BellGab.com Archive

Free Art Bell

Quote from: wr250 on January 25, 2015, 07:17:30 PM
its like you have 2 apples. you double the number of apple you have (2*2) for a total of four. but mathematically -2*-2=4 is also true and a mathematically valid answer.

The problem is it may not make "sense" as we understand it to say a negative number (or imaginary) is at all valid for some quantities. Like magnetic monopoles. Maxwell's equations are set up to ignore magnetic "charges" since we have never seen one and thus we conclude they don't exist. If they did they could be accommodated easily. But such things have never been seen (and no evidence exists for them) so we discount them. Including them becomes and interesting mathematical game of "what if". It's tough to answer if such things might really be possible, which is why we need experiment to put physics on the right track.

Quote from: aldousburbank on January 25, 2015, 07:17:28 PM
So, like a cosmic strip club?

^^^ this.

You may only think what you're seeing is real.

Art should avoid all of these difficulties and become a host on the gabcast. Boom, production problems solved

Quote from: zeebo on January 25, 2015, 02:01:30 PM
Tachyons are real?  I thought they were just a Star Trek Next Gen. device.  Will have to look into this.

They're not physically "real", but they do come from real theory. You can take physics and put exotic bits of math into it (like tachyons, or exotic matter, or whatever) and see what it would be like afterward. But it doesn't mean things are really like that.

Quote from: zeebo on January 25, 2015, 12:30:27 AM
This is dated and I don't know if it's accurate, but a kinda cool musing on photons.

http://www.propermotion.com/jwreed/Essays/The%20Life%20of%20A%20Photon.htm

This was a neat article. But the real punchline for me is that the observer's eye and Andromeda are the same place and time for the photon in that story!

All about tachyons, better than I could say it and right from the horse's mouth!

https://www.uam.es/personal_pdi/ciencias/jcuevas/Teaching/Taquiones.pdf
Enjoy!

Quote from: Georgie For President 2216 on January 24, 2015, 06:07:58 PM

Indeed.  Matter with negative mass would have negative inertia and possibly negative gravity? which would be strange indeed.  I'm not sure such a thing is possible but I have been curious since the late 90s whether it could be an explanation for the great voids and large scale structure, and some of the effects we see, like the Great Attractor, which I propose is really the Great Repulsor, as two great voids attempt to merge.  It's probably pretty silly, but that's what I'm here to find out.

Theorists love to talk about "exotic matter" which is pretty much just negative energy (or negative mass) to stabilize finnicky solutions. It's how we got started talking about traversible wormholes and warp drives. It can give interesting mathematical behavior in some cases and even if it's not physical it might make a solution interesting in a different way.

It's basically the equivalent of "yes, and" for a theorist.

Certainly some kinds of physical effects are measurable and related to negative energy (like the Casimir effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect), but it's not really understood yet how it can be used or in what quantity or what real applications such things may yet have.

Quote from: Georgie For President 2216 on January 24, 2015, 05:16:33 PM
Agent, can I infer from your discussion that a hypothetical particle of negative mass would necessarily travel faster than light and with negative time progression?

Also, something which has long bothered me:  is it possible such particles could be confined to the great voids between galactic clusters and walls in the large scale structure of the universe?  Is it possible they could be creating a repulsive force compressing areas of ordinary matter together -- perhaps being interpreted as dark energy or contributing to the appearance of dark matter?


I suppose if they did travel faster than light it wouldn't make any sense for them to be confined in that way.

Negative mass is a bit of a different exotic something. Negative mass would still give m^2, and imaginary mass like the kind discussed earlier on in the article posted would give back a -m^2. That - sign makes all the difference. Such stuff if it existed would have to have v>c always and the standard energy relationship would be flipped - as it moved faster and faster it would have less and less energy.

I would argue the lack of a ground state (E=0 would occur only at v=infinity) would be a case against this kind of matter. And I would need a good argument to believe neutrinos might be this stuff.

Anyway even imaginary mass should still have positive energy and would still (presumably) affect gravity in the same way as normal matter in general relativity.

