Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

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DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I mean look at this.

It looks like the friggin eye of God!! How can you look at this and not see how awesome and grandiose it looks?? Philistines!

EDIT: Black hole page snipe. Yesss

# ? Dec 20, 2019 02:28

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# ? May 25, 2024 03:51

ashpanash: Apr 9, 2008; I can see when you are lying.

DrSunshine posted:

It looks like the friggin eye of God!! How can you look at this and not see how awesome and grandiose it looks?? Philistines!

The image with doppler redshift properly accounted for was deemed 'too confusing'.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 06:39

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

Ah you can see the dust because with the doppler shift it is emitting in the x ray regime?

# ? Dec 20, 2019 12:39

PawParole: Nov 16, 2019

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

That's a funai way of saying 'look at this complete mumbo jumbo'

There's no such thing as negative matter. He's discussing negative energy densities in a very specific atomic configurations and how there may be a chance of some configurations being stable enough to experiment with.

Nobody is creating exotic anything, and on no way is this related to wormholes or warp drives.

sufficient amount of negative energy densities can modify the stress energy tensor enough to warp space.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03805

https://twitter.com/kerr_laserpope/status/1056995097978527749

# ? Dec 20, 2019 14:03

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

It was a joke

Also never said that multiverse black holes were real, just discussed a possible method to test if hey are.

I wasn't entirely serious about forbidding you certain words, either

So I guess this means we both failed to recognize each other's jokes? :v:

# ? Dec 20, 2019 15:05

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

PawParole posted:

sufficient amount of negative energy densities can modify the stress energy tensor enough to warp space.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03805

https://twitter.com/kerr_laserpope/status/1056995097978527749

Isn't spacetime shown to be flat experimentally at this point? It's possible that we haven't used measurements sensitive enough to detect the curvature, I guess.

Libluini posted:

I wasn't entirely serious about forbidding you certain words, either

So I guess this means we both failed to recognize each other's jokes?

# ? Dec 20, 2019 16:12

PawParole: Nov 16, 2019

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Isn't spacetime shown to be flat experimentally at this point? It's possible that we haven't used measurements sensitive enough to detect the curvature, I guess.

the sun and earth curve spacetime locally. spacetime with zero curvature would be somewhere out in interstellar space

# ? Dec 20, 2019 16:20

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

PawParole posted:

the sun and earth curve spacetime locally. spacetime with zero curvature would be somewhere out in interstellar space

poo poo, I didn't think about local curvature. That's potentially pretty cool!

# ? Dec 20, 2019 16:21

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

I was given this book call "The Grand Mechanical" and told it posits a Unified Theory of Everything. https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Mechanical-Ben-Yehooda/dp/1481778072

I don't really get it, but it doesn't seem like it does so at all? What's going on?

# ? Dec 20, 2019 18:08

Heck Yes! Loam!: Nov 15, 2004; a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I was given this book call "The Grand Mechanical" and told it posits a Unified Theory of Everything. https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Mechanical-Ben-Yehooda/dp/1481778072

I don't really get it, but it doesn't seem like it does so at all? What's going on?

Hmm, lets read the description:

quote:

This is a mechanic, coherence, deterministic, totalitarian, elegant and simple theory of everything. This book will take you through the physical world describing it from a mechanical point of view, and showing the simplest, most elegant understanding for all of the physical phenomenon we know. The book will also be making predictions for phenomenon not yet discovered. The book goes through the fallowing; Big Collision, Expansion, Dark Energy, Electrons & Protons, Gravity, Momentum, Galaxies, Dark Matter, Black Holes, Relativity, Electromagnetic Waves, Electric Force, Strong Force, Weak Force, Chemistry, Spin, Moving Particles, Magnetic Force, Energies, Uncertainty, Quantum, Particles and Mathematics, bringing all of them together to a one coherent concept.

The terms used for this include:"woo" , "mumbo jumbo" , or :catdrugs:

# ? Dec 20, 2019 19:12

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I, for one, am definitely going to be learning my science from a book that eagerly crows itself to be "totalitarian".

