When you boil things down, in the long run it doesn't matter if these things bound into mile-deep canyons or slam themselves into a rock, because they are so cheap. When you compare the traditional planet explorer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, to the softball sized clump of metal seen in the picture, it is obvious we could produce hundreds of these "grasshoppers" for the same price. NASA should ignore all of the crazy, nutball, treehugging, hippie liberals who are afraid we might damage Mars' natural environment. Obviously the guys at NASA are careful enough to check for things surrounding the "grasshopper" before letting it bounce. If you read the entire article, it stops and reorients itself before bouncing again. Of course the scientists and programmers will allow for such intervention to prevent destruction of a lifeform or the like. This plan should definitely be implemented. Critical philistines and insane green-peacers should be ignored.
The only thing stopping humans from living this long, or even being immortal, is a part of the cell called the telemeter. It is a cell structure of a given length which divides in two with the cell, and eventually, becomes too small to divide further. When you run out of cells to divide, your body begins to erode, so to say, and you slowly begin to die. In cancerous cells, however, the telemeters do not shorten, causing the cell to divide unchecked. If only we could control this division, we could make people that could not only live forever, but would have eternal youth. Cancer wouldn't be so bad if only it didn't kill you. If only there were some sort of shot or pill to trigger and stop cell division, we could all be more or less demigods. The applications of such a thing are just mindblowing.
How can jaws be complex? Aren't they just bones with teeth sticking out of them? How does an unfertilized egg reproduce? Why, if these were discovered six years ago, is this just being announced now? Why are they keeping a colony consisting of females? If they can reproduce on their own, what are males for? Why does none of this make sense? Does anyone know any of these answers?
I still don't like how the government doesn't like cloning becuase the "moral majority" (which is neither moral, nor the majority) says it is unethical. We researched the atom bomb, a device capable of killing millions of people in a fraction of a second. Cloning could just as easily wipe us out as that can, but people are smarter than that. It's sick some people can't even trust themselves to have the power to stop so many things wrong with the world (hunger, lack of organs for transplant) because they are afraid they will abuse it.
We already know how the Higgs particle interacts with other particles, as I stated in another post on this article. Additionally, it would not explain the mass contained by leptons, such as the electron, since they are not affected by the weak nuclear force. Not to be anal or anything, I'm just saying that this is not the end of particle physics or the Standard Model.
This article, as well as the one concerning the Higgs particle, is a perfect example of the huge leaps and bounds by which physics has been progressing lately. A gamma ray study conducted from space is critical to the determination of the origin of gamma rays, which will undoubtedly be helpful in discovering the nature of gamma rays, which are released in nearly every reaction on the atomic level as a result of mass defect. It is ironic that we have to look millions of light years away at objects infathomably immmense to understand infinitessimally small objects we concern ourselves with every day.
Even if this "God particle" was the prophesized Higgs particle, science would still need to account for the strong nuclear force (a Grand Unified Theory, or GUT), and gravity (a Theory of Everything). Not only must the Higgs particle be found, but the particle origins of the strong force and gravity as well.
