therefore, the U.S. Congress, not wanting to any more money than necessary to get re-elected, withdrew U.S. support in 1998, and the project is expected to fail without U.S. funding. Go to Scientific American Magazine for more information on this project.
That these guys are finally getting to do actual experimentation, perhaps sometime soon being able to tweak parameters to alter behaviors, to better test the theories. Observation of celestial activity will always be the predominant method of learning, but being able to recreate some of these events in the lab is a massive step forward. Up-close observation is something I never dreamed possible.
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
oops here's the addy: http://24.15.183.13/nova
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
UM COULD YOU STOP LOOKING FOR IT AT THE FIRST ADDRESS AND USE THIS????? /var/lib/apache/htdocs/lasernova.html
[Thu Jun 14 16:11:04 2001] [error] [client 12.111.37.145] File does not exist: /var/lib/apache/htdocs/lasernova.html
[Thu Jun 14 16:11:06 2001] [error] [client 12.111.37.145] File does not exist: /var/lib/apache/htdocs/lasernova.html
[Thu Jun 14 16:17:32 2001] [error] [client 64.122.5.99] File does not exist: /var/lib/apache/htdocs/lasernova.html
[Thu Jun 14 16:11:02 2001] [error] [client 12.111.37.145] File does not exist:
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
>Yes there is still accountability. There is no >reckless desire in the persuit of science. Nobody >is doing any experiments that could result in the >obliteration of our civilization. While I much agree with your other statements (especially the one about aiming the lasers at his head, that was classic!) I must point out that there have been experiments done which could have wiped us out and that is germ warfare experimentation. I saw a special on the History channel about how the Japanese experiments on it which involved Chinese test subjects still occasionally run amok in China causing epidemics of Bubonic Plague in some areas from time to time. The US and the U.S.S.R. did a TON of research on super bugs to be used as "doomsday weapons", or more accuratly, just as a threat use being used. Even today you still have this going on in Korea, Iran, Iraq and any other number of small nations. While it may be military in nature, it is still scientific work, just being put to horrible misuse...
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
In your model however you would need to have the speed at which the matter was converting other matter into dark matter to be able to say that all mater was already dark matter. The universe is expanding constantly and so therefore for all matter to be dark matter the rate at which normal matter was converted into dark matter would have to exceed the rate of expansion in the universe.
But anyway the parent was a troll, but I just had to post my thoughts.
We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge. - Rutherford D. Rogers
1.21 gigawatts! (Tearing hair out) 1.21 gigawatts!
I'm thinking this is what they're talking about (haven't seen a mirror go up yet) http://www.aip.org/physnews/preview/1997/dpp97/sn8 7a.htm
If you had a star in a jar in your dorm room and it made your muscles big and built but you were deformed partcially, hey it can only help me!!!!
There are a lot of explanations going around this thread about how core collapse supernovae occur. Some good, some terrible, none quite right. Rather than correct what's been said, I'll instead point y'all to a few of the sources of real info out there.
A good place to start is the NASA Observatorium page on Stellar Evolution and Death
A friend in the business maintains a page full of links to SN pages. Many of these are links to research groups, but there are also links to general education and image catalogs.
BTW, in case you don't believe that I know of what I speak, follow this link