# ? Dec 20, 2019 19:25

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

DrSunshine posted:

I, for one, am definitely going to be learning my science from a book that eagerly crows itself to be "totalitarian".

I can easily just imagine they wanted to use a word that means "total" to go along with "absolute"; it's not like "absolutism" automatically means a form of government.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 19:30

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Raenir Salazar posted:

I was given this book call "The Grand Mechanical" and told it posits a Unified Theory of Everything. https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Mechanical-Ben-Yehooda/dp/1481778072

I don't really get it, but it doesn't seem like it does so at all? What's going on?

My handy guide for dealing with every non-fiction book:

1. Go into the index, look up 1-2 of the more interesting sounding sources
2. Are the sources hilarious garbage? Throw the book into the trash
3. Is there no index? You may have accidentally started reading a fantasy novel! The book could still be enjoyable, so only get rid of it if you don't

Apply this test to your book and please report your judgement back to the thread

# ? Dec 20, 2019 19:47

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

Weird that 100 years of lingering inconsistencies in physics would be resolved in a 48-page paperback available on Amazon. Has anyone shown this to Edward Witten?

# ? Dec 20, 2019 20:27

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

We should do a Let's read to see how bad it gets

# ? Dec 20, 2019 20:36

Mozi: Apr 4, 2004; Forms change so fast
Time is moving past
Memory is smoke
Gonna get wider when I die; Nap Ghost

When half-truth is gone & we are dust, the full-truth we print, protect & teach alone lives on! Full-truth is God, it must! Help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, lightning-like 6 billion strong & in our Eternal Father�s Kingdom, we�re All-One! �Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!�

# ? Dec 20, 2019 21:05

DandyLion: Jun 24, 2010; disrespectul Deciever

Mozi posted:

When half-truth is gone & we are dust, the full-truth we print, protect & teach alone lives on! Full-truth is God, it must! Help teach the whole Human race, the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith, lightning-like 6 billion strong & in our Eternal Father�s Kingdom, we�re All-One! �Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!�

I feel cleaner just hearing it.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 21:10

Arglebargle III: Feb 21, 2006

God is real and he smells like peppermint.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 22:00

ashpanash: Apr 9, 2008; I can see when you are lying.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-two-entities-1 posted:

These findings promoted Einstein�s idea that empty space is not actually empty but holds an entity. Before this, the common convention was that space was nothing but particles, stars, planets, and other objects spread within it. Eddington discovered that space itself is an object�that is, space has the ability to bend. The bending of empty space has since been revealed in numerous light-curving events. This empty space is named the spacetime continuum, a three-dimensional elastic sheet spread in all directions. The spacetime continuum interacts with masses by stretching around them; with large masses, the stretch is strong enough to curve the path of observable light beams.

The simple yet significant differentiator of the TEToE is the axiom that empty space is composed of not one, but two entities, each a three-dimensional elastic sheet spread throughout the entire universe. Together, the two entities compose the single layer known as the spacetime continuum. Separating the spacetime continuum into two different entities makes it possible to account for much of nature with few axioms and with one coherent, logical idea.

Space doesn't bend. Spacetime curves. Spacetime is 3+1 dimensional, a representation of the Poincare group, SO(1,3). Referring to it as three dimensional ignores perhaps the most important part of special and general relativity. The combination of space and time is a fundamental, absolutely mandatory part of this. The spacetime metric interacts with energy density, momentum density, pressure, and shear.

That was just in the preview. I shudder to think what lurks in the whole book, but I'm sure it's just some Dunning-Kruger who read a few pop-sci articles, had a half baked idea, and thought he was the most brilliant person alive.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 22:24

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

ashpanash posted:

Space doesn't bend. Spacetime curves. Spacetime is 3+1 dimensional, a representation of the Poincare group, SO(1,3). Referring to it as three dimensional ignores perhaps the most important part of special and general relativity. The combination of space and time is a fundamental, absolutely mandatory part of this. The spacetime metric interacts with energy density, momentum density, pressure, and shear.