There is something about this article which keeps confusing people, so I would like to take this chance to clear things up. The Standard Model states that all matter comes from twelve particles, six leptons, and six quarks. These particles mirror eachother, if you will. They are divided into three families, the first, whose particles comprise everyday matter, are the up quark, it's "partner" the down quark, and their "relatives", the electron, and the electron-neutrino. The second two groups are only observed in cosmic rays and high energy experiments. They consist of the strange quark and the charm quark, with the muon and muon-neutrino in one group, and the bottom and top quark, with the tau and tau-neutrino in the other group. This is the Standard Model, but it is not perfect, because it does not include the force which utterly dominates the large-scale universe: gravity. Additionally, it has 20 free parameters, i.e. properties or values only able to be determined through measurement. As imperfect as it is, that is the Standard Model. Now that that's out of the way, on to the Higgs particle. For simplicity, we shall only concern ourselves with everyday particles, i.e. the up and down quarks, and the electron. The electron is about 1800 times lighter than the proton, which is comprised of two up quarks, with a charge of +2/3, and a down quark, with charge of -1/3 (thus a net charge of +1). This is derived from the fact that protons and neutrons are affected by the electroweak force (the weak nuclear force, magnetism, and electricity, which are in essense one and the same) carriers, W's and Z's, while the electron is not. This is because in quantum phsyics, even a vacuum is not empty; it is filled with transient particles popping in and out of existence. The Higgs field can be compared somewhat to the corrugations in a sheet of cardboard. The massless carriers of the electromagnetic force (photons) travel effortlessly between the ridges, while the carriers of the weak force must travel over the corrugations. They absorb the needed energy from the Higgs field, and in the process become heavy. Without Higgs particles, W's and Z's would have no mass, and thus as they were absorbed by up and down quarks in protons and neutrons, they would not gain any mass (mass from other sources would also be zero, reducing its mass, in effect, to zero). So the Higgs particle is, in essense, where mass comes from. However, you can't simply jam a bunch of them into a ball and create a black hole. If that were so, there would be nothing stopping a trash compactor from pressing a soda can to infinite density and sucking your house into a black hole. There are other forces which prevent the particles from being pushed so closely together. The force required to do so is so incredibly immense that ordinary (and even extraordinary) means are required. Particle accelerators use as much power as small cities to break apart a few subatomic particles from eacother. To smash apart quarks, even a particle accelerator the circumference of the Earth would not be strong enough. I do not know exactly the density of a proton, but it is something on the order of fifteen trillion tons per cubic centimeter. Clearly protons like to keep a safe distance from one another. Furthermore, since the quarks that make up protons only constitute an infitessimally small portion of the volume of a proton, but nearly all its mass, their density much be even more astronomical in magnitude. So, in conclusion, unfortunately (fortunately?) labratories cannot simply cram Higgs particles in a bunch and suck the Earth into a black hole (one less thing to worry about.)
Why is this even a headline? Obviously the fact that only 16 people have commented on it shows that no one really cares anymore about shuttle launches. There was even a Simpson's episode to mock it. It could be the billionth shuttle launch, for all I care. No matter which shuttle it is, you can only look at a massive hunk of metal hurtling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds before it gets old. The only time I was even moderately more hyped about a shuttle launch was in 1995 when I met Eugene Kranz. For a while I was really pumped about NASA and the space program, but then I once more realized that it's not all _that_ exciting. Mr. Kranz, by the way, is a very nice fellow, it's not that I didn't like him, just that, as I have said many times, shuttle launches get boring quickly.
Man, this sort of thing isn't new at all. Some of my friends and I built something out of a kit identical to this almost two years ago. It was from a catalogue my friend Val had, and called "GroBot". The price isn't even cheaper, if anything, it's more expensive. I would recommend this sort of thing, though, for anyone interested in home-made robots. We since made a much larger and complex robot, also using PBASIC, as much of a pain as it is. Once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad, and it's convenient in that it works with all Paralax products. I am pretty sure that is what the P in PBASIC stands for. In any event, this sort of thing is not at all new, but it is pretty cool.
I bet someone already thought of this, but why couldn't these planets have just escaped their orbits around whatever star it is that they were from, some odd billions of years ago? Also, would it even be accurate at this point to call them planets? The definition of a planet requires that it orbits a star, which these obviously do not. Also, part of the reason they are so large could be attributed to lower pressure from solar winds from whatever star they orbited. Just like a balloon inflated slightly at sea level will inflate is it rises into the atmosphere, a ball of gas will also expand with less ambient pressure upon it. I could be wrong on all counts here, but it at least makes sense.
I don't know exactly how this works, but some government agencies in the US and abroad have their militaries looking into emitting "cancelling" audio waves that would eliminate that obnoxious helicopter "wop wop wopping".
At first I read this and thought that it would be the greatest invention in the history of mankind, but then the skeptic in me hinted at the mathematician in me, and so they got together and did a few calculations.
First of all, to say that a man-carrying spacecraft will weigh a mere 200 newtons is horribly unrealistic. Let's say it has a meager crew of two men, weighing 75 kg a piece, for a total of 150 kg; plus we'll say another 50 kg for spacesuits and such. Now we will use another 200 kg for the weight of the extremely diminutive spacecraft they are to travel in, all in all, that gives us a weight of 400 kg. However, for each day in flight, the engine requires 1 kg of fuel, and the astronauts, we will say, a conservative 3 kg of food a day, for another 4 kg of mass for each day of travel.
