Out of Pod Experience

I want to disintegrate people with a flashy death ray gun. How do I go about doing that?

Because I don't really feel like waiting for a nuclear holocaust, survive inside a vault, wait even longer and one day when I am out wandering about in the wasteland, stumble over a crashed UFO where one of the dead aliens has a flashy death ray gun....

Thermodynamics was specifically developed to explain complex systems of many MANY particles. a perpetual motion device would be a macroscopic, closed, isolated system, that exists in a non stationary energy state and never decays to a lower energy state when left to its own devices. but consider a hydorgen atom. the lowest energy state of a hydrogen atom still has an "orbiting" electron because lower energy states are quantum mechanically disallowed. that hydrogen atom would be in a stationary state.

its like a slinky on the a flight of stairs. it is the natural tendency for the slinky to move down the stairs, but once it hits the bottom, it has no where to go, so it stops.

so, this depends entirely on your frame of reference. if you were to calculate your net acceleration with respect to the room you are sitting in it would be 0, because you are at rest. after that it depends on the frame in which you are calculating it. with respect to the moon? the sun? the galactic center? the local group? net force and acceleration are not frame invariant quantities.

i can explain it but i am not going to go through the derivation of something like particle cross sections on the forum because i can't draw feynman diagrams here and the forum does not support Latex, so the math would be ugly as hell. if you have the quantum mechanics background, Introduction to Elementary Particles by Griffiths is a good start. i use my copy all the time.

for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the question, here is a brief overview. suppose you take two neutrons, smash them together with some energy E, and examine things like how frequently the neutrons collide, or the quantity and type of particles that are produced after the collision. what you will see in general is that the harder you try to smash them together, the more likely it is that the neutrons will interact. HOWEVER, at certain energies you will see a spike! a rapid increase in the rate at which the neutrons actually collide! this is called a Resonance effect the question is why does this happen?

smashing subatomic particles is not like smashing rocks together. the particles produced in the collision are not "parts" of the initial particles. they are bits of matter that have condensed out of the energy released in the collision (they are technically quantizations of their respective fields), and this occurs in a similar fashion to making change. if you want to make $6 in change the "easiest" (and therefore most likely) way is with a $5 and a $1, and not 24 quarters. similarly, if you have enough energy to produce a pion after the collision, then you are more likely to get that pion and not a whole bunch of electrons and positrons instead.

when we write down the math that describes the state of the particles at the point where we might see them collide, what we are doing is writing down a sum of the probabilities of all the possible outcomes of that collision (all the possible ways we can make change). what we see when we do this is that the particles like to condense in a way that converts as much of the collision energy into rest mass as possible. this occurs as a direct result of kinematics; specifically conservation of momentum. it is much "harder" to arrange 100 electrons and 100 positrons in a state that conserves momentum with respect to the collision than it would be to arrange a pi+ and a pi-. this is simply because there are more bodies to account for and because it is unlikely any one electron would carry the majority of the momentum, while the pi+- result can easily distribute the momentum evenly. as a result, the resonance peaks land on energy ranges that match up with the rest energy of other allowable particles from this collision

so as we start increasing the energy of the collision, we get to energy ranges where a collision would produce many MANY particles per unit energy, and so the possible states are kinematically restrictive and therefore unlikely. in these ranges, the collision probability is almost completely dependent on the dimensions of the colliding particles. we also get to energy ranges where the collision would produce fewer, more massive particles per unit energy, and so the possible states are more likely.

or at least that's how i think of it... hope this helps!

oh man, i love Sam Neil and that movie :3 Event Horizon was great! i'm totally watching it as soon as i get home now heheheh.

ok so first paragraph appears to be all about Death by black holes :3 the technical term for this is Spaghettification. and no, i'm not making this up! the gravitational force acting on an object is directly related to the distance between the two bodies in question and their masses. this means that there is a very slight difference between the force of gravity acting on the hair on your head compared to that acting on your toes. we don't usually notice this because on earth that difference is astronomically small. but near a black hole is another story... here, the difference in the gravitational forces acting on different parts of your body is significant, and this difference increases more and more as you approach the hole.

if you are falling in feet first, eventually the force difference between your head and your toes will be enough to break the molecular bonds holding your midsection together, and you will snap in half. your torso and your legs will continue to fall and the force differences will continue to increase, eventually snapping you in half at the knees and chest. as you continue to fall this process continues on and on, until you are just a single stream of atoms, then a single stream of subatomic particles, and then just energy. the time it takes for this to occur again, depends on your reference frame, but an observer outside the horizon would never actually see you cross it.

as for whether or not our entire universe could exist within a black hole, some theories certainly allow this! this idea actually relates to your next set of questions concerning the dimensionality of the universe. because of the way space and time are compressed past the event horizon, you loose a dimension of what we would perceive as time once you cross it because past that point, the only way you can go is down towards and around the singularity. we could all be falling towards a singularity, but we cannot perceive it because its position relative to our own is along a dimension we no longer have access to because of the compression of space-time.

it may actually be that we live in a highly curled and knotted, 1D universe, which would imply that the position and time of every event would have a unique position along this knotted universe. it's a similar idea to drawing a picture without ever picking up your pencil. the end result is a two dimensional image, but it is composed of a single twisted 1D line, so you can uniquely specify any point in the image by giving how far along the line you must travel from the start. because of how the picture is drawn there are only certain locations you could exist within it (specifically, wherever the line is), which directly implies a quantization of space. indeed we do see this in the lab and on the chalk board because of the existence of the Plank Length (which i detailed earlier in the thread), so the hypothesis is compelling in my opinion.

Its all lies, god created the earth and the people.

Adam and eve was real.

Deal with it, we have enough proof

What is dark matter?

huh, okey. thank you.
Are there any theories of it's actual content?
Last year I remember there where a lot in the news about CERN and their accelerator..and it had something to do with dark matter, what was that all about?

I've always wondered why they don't just think there is a lot matter we don't see. Dim stars, planets, black holes.

Speaking of black holes - do you think it's strange that they aren't anchored in space (meaning if they are at the center of galaxies, and galaxies move)? I was wikipediaing them and saw that they think there may be a thing called an ergosphere which is like a buldge in the direction of rotation. Seems strange that things that defy physics would do normal things like that. Just interesting.

well, that depends on a couple things. specifically your position and your orientation when this starts to occur. if you are outside the event horizon, yes, you will feel it. if you are past the event horizon you would only feel it if you were falling in head first. you wouldn't feel it past the event horizon if you fall in feet first