Quote from: Art Bell on January 24, 2015, 08:36:38 PM
Hi again,

It's been a long time since I have posted. First I did not miss any shows for Sirius/XM save for one when the studio in New York went down, none missed for my back or the spider bite.

Second, I do still have the Flu and have had a bad back since I was in my 20s, sometimes it is ok and at other times I can not walk. Only people with bad backs can possibly understand.

Third, IF I decide to take a run a streaming it will be free while live as I have always said, this would be in July
after my Non-Compete is over. It would also be at my own expense and require a considerable investment. It will
also require a Producer which may be a problem because Paul may not be available, no Producer would mean no show.

Fourth, I have zero regrets about having left Sirius/XM and were I faced today with the same situation now, would make the same decision. The ONLY thing I would have done is to not have signed a contract with them in the first place without understanding their streaming problems, it was represented to me that they had a viable National and International stream in place, that is on me.

Fifth, If anything aside from my Health would hold me back it would be the people who as I have read on this board are already starting to say I will quit again, if I decide to give this a try at my age there is no guarantee
my Health will hold out and if it does not it might be wiser to not begin as opposed to facing all the grief I would get if at some point I could not hold up.

These are the things I am considering...

                                                                                                          Art Bell

Hi Art,

Great to see you back here. Whatever happens, make sure to choose the option that maximizes your happiness.

Cheers

Quote from: Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost on January 24, 2015, 02:05:52 PM
Thanks for the heads up!  I'm going to go pick up the book at the library this afternoon.

I'm going to keep on the lookout for it, I'm sure it will be a very interesting read.

Quote from: FearBoysWithBugs on January 24, 2015, 02:11:15 PM
Might be me, but that link did not work for me.  The site comes up but not the article.

Bizarre.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/10151024-finally-new-horizons-has-a-kbo.html
Did that work?

Regardless... interesting stuff is afoot.

DOOOOOOOOOM!!!

Quote from: FearBoysWithBugs on January 24, 2015, 01:12:26 PM
I think it is moving too fast to do that.  But agree that the images will be sexy.

My mistake, it is scheduled for flyby summer this year. Then on off to more of the Kuiper belt. Interesting post about followup KBO targets here
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/10151024-finally-new-horizons-has-a-kbo.html.

I just watched Mirage Men, a documentary about Richard Doty, Bill Moore and Paul Bennewitz. I have always been interested in the subject of UFOs but this doc made a case for a more down to Earth - still creepy - explanation for some of the more bizarre "contactees" and the crossover between UFO phenomenon and psychological operations. The show was really interesting and kept me thinking about it for a long time afterward and makes some interesting connections. I saw it on netflix, at least here in Canada it was available.

A friend recommended The Martian by Andy Weir, and I would have to second that recommendation. About 2/3 through and it's awesome and intense. I can't remember the last time I was so immersed in a novel.

Quote from: zeebo on January 21, 2015, 10:02:04 PM
Comet Lovejoy.  I saw it with my binocs, but it just looked like a very faint greenish nebula.  Here's a better pic.

This is a very nice image. I stood around with some friends outside our building on campus to try to get a view in -35 degrees ( C or F, it doesn't really matter when it's that cold). One guy didn't have a coat so we weren't out for long... 
Otherwise haven't had a chance to get much of a view at all though the pictures I've seen (like this one) have looked beautiful.

Let me also say that Maxwell's laws also allow for solutions to the electromagnetic wave equation that travel backward through time! We are used to the solutions which are time-delayed which represents the finite speed of light effect - it takes a while for signals to travel through space. Before relativity in classical electromagnetism this has to be put in by hand. You could just as easily put in "advanced" effects just as easily, where the influence travels the other way from future to past. Then when you solve the wave equations you find electromagnetic waves - light rays - that travel backward in time. These solutions are just thrown away as "unphysical" which they are since we've never observed such things. But experiments have been done to try to find them if they are real!

So it's interesting that these kinds of features survived from classical mechanics into GR where causality is strictly enforced for ordinary matter. Maybe there's something to it. Or it may be the next theory will utterly kill them off completely once we understand quantum gravity properly.

