Random thoughts about ...

[lionkingcmsl]

On my drive down to work to day I got to thinking about...

Black Holes

Being no information can "get out" of a black hole, how do we know what is actually happening inside "the belly of the beast"?

Theorists aside, we have no idea what is actually occurring. Could it not be that the matter that is drawn into a black hole is not compressed to a point where the strong/weak/atomic forces take over and there is one great atom inside, the likes of which man has never seen, and never can see.

If that is the case, has the astrophysicists accounted for the matter that may be in black holes to help "close" ...

The Universe

Is there enough matter to close the universe so it ends in a big "Crunch" instead of expanding forever and the resulting heat death as the stars all start to die?

I tend to believe there is. As you look into space you are looking backward into time. The star "Proxima Centuri" is the closest star outside of a solar system. The light that you see it by left the star over 4 years ago. That is also true of our sun. The light that is streaming in your window on a sunny day left the sun about 8 minutes ago. So looking into space is truly time travel into the past.

Given that fact, how we see the stars is not how they are today. We see them how they were when their light left them. There are probably enough planets out there that can close the "gap" between a closed universe and an open one.

Now that I stated that, and the end will come with a "big crunch" vs. the original "big bang", I have to ask the astrophysicists, "What's on the other side?" I mean what did the big bang take place in? It had to happen somewhere, and that somewhere has to be in an universe, correct. Now if you say that all the matter we know today came from the big bang and is now filling the universe then that makes sense, but to say the universe itself came from a big bang, it's sort of a quandary, is it not. Like the chicken and the egg riddle.

This leads me to ...

The "Flat Earthers"

I ask them the same question, "What is on the other side?"
If we assume the earth is like a pancake, and I'll get to reasons why I doubt that later, what would you find if you could go to the edge and climb down, what would you find. And what is under the earth? Is there a void? Hell? Heaven?

Now the reasons I believe that the eart is a globe, actually an oblate spheroid due to the flattening of the poles and the bulging of the Equator because of the Earth's rotation.

One, is the experiment done in ancient Greece. I don't have the notes with me, but the person who did the experiment had the Earth's dia to within 2%, IIRC.

Two, this is something that anyone can do on the shore of a large body of water, a clear day, and a good set of binoculars, or spy glasses.
Watch a ship as it appears from "over" the horizon. Do you see the ship appear at once and steadily grow larger, as someone walking toward you on the beach (the growing larger part. If a person appears suddenly call Fox and Sculley. :=3 )? No, the ship appears from the "top" down. If it is a sailing ship, the best ship for this type of observation, you see the "crow's nest" first, then the mast and then finally the hull. This proves that te earth has a curved surface.

Third, if the earth was flat, all people would see the Sun at the same angle at the same time. And regarding the Sun, if the Earth was flat, where does the Sun go when it sets?

Fourth, "nature" like circles and spheres. Look at a soap bubble, or an air bubble in a liquid. What shape are they? They are spheres. A circle, or its 3D counterpart a sphere, is the most compact shape possible. To add to that observation, how many natural sharp edges, outside of rocks, do you see? Not many. The only sharp edges are where they serve a purpose as in a cat's claws. The conic sections are abundant in nature.

Fifth, the other planets, are far as we can determine,are spheres. The is also easily observed by any amateur star gazer with a good telescope. Using Mars as an example, because it has surface features we can identify easily, it can be seen that it rotates. Large surface features, like mountains, do not move across the landscape within a human lifetime.

Why didn't I use the Mon or Jupiter? Well, the Moon's period of rotation also equals its period of revolution around the Sun, therefore we see the same "face" all the time. Though during a solar eclipse you can see the mountains on the "edges". Jupiter has a cloud layer which prevents us from seeing the surface, if there is one. These clouds are constantly in motion. This does lead me to ask, if Jupiter was not a sphere how do explain the "Red Spot" as it appears and disappears? Large vortexes start from small ones. They don't grow their leading edge first and then expand from that. This is easily observed from watching Earth bound weather like torandoes and hurricanes.