It is approximately 5.8 billion km from pluto to the sun, and approximately 149 million km from the earth to the sun, so I hopefully can assume it is about 5.7 billion km from the earth to pluto, which I will use to represent the edge of the solar system (hey, it is, after all, isn't it?) Since F=ma and d=(at^2)/2, we can express d as being equal to (Ft^2)/(2m). There are about 86400 seconds in a day (slightly less, since a day is 23 hr, 56 min, 4.0989 s, but i have to be reasonable). The craft will need an extra 4 kg a day, which translates into 1 kg every 21600. We can then express the craft's mass in terms of t in s as m=400 kg+(t/21600s) kg. Using a bit of algebra we can get m=(Ft^2)/(2d). We can set these two equations equal to eachother and get the quadratic t^2-(1.75926*10^8)ts-(1.52*10^15)s^2=0. Solving this and eliminating a negative answer gives us about t=184 million seconds, or 2131 days, which is about 5.84 years. This would be far and away the longest mission ever (with an actual purpose, not including Russian guys spinning chess pieces in antigravity for ten years at a time while the government scrounges up enough money to get them home). The craft would weigh, by the way, about 8927 kg. These are most conservative estimates, and if someone can give me actual figures for my guesses I would be more than glad to do the math to figure them. Maybe later I will figure how long it would take to get to alpha centauri. The craft accelerates at about 3.36*10^-4 m/s^2 and would be going about 5.7*10^9 m/s, which leads to some interesting questions, since that is nearly twenty times the speed of light. When I sat down to do all this math, I thought I would debunk this technology, but really all I did was show that it unfurls even more questions, and that possibly all of you may be able to guess that I am doing poorly in my AP Physics B class.
Re:The Nature of Electron Fission
on
Electron Fission
·
· Score: 1
Please elaborate on this "electrino" of which you speak. Have any properties or anything for it been proposed? I find the idea of splitting a lepton utterly groundbreaking. It would add a completely new aspect to the concepts of Supersymmetry and the Standard Model. Of course, then, accompanying research would have to be done to dissect all other leptons and quarks. Would these electrinos be affected by W and Z particles? The electromagnetic force? Only time will tell.
The article, in my opinion, is horribly vague, to the point where it is very difficult to discern what it actually means. Is it, as someone else suggested, regarding the fission of electron wave functions? Or is an electron being physically split here? The differences between the two are astronomical. Splitting a wave function merely relates to separating into two parts a function which will relate to an observer the probability of the electron being found in a certain place at a certain time. However, to actually split an electron would be truly something; as a member of the lepton family, electrons were understood to be the fundamental building blocks of matter. Its accompanying neutrino, along with the muon particle, the tau particle, and their accompanying neutrinos, made up the leptons. The leptons, in turn, with the six quarks, comprised the "chassis" of the Standard Model, that is the theory describing the nature of matter, in which the quarks were affected by the strong nuclear force, and the leptons were not. Were an electron to be actually physically split, it would open up a whole new realm of particle and subatomic physics. Wow. It would be like smashing the pieces of the smashed pieces of the smashed pieces of the atom. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify the nature of the statement in question.
As soon as i read this article, my memory was instantly harkened back to the Yahoo! commercial in which a man living in the Australian outback buys cushions to "catch" a falling communication satellite. Now I don't know exactly how the Russians do it, but when i hear "deorbit", I think "burn up in the atmosphere before crashing into the earth." If that thing is landing anywhere even remotely near my house, I am taking every possible measure to ensure that I will have Mir for my own. Forget college, my money will get me something much better than education, a Russian space station. Have your degrees, I am content with my planet-orbiting habitation module. I almost hope this triggers some sort of international conflict, maybe other countries would start to send me their satellites out of pity or protest. The only forseeable downfall is that darned fungus. An additional scenario, also quite conceivable, involves me killing off the earth's population courtesy an intergalactic space fungus. Whether I start a space vehicle collection or kill the entire planet, all shall know my name. Regardless the consequences, Mir shall be mine, unless it is landing in some random other place like Burkina Faso, and whatever lucky shmoe has it land in his back yard will have my idea to thank for it. Free space stations for all.
