Ask any question you want about Physics

originally posted by: Choice777
What if the pressure is normal and it reaches the 250.000 atm while it's plasma ?

As Eros said that wouldn't make a difference. Fouche said it's fiction. Then he goes "wink wink" and tries to imply maybe it's not, but the fact is he said it's fiction and the implausibility of Mercury being plasma under such conditions should confirm his assertion that it's fiction.

And what about that element 115 that some claimed to have this vey small island of stability that some said exists and makes it stable enough for ''anti gravity'' tech, while others dismissed not only element 115 as ever possibly existing

I never heard 115 denied, only that a stable form has never been found. Several isotopes have been found and all of them extremely unstable. Furthering the problem is that Lazar, who claimed to be a physicist but has no credentials, was interviewed by a physicist who does have credentials, Stanton Friedman, who said Lazar doesn't know some basic things about physics that a physicist would know. So even if "the dog ate his diploma" and none of his professors or classmates remembered him, he should still know physics if he was really a physicist, right? So, we are pretty sure Lazar lied about his education, and by inference, probably a lot more than that, like his claims about element 115, which are not supported by any known physics and you could even say we have evidence to contradict his claims.

My thought is simple....how many singular ufo sightings have there been so far in the entire recorded history of man ? 10.000+ or maybe 100.000+ ? I suspect way into the 100.000s....heck there's thousands per year per each country in the world.
IF just one , 1, is real, then it's EPIC.

The volume of sightings isn't that important, but yes if one UFO is an alien spaceship that would be epic. But which one and where's the evidence? I thought I might be able to find it when I started researching about 5 years ago, but what I found in digging into claims is that the popular tales are half-truths and when you get the rest of the story they often fall apart.

Same with ufo, out of all the sighting surely at least one must be real...especially considering the vastness of the universe, and the implied multitude of planets, and the fact that , YES, some people actually wake up with fresh scars right after ''dreaming'' of being abducted. Was just reading some random webpage 2 nights ago, on some article about a doctor performing operations to remove objects from people, and the reply fields below were just full with replyes in various languages from various people

I've had a similar object removed from my body, and it wasn't extraterrestrial in nature and I've seen no evidence the other objects removed from people's bodies are extraterrestrial either (unless it's a micrometeorite or something, but I doubt any are). My object looked like a little crystal, but apparently the doctor who stitched me up after an accident didn't see it, it was a small piece of glass slightly smaller than a bb that he stitched up inside me after a car accident. I can't say nobody has alien implants, but what I can say is whenever I hear those stories about implants, they sound too much like my own experience with foreign matter in my body, so I tend to discount them based on my personal experience.

Anyway...i believe chances are someone if coming to this planet from far far away, therefor they must have mastered something that contravenes gravity's effects. The question is how, not IF.

You're entitled to your speculation, but it's only speculation. As far as most scientists are concerned, sure it's a possibility, but it's still an "if". Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains the topic from a scientist's viewpoint here:



Of course he doesn't speak for all scientists, but my guess is this view is probably pretty representative of the majority of scientists.

And on the talk about there not being any materials with ''negative mass''...well air doesn't have any special property until you heat it, then it rises amongst the other air...what if the key is some process that will make normal matter not have trully ''no mass'' but a lot ''less mass'' than the rest of the matter which hasn't undergone this unknown process ? Then it would just like being quite transparent to gravity.

If you want to discuss a "negative mass" analog, the closest thing we have to discuss is "dark energy", in fact Dr White cites that example. We don't fully understand dark energy and the only reason dark energy makes up most of the mass/energy content of the universe is because the universe is so vast. However in terms of energy density per unit volume, it's actually quite low, so even if it was possible to somehow utilize "dark energy" for interstellar travel, there's not much of it there per unit volume to harvest. Even when you factor in the volume of space a relativistic velocity spaceship encompasses, it's not that much energy. So we would need something like that but a gazillion times more concentrated...ok gazillion isn't a real unit, but I'm sure Dr White can give you the specifics, we need a lot more than what dark energy has, to do what he wants to do.

originally posted by: Choice777
Example: percentage of world population that has died from injuries caused by toothpicks, even one toothpick....as absurd as it sounds, there must be at least one person, somewhere, at some point in time that has dies like this, either by the toothpick being tipped in poison or infected, either by getting shocked and tripping and smashing the head on some object....surely somewhere somehow somebody had died because of a toothpick.
Same with ufo, out of all the sighting surely at least one must be real...

That's not good logic.

