Sorry if I gave the impression it's being destroyed. You're right, it's not and that's not what I meant. It's the bumping that produces X-rays, but that still means less energy for the BH to absorb.
Okay, let's look at this concept of a 0 Kelvin mass.
To have a temperature of 0 K, the object must have no kinetic energy (as temperature is just a function of the kinetic energy of the constituent particles). Now thermodynamics says you can't have a temp of 0 k, but thermodynamics is just a statistical thing, and only really works when you have a large number of particles. So let's look at something small. Start with an atom.
An atom has a bunch of electrons going around it. If we take away the elctron's kinetic energy (withour magic KE sucker), they fall into the nucleus. They then bump into the protons, producing neutrons and energy, which means more KE to suck away.
But let's keep on sucking. We suck away the KE from those neutrons. But, the exclusion principle says that they can't be in the same place at the same time. Well, that's an over-simplification. What it actually says is they can't have the same energy level. In other words, each of them must have a different enegy level to the others. In other words, only one of those neutrons can have an energy of 0.
But wait, it gets worse. Those neutrons are made up of quarks. Two down quarks, and one up quark, in fact. Each of the down quarks, being the same type of particle have to have different energy levels. So we can only have one quark with a KE of 0. But we can't get a quark on its own.
Since we can't get that one particle on its own, we can't get a KE of 0, so we can't get a temp of 0 K.
There are, of course, other particles we could try this with, but no matter what we end up finding there is no such thing as a mass with a temp of 0 K.
The simple fact is that entropy is just another measure of energy. The very idea of a mass without energy is nonsense, and that is why it is safe to say that a BH's radius is proportional to its entropy.
Hope that helped, and I hope I didn't get too caught up in physics stuff.
Okay, I'm gonna admit it - I am a physicist. At least that's what my degree says, anyway. I just though it might be helpful to explain what I got from it. Sadly, it the article was kinda lacking in details, but this is what I gathered.
Basically, a black hole is a big old sucky thing. It pulls in everything around it. Since the stuff can only fall in so quickly, the stuff spends a lot of time whirling around the black hole before it falls in. While it's whirling around, it tends to bump into the other stuff that's similarly whirling.
Now, with all that whirling and bumping, some of the stuff gets turned into x-rays (E=mc^2, remember?).
Now, the stuff that got turned into x-rays doesn't make it into the black hole, which is useful 'cause that's how we detect the things in the first place.
With a bigger black hole, there's a lot more whirling and bumping going on, so less of the stuff that the black hole starts out sucking on makes it into the Sarlac pit - I mean black hole (sorry, just re-watched ROTJ).
That means that with a smaller black hole, a bigger proportion's gonna make it into the black hole itself.
At least, that's what I got from the article. But then, my specialty's nuclear physics...
Re:A great step in the right direction
on
Online Voting?
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· Score: 3
I work for a students' association, and I remember a coouple of years back we tried a form of electronic voting - in this case using a telephone system rather than the internet.
We'd always had low turnouts for elections, and it was hoped that by being more convenient this would improve the situation. Quite the opposite, in fact. The turnout was one of the lowest in the student union's history. Worse yet, a large proportion of the people screwed it up and didn't get their votes counted at all.
I realise it's not quite the same thing, but the principle's the same. People don't trust that new-fangled technology bollix, and when they use it they screw it up.
And when you throw in the fact that students tend to be more technically literate than most...
Most people can handle the technology behind a felt tip pen. Let's not confuse them.
Y'know, I always thought all that nanotechnology stuff I saw in Star Trek and so many books I read as a teenager was a loud of bollocks. I mean, I seemed like one of the stupider ideas that SF was fond of.
Maybe I was wrong.
I mean, these things can be used as bearings and springs. Everything mechanical is made up of a number of relatively simple objects (much like a good programming language), and these are two of the important ones.
If they can find ways to make more of the mechanical structures, and arrange them into complex structures, I may well own those SF writers an apology.
The developers of the atomic bomb thought that there was a possibility (admittedly remote) that the bomb might ignite a Nitrogen Cycle and burn up the earth's atmosphere. They detonated the thing anyway. There's always going to be someone who's going to be willing 'take that risk' for you.
It would be nit-picking if I pointed out that a "Nitrogen Cycle" is the natural process by which nitrogen gets from the air to plants to animals and back again, so I won't.
However, I probably should point out that the story is actually that the scientists were betting on whether or not the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire and destroy human life.
Given the difficulty in collecting upon winning that bet, I somehow doubt they though it was a serious risk.