Slashdot Mirror
When you boil things down, in the long run it doesn't matter if these things bound into mile-deep canyons or slam themselves into a rock, because they are so cheap. When you compare the traditional planet explorer, which costs tens of millions of dollars, to the softball sized clump of metal seen in the picture, it is obvious we could produce hundreds of these "grasshoppers" for the same price. NASA should ignore all of the crazy, nutball, treehugging, hippie liberals who are afraid we might damage Mars' natural environment. Obviously the guys at NASA are careful enough to check for things surrounding the "grasshopper" before letting it bounce. If you read the entire article, it stops and reorients itself before bouncing again. Of course the scientists and programmers will allow for such intervention to prevent destruction of a lifeform or the like. This plan should definitely be implemented. Critical philistines and insane green-peacers should be ignored.
The only thing stopping humans from living this long, or even being immortal, is a part of the cell called the telemeter. It is a cell structure of a given length which divides in two with the cell, and eventually, becomes too small to divide further. When you run out of cells to divide, your body begins to erode, so to say, and you slowly begin to die. In cancerous cells, however, the telemeters do not shorten, causing the cell to divide unchecked. If only we could control this division, we could make people that could not only live forever, but would have eternal youth. Cancer wouldn't be so bad if only it didn't kill you. If only there were some sort of shot or pill to trigger and stop cell division, we could all be more or less demigods. The applications of such a thing are just mindblowing.
How can jaws be complex? Aren't they just bones with teeth sticking out of them? How does an unfertilized egg reproduce? Why, if these were discovered six years ago, is this just being announced now? Why are they keeping a colony consisting of females? If they can reproduce on their own, what are males for? Why does none of this make sense? Does anyone know any of these answers?
I still don't like how the government doesn't like cloning becuase the "moral majority" (which is neither moral, nor the majority) says it is unethical. We researched the atom bomb, a device capable of killing millions of people in a fraction of a second. Cloning could just as easily wipe us out as that can, but people are smarter than that. It's sick some people can't even trust themselves to have the power to stop so many things wrong with the world (hunger, lack of organs for transplant) because they are afraid they will abuse it.
We already know how the Higgs particle interacts with other particles, as I stated in another post on this article. Additionally, it would not explain the mass contained by leptons, such as the electron, since they are not affected by the weak nuclear force. Not to be anal or anything, I'm just saying that this is not the end of particle physics or the Standard Model.
This article, as well as the one concerning the Higgs particle, is a perfect example of the huge leaps and bounds by which physics has been progressing lately. A gamma ray study conducted from space is critical to the determination of the origin of gamma rays, which will undoubtedly be helpful in discovering the nature of gamma rays, which are released in nearly every reaction on the atomic level as a result of mass defect. It is ironic that we have to look millions of light years away at objects infathomably immmense to understand infinitessimally small objects we concern ourselves with every day.
Even if this "God particle" was the prophesized Higgs particle, science would still need to account for the strong nuclear force (a Grand Unified Theory, or GUT), and gravity (a Theory of Everything). Not only must the Higgs particle be found, but the particle origins of the strong force and gravity as well.