We know that toothpicks exist, and they come in contact with humans and they have physical properties which conceivably could be altered or in unusual circumstances be dangerous.

It's more like saying, surely somewhere somehow an astronaut has gotten cancer because of a kitten's yawn.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: Choice777
What if the pressure is normal and it reaches the 250.000 atm while it's plasma ?

As Eros said that wouldn't make a difference. Fouche said it's fiction. Then he goes "wink wink" and tries to imply maybe it's not, but the fact is he said it's fiction and the implausibility of Mercury being plasma under such conditions should confirm his assertion that it's fiction.

Obviously it's not Mercury plasma. If there were any truth to it, what would it be? The physics would have to be deep and profound and unexpected. If I were writing a plausible science-fiction story....rotating supercooled rubidium in a large scale Bose-Einstein condensate. Make up something about macroscopic quantum gravity and Mach's principle.

originally posted by: mbkennel

originally posted by: Choice777
Example: percentage of world population that has died from injuries caused by toothpicks, even one toothpick....as absurd as it sounds, there must be at least one person, somewhere, at some point in time that has dies like this, either by the toothpick being tipped in poison or infected, either by getting shocked and tripping and smashing the head on some object....surely somewhere somehow somebody had died because of a toothpick.
Same with ufo, out of all the sighting surely at least one must be real...

That's not good logic.

We know that toothpicks exist, and they come in contact with humans and they have physical properties which conceivably could be altered or in unusual circumstances be dangerous.

It's more like saying, surely somewhere somehow an astronaut has gotten cancer because of a kitten's yawn.

My example wasnt a literal analogue. The toothpick doesn't have to be proven to exist like the UFO etc... My example was only to demonstrate my axiom: any system with good numbers in it will have a noon zero percentage for whatever condition you impose. People that have died within 60 min of winning a lottery, must be someone, people that have died within 10 seconds of winning a lottery again there must be someone from the billions of played tickets, red cars that have been stolen, found and stolen again, and found and stolen a 3rd time. I bet you there is at least one such car on this planet.... Just cause there's too many cars, to many thieves and to many idiots that don't learn to lock the cars.
My axiom doesn't try to prove the existence of any of the cars, people, colors, etc... It's just an axiom that I find true and makes me think at least one UFO case in human history must be the real deal... How I'm so sure about my axiom??? Simple: truth is stranger than fiction.
PS: kittens don't produce cancer. Trust me, I googled it. Lol.

I always thought the clocks on satellites were slightly slower because they are moving faster through space than the clocks on earth. Like the theoretical clock moving near the speed of light slows to an almost stop.

a reply to: Choice777

You said kittens dont cause cancer but by your logic some kitten somewhere does. Or somewhere their is a dolphin that can speak german.

Are you sure you have all the elements of the universe listed on the periodic table?

originally posted by: jackobyte6
I always thought the clocks on satellites were slightly slower because they are moving faster through space than the clocks on earth. Like the theoretical clock moving near the speed of light slows to an almost stop.

The velocity is one of the two factors, but the other important factor is gravity. At a particular altitude somewhat above the ISS orbit but significantly below the GPS satellite orbit, is an orbital altitude where the clock on a hypothetical satellite would run at the same speed as a clock on Earth's surface, where those two effects cancel each other out. The altitude is shown on this chart where the blue line crosses the X-axis:

en.wikipedia.org...

Above that altitude, while velocity does have some effect, that effect is overwhelmed by reduced gravity, so the GPS satellite clocks actually run faster than a clock on Earth.

originally posted by: SamHill
Are you sure you have all the elements of the universe listed on the periodic table?

We're pretty sure we don't, but the bigger question for me is, will we actually find the hypothesized "island of stability" as we continue to discover new elements and their various isotopes?

That's an open question, and in my opinion it could go either way...we may or may not find the hypothesized "island", shown on the right in this graphic.

In nuclear physics, the island of stability is a set of predicted, but as-yet undiscovered, heavier isotopes of transuranium elements which are theorized to be much more stable than some of those closer in atomic number to uranium.

If it turns out there is no "island of stability", then the periodic table may already list all the stable elements, though we will continue to find new unstable elements/isotopes.

originally posted by: dragonridr
a reply to: Choice777

You said kittens dont cause cancer but by your logic some kitten somewhere does. Or somewhere their is a dolphin that can speak german.

Maybe I forgot to say that the axiom deals with possible things not impossible.... Dolphins can't speak, cats don't produce cancer... Etc.

