http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=28108
OH MAN
I will now set wonderful ground rules for this excellent and intelligent science discussion, I am suprised no one else has said anything, but this post is so full of just stuff that I didn't see anyone post some common sense.
One and only rule.
1. THE INTERNET IS OUT OF BOUNDS. If you use the internet to find these wonderful equations and act like you have PHD's in Physics and Quantum Physics you will be sent directly to jail, you will not pass GO! and you will not collect $200. If you can't follow this then at the very least give us links to whatever site you got your info from, at least then we can see how reputable your source was.
If by the rare and very unlikely chance that you do have a Master's/PHD in Physics and Quantum Physics then by all means go right ahead and share your knowledge because you all have worked for and achieved this level of intelligence that most of us can't even begin to fathom.
Besides, all of us gamers know that the most likely scenario of disaster involving the Hadron Collider will be the opening of an interdemensional gateway that will release Head Humpers into the world and bring about the reign of the combine.
http://www.destructoid.com/crowbar-finally-shipped-to-prevent-humanity-s-destruction-103120.phtml
@Jetheren
Read dknippe2's reply on page 4, 4th post on the page.
YES FINALLY SOMEONE WHO HAS A DEGREE! FINALLY! (well at least claims, but I will be giving the benefit of the doubt as most people don't every say that they have a degree)
Again, I only skimmed this post as the posts before I finally got fed up were just people spouting off wonderful facts that the glorious internet has provided us.
Thank you dknippe2 for telling us you have a degree, that at least gives you credibility, but sadly this is the internet and no one can ever be sure who is what. But since most people just spout of ideas/equations and you actually told us your degree I actually believe you know what you are talking about.
I really didn't mean to come off as rude in my first post on this page, it is just that obviously most people on this forum have really no idea what they are talking about when it comes to astrophysics and so they go to Wikipedia and other sites to find information and then they post. It is one of my pet peves, I apologize again, but my rule still stands. INTERNET BAD!
Haha, no problem. I understand what you mean about the somewhat dubious nature of most information coming straight from the internet. Interestingly though, Wikipedia's pure science articles have actually been shown to be more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica. A lot of their explanations on math topics are easier to understand than the versions in my textbooks!
Oh, and at donnor11...I don't mean to shoot you down or anything, but there's an overwhelming amount of evidence for the big bang. The term big bang was also an intentional misnomer from a certain physicist who didn't like the idea, and prefered a steady state (static and unchanging) view of the universe. So the big bang was not an explosion in any sense of the word, but a literal outward expansion of space itself.
Proof for anything usually consists of repeatability of experiment and having multiple, independent lines of evidence all pointing to the same thing. This is the case with the big bang model. The first observation was that all galaxies are moving away from each other at ever-increasing speeds. Naturally, if they are flying apart now, at some time in the past they were flying apart but closer together, and so on. Another piece, and by far the most significant which has provided more data than we can process, is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. This is the afterglow of the big bang. It gets a little technical but the main point is that at this point in time, the observable universe is too big for light to go from one end to the other in the time necessary to do so (we know the age of the universe from the ages of stars and their compositions, among other things). So, this light could not "communicate" its state to another photon at the other end of the universe. The crazy thing is, the CMB is a picture of a very short after the big bang, about 300,000 years. This picture shows that the ENTIRE universe communicated with itself COMPLETELY across ALL distances. This means that the picture shows a near perfect thermal equilibrium, this could not happen in the current state of the universe today. As such, those regions of space that are no longer in causal contact, MUST have been at some point in the past. That essentially proves that the big bang had to have happened, the details aren't completely clear, but we can accurately model the evolution of the universe down to about 10^-34 seconds after the event occured. After that things get fuzzy because of quantum mechanics and gravity not being friends yet.
There's a ton more to it, and it's really interesting stuff, but that's the main idea. I hope I have at least partially restored your confidence in the minds trying to figure all this out!
Guess the black hole didn't form, that or they never began the experiment.
The experiment has been delayed. There is a crack in the LHC and currently undergoing repair work. Experiement is expected to begin feb/march 2009
oh, thanks.
Yeah, evidently a technitian soldered a wire on to the wrong connection, wich make on of the giant magnets crack. To repair it, they have to warm up the entire collider (it's below/around -200F), replace the magnet, and cool it back down again... In short, it could take a while to fix, not to mention the $$ ivolved...
My understanding of physics is probably average. And though coming from an industrialized nation tends to make us pessimistic realists who discount extreme points of view, i wonder how valid "science" can be? Not technology, but science. Remember when everyone thought the world was flat? It was an accepted view. But science and everyone was wrong. Reality was weirder than our imaginations. While i am hopeful the supercollider wont kill us all and the planet. Maybe reality is not quite as stable or predictable as i think it is.
I think i will take Annatar's suggestion and get a few beers, just in case.
-Teal
p.s Does this mean i wont get my paycheck next week, for working last week? That is really a pain.
lol, that would bite.
There is a trait that many people exibiht that is quite an extrodinary trait to possess. They live there day like its there last. They have no regrets about the choices they have made, and they always are smiling, because they are genuinally happy. World War III could be tommorow, but these people don't care all to much. I want to be like those people
Like Winnie the Pooh. Or Hitler.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by living a day as if it were your last. Does it mean not incurring any debts? Does it mean living wholesomely each day? Is this not living without regrets?
Or does it mean partying, getting drunk each night, living absolutely wildly each day, driven to explore anything at all? Hedonism? Where the goal of life is not to have a goal of life?
The question is, what if the end of the world, or World War III, or whatever, never came? What would you be left with on your deathbed? The knowledge that you were a hedonist? Or the knowledge that you lived otherwise, that you lived well?