There is something about this article which keeps confusing people, so I would like to take this chance to clear things up. The Standard Model states that all matter comes from twelve particles, six leptons, and six quarks. These particles mirror eachother, if you will. They are divided into three families, the first, whose particles comprise everyday matter, are the up quark, it's "partner" the down quark, and their "relatives", the electron, and the electron-neutrino. The second two groups are only observed in cosmic rays and high energy experiments. They consist of the strange quark and the charm quark, with the muon and muon-neutrino in one group, and the bottom and top quark, with the tau and tau-neutrino in the other group. This is the Standard Model, but it is not perfect, because it does not include the force which utterly dominates the large-scale universe: gravity. Additionally, it has 20 free parameters, i.e. properties or values only able to be determined through measurement. As imperfect as it is, that is the Standard Model. Now that that's out of the way, on to the Higgs particle. For simplicity, we shall only concern ourselves with everyday particles, i.e. the up and down quarks, and the electron. The electron is about 1800 times lighter than the proton, which is comprised of two up quarks, with a charge of +2/3, and a down quark, with charge of -1/3 (thus a net charge of +1). This is derived from the fact that protons and neutrons are affected by the electroweak force (the weak nuclear force, magnetism, and electricity, which are in essense one and the same) carriers, W's and Z's, while the electron is not. This is because in quantum phsyics, even a vacuum is not empty; it is filled with transient particles popping in and out of existence. The Higgs field can be compared somewhat to the corrugations in a sheet of cardboard. The massless carriers of the electromagnetic force (photons) travel effortlessly between the ridges, while the carriers of the weak force must travel over the corrugations. They absorb the needed energy from the Higgs field, and in the process become heavy. Without Higgs particles, W's and Z's would have no mass, and thus as they were absorbed by up and down quarks in protons and neutrons, they would not gain any mass (mass from other sources would also be zero, reducing its mass, in effect, to zero). So the Higgs particle is, in essense, where mass comes from. However, you can't simply jam a bunch of them into a ball and create a black hole. If that were so, there would be nothing stopping a trash compactor from pressing a soda can to infinite density and sucking your house into a black hole. There are other forces which prevent the particles from being pushed so closely together. The force required to do so is so incredibly immense that ordinary (and even extraordinary) means are required. Particle accelerators use as much power as small cities to break apart a few subatomic particles from eacother. To smash apart quarks, even a particle accelerator the circumference of the Earth would not be strong enough. I do not know exactly the density of a proton, but it is something on the order of fifteen trillion tons per cubic centimeter. Clearly protons like to keep a safe distance from one another. Furthermore, since the quarks that make up protons only constitute an infitessimally small portion of the volume of a proton, but nearly all its mass, their density much be even more astronomical in magnitude. So, in conclusion, unfortunately (fortunately?) labratories cannot simply cram Higgs particles in a bunch and suck the Earth into a black hole (one less thing to worry about.)
It was 1989 Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman who said all of science is too complicated to be put "on the front of a T-shirt."
Why is this even a headline? Obviously the fact that only 16 people have commented on it shows that no one really cares anymore about shuttle launches. There was even a Simpson's episode to mock it. It could be the billionth shuttle launch, for all I care. No matter which shuttle it is, you can only look at a massive hunk of metal hurtling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds before it gets old. The only time I was even moderately more hyped about a shuttle launch was in 1995 when I met Eugene Kranz. For a while I was really pumped about NASA and the space program, but then I once more realized that it's not all _that_ exciting. Mr. Kranz, by the way, is a very nice fellow, it's not that I didn't like him, just that, as I have said many times, shuttle launches get boring quickly.
Man, this sort of thing isn't new at all. Some of my friends and I built something out of a kit identical to this almost two years ago. It was from a catalogue my friend Val had, and called "GroBot". The price isn't even cheaper, if anything, it's more expensive. I would recommend this sort of thing, though, for anyone interested in home-made robots. We since made a much larger and complex robot, also using PBASIC, as much of a pain as it is. Once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad, and it's convenient in that it works with all Paralax products. I am pretty sure that is what the P in PBASIC stands for. In any event, this sort of thing is not at all new, but it is pretty cool.
I bet someone already thought of this, but why couldn't these planets have just escaped their orbits around whatever star it is that they were from, some odd billions of years ago? Also, would it even be accurate at this point to call them planets? The definition of a planet requires that it orbits a star, which these obviously do not. Also, part of the reason they are so large could be attributed to lower pressure from solar winds from whatever star they orbited. Just like a balloon inflated slightly at sea level will inflate is it rises into the atmosphere, a ball of gas will also expand with less ambient pressure upon it. I could be wrong on all counts here, but it at least makes sense.
I don't know exactly how this works, but some government agencies in the US and abroad have their militaries looking into emitting "cancelling" audio waves that would eliminate that obnoxious helicopter "wop wop wopping".