I'm not convinced that time slows down when you move faster.
I think is a grave fundamental error in today's phisics... Time doesnt slow down, space moves faster in relation to you.
Like that situation mentioned above " the theoretical cloak that moves at the speed of light that almost speed down.... I think it only appears to slow down because it is moving away from us just or almost as fast as the light that would come from it towards us to shows us the needless... when at actuall 1 c , in effect what happens is that we stop receiving new photons from it that would indicate the position of the second, minutes, hours needless... but the clock itself has no reason to stop functioning unless it's physically damaged by some sort of light boom similar to the sonic boom... which I don't.
And now for the more difficult to grasp paradox as I define it... The situation in which people on a voyage to a nearby star go towards it at multiple of the speed of light... FTL... Faster than light rebel.... OK.. Say its true, people say that if they go to the star, and come back, us the people on earth would have aged considerably in relation to them which would not have agreed because they were moving at the speed of light, or faster, and like the clock, they "slowed down".... Wrong !!!
Again it's simple to prove its a paradox and truly not possible...
If they move at 50c for 6 months, stay for one day, make the return trip again 6 months, let's just say it's a full year.
In all this time on earth 1 year has passed, inside the ship 1 year has passed... Nobody ages more or less than the others.
What will happen is: we sill see the ship and lets say a crew member at the window waving his hand from left to right... for simplicity and the obvious spectacular effect let's say the ship accelerated instantly from 0 mph to 50c... We will see the guy with his hand waving and the moment the ship has jumped to FTL at 50 times c we dont see anything anymore...we will see one last picture with his hand frozen in mid air because he has left, he's no really there but only the last layer of photos reflecting off him and the ship and his hand... these last few photos are all we get cause the objects are already far away within nanoseconds and the next frames, or layers of photos that should have reflected off of them and reached our eyes, are not able to reach us at all... Those photos that are reflected while the ship is moving at c or at 50x c are either stationary or moving away from us.
Thing about it.... If I'm on a moving truck at 50 mph and trow a ball at 50 mph backwards... What's the site of the ball in relation to the ground on which the truck is driving??
Zero.
If the truck is going at 100mph, the ball even if I mean to trow it at 50mph it will actually be moving forward relative to the ground at a speed of 50mph.
If my ship is moving at 0mph you will see me waving.
When I accelerate, start my hyperdrive, and go to the speed of light instantly, or even 50c, or a million c, photons hitting me and reflecting towards you will never be visible cause they will never make contact with me except for a last time when I'm at 0.999999999 c.
Once I get to 1 c, photons from outside the ship are stationary for me, they never manage to bounce off of me, unless they are coming towards me opposite to my direction of movement..and in that case they wont reflct towards you, cause you're behind me, you will never see them.... They never actually manage to touch me cause we are both moving at 0 mph , the photons in relation to me, so they try to play a never ending catch up game with me, but they never catch me cause in relation to me they are not moving, what ever source emitted then, if it's even a mm away from me, they will stay 1 mm away from me until I drop below 1 c.

So in conclusion... a ship moving at the speed of light will give observers a simple last picture of it before departing, once it has departed, you stop seeing the ship in its current state... That last frame, still picture in the picoseconds when the ship goes from 0.99(9) to 1, will only be visible for as long as any other photons are.... Now u see the ship and crew man waving, and now it's all gone. They travel to their destination and back in 1 year, everyone has aged 1 year, the people on earth, the crew, the ship, they destination planet. The only thing is that we didn't receive photons from the for 1 year... Expect for the one day they were on the disturbing planet. With a powerful telescope if we see the planets surface, we will see them exploring 25 years from when they left... 6 months at 50c, the planet they reached is 25 light years away.

edit: Also photons going againts the ship will also never be visible to an observer waiting at the destination until after the ship has arrived cause they may bounce off the ship but they will be way to slow compared to the ship..50 times to slow.
the tricky part is with photons moving against the ship hitting the sides of the ship and partially reflecting backwards to the observer left behind.
I think those photons will reflect of the ship at it moves 50 times faster than the actual photons, and will produce a boundary like image of the ship..in effect you will see the ship as long as it moves in a straight line...once it has moved left or right or up or down , you will lose track of it, and will find it hard to reaquire its position in the vastness of space....true, it will be some what visible as a contour, but again once it moves far enough, all the contour movements you will receive will be with a delay considering the photons have 1 c and the ship is at 50 c , you will increasingly get image that are out of date, and will increase to be out of date.

