Out of Pod Experience

Something I've often wondered about maybe you can answer:

Introduction:
Water will instantly boil if exposed to a near vacuum at room temperature [I confirmed this with a vacuum chamber] since low air pressure reduces the boiling point of water. BUT outer space is generally considered to be freezing cold unless exposed to direct sunlight at an orbit distance lets say like Earth orbit.

Question:
So in a near-'complete' vacuum of space, what would happen if I opened a plastic bottle of water while floating extra-vehicular in a space suit-- [assuming the water in the bottle was kept heated to room temperture till the moment I unscrewed the top].

a) would the water instantly boil, then as the whole system loses thermal energy it would freeze solid?

b) would the water flash freeze due to the relatively small volume and quick loss of heat?

c) would both happen in a matter of speaking? Flash freezing but simultaneously sublimating directly into steam?

d) if I was holding the bottle in direct sunlight and not in shadow [which is how I imagine I would be holding it to watch what would happen], would the solar thermal energy alone keep the water from freezing at all?

e) none of the above... perhaps it explodes and blows my hand off? :O which would leave me very perturbed. . . but relieved that at least that It was all captured for YouTube in glorious fail-experiment HD.

Why do people believe that Zero and Infinite exist?

You don't plug a number into an equation unless you have some faith in that number's honesty.

Zero is nothing, therefor it can not even be a number. There is not a number (I don't count a kicked over 8 symbol as a 'number') for Infinite either.

Yet these are used by numorous fields of science and mathematics as suitable numbers that they must have faith in. Is this not contradicting and creating false faith in an outcome?

Everywhere is something.. supposed endless accelerated expansion of universe on the macro, and micro scale. Deeper you go inward, you guys start creating dimensions.. which is pretty much creating a house in a house in a house in a house.. oh look! yet another new particle that might exist..

Infinite. Yet why and how is something that is Infinite.. expanding?

Better yet, toss a Zero into the mix.. and Infinite vanishes completely. Only Zero remains.

Where the hell does Zero come from anyway.. if everytwhere/thing is something, even if it is mere quantum fluxies.

I don't want dictionary definitions of the words.. that is absolutely irrelevent without proof of them actually being Real aspects of physical laws. I get if I ate an apple, I have zero apples.. but the energy of the apple still exists and all that entropy crap.. I get that. So how does one actually prove Zero exists?

How does one prove infinite exists when claim of an Expanding Universe? Simply chuck extra dimensions into the mix that go on endlessly? Puke. I'd punch my wall at the frustration of this.. tiny.. problem our math has created, but I know that I might break bones, living in a limited 4d world and all.

Q:
Why is the Higgs-Boson (considering it exists) required to give mass to other fundamental particles (e.g. electrons)?

Considering Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper I think you are fine but you might want to open a window or something

My Question:




If a vacuum is nothing, how can a charge be conveyed through it and impart force onto a second charged particle?

wow! lots of good questions! sorry for the late responses, today was busy and i just got back in. anyway, onwards to eggs!

information on eggs taken from
here!

suppose our egg has a specific heat capacity of 3.1 J g^-1 K^-1

suppose our egg has a mass of 71g (it's a
Jumbo egg
and we are hungry!)

suppose we want to eat it at a nice temperature of 125 C or 398 K and
the egg starts chilled
at 4 C or 277 K

the energy required to fry our egg is now just m*c*(Tf - Ti) or 23,632 J

and suppose we want to do this in 4 minutes or 240 seconds

so our egg requires about 111 J/s or Watts of power.

now, there are a lot of variables in the whole "hull of a spaceship" bit, so lets suppose our egg is just floating in space, and that it doesn't have an albedo and fully absorbs all forms of electromagnetic radiation (tall order i know, but hey, i don't have a lot to work with here). to calculate the distance from the sun our egg needs to be to fry in 4 minutes, we need to calculate the absolute intensity, which is...

I = P/(4*pi*R^2)

where P is the absolute power emitted by the sun and R is the distance we want to calculate.

I is the power radiated per square meter. neglecting all the other interesting bits, our egg with then absorb energy based on its crossectional area with respect to the sun. if we multiply I by the area of our egg, that will give us the power absorbed by the egg, or 111 J/s. just holding up my hands i would say that the average fried egg has a radius of about 3" or .0762m. if we assume it's circular this gives us an area of .0182m^2. now it's easy!

