Out of Pod Experience

black holes do not violate any laws of physics, so it's perfectly reasonable for them to have spacial qualities like the ergosphere. they are just "super dense" masses. all of their properties follow directly from general relativity =D

I can't find a link about it, but if iir they were trying to "create" dark matter?
and there were comments made that if that was possible it would most probably destroy earth.

I liked the post. I think the only "spaceship" that works like this is the pogo stick. For those who had no childhood. Only has enough energy to go places that your body has though.

Tsadkiel, do you think newton's 3rd law is the inspiration of EVE ships needing, +1 warp strenght to enter warp? Like the +1 shows there is at least one external force on you and your just not an internal force, so you can enter warp and escape.

the primary differences between the two are the time span in which they occur, and the type of force used to achieve ignition. stellar fusion is a result of Gravitational Confinement, which is to say that gravity is the force that "squeezes" atoms together close enough to fuse (close enough that the attractive nuclear force overcomes the repelling electric force between the protons of the nuclei). Laser initiated fusion is usually of the form known as Inertial Confinement, which is to say that forces that result from motion is what "squeeze" the atoms. Laser based inertial confinement is done by focusing an intense pulse of coherent light evenly over a fuel pellet composed of a catalyst shell encasing a high pressure mixture of deuterium and tritium. the light pulse vaporizes the shell of the pellet, which expands in all directions, including inwards. this increases the pressure of the fuel to the point where it begins to fuse and release energy. inertial confinement has also been achieved using Z-pinch devises and high yield explosives. gravitational confinement is stable over the course of millions of years because gravity is such a week force, and so requires a great deal of fuel to initiate ignition. inertial confinement is stable over the course of only nanoseconds.

stable, long term fusion reactions on earth are primarily achieved through Magnetic Confinement, which initiates fusion by squeezing plasma using strong magnetic fields. the most common device for accomplishing this is known as a TOKAMAK device (the acronym is in Russian), which does the squeezing with incredibly strong toroidal (circular) magnetic fields. this is not an easy task and is similar to trying to squeeze jello with rubber bands... but we can do it! there have been several TOKAMAK devices over the years and none of them have been able to produce more electrical power than what they consume. the primary restriction that causes this is simply a matter of technological efficiency, and the specifics of the structure of the toroidal field. the soon-to-be state of the art of TOKAMAK based magnetic confinement is currently being built in the south of France and it is called ITER. their predictions indicate that their design may be the first to produce useful electrical power (by a few percent).

So the other night I needed to grab my keys from my bedroom. It was dark so I switched on the light to find them. Leaving the room, I flipped the switch and left.
My question to you is, when I flipped the switch off where did the light go?

Dark Matter is a Quantum Super Position between Matter and Anti-Matter. End of Dark-Matter related discussions.

so, you turn on your light, and billions of trillions of photons go screaming away from your light bulb! they bounce off the walls of your room and the objects it contains. as long as the light is on, photons continue to be emitted. a very small percentage of them are absorbed by your eye which you then perceive as sight. the rest bounce around until they are either absorbed by local materials (walls and objects, but also gasses!), or they escape from your room, home, planet, etc... this all happens in less than a blink. as a rule of thumb, light travels at about a foot per nanosecond in a vacuum, so unless your room is astronomically large (in a very literal sense), you will not be able to see any of this with your naked eyes.

And you're playing eveonline. This is why you still havent found Higgs Boson. Slacker.

XD it helps keep me from going completely insane heheheh

a very interesting philosophical question, but it all hinges on on statement.



this is not true, so far as we understand it. in physics we would say that the universe is non-deterministic, which is a fancy way to say that it is impossible to know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe simultaneously. we have experimental evidence to support this claim in measurements of the consequences to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

now, locally and specifically, yes, science can make very precise predictions (planetary orbits for example). but these measurements always carry some measure of uncertainty; that some object will be at some location at some time to within +- some number of meters or seconds. but even at the most precise level, quantum mechanics outright forbids perfect certainty in measurements of position and velocity. because of this the very core of quantum mechanics is statistical. when we calculate the "position of a particle" what we are calculating is something called an Expectation Value, which is thought of as an average of the results of completely independent and isolated measurements of identical experiments (a million grad students make identical measurements of position on a million identical experiments simultaneously. the expectation value for the position of a particle would be the average of these measurements.)

the statistical, non-deterministic nature of the universe can be directly seen by examining the decay rates of radioactive isotopes. given a single atom of U-238 it is impossible to predict with perfect certainty precisely when it will decay, because even if we could measure the exact position and momentum of every nucleon and electron in that atom at the same time, to do so would fundamentally change its state, and our measurements would no longer be valid. but we CAN produce predictions that tell us the likelihood that it will decay within some amount of time, and if you give me a very large sample of U-238 i can tell you about how many years it will be until some quantity of it decays.