Does living without regrets mean being constantly prepared for death? That is, where death could come at any time and you'd be perfectly prepared for it? This is an effect of Christian belief (and it may be for other religions - I confess I don't know). Is it an effect of hedonism?
A very interesting question, no?
Sibilantae, that's a fairly good point (still not conceding that there are in fact people that "live every day like it's the last").
I mean, if we consider what I'd do if this'd be the last day of Earth, or my last day on Earth, in the context of which you propose to place this trail of thought. If it'd be my last day, I'd strap bombs to my chest and go take care of some domestic politics.
If it'd be the end of the earth, or civilization as we know it, I'd take my féz, a set of golf clubs, my cigars, my smoking robe (1), go to the tallest building in town, and proceed to play golf, listen to trallpunk at obscene levels of volume, and get drunk off my arse on the contents of my liquer cabinet. When the meteors/bombs/zombies comes, I want a front seat view.
Doing that every day would kinda detract from the inherent value of the vision.
"Living every day as if it was your last" is an oversimplification of the attitude in question. A more accurate description would be "Remember that you could die on any given day, so don't screw today up. However, odds are you won't die any time soon, so don't screw tomorrow up either." The basic idea is not to hold grudges, take as much joy from each day as you can without destroying any hope you have of taking joy from remaining thousands of days you probably have left, don't bother yourself with trivialities, stuff like that. You have to remember that anything short enough to use as a slogan is probably misleading. And yes, there are people like that. Buddhists are a good example.
Buddhists doesn't live for today, or tomorrow. They accept existance as a part of the eternal & cyclical, the very opposite of the modern-day atemporal "Living for today" & "Carpe Diem".
Luckmann, great way to put it! I am satisfied
I am only ashamed that I assume hedonism in statements such as "living every day as one's last". My apologies
Good point! This is actually where a lot of people have a misconception of "science", or more properly the scientific method. The method is not an end product- it is a process for obtaining an end product. It's not very complex either:
1) Observe something.
2) Make a hypothesis about what the something is or why that something happened.
3) Make a test to determine if your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.
4a) Test successful. You have a good theory upon which to base the observation. Congragulations! Hopefully you can now do step 1 better than ever!4b) Test unsuccessful. Your hypothesis was incorrect. Oh well, go back to step 2.
And that's all there is to science. The troublesome aspect is that far too many people wind up treating a hypothesis like a theory, and way, way too many treat theories as facts. One of the trickiest aspects to master is to always have a healthy dose of doubt in all things. Take those people who considered the Earth to be flat- they were wrong, but a refusal to even suspect that they might be wrong led to all sorts of regrettable actions, to put it mildly. It's thus very important to realize that any theory could potentially be incorrect, which is why occasionally retesting them is quite good.
Take the old science of alchemy- laughable by today's standards, it neverless managed to set a few theories. These theories were gradually built upon, retested, discarded, and/or refined by good scientests to produce modern chemistry. Even a mostly incorrect set of initial theories at least gave them a place to start, and the method of science led to better answers.
No, no. It's ever decreasing or it's constant, the two current end of universe scenarios stemming from the big bang are that it will end in fire or ice depending on the total mass of the universe. There is a certain calculated critical value, based on the observed rate of expansion, a point at which, if the universve is massive enough, the gravitational pull will force it into the big crunch, and the process repeats; or if the universes mass is below this point, the gravitational pull will not be great enough (because gravitational pull is an inverse function of distance, growing less the farther apart things are) and the rate acceleration outward will reach a balance with the gravitational acceleration inward, so the expansion will never cease. Laws of thermodynamics come into play, as the universe expands it cools, eventually the temperature will approach 0 K. I believe I read about this first in Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, and I know it's written about in Stephen Hawking's updated version of A Brief History of Time as well as A Briefer History of Time.
Let me just jump in here and say that, actually, it is increasing. Something astrophysicists dub "dark energy" is expanding the space between galaxies (all matter, actually) and causing them to move accelerate faster and faster away.
It's pretty interesting stuff., worth looking up on Wikipedia at least.
Altho not accurate,
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/469806
It's still funny.
"Dark Energy" is just a concept physicist throw in who are unable to accept that when the math fail to meet their expectations, then they are wrong, or if the math fails to meet the measured data, our math isn't advanced enough. Mathematics based on relativity indicated there should be a varience in Mercury's orbit, a varience that wasn't noted until after it was predicted, not because no-one had been making careful measurements of Mercury, but because no-one wanted to accept that Newtonian gravity might not be accurate. The origin of this "Dark Energy" according to Wikipedia is Einstein's "cosmological constant" which he later refered to as his greates mistake. It was a constant that he added to his calculations to alter the results because he didn't like the fact that they indicated a variable expanding universe, he preferred the static state theroy.
tldr: Apparently expansion is accelerating, according to this next guy. It was published in 2001.
In 1998, two teams reported results on distant supernovae - the Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter and the High-Z Supernova Team led by Brian Schmidt, of which I [the author] am a member. Both had adequate samples of supernovae in galaxies to see the expected twenty-five percent increase in brightness. Both groups got a big surprise. The distant supernovae were not brighter than you'd expect in a constant-expansion universe. They were fainter, and by a significant amount. If this dimming is due to the way the universe is expanding, it implies the opposite of deceleration, that is, acceleration. If the expansion is accelerating, the supernova observations are the first experimental indication of a very important physical effect.
Of course... perhaps the more distant supernovae are dimmer... because they are (on average) from younger stars, or [other possible reasons]. Both teams looked into these possible problems and concluded that they probably do not dominate the measurements.
...The simplest prediction is that the expansion of the universe we see today will continue, and continue to accelerate forever.
Reference:
Black et al, 2001, Cosmic Horizons, The New Press, New York.
[Article by Robert P. Kirshner]
Apologies about the length Post edited to correct typographical errors.
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