Pegg = Isun*Aegg = (Psun * Aegg)/(4*pi*R^2)

solving for R^2 we get

R = sqrt( (Psun*Aegg)/(Pegg*4*pi) )

which comes to R = 7.22 x 10^10 m, or in more meaningful units, .4845 AU. an AU is an Astronomical Unit and is defined as the distance from the sun to the earth. to put this in perspective, this is a bit past Mercury (.39 AU) and well before Venus (.72 AU)

hope this helps with your future egg frying plans ;)

this is something i am still trying to understand myself.

a key thing to point out though is that physics RARELY explains "why". a scientific theory is simply a collection of evidence that does two things: describe WHAT is happening, and HOW it happens. there are superficial "whys" like "why does the moon go around the earth? gravity!", but if you ask why enough the answer will eventually be "we don't know yet".

the other thing to point out is that the Higgs field is NOT required to give mass to other particles. there are several theories that do the same thing, it is just that the Higgs mechanism is currently the most widely accepted and so it's one of the first to be tested (these other models are colloquially referred to as "Higgsless models" if that gives you an idea as to the communities confidence in the Higgs).

so answering the actual question though, i can really only talk math here :(, basically, if you do the calculations to figure out the various properties of a particle, you will end up with a term that corresponds to a boson field that is directly coupled to the mass of the particle (ie, if the field is zero, the mass is zero).

hope this helps!

I forgot about This

Water rockets in order to visualize explosive decompression in space.

From what I understand the observer will only see the image of the object being slowed down and eventually stop. The object itself will travel on to the event horizon and be reduced to gamma rays and atoms. The observer would see an increase in mass as the gravitational field of the black hole will get stronger but unless the object is something like a star the increase will be very very small and probably not even noticeable.

As for the observer watching a star collapse into a black hole they probably wouldn't see much as the whole process takes place in less than a millisecond. The observer would just see the remains of the star (outer layers that didn't get absorbed) fly off into space and in the center would be a black sphere. Once the layers get far enough away the only way to tell if there is a black hole is by the gravity field it gives off, the distortion of the star light behind it, or if it's consuming other stuff the accretion disk/gamma ray jets.

For the observer falling into the black hole they wouldn't get far enough into the gravity field to observe much. They would be torn in half as their feet accelerate more rapidly than their torso/head. They would be reduced to atoms long before they reached the event horizon. If they were able to survive crossing the event horizon it is theorized all the light and matter the black hole has absorbed would be visible swirling around on the inside or the matter would be spit out a "white hole" somewhere else. But there has been no proof of white holes other than mathematics suggesting the possibility of them existing. Really, we can only guess at what would happen as we can't get any data past the event horizon. Who knows maybe there is a magical land full of flying ponies on the other side.

As for the time acceleration part if the observer could stay just on the outside edge of the event horizon they would witness the universe proceed at and accelerated rate but they would still experience the same time frame i.e 1 sec near the black hole=1sec to them but 1sec to them=? seconds on the outside world. This is a theoretical means of time travel but the fuel needed to accelerate your spacecraft to the velocity needed to maintain orbit would be astronomical.

I don't think they would see the end of the universe as they cross the event horizon as that would also mean the destruction of the blackhole and mean there wouldn't have been an event horizon in the first place and everything on the other side would exist after the universe was destroyed(ended). To me that would cause a paradigm but I'm not entirely sure about that one so I might be wrong. Time travel is hard to wrap your head around and paraphrasing Capt. Janeway from the U.S.S Voyager (star trek) take on time travel "**** the temporal prime directive."

For two objects heading for the event horizon it wouldn't matter as the first object would show the same signs as it appeared to the observer watching from a distance. Think of the event horizon as an opaque POS shield. You will see the object "slow" down but never cross the shield but once the object crosses the shield it's gone forever but it's image will remain.

Well it has to do with electromagnetism. There are various parts to it but what you are asking about basically has to do with a changing electric field inducing a magnetic field and vise-versa. These fields don't require a medium to interact with charged particles (think of magnets) but can still exert a force. This is the same process used in electric motors, electro magnets, electric generators, etc

Electromagnetism also is the reason why I can type this post as the atoms in my fingers are repelling the atoms in the keys on my computer. Yep, you never actually touch anything. All you feel is the electrical resistance (force) of the atoms in your skin repelling the atoms of anything else. This is due to the charged sub atomic particles, mostly electrons, repelling other electrons.

I hope I gave you the answer you were looking for but if you were wanting something like "this physical thing is the reason." Then there really isn't an answer since electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of nature and can't really be explained by a physical object or process...yet.

It's like trying to explain how gravity works. We know how it behaves but not what causes it (the graviton is the particle thought to be responsible for it but hasn't been discovered yet). We don't even know for sure what gives matter mass. All we have are theories but with the LHC up and running maybe we will have some answers in the near future.