December 21, 2004

• Fuck science, I say. Wastes time [insert apropos joke here].
• it's nice to see that martian hobos clean windshields too!
• I bet Nostril tied his pants to the Pioneer antennas.
• that's really really weird.
• The Mars rover oddity seems to have a very plausible explanation: wind/dust devils. In a thin atmosphere, the winds can get pretty fast (though the force they muster is much less than in our thicker atmosphere). And it looks like Oppotunity's been on the lucky receiving end of a few gusts that took more dust away than they deposited. Now that Pioneer thing... well, that's some freaky shit. In my pseudo-professional opinion.
• I really like how we know virtually nothing about gravity. It's kinda romantic.
• What's odd is a science report describing the rover as having gone through a "space-borne car wash" and referring to Mars as the "Red Planet". Exactly when is dumbing down every bit of information going to end?
• Something funny? You mean like Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg?
• Cripes. My Volvo has had more alien car washes.
• The pioneer article is very interesting. Cheers.
• The Pioneer probes are just running into the big movie screen out there. The one the rest of space is just projected on to. What I want to know is, is it back projection or front projection?
• >I really like how we know virtually nothing about gravity. Actually, we know a great deal about gravity. The neat part of science is that its self-correcting. If Anderson does find something new then it will make our understanding of gravity even stronger. Just like Einstein overwrote some of Newton and Quantum Physics overwrote some of Einstein. This is the process.
• The Mars rover oddity seems to have a very plausible explanation: wind/dust devils. In a thin atmosphere, the winds can get pretty fast (though the force they muster is much less than in our thicker atmosphere). Cause you know, wind in our thicker atmosphere has always been real awesome at cleaning my windshield. In a thin atmosphere, with less physical substance to it, wind is even more awesome at cleaning. On Mars, you don't even need toilet paper; the wind will clean it for you. This is TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE!
• New readings indicate the force of sarcasm just increased in this thread. I blame "dark splatter" - and martian toilet paper.
• Actually, Mr. K., it is pretty plausible. Also remember that the surface of the rover is flat (thereby more likely to gather dust that's in the air even when it's not very windy). Having lived briefly in some of the SoCal "canyon" areas which are prone to high winds, you'd be surprised how much dust a good windstorm would kick off of the nooks and crannies of your car, especially the horizontally flat areas, which the rovers' solar panels are. And also remember that the panels don't need to be perfectly cleaned to improve their power performance: consider that some segments may have been gathering a fairly thick amount of dust, so much that the light getting through is almost entirely cut off. A bit of strong wind would certainly kick off the topmost layers, thereby letting a lot more light through to the panels. I don't see how that seems such a stretch.
• when they detect martians trying to sell roses to the rover we'll know for sure.
• One interesting thing I read about the Pioneer probes was that if gravity did drop off slightly from the Newtonian model over long distances, we wouldn't need "dark matter" or "dark energy" models. Evidently, you can nicely explain both how galaxy structures form, and how the universe seems to be expanding just with gravity that drops off slowly. I guess we'll see...
• Is it just me that is sceptical about this whole "dark matter" thing? That 90% of the universe is made of undetectable, invisible matter? Isn't this the kind of thing that people tend to be amazed that people believed 200 years ago?
• Dark matter was 'invented' to make up for a flaw (one of many) in the current Big Bang theory. It's just a kludge.
• Dark matter is actually hypothesized not because of problems with the Big Bang theory, but because of more current, observable problems. Firstly, the galaxies we can observe, if you include all of the "light matter," that is, stars and their observable zodiacal dust, etc., collectively don't have NEARLY enough gravitational attraction to hold the galaxy together. So what, exactly, the "dark matter" really is, that's mostly conjectural. However, the fact that neutrinos have nonzero mass helped a little bit. Not much, but a little bit. Basically, this observed dearth of observable mass to account for the gravitational behavior of the galaxy as a whole (and the galaxies we can observe interacting, within and between) means one of two things: 1. There's something about gravity which we don't understand that is holding the galaxies together. This is very unlikely, as evidence indicates that there is actually something which is pushing galaxies away from each other at an INCREASING rate, so that means gravity doesn't have a mysterious potential growth with distance, which this hypothesis would require. 2. There is a LOT of matter which is adding to the collective gravity of what we can observe, but we haven't been able to observe that matter yet (Dark Matter). 3. There's a whole new force which is not gravity, but behaves a lot like it, and seems to only act on galactic scales. The consensus among astronomers is that 2 is the most likely idea, and one which I agree is the most likely. Also Blaise, the idea of a lot of particles that are strange critters that are unobservable, or barely observable under the right conditions, pervaded all of the 20th century. A single neutrino may pass through several light-years of lead without interacting. Billions pass through you each day, and pay no attention to the particles in your cells. Neutrinos are very picky critters that barely interact with anything (and require very particular experiments to detect them at all), and it was only in the last 10 years that they were found to have any mass at all. The frontiers of physics, astronomy and cosmology are way, way out there. In both a good and a bad way, there is a LOT that we know we don't know. So there's a lot of room for observation and research.