Now if the "flat Earthers" agree that the other planets, and the Sun, are spheres, then why not the Earth? Why would the Earth be so different in this regard? Being that nature would prefer a sphere when it comes to 3D objects, why would it suddenly say, "Well, I'm going to make the Earth a pancake?" Nature obeys the same laws no matter where you are.

Sixth, regarding some claims that the disappearances of some ships and planes are the result of them "falling" off of the edge, and that Columbus never sailed around the world because he hit America, I say hogwash.

They are forgetting that some of these disappearances are in established "sea lanes" that are used every day without problem. So what took these ships? Rouge waves? A huge, instanteous, whirlpool? Aliens? Heck if I know, but I'm certain it wasn't the edge of the world.

Also they are forgetting that the Earth has been circumnavigated many times since Columbus, the first being Magellan and his crew.

The "flat-Earthers" are always saying that there is a big scientific, political, and economic cover up of the true nature of the world.
I have to ask why would there be such a thing? The discovery of a flat Earth would be of astounding consequences and I doubt that any serious scientist would be hushed for long.

Just some idle thoughts as I drove to work today.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Information can escape from a black hole. Scientists have overlooked the fact that gravity has waves; any variation of gravity within the blackhole is felt outside of it. Boom, I've disproved a longstanding physics theory - just wave a large boulder back and forth! :)

As for the masses; yeah, scientists have long thought that the "missing matter" is bound up in black holes. There's no real way to count black holes since they are invisible to ambient detection. But there is proof that the universe will not collapse again but will instead go on forever until there is nothing but cold, frozen dust. Careful measurements of the farthest stars we can see has shown that the hubble constant is changing. In short, everything is flying apart not at the same speed, but accellerating away from everything else.

Some of us beleive that there is another state of matter - one which we have not seen yet. A state of matter with a negative gravity that repels all other mass. Such a material would be nothing but elementary particles filling the void. As more matter changes to contra-matter (say, bursting out from the suns in the promenances or from the "blue sprites" that appear out of thunderstorms) the void fills with repulsive stuff. It's a slow leak of matter into contramatter, but it takes place over billions of years and the cumulative effect of it filling all of space is quite strong - strong enough to push galaxies faster and faster away from each other.

And since any contramatter would immediately rush away from the planet and its gravity, we would very likely have never seen it.

[galish.livejournal.com]

Black Holes:

Black holes are supermassive collapsed stars. They are called 'black' because gravity inside the black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape.

Oh yes it can, said celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking a quarter of a century ago. Hawking's mathematical gymnastics showed that black holes could radiate light or particles -- hence the eponymous 'Hawking radiation'.

End of story? Not quite, announce Maulik Parikh of the Spinoza Institute in the Netherlands and Frank Wilczek of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The maths, they claim, never quite matched the 'pictorial' description of how Hawking radiation works, as glibly propounded by science writers and pub intellectuals. Now Parikh and Wilczek say their new derivation of Hawking radiation closes the gap
http://www.nature.com/nsu/001228/001228-6.html
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Dark Matter:

Whatever it is, dark matter may not move in mysterious ways, researchers told this week's American Physical Society annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

They calculate that this elusive matter - which makes up a quarter of the Universe - shifts around much as does the visible matter of stars, planets and dust. And in so doing, it may surround galaxies in lumps.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030407/030407-1.html

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Universe expansion accelerating not slowing down:

The accelerating expansion of the Universe can be explained without invoking a force of dark energy, a group of US physicists is proposing1. Gravity alone might be driving everything apart with ever-increasing speed, they claim.

"The fact that the Universe is speeding up might be the biggest mystery in all of science," says Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. "Really big problems require crazy new ideas - and ours is right up there with the craziest." He hopes others will build on the idea, or knock it down.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030630/030630-7.html

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Enjoy, that website has TONS of good information and science

Gal'ish