The problem with humanism in this case is it seems to presume that the human body as it stands (if you'll excuse the pun) is some kind of "divine form." (And I don't mean any kind of religious implications from this, merely using religion as a metaphor.)
The simple fact is that the human body is a pretty crap desing on the whole. We use all kinds of stuff to compensate - clothes to keep us warm, glasses to improve eyesight, books/computers to improve memory, cars to make us go faster - that's just what we do.
Just because we've worked out how to change the instruction code that makes us a crap design doesn't make it a priori a better or worse thing than those external modifications. Knowledge in and of itself is neither good nor evil.
So if we can make ourselves and our lives better, why not? Sure there will be risks, but then again, we didn't get where we are by saying: "That climbing down from the trees lark looks a bit risky. Those sabre-toothed tigers could get me.
Okay, having read the article, one word springs to mind: OUCH!
That whole thing - cutting open your eyes - I'm not afraid to admit to feeling a little squeemish about that one. And getting it done so that you can watch TV? The really scary part is that some people would actually do that. Surgery to watch TV without needing that big ol' box.
Have to agree with you. We are all going to die now.
Living in New Zealand, I can easily see why they'd do it. Sure I spent practically everything I earned last year getting myself a really good computer, but I'm still more proud of those crappy LCIIIs I assembled for text inputting at work out of ten year old bits scattered around the office.
They might be slow. They might crash a lot. I might spend ungodly amounts of time just keeping the damn things running, but hell, I did it.
Besides, there really isn't anything better to do round here.
Perhaps in the next five years we will see the advent of the non-spinning drive, and portable disk space approaching the petabyte. Enough storage to keep most of what we now consider to be human knowledge.
Maybe it's enough to keep most of human knowledge on it, but I bet M$ can still come up with an OS that will fill most of that storage capacity.
Of course this has been predicted for a while. OD course they kept saying we'll have it soon and then not coming through. Same with a lot of stuff. Still, the engineers usually get it right in the end. But it's always later than they said it would be. 2003 seems a little optimistic t'me.
Look, everyone here seems to be thinking suger + water = Kool-Aid. This is all well and good, but there are bigger issues at stake. The real issue is: If we can find some intergalctic yeast, we can turn the universe into one gigantic brewery. Now that's practical science. Suger + water + yeast = FUN!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry if I gave the impression it's being destroyed. You're right, it's not and that's not what I meant. It's the bumping that produces X-rays, but that still means less energy for the BH to absorb.
Hope that's clearer.
Okay, let's look at this concept of a 0 Kelvin mass.
To have a temperature of 0 K, the object must have no kinetic energy (as temperature is just a function of the kinetic energy of the constituent particles). Now thermodynamics says you can't have a temp of 0 k, but thermodynamics is just a statistical thing, and only really works when you have a large number of particles. So let's look at something small. Start with an atom.
An atom has a bunch of electrons going around it. If we take away the elctron's kinetic energy (withour magic KE sucker), they fall into the nucleus. They then bump into the protons, producing neutrons and energy, which means more KE to suck away.
But let's keep on sucking. We suck away the KE from those neutrons. But, the exclusion principle says that they can't be in the same place at the same time. Well, that's an over-simplification. What it actually says is they can't have the same energy level. In other words, each of them must have a different enegy level to the others. In other words, only one of those neutrons can have an energy of 0.
But wait, it gets worse. Those neutrons are made up of quarks. Two down quarks, and one up quark, in fact. Each of the down quarks, being the same type of particle have to have different energy levels. So we can only have one quark with a KE of 0. But we can't get a quark on its own.
Since we can't get that one particle on its own, we can't get a KE of 0, so we can't get a temp of 0 K.
There are, of course, other particles we could try this with, but no matter what we end up finding there is no such thing as a mass with a temp of 0 K.
The simple fact is that entropy is just another measure of energy. The very idea of a mass without energy is nonsense, and that is why it is safe to say that a BH's radius is proportional to its entropy.
Hope that helped, and I hope I didn't get too caught up in physics stuff.
Okay, I'm gonna admit it - I am a physicist. At least that's what my degree says, anyway. I just though it might be helpful to explain what I got from it. Sadly, it the article was kinda lacking in details, but this is what I gathered.
Basically, a black hole is a big old sucky thing. It pulls in everything around it. Since the stuff can only fall in so quickly, the stuff spends a lot of time whirling around the black hole before it falls in. While it's whirling around, it tends to bump into the other stuff that's similarly whirling.
Now, with all that whirling and bumping, some of the stuff gets turned into x-rays (E=mc^2, remember?).
