Science or Science Fiction: The thread to debate science.

[Lithe_Joint]

You guys have to be joking!

How can you possibly use maths to secure a scientific fact when:
a. Science is based on theory.
b. Maths is a method to prove or disprove the theory.

All the greats like Einstein's and Newton's theories were considered to be the ****, but as we progress, they have but only skimmed the surface of what makes our world turn.

I would like to submit that, just like Shroedinger, it is what it is at the point at which you observe it. At any other point it will be different for everyone else.

[RiaX]

Uhm, you have to use mathematics to prove a scientific theory, hence all the equations you learnt in high school.

[RiaX]

Just watched an episode on dicoveryshowcaseHD about black holes part of a documentry series called 'How the universe works' ... very nice doc if you like pretty space pictures like me plus its really up to date

However something caught my attention they were talking about super massive black holes and their mass .... how do they calculate that mass ? in every documentry you hear "so and so is 150 billion times the weight of our sun to put it in perspective" , firstly i dont know the weight of the sun lol but besides that how to they calculate that even thought its an approximate it surely cant be pulled out of thin air ?

[rustypup]

THIS JUST IN! Swearing is great for pain tolerance!

[jee]

Waxing between fascinated and irritated... you decide

Carl Sagan's Cosmos - Science and philosophy using music as the medium

[Ron2K]

After 52 years of conceiving, testing and waiting, marked by scientific advances and disappointments, one of Stanford's and NASA's longest-running projects comes to a close with a greater understanding of the universe. Stanford and NASA researchers have confirmed two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, concluding one of the space agency's longest-running projects. Known as Gravity Probe B, the experiment used four ultra-precise gyroscopes housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein's theory about gravity. The first is the geodetic effect, or the warping of space and time around a gravitational body. The second is frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates.

Source

[KALSTER]

Excellent!

[StarPhoenix]

Just watched an episode on dicoveryshowcaseHD about black holes part of a documentry series called 'How the universe works' ... very nice doc if you like pretty space pictures like me plus its really up to date

However something caught my attention they were talking about super massive black holes and their mass .... how do they calculate that mass ? in every documentry you hear "so and so is 150 billion times the weight of our sun to put it in perspective" , firstly i dont know the weight of the sun lol but besides that how to they calculate that even thought its an approximate it surely cant be pulled out of thin air ?

The mass of the earth is approximately 6X10^24kg
The mass of our friendly neighbourhood is somewhere around 333 000 times that of the earth, though that
changes with time as it radiates away some of its mass.

If a remember my high school science correctly, you might be able to get away with guesstimating the mass of
a black hole [for example] by measuring the strength of the gravitional field it exerts on an orbiting body for which the mass is known. You would also need to know the size of the collapsed star. All you need
do then is to plug the values you do know into F=G.M.m/r^2 [F=gravitional force, G=gravitional constant, originally determined through the ingenious use of metal balls and bendy wire, M is the mass of the black hole, m is the known mass of the body and r is the radius of the collapsar] This is an old Newtonian equation though, and I don't know how relevant it
still is. Perhaps someone like Prime could fill us in on that?

At least I *think* that is how it might be done. Science graduates are welcome to correct me on this.

[rustypup]

ADHD is a manufactured condition aimed at plugging drugs to as many people as possible!

Look at the criteria that are used to call a child ADHD. They talk out of turn, they don’t sit still, they wiggle around too much in their seats, they are impulsive, disorderly, and so on. It’s a bunch of behaviours that are seen in just about every child at some stage of their life. This is by design; they have taken kind of irritating, bothersome, disruptive behaviours in children and have kind of cobbled them together and called it a disease.

[hamin_aus]

And there we have he opinion of child psychologist Rustypup, whose once-promising career now lies in tatters after a judge ruled he was no longer allowed with 500 meters of a child, or any place where children congregate.

Also, who cares. Drug your kids up if it's easier for you than actually being a parent, just don't be surprised when they turn out to be functional retards as adults.

[GreyWolf]

THIS JUST IN! Swearing is great for pain tolerance!

cracked.com covered this a while back.

[cyberfox271]

Anyone know what charge an anti-neutron has? And on the subject of how they measure the density and mass of celestial bodies: For density they use the amount of redshift the star has and as for mass...Phoenix is probably right. That equation might still be used, because the theory of relativity only makes a real difference with objects with unusually large densities and masses. While in normal life we all use Newtonian laws, because it doesn't make a difference. Feel free to flame. I'm here to learn.