Quote from: zeebo on January 23, 2015, 11:27:54 PM
Very cool.  Amazing really that they can pinpoint something so far away.

New Horizons was launched in 2006 (or around that) and is expected to enter orbit around Pluto this July... so there will be a ton of closeups coming soon!

Quote from: wr250 on December 27, 2014, 11:07:26 AM
neutrinos faster than light?


http://phys.org/news/2014-12-faster-than-light-particles.html


i find the article poorly written, perhaps agent : Orange can chime in when he finds time.
i was put off at the beginning where it is stated that : mathematically an imaginary number is the square root  of a negative number ,written bi where

Code Select Expand

i=−b^2, not the square. perhaps it works differently with mass equations (but i doubt it), or they mean

Code Select Expand

−b^2 . a negative number squared is always a positive number. EX: -22 (-2 multiplied by -2) is 4 (not -4) .


note i had to use the code tags to prevent autoformatting ,which made a huge mess of the post.

Quote from: wr250 on January 21, 2015, 05:57:37 PM
a month later i figure that the equation above is wrong. probably due to autoformatting.

-b^2 is -b squared which would be a postive number.
what was meant was i=SQROOT of -b

An imaginary number is written with i^2 = -1. So (i x m)^2 = -m^2
Or, if you like things in terms of square roots, sqrt( -m^2 ) = i x m, or just im if you prefer.

There are three kinds of paths particles can take through space-time in general relativity. These are defined in terms of path lengths or proper times, the time an observer travelling on that path would record on a watch they carried with them.

Time-like paths are the trajectories normal particles follow. These particles have positive mass like all of the matter we know. They move through time from the past to the future (though the rate at which they can be said to move from the past to the future is relative of course ) and they have speeds less than the speed of light. The proper time measured along this path is always positive, so causality is preserved for normal matter. As we would expect these particles all have positive mass that is real (which was good news for Einstein).

Null paths are the trajectories that light-rays follow. In fact, any particle with no mass (m=0) will follow one of these paths. The proper-time along these paths is 0, which means that light rays themselves don't experience time (which is infinitely fascinating to me). These kinds of paths are called null geodesics. Particles with no mass move at the speed of light always.

Space-like paths are the opposite to time-like paths, they are directed from the future to the past, and have proper times that are negative! Since energy must always be positive, the particles travelling along space-like paths are imaginary mass particles that must travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. In fact, the energy-velocity relationship is upside down for these kinds of particles. The slower they go, the more energy they have, which is weird and counter-intuitive. These kinds of particles are not widely considered realistic and when a tachyon shows up from a quantum field type of calculation then the theory is considered flawed and there's something wrong with the assumptions that have gone into developing it. These particles make all kinds of strange trouble for the universe and a lot of people have looked at what kind of paradoxes might exist if they were kicking around the universe.

So that article posted earlier is about trying to find such past-directed particles. But there are some big problems with this guys idea. The main one is that his claim hinges on the neutrino being a negative mass particle. Ehrlich claims the mass bound on neutrinos is -0.11 +- 0.016 electron Volts. (from his article here which i have not read http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804). That may be, but the observations and experiments with neutrinos are still in their infancy and are not anywhere near precise enough to make the claim the neutrino really has a tiny and negative mass. So I would be suspicious of the whole thing and take it with a salt-shaker full of salt instead of just a few grains.

Still it would turn established physics on it's head so if there's still a possibility let's go do some small experiments first like the ones mentioned in the original article (ie using tritium beta decays and cosmic ray data) before we treat it any more seriously.

Blowing a kneecap off of an established idea is the dream of every theorist.

However, in closing, let me say this

Quote from: zeebo on January 21, 2015, 09:28:07 PM
Don't worry about it, the imaginary number isn't really there.   

is wisdom

Quote from: Zoo on January 23, 2015, 01:05:18 PM
Fact light travels slower in a vacuum. I care not what other people or books say or think. Facts are facts!!1

Can you define vacuum for us?