I have reason to believe that ftl is instant and there are no in between warp speeds or anything like that
a reply to: Choice777

originally posted by: Choice777
I'm not convinced that time slows down when you move faster.
I think is a grave fundamental error in today's phisics... Time doesnt slow down, space moves faster in relation to you.

I think the error is in your not understanding the theory of relativity, because if you and another observer are moving away from each other, you see his clock run slower and he sees your clock run slower, so it's a matter of perspective (called "frame of reference"). So, time doesn't actually slow down on an absolute basis for either observer, when two observers move apart at relativistic velocities, it's a matter or relative motion changing the speeds they see the two clocks tick.

Time dilation

When two observers are in relative uniform motion and uninfluenced by any gravitational mass, the point of view of each will be that the other's (moving) clock is ticking at a slower rate than the local clock.

You can't really disprove the theory with a thought experiment because there's too much hard data to refute, like the experiment in the NIST lab where they measured the time difference between two clocks when one was moving versus another that was stationary inside the lab. You would have to say what is wrong with their data or experiment, and you probably haven't even looked at their data. Maybe you should start there before concluding the theory is in error, which it may be, but you would need way better arguments to prove it because nothing you said addresses why experiments which you haven't addressed and may not even be aware of are consistent with the theory.

I think a lot of people like to spend time pondering on the theories, they like to stay in their heads and explore the what-ifs, but... what if the subject being studied cannot be repeated like all this UFO, ghostie stuff. Does that mean that it cannot be investigated by science because it is not repeatable? Surely, we will have to come up with a method whereby the subject of the expeiment cannot be relied apon to have an action on-cue. Really, it just goes to show how fixed and rigid we all are that we need this to have 'proof' that something exists.

Does experience count for nothing?

Well, maybe science will have to change to be able to study the things which are more etherial if we ever hope to get beyone the stars, then the answers may be in investigating these non-repeatable things.

Anyway...

I think people who think scientists are arrogant don't know that many real scientists. Sure a few people are arrogant in every field, and science is no exception. But most scientists are pretty honest about what they don't know, which is still quite a bit. They also admit that what they think they do know can be falsified or revised by a new observation or experiment, and this is the very definition of science, and to me it's not nearly as arrogant as say, some religious doctrines.

Where are all the curious scientists then? The ones who love science for the sake of it and want to investigate the curiosities of the universe?

There are so many unexplained things out there that if only one in ten scientists (with balls) were curious about them we would get more information on the unexplained. However, I realise it has an impact on their private lives, their funding opportunities and their credibility in the eyes of their peers. Start investigating something weird and the wrong folks get to hear of it and your life is in tatters.

So, my first question is - How can we encourage more open and frank investigations which do not have a major negative impact on the future of those scientists involved?

second question - If we actually took ghostie-hunting seriously, we would probably find out a lot about
1. what happens after death
2. where we go after death
So why no-one takes it seriously?
(probably because it cannot be repeated on-demand, but there are other more psychology-type research which also cannot be repeated?)

a reply to: qmantoo


You can have all kinds of scientist study anything that interests them even your ghosties. Problem is coming up with experiments with a testable outcome. Every now and than you see someone who thinks they have an idea for an experiment. One i saw was voice print analysis on recordings. Only problem is to my knowledge no one has thought of an experiment to prove or disprove them other than some psychological experiments. But dont think there arent scientists interested in ghosts probably some go ghost hunting. Scientists are probably more curious about things than the average person because not only do they want to know something happens they also want to know why.

My questioned is do you know everything there is to know about physics?

originally posted by: BasementWarriorKryptonite
My questioned is do you know everything there is to know about physics?

No one does thats why people collaborate all the time with other scientists.

a reply to: dragonridr

But then how could I possibly ask you anything about it. It's like asking someone about religion.

a reply to: dragonridr

Scientists are probably more curious about things than the average person because not only do they want to know something happens they also want to know why.

How. Not why.
Let philosophers worry about why.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I didn't read all post so if you have answered my question or simular please direct me to the answer..

My question is ... why do I feel greater forces working on my body if I turn a tight corner in a big and heavy car than a small one.. turning the corner with the same speed of course.

thx.

originally posted by: qmantoo
I think a lot of people like to spend time pondering on the theories, they like to stay in their heads and explore the what-ifs, but... what if the subject being studied cannot be repeated like all this UFO, ghostie stuff. Does that mean that it cannot be investigated by science because it is not repeatable?

It makes it hard, not impossible. There have been scientific investigations of UFO reports, maybe with some whitewash but the Cometa report didn't seem to try to whitewash anything.