Now, the stuff that got turned into x-rays doesn't make it into the black hole, which is useful 'cause that's how we detect the things in the first place.
With a bigger black hole, there's a lot more whirling and bumping going on, so less of the stuff that the black hole starts out sucking on makes it into the Sarlac pit - I mean black hole (sorry, just re-watched ROTJ).
That means that with a smaller black hole, a bigger proportion's gonna make it into the black hole itself.
At least, that's what I got from the article. But then, my specialty's nuclear physics...
I work for a students' association, and I remember a coouple of years back we tried a form of electronic voting - in this case using a telephone system rather than the internet.
We'd always had low turnouts for elections, and it was hoped that by being more convenient this would improve the situation. Quite the opposite, in fact. The turnout was one of the lowest in the student union's history. Worse yet, a large proportion of the people screwed it up and didn't get their votes counted at all.
I realise it's not quite the same thing, but the principle's the same. People don't trust that new-fangled technology bollix, and when they use it they screw it up.
And when you throw in the fact that students tend to be more technically literate than most...
Most people can handle the technology behind a felt tip pen. Let's not confuse them.
Y'know, I always thought all that nanotechnology stuff I saw in Star Trek and so many books I read as a teenager was a loud of bollocks. I mean, I seemed like one of the stupider ideas that SF was fond of.
Maybe I was wrong.
I mean, these things can be used as bearings and springs. Everything mechanical is made up of a number of relatively simple objects (much like a good programming language), and these are two of the important ones.
If they can find ways to make more of the mechanical structures, and arrange them into complex structures, I may well own those SF writers an apology.
Nanotech here we come!
The developers of the atomic bomb thought that there was a possibility (admittedly remote) that the bomb might ignite a Nitrogen Cycle and burn up the earth's atmosphere. They detonated the thing anyway. There's always going to be someone who's going to be willing 'take that risk' for you.
It would be nit-picking if I pointed out that a "Nitrogen Cycle" is the natural process by which nitrogen gets from the air to plants to animals and back again, so I won't.
However, I probably should point out that the story is actually that the scientists were betting on whether or not the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire and destroy human life.
Given the difficulty in collecting upon winning that bet, I somehow doubt they though it was a serious risk.
The problem with humanism in this case is it seems to presume that the human body as it stands (if you'll excuse the pun) is some kind of "divine form." (And I don't mean any kind of religious implications from this, merely using religion as a metaphor.)
The simple fact is that the human body is a pretty crap desing on the whole. We use all kinds of stuff to compensate - clothes to keep us warm, glasses to improve eyesight, books/computers to improve memory, cars to make us go faster - that's just what we do.
Just because we've worked out how to change the instruction code that makes us a crap design doesn't make it a priori a better or worse thing than those external modifications. Knowledge in and of itself is neither good nor evil.
So if we can make ourselves and our lives better, why not? Sure there will be risks, but then again, we didn't get where we are by saying: "That climbing down from the trees lark looks a bit risky. Those sabre-toothed tigers could get me.
Okay, having read the article, one word springs to mind: OUCH!
That whole thing - cutting open your eyes - I'm not afraid to admit to feeling a little squeemish about that one. And getting it done so that you can watch TV? The really scary part is that some people would actually do that. Surgery to watch TV without needing that big ol' box.
Have to agree with you. We are all going to die now.
Damn. I had plans next week...
Um, no, not really.
Living in New Zealand, I can easily see why they'd do it. Sure I spent practically everything I earned last year getting myself a really good computer, but I'm still more proud of those crappy LCIIIs I assembled for text inputting at work out of ten year old bits scattered around the office.
They might be slow. They might crash a lot. I might spend ungodly amounts of time just keeping the damn things running, but hell, I did it.
Besides, there really isn't anything better to do round here.
Perhaps in the next five years we will see the advent of the non-spinning drive, and portable disk space approaching the petabyte. Enough storage to keep most of what we now consider to be human knowledge.
Maybe it's enough to keep most of human knowledge on it, but I bet M$ can still come up with an OS that will fill most of that storage capacity.
Of course this has been predicted for a while. OD course they kept saying we'll have it soon and then not coming through. Same with a lot of stuff. Still, the engineers usually get it right in the end. But it's always later than they said it would be. 2003 seems a little optimistic t'me.
Does this mean Emmett's free as in speech, not as in beer?
Look, everyone here seems to be thinking suger + water = Kool-Aid. This is all well and good, but there are bigger issues at stake. The real issue is: If we can find some intergalctic yeast, we can turn the universe into one gigantic brewery. Now that's practical science. Suger + water + yeast = FUN!