[KatrynKat]

The antineutron is the antiparticle of the neutron with symbol n. It differs from the neutron only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign. It has the same mass as the neutron, and no net electric charge, but has opposite baryon number (+1 for neutron, −1 for the antineutron). This is because the antineutron is composed of antiquarks, while neutrons are composed of quarks. In particular, the antineutron consists of one up antiquark and two down antiquarks.

Anti-Neutron Wikipedia

[rustypup]

aaaargh!... the end times are upon us!

<starts booking crates of DE through Gamwave>

[StarPhoenix]

That's it, I'm switching to herbal tea!

[Anakha56]

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/07/anti ... sts-escap/

Antimatter gets trapped for 15 minutes by CERN scientists, escapes unharmed
By Sharif Sakr posted Jun 7th 2011 8:31AM

Antimatter particles are elusive little critters that tend to disappear moments after being spotted. Unless, it turns out, you trap them in a "magnetic bottle" and turn the temperature right down to almost absolute zero. CERN scientists have now used this technique to hold 300 antihydrogen particles for up to 1,000 seconds, relaxing them into their ground (stationary) state to make them easier to study. This opens the way for further research later in the year, when captured particles will be prodded with lasers and microwaves to see if they obey the same laws of physics that govern everything else in our universe. After all this effort, we're quietly hoping they don't.

[SykomantiS]

This might be a really stupid question. But does a photon come from the realm of 'matter,' having an antimatter opposite, or what?
Cause if it is, bombarbing a bunch of antimatter with photons wouldn't really tell us anything, 'cept that it's an easy way to genereate lots of energy

Or am I being a noob?

[KALSTER]

Photons are their own anti-particle as well. In other words, in a matter and anti-matter universe, photons would be the same. The same would go for gravitons, if we ever discovered them.

[jee]

edit: oops note to self to read the news page first before posting.....

Steve Perlman, founder of the cloud-based gaming-on-demand service OnLive, claims to have discovered a new method of wireless communications that would not only drastically outpace what we have now, but would actually disprove many of the accepted rules of how wireless communications in general work.

First things first: This theory popped up in a presentation Perlman gave at the NExTWORK conference, and only received a small mention. There was no demonstration, no real proof given, and since his proposal flies directly in the face of the Shannon-Hartley Theorem, a guideline for wireless technologies, we're not inclined to really believe his claims. But! Sometimes somebody says something so crazy with such confidence that you have to sit up and take notice, and this particular idea would have such massive effects on communications technology that we're bound to at least encourage discussion about it. That's not to be taken as an endorsement, though.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, here's what Perlman (all to briefly) proposed. DIDO is an entirely new radio system, with different towers and different chips that work in an (as yet undisclosed) entirely different way. He claims that DIDO would also be able to broadcast through solid objects that usually block cell signals, that it needs no bigger tower than a small base station "the size of a router," and that the base stations can broadcast a signal much farther than usual towers--up to 30 miles, at which point they'd be dealing with the curvature of the Earth, which Perlman says does not deter them.

Perlman said that his DIDO (distributed-input-distributed-output) system overcomes the traditional broadband system in which each user gets a small piece of the overall bandwidth of the tower to which they're connected. Instead, with DIDO, each user would be able to access the full speed of the tower.

Wired interviewed an electrical engineering professor who noted that elements of the Shannon-Hartley Theorem have in fact been disproved, or at least altered, with multiple-input-multiple-output systems, currently being used in the latest 4G tech. But nobody has yet seen Perlman's DIDO system in action, though he has patented it and insists he is "as confident" about DIDO as anything else he's ever designed. Us? We're skeptical--but that doesn't mean we wouldn't welcome a revolutionary wireless system.

source

[KALSTER]

Sounds very fishy indeed. But it would be fantastic if this pans out!

[StarPhoenix]

I see that Google has based their doodle for today on Fermat's Last Theorem.

So you think you're clever, do you?

[rustypup]

fermat trolled mathematicians over multiple centuries... master troll?

[StarPhoenix]

fermat trolled mathematicians over multiple centuries... master troll?

Possibly....seems mighty silly that he did not simply write his proof on another sheet of paper/the walls/whatever else happened to be handy. That's genius for you.


Prepare to be rendered redundant

[StarPhoenix]

Three cheers for Grumpy

Get certified now, Curmudgeon.

[KALSTER]

Interesting, but:

While the two studies don't look at the same aspects of monkey and human behavior for the same reasons

Monkey? I hate it when people do that.