That was just in the preview. I shudder to think what lurks in the whole book, but I'm sure it's just some Dunning-Kruger who read a few pop-sci articles, had a half baked idea, and thought he was the most brilliant person alive.

You seem to have a good grasp of what's current. Can you recommend any books to help get a grasp of this subject? Half my knowledge is out of date. I'm particularly interested in resources that tackle the math well enough for someone who has a little linear algebra to understand it, but don't go full hog into whatever dark magic real physicists do.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 22:32

ashpanash: Apr 9, 2008; I can see when you are lying.

Kesper North posted:

You seem to have a good grasp of what's current. Can you recommend any books to help get a grasp of this subject? Half my knowledge is out of date. I'm particularly interested in resources that tackle the math well enough for someone who has a little linear algebra to understand it, but don't go full hog into whatever dark magic real physicists do.

Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWMHnDwyliMevB36wgRbjXhJkoN_RUQ
Lecture list and course work w/ solutions

Enjoy!

# ? Dec 20, 2019 22:36

dex_sda: Oct 11, 2012

I personally recommend Hartle's Gravity. It is the de facto textbook on practical GR, and possibly the one that requires the lowest level from actual math books.

You will still need a solid grasp of Newtonian mechanics, calculus, and you need to have seen linear algebra at some point in your life. But nothing more is needed, which is an incredibly short laundry list for this topic.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 22:44

ashpanash: Apr 9, 2008; I can see when you are lying.

The real 'trick' to understanding these more esoteric topics is building up the mathematical machinery you need to get there. And there's quite a bit of it. You can't just download 'General Relativity' into your brain. You need to learn all about metrics and tensors and manifolds and Christoffel and Levi-Civita symbols and stuff like that. Once you start to understand the parts of the machine, you can begin to fit it all together.

And I'm not going to tell you it's easy - it's not. You'll need to devote a lot of time to thinking and doing problems along the way. But I also won't say you need to be some sort of genius or anything. I'm certainly not. You just need to want to learn it, and you need to put in the time. Think of it like an instrument - practice, practice, practice. If you do that, you'll get better and better. And when you do learn the math, you'll appreciate it so much more than you ever could have from just learning the pop-sci.

# ? Dec 20, 2019 23:01

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

ashpanash posted:

Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWMHnDwyliMevB36wgRbjXhJkoN_RUQ
Lecture list and course work w/ solutions

Enjoy!

You rock! Thank you!

# ? Dec 20, 2019 23:34

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Stellar Engines yo!

# ? Dec 22, 2019 16:55

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Raenir Salazar posted:

Stellar Engines yo!

Ahahaha. I love learning about these ridiculously ambitious stellar projects. The scale and ambition of them is just breathtaking and extremely entertaining for me.

EDIT: The source paper for this video is an entertaining read too.

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Dec 22, 2019

# ? Dec 22, 2019 17:12

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

DrSunshine posted:

Ahahaha. I love learning about these ridiculously ambitious stellar projects. The scale and ambition of them is just breathtaking and extremely entertaining for me.

It also potentially answers some concerns about a interstellar civilization; over a long enough timespan you can just gradually pull all the colonized star systems closer together to be within a more reasonable travel and communication range!

# ? Dec 22, 2019 17:17

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

Raenir Salazar posted:

Stellar Engines yo!

Heh. The Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds.

# ? Dec 22, 2019 22:58

PawParole: Nov 16, 2019

http://eng.kantiana.ru/news/261163/

Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the universe's expansion to accelerate, not dark energy

# ? Jan 1, 2020 19:22

mycomancy: Oct 16, 2016

PawParole posted:

http://eng.kantiana.ru/news/261163/

Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the universe's expansion to accelerate, not dark energy

Hm, that smells fucky.

# ? Jan 1, 2020 19:31

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

mycomancy posted:

Hm, that smells fucky.

This is what peer review is for right?

