Out of Pod Experience

You want him to write an essay for you? Whatever... I still would like to know how perpetual motion is possible.

When I have two balls on a billiard table, one is standing still and the other is rolling towards it, then we have one ball that is in motion. When the rolling ball hits the other is its energy transferred onto the second ball and it starts rolling. The second ball will continue rolling until the friction of the table slows it down and brings it to a halt. The friction itself is caused by the many little fibres of the billiard table's cloth, which turns the motion into heat. The heat then spreads out and disperses into the environment. Heat itself is a motion of the molecules... We speak of motion and energy transfer, but we do not call it a perpetual motion, nor do we describe the chain of events as a perpetual motion when it keeps going on and on.

So how can a photon trapped inside a device have a perpetual motion? It will interact with its environment and even when it appears to be continuously in motion is the assumption of a perpetual motion pretty far fetched. We are not able to describe the photon's exact location due to the Uncertainty Principle. At best can we give a probability of its location and to talk here of a motion of a particle, and one that behaves like a wave, too, is already brave.

So, no, for all we know is there no such thing as a perpetual motion. You first need to proof it and you will not be able to. The idea itself is an abstract and we use it for when we do not know all the events and to keep searching for more answers. To describe particle physics with the Law's of Newton and to assume perpetual motion would exist in particles makes me think that Tsadkiel is not more than a middle school physics teacher who wants to be a particle astrophysicist.

I'm pretty sure people would never "get sucked into space from the surface of Earth." By the time the pull of the black hole was sufficient to pull us off the surface, it would have destroyed the planet. There would be no Earth from which to pull us...for that matter, there would be no "us" at that point. Just a lot of rocks with little blobs of carbon and ice mixed in.

Warning: I'm no science major. If I get any of this wrong, I expect to be promptly corrected by someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

It sounds like what would be necessary is a Lagrangian Point right at the surface of the Earth. If I'm not completely screwing this math up, you'd need a black hole with something like 1x10^40 times the mass of the Sun to do that from two lightyears away. That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns.

nothing, actually. because you can no longer observe the second entangled particle, you can no longer tell that the one that escaped was ever entangled at all.

it sounds like your question may have been inspired by something called Hawking Radiation, which is a mode through which a black hole can evaporate. it is caused by the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs forming near the horizon of the black hole. half of the pair falls in, and the other half travels away from the black hole.

Quasars are highly energetic active galactic nuclei, which essentially means that the accretion disk of the black hole IS a galaxy. I looked up OJ 278 and based on observed orbits this quasar has an estimated mass of around 18 billion suns... if this thing were anywhere in our solar system we, and the rest of the galaxy, would literally be torn apart XD

For the sake of not getting too into the details which I can only claim to marginally understand myself, I skipped over a lot of technical babble. I was speaking specifically of the L1 point, the one directly between the two bodies. It also represents the point at which you would move from one body's gravity well into another's, does it not? For example, on one side of the L1 point you would experience a slight pull toward the black hole, while on the other you would be pulled toward Earth?

Assuming I'm understanding *that* part properly, it follows that a Lagrange point existing on the surface of the earth would result in what would essentially be a zone of such low gravity that it would take very little force to overcome it. In such a zone, even the slightest disturbance should result in us drifting away from the surface.

For the black hole to actually directly pull things off the surface of the planet, it would have to be pulling the planet as well, and that goes back to the "death by black hole" post mentioned earlier.

Of course this all a "frictionless vacuum" discussion as there are so many other ways we're breaking the laws of physics for this scenario. And again, I could be completely missing something, as my understanding of L-points doesn't cover how they would behave on the surface of a planet.

no, what i am trying to say here is that the location of Legrange points depend on the location of the orbiting bodies. if our two body system consists of the earth and our black hole, you will never have a Legrange point on the surface of either. also, the Legrange points are not locations of zero acceleration. objects at Legrange points are simply stationary with respect to one of the bodies. objects at L-points still orbit as normal. if we calculate the effective potential for say, the sun and a black hole, and place the earth at L1 with respect to the hole, it simply orbits the sun with the exact same angular velocity as the black hole.

i think an example would be useful here...

consider the earth-sun two body system and suppose we place a tiny satellite at L4 or L5. as the earth moves around the sun, so too does the satellite. because it is at an L-point, the angular distance between the satellite and the earth remains CONSTANT. now, say way place a satellite at L1 or L2. again, the angular relation between the satellite and the earth is a constant (zero), so the earth, sun, and satellite will always be co linear. now, this satellite, REGARDLESS of which Legrange point is sits at, still experiences gravitational acceleration from the sun! it is NOT reduced in anyway. the satellite simply orbits at the same angular velocity as the earth.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between casual scientific interest and a real science education :)

I'm curious now exactly what WOULD be required to lift people off the earth from 2 LY away. You know, in an environment where the Earth was immune to the tidal forces and other nastiness that come with a gravity well capable of sucking relatively massive objects off its surface.

I spent a good few hours the other weekend Googling how strong the power of freezing water is (I once heard it was an unstoppable force!). Did you ever see anything cool or amazing in school or a lab in that regard?

I tried to break a plastic water bottle in the freezer. It bloated quite a bit, but didn't bust.

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but I think you are wrong.

Two objects with an equal mass and an equal density will always posses a Lagrange point (L1) in between them regardless of their distance to each other.

Two objects with different masses can have no L1 point, because the gravitational force is a square function and not a linear function. The point shifts towards the object with the lesser mass and can then "fall" into the object if the difference in mass is large enough. This is especially true when the objects not only posses a difference in mass, but have different densities, too, because the L1 point will fall into the object with the lesser mass sooner the more bloated it is.


You have cancelled out the mass of Earth and the blackhole, knowing they are different!

Maybe you wanted to say that gravity always sucks and never blows?