Surely, we will have to come up with a method whereby the subject of the expeiment cannot be relied apon to have an action on-cue. Really, it just goes to show how fixed and rigid we all are that we need this to have 'proof' that something exists.

This scientist is just trying to collect as much data as he can on a seemingly paranormal topic and see if he can make sense out of the data, and figure out what's going on. It's an interesting area of research:

Jim Tucker

Jim Tucker is the medical director of the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.[1] His main research interests are children who claim to remember previous lives, and natal and prenatal memories.[2] He is the author of Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, which presents an overview of over four decades of reincarnation research at the Division of Perceptual Studies.

I stumbled across this youtube video one day with him researching one of his subjects, and was totally fascinated and can think of no ready explanation in mainstream science, though as pointed out in the video there could be some subtle mainstream explanations, however they don't appear to be that likely.

The Boy Who Lived Before

Cameron, ever since he was just a toddler, talks about another family he used to live with, called the Robertsons. Cameron knows the names of his previous family, where they lived, and can even describe the house and the landscape of his previous home on the island of Barra, some 200 miles away. But Cameron has never been there. Doctor Jim Tucker, of the University of Virginia, and Cameron's mother travel to Barra with Cameron to find the house, exactly as Cameron described.

Not everything was exactly as the boy described but a lot was, and it's really bizarre to say the least.
It almost seems like there was something like a ghost in the boy, though I don't really believe in ghosts but I can't really explain that video...it's way harder to explain than anything KrzYma posted.

Where are all the curious scientists then? The ones who love science for the sake of it and want to investigate the curiosities of the universe?

There are so many unexplained things out there that if only one in ten scientists (with balls) were curious about them we would get more information on the unexplained. However, I realise it has an impact on their private lives, their funding opportunities and their credibility in the eyes of their peers. Start investigating something weird and the wrong folks get to hear of it and your life is in tatters.

So, my first question is - How can we encourage more open and frank investigations which do not have a major negative impact on the future of those scientists involved?

second question - If we actually took ghostie-hunting seriously, we would probably find out a lot about
1. what happens after death
2. where we go after death
So why no-one takes it seriously?

I just gave you details on a scientist who takes his research seriously. Be accompanied Cameron to Barra to gather as much first-hand data as he could.

The subject of UFOs is a bit trickier, but dragonridr is right, scientists can be as curious as anybody else. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, was curious about UFOs, though it wasn't known publicly until after his death, when a letter was found about the Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting:

Famous Socorro landing case a hoax?
See 4th link in that thread:

A letter from Dr. Linus Pauling located within the Special Collections of Oregon State University (where the Pauling papers are archived) provides insight into the true nature of the Socorro sighting. In a 1968 letter to Dr. Stirling Colgate -the President of New Mexico Tech- Pauling inquires about the Socorro sighting. Colgate replied to Pauling by sending back Pauling's letter with a handwritten notation at the bottom. Dr. Colgate writes: "I have a good indication of the student who engineered the hoax. Student has left. Cheers, Stirling."

So he was curious about UFOs and who knows how many other letters he wrote inquiring about them?

I think the best you can hope for is for guys like Dr Bruce Maccabee to do their own scientific research in their spare time since nobody is funding UFO research these days. The guys who write books seem to have an agenda (which is at least partly to sell books) so you don't always get the full truth in UFO books or other literature. Dr Maccabee has written some very interesting UFO articles however. I think he was acting somewhat in an official capacity when he was part of the JAL 1628 UFO investigation, and I used his research extensively when I investigated that case.

originally posted by: zatara
a reply to: Arbitrageur

I didn't read all post so if you have answered my question or simular please direct me to the answer..

My question is ... why do I feel greater forces working on my body if I turn a tight corner in a big and heavy car than a small one.. turning the corner with the same speed of course.

In my experience, small cars can turn corners tighter than big heavy cars so I feel greater forces in the small car. Of course they're not going at the same speed in that case. If the cars are going the same speed the size of the car shouldn't make any difference. Think of the NASA centrifuge where they apply G-forces to test subjects, there's no car at all. The G-force is a function of the velocity/acceleration, not the size of the car. If the bigger car has a "softer" suspension, it may lean more in a hard turn.

Have you really controlled the experiment that carefully, and how accurately have you monitored the speed? Maybe one or more of the speedometers you've used are out of calibration? This inaccuracy of human perception is touched on in the Neil DeGrasse Tyson video I posted a few posts back, which was about UFOs, but it applies to all human perception, since it's generally subject to many flaws, and that's why scientists tend to discount human perception in favor of measurements by instruments.