# ? Jan 1, 2020 19:47

Kesper North: Nov 3, 2011; EMERGENCY POWER TO PARTY

If it smells fucky, you're doing pee-er review, not peer review.

# ? Jan 1, 2020 21:49

1glitch0: Sep 4, 2018; I DON'T GIVE A CRAP WHAT SHE BELIEVES THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS CHANGED MY LIFE #HUFFLEPUFF

Libluini posted:

To get back on this, my thoughts on the matter are that if wormholes are possible, they're very probably aren't gonna gently caress up all of space when they form, that would be like if it were possible to set the entire planet on fire by blowing up a nuke. Which is something scientists actually thought possible, while unlikely -until it was proven to be baloney.

What I think will really happen in a hypothetical wormhole-scenario, is that the spacetime inside a wormhole will get twisted enough to be bigger on the inside than outside, with the outside being like, a photon wide in diameter and the inside large enough for a kilometer-long spaceship to get through*. This kind of rolled-up spacetime at least seems more likely to me than whatever String-theorists are going on about with their rolled-up extra dimensions. At least here only our normal dimensions need to be rolled up to make this possible.

*Depending on how much effort you put into compressing spacetime this much, of course. Could be that even if it's possible, making a stable wormhole large enough for spaceships may turn out to be too much for a very long time, so communication (at the lower end) or a single-person transfer (at the higher end) may be the only practical applications. If it works like that, since we have zero evidence to distinguish between the three main possibilities here:

1.) Wormholes aren't real, go home, you're drunk
2.) Wormholes are real, but trying to make a stable one fucks up spacetime so much, angry space gods decent to eat you
3.) Wormholes are real, and strong, and our friends. They eat a lot of energy, though

With our purely mathematical knowledge and what little we learned from studying actual black holes, we don't know which of those three options will turn out to be real and which ones will be the fake news of the scientific world. I'm a firm believer in 3, but I'm willing to admit that the universe may secretly laughing over my be stupidity.

That's interesting! All my knowledge about exotic matter comes from science articles I've read many years ago, so it's nice to see some authors use this weird concept for their books.

Don't worry, with my bad joke about hyperspace I deserve this.

So, I'm well aware that a lot of authors like to use a "hyperspace" to nullify the dreaded real physics malus on their novel stats, but whenever someone puts real thought into the concept of additional layers of the universe, I tend to really like it and speculate about how we, with our knowledge today, would have to go about to find those additional layers.

Now my hyperspace-comments were halfway meant as jokes, as I know that many English authors just write down something like "hyperspace = cool, normal space = boring" and then stop thinking about it, while I grew up with German SF ballooning this concept up into an entire alternative descriptions of physics and the way those two different ideas of hyperspace collide with each other will never not be funny to me.

But I really do sometimes wonder if we're just one tiny step away from finding something like hyperspace. I think most SF is actively harmful for ideas like this, since most English SF with hyperspace in it doesn't really impress me on the plausibility-scale and often it's just a shorthand to make FTL work instead of an actual thought-out concept of how physics could work.

Now that I'm typing it, I'm thinking about dark matter and dark energy and if maybe the particles we want to find may turn out the gate to this kind of thing? In the German SF I've read, everything goes back to some rando tripping over a crystal and accidentally blowing up half a mountain with hyper energy, thus setting millions of years of FTL-research into motion. The idea we could miss something so obvious is of course brutally absurd, but if a hypothetical hyperspace is connected to something hard to get to, like dark matter, why not?

My stupid idiot guess is dark matter is the exhaust from whatever process allows FTL travel and basically aliens have polluted the universe.

# ? Jan 1, 2020 21:58

Kerning Chameleon: Apr 8, 2015; by Cyrano4747

1glitch0 posted:

My stupid idiot guess is dark matter is the exhaust from whatever process allows FTL travel and basically aliens have polluted the universe.

That would be the perfect punchline to ending everyone's dreams of clean gay communist space colonization forever, I support it wholeheartedly.

