Out of Pod Experience

Tsadkiel, since I am feeling mean and I want you to suffer, I want you to spend ten hours on Graham's number.

it's more like "these are the only explanations that fit the current data"

as for the big bang, well, we can recreate mini big bangs in particle accelerators and the models we have for the actual big bang allow us to predict the behavior of these laboratory big bangs.

if this is what you really think is going on then yes. no one is stopping you from learning the necessary material but you.

Tsadkiel, I thank you for your replies to my questions and truly respect your field. But I don't think that you are reading what I am typing. I surmise that you probably exalt the pursite of science in such a way that anyone who questions it ends up royally pissing you off.

That is not atypical behavior by any means, it is in actuality, fairly commonplace.
So for the sake of the continuation of this thread, I shall now digress.


Good luck in your pursuits.

i've never heard of this but now that i am reading about it i'm curious :3 more to come tomorrow. it sounds like something related to the Ackermann function, which i only know because of XKCD heheh

no, we aren't. we really really aren't and i've tried to explain why. you took my entire response and reduced it to a single, out of context quote...
shouldn't you be off "digressing"?

I think we can agree that "only" is a bit of a stretch. It's a "best fit" model...but that's a big part of science. It's just important to understand that such theories rarely last more than a decade before some discovery turns them on end and forces quite a bit of recalculation.

sure can! this equation comes from Special Relativity (not to be confused with General Relativity) and appears when you start trying to describe mechanics in reference frames moving at relativistic velocities (velocities approaching the speed of light). when you try to do this a factor known as Gamma appears...

Gamma = 1/sqrt(1-V^2/c^2)

where V is the velocity of the frame. for V < c, Gamma > 1. for V -> c, Gamma -> infinity, and for V > c, Gamma is imaginary (which is a whole other topic).

Gamma tells us how space and time change relative to your velocity. these effects are known as Lorentz contraction and time dilation . once we derive how space and time change in relativistic frames, we can derive how velocities will change (suppose you see a ship pass near the speed of light and a person on the ship tosses a ball around, what do you see. in this case, V is the velocity of the ship. the velocity of the ball is the quantity we needed to derive). once we have velocity we can derive momentum and energy!

when we derive the total energy of an object in the context of special relativity we get a trailing term of gamma*m*c^2. notice that when the velocity is zero this term will remain as just m*c^2! so this energy is around even when an object is at rest (the reason we never noticed this before is because energy is always conserved and this term would appear on both sides of any conservation equation we would usually encounter) and so we call it the Rest Energy. the most common interpretation of this is that this is the energy required for the object to exist as matter.

in an explosive nuclear reaction, the constituent particles that make of the fuel collide with each other at relativistic velocities and can be partially (sometimes completely) converted into energy. the amount of energy yielded in these collisions is proportional the m*c^2 for the particles in question.

Here are a few others.


1. I read somewhere that although our sun is a "very average main sequence star" recent observations seem to indicate that it's output is somewhat more regular then others like it. Any truth to this?


2. After the big bang, why was only hydrogen formed? I always figured that it would make sense if heavier elements were created do to the great energies and pressures involved. It was far more powerful then a super nova, so why did it not also create heavy elements like super nova do?

3. Cosmic background radiation, why is it only in microwave frequencies, and more importantly, what was it's original frequency before it was red shifted?


4. Has anyone detected wavelengths shorter then gamma waves involved in say... splitting protons into quarks as oppose to just splitting atoms?

Thx!

The answer to the ultimate question is actually its own question: Why Not? THAT is what we should try to figure out the answer to, not "Why".