Quote from: area51drone on December 20, 2014, 12:40:41 PM
BTW Agent.. I'm still waiting.  Patiently, but still waiting     I hope you have a great holiday and I hope your relative gets better soon.

Yeah I know :\

I have a text file sitting on my desktop that has some text in it from you, I have been slowly filling in a response but I need a few free hours to put something thoughtful down (as opposed to a mash of links) and I just haven't had the time to spare. Sorry to keep you hanging man but glad you're still interested in talking anyway
I came back on today because I got a pm, and stopped by "just to answer it". But then got caught up in catching up

Happy holidays to you too by the way, all the best

Quote from: Camazotz Automat on November 12, 2014, 06:09:26 PM
~ B L A C K   R O T   ! ~

(screams ... faints)

((Not even a smidgen of red yet. I will try to string it along.))

So how did Tom Tom turn out?

Also, here's a lunar halo I took a few weeks ago:

Free Art Bell

Quote from: West of the Rockies on December 20, 2014, 11:05:50 AM
Is there a solid guess as to when a wo(manned) craft might touch down on Mars?

Still a while... right now it looks like NASA plans to go forward in collaboration with SpaceX.

The first thing to do is get the F9R test out of the way on Jan 7, 2015:
http://www.universetoday.com/117480/rocket-issues-force-spacex-and-nasa-to-postpone-falcon-9-rocket-launch-to-january-2015/

Then once reusable rocket parts have pulled back the curtains start putting more ambitious goals center stage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_%28spacecraft%29
http://www.universetoday.com/115408/how-nasa-and-spacex-are-working-together-to-land-on-mars/

In the meantime, you'll get some pictures of Pluto in July next year to amuse you:
http://theconversation.com/rise-and-shine-new-horizons-awakes-ahead-of-a-date-with-pluto-35332

Quote from: wr250 on December 20, 2014, 11:07:27 AM
the sooner the better. thats when noorys contract will end.

I really love that this is the inspiration and driving force behind the bellGab space program...

I enjoyed Interstellar much more than I liked Gravity. The film had it's problems but I didn't think any of them were too serious. The science was not great but in other places done very well.

Now, having said that...

Seven years to one hour time dilation? That's huge gravity. And they escaped with that puny landing craft? Why couldn't they have spent a few years doing orbital recon before landing on the surface to find out what the conditions were like? McConnaughey was constantly describing time dilation and relativity, he should have been able to figure out the proper time the previous explorer was on the surface, and adjust to the ships coordinate time.

But that's a pretty small nitpick. I'm still impressed because I've never seen the Unruh effect in a movie before. *gush*

Makes me hope for a big screen version of The Forever War. 

http://time.com/3636857/voyager-1-tsunami-space/

Hope everyone is doing well out there and happy holidays. Sorry I have still not had much time to myself to post much of anything, still taking care of my sick relative and trying to get some papers out the door too.

The mention of solar flares reminded me of this story, which deals with CMEs. I did a few small spots on a local station recently and this story was one of the things they wanted to touch on. So recently I had a day devoted to reviewing the basics of physics dealing with the Sun. 

Hope everyone is well, and hanging in there. Happy holidays. And hopefully I will once again get to spend more time on here soon!

Woke up and found this, thought it was interesting
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/

Hope you are all doing well and sorry I'm taking so long posting some stuff for you A51D! Hope to be back in a normal rhythm in a few weeks.

Hope all are well.

And that comet landing was a blast, wasn't it?!

Quote from: area51drone on October 30, 2014, 11:47:26 PM
Agent,

If you have time, could you revisit these posts for me?  I've been waiting for you to comment on them, since, oh, July.  Not like you have to, but I would definitely like to hear your opinion.


http://bellgab.com/index.php/topic,4908.msg279650.html#msg279650
http://bellgab.com/index.php/topic,4908.msg279802.html#msg279802
http://bellgab.com/index.php/topic,4908.msg280074.html#msg280074
http://bellgab.com/index.php/topic,4908.msg297102.html#msg297102

For sure I'll get back to this but it might be a few days.

The wife and I just watched The Mist, which was pretty neat. Was not expecting that ending!!