At first I read this and thought that it would be the greatest invention in the history of mankind, but then the skeptic in me hinted at the mathematician in me, and so they got together and did a few calculations. First of all, to say that a man-carrying spacecraft will weigh a mere 200 newtons is horribly unrealistic. Let's say it has a meager crew of two men, weighing 75 kg a piece, for a total of 150 kg; plus we'll say another 50 kg for spacesuits and such. Now we will use another 200 kg for the weight of the extremely diminutive spacecraft they are to travel in, all in all, that gives us a weight of 400 kg. However, for each day in flight, the engine requires 1 kg of fuel, and the astronauts, we will say, a conservative 3 kg of food a day, for another 4 kg of mass for each day of travel. It is approximately 5.8 billion km from pluto to the sun, and approximately 149 million km from the earth to the sun, so I hopefully can assume it is about 5.7 billion km from the earth to pluto, which I will use to represent the edge of the solar system (hey, it is, after all, isn't it?) Since F=ma and d=(at^2)/2, we can express d as being equal to (Ft^2)/(2m). There are about 86400 seconds in a day (slightly less, since a day is 23 hr, 56 min, 4.0989 s, but i have to be reasonable). The craft will need an extra 4 kg a day, which translates into 1 kg every 21600. We can then express the craft's mass in terms of t in s as m=400 kg+(t/21600s) kg. Using a bit of algebra we can get m=(Ft^2)/(2d). We can set these two equations equal to eachother and get the quadratic t^2-(1.75926*10^8)ts-(1.52*10^15)s^2=0. Solving this and eliminating a negative answer gives us about t=184 million seconds, or 2131 days, which is about 5.84 years. This would be far and away the longest mission ever (with an actual purpose, not including Russian guys spinning chess pieces in antigravity for ten years at a time while the government scrounges up enough money to get them home). The craft would weigh, by the way, about 8927 kg. These are most conservative estimates, and if someone can give me actual figures for my guesses I would be more than glad to do the math to figure them. Maybe later I will figure how long it would take to get to alpha centauri. The craft accelerates at about 3.36*10^-4 m/s^2 and would be going about 5.7*10^9 m/s, which leads to some interesting questions, since that is nearly twenty times the speed of light. When I sat down to do all this math, I thought I would debunk this technology, but really all I did was show that it unfurls even more questions, and that possibly all of you may be able to guess that I am doing poorly in my AP Physics B class.
Please elaborate on this "electrino" of which you speak. Have any properties or anything for it been proposed? I find the idea of splitting a lepton utterly groundbreaking. It would add a completely new aspect to the concepts of Supersymmetry and the Standard Model. Of course, then, accompanying research would have to be done to dissect all other leptons and quarks. Would these electrinos be affected by W and Z particles? The electromagnetic force? Only time will tell.
The article, in my opinion, is horribly vague, to the point where it is very difficult to discern what it actually means. Is it, as someone else suggested, regarding the fission of electron wave functions? Or is an electron being physically split here? The differences between the two are astronomical. Splitting a wave function merely relates to separating into two parts a function which will relate to an observer the probability of the electron being found in a certain place at a certain time. However, to actually split an electron would be truly something; as a member of the lepton family, electrons were understood to be the fundamental building blocks of matter. Its accompanying neutrino, along with the muon particle, the tau particle, and their accompanying neutrinos, made up the leptons. The leptons, in turn, with the six quarks, comprised the "chassis" of the Standard Model, that is the theory describing the nature of matter, in which the quarks were affected by the strong nuclear force, and the leptons were not. Were an electron to be actually physically split, it would open up a whole new realm of particle and subatomic physics. Wow. It would be like smashing the pieces of the smashed pieces of the smashed pieces of the atom. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify the nature of the statement in question.
As soon as i read this article, my memory was instantly harkened back to the Yahoo! commercial in which a man living in the Australian outback buys cushions to "catch" a falling communication satellite. Now I don't know exactly how the Russians do it, but when i hear "deorbit", I think "burn up in the atmosphere before crashing into the earth." If that thing is landing anywhere even remotely near my house, I am taking every possible measure to ensure that I will have Mir for my own. Forget college, my money will get me something much better than education, a Russian space station. Have your degrees, I am content with my planet-orbiting habitation module. I almost hope this triggers some sort of international conflict, maybe other countries would start to send me their satellites out of pity or protest. The only forseeable downfall is that darned fungus. An additional scenario, also quite conceivable, involves me killing off the earth's population courtesy an intergalactic space fungus. Whether I start a space vehicle collection or kill the entire planet, all shall know my name. Regardless the consequences, Mir shall be mine, unless it is landing in some random other place like Burkina Faso, and whatever lucky shmoe has it land in his back yard will have my idea to thank for it. Free space stations for all.