# ? Jan 1, 2020 22:47

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Kerning Chameleon posted:

That would be the perfect punchline to ending everyone's dreams of clean gay communist space colonization forever, I support it wholeheartedly.

God you're obnoxious about this gimmick.

# ? Jan 1, 2020 23:11

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Kerning Chameleon posted:

That would be the perfect punchline to ending everyone's dreams of clean gay communist space colonization forever, I support it wholeheartedly.

As someone with the Chaotic Evil alignment, I support the replacement of the clean space dream with the heavy industry space dream of destructive colonization. I have no idea why you think that's better though, are you a fellow evil demon?

# ? Jan 1, 2020 23:45

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

What I've learned is that I should get into reading some German SF! Any recommendations?

# ? Jan 1, 2020 23:47

Tighclops: Jan 23, 2008; Unable to deal with it; Grimey Drawer

Raenir Salazar posted:

God you're obnoxious about this gimmick.

He's a hateful little poo poo who's allowed his nihilism to consume him, whatever few valuable contributions he's made in the past aren't worth the sea of "lol humans are bad nothing matters only *I* am realistic about space" garbage posts in the meantime. I may not agree with everything you post, but at least you're trying to argue in good faith. Put him on ignore like I did ages ago.

It's like those "voluntary human extinction" people. Why the gently caress would you give that the time of day?

# ? Jan 1, 2020 23:55

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

DrSunshine posted:

What I've learned is that I should get into reading some German SF! Any recommendations?

Uh wow, how good is your German? Because a lot of the good poo poo never really got an English translation, as far as I know.

Back when other people were reading Isaac Asimov, I was reading Hans Dominik. His books Das st�hlerne Geheimnis and Atomgewicht 500 were the ones I still remember fondly. No idea if those ever got made available in English. The first one is about some weird structure being built in the ocean and the second one is about very heavy elements. (I think they accidentally turn the moon into an atomic sun in that one, if I haven't mixed anything up with other books from Dominik.)

If you're restricted to only English, I suggest starting with this product here:

Lemuria

It's a short book series set in the German Perry Rhodan universe and it's written by six different well-known German SF-authors. Chances are high at least one of them will be your taste. The publisher had this weird idea to translate this mostly recent short book cycle into English, so it's your best shot really.

(Those six books are also available straight from the publisher as ebook downloads, so they're probably the easiest entry point if you don't want to run down random novellas translated by god-knows-who published by one of the many failed attempts to bring the series into the Anglosphere. I don't even know if some of the later attempts are still running! You would have better chances if you could read Japanese, for some reason Japan really loves Perry Rhodan.)

# ? Jan 2, 2020 00:12

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# ? May 25, 2024 03:51

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Libluini posted:

Uh wow, how good is your German? Because a lot of the good poo poo never really got an English translation, as far as I know.

Back when other people were reading Isaac Asimov, I was reading Hans Dominik. His books Das st�hlerne Geheimnis and Atomgewicht 500 were the ones I still remember fondly. No idea if those ever got made available in English. The first one is about some weird structure being built in the ocean and the second one is about very heavy elements. (I think they accidentally turn the moon into an atomic sun in that one, if I haven't mixed anything up with other books from Dominik.)

If you're restricted to only English, I suggest starting with this product here:

Lemuria

It's a short book series set in the German Perry Rhodan universe and it's written by six different well-known German SF-authors. Chances are high at least one of them will be your taste. The publisher had this weird idea to translate this mostly recent short book cycle into English, so it's your best shot really.

(Those six books are also available straight from the publisher as ebook downloads, so they're probably the easiest entry point if you don't want to run down random novellas translated by god-knows-who published by one of the many failed attempts to bring the series into the Anglosphere. I don't even know if some of the later attempts are still running! You would have better chances if you could read Japanese, for some reason Japan really loves Perry Rhodan.)

I don't know either German or Japanese, but I'll start with that Lemuria series. Thanks a lot!!

# ? Jan 2, 2020 00:20

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Space, the Final Frontier: It Gazed Into My Open Refractor

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