March 17, 2005

• [this is inexplicable]
• Good post. That was an enjoyable morning read.
• A dark banana which contracts the basic premises of current physics to you.
• Nostril was gonna post this, so he tells me. Now he's slunk away, having had his anti-science paranormalism stolen from him.
• A fitting post on the centennial anniversary of Einstein's finishing his first paper of his "miracle year" (and the only one that he himself called "revolutionary"), on the nature of light - that it was both a particle and wave. Recommended listening: Albert Einstein's Year of Miracles: Light Theory. One quote from that story that I liked (as pertains to this discussion) was that our confusion about things not making sense "reveals more about the nature of intuition than that of the universe." It is often our perception of what makes sense that needs to change.
• And what's the deal with the holes in your socks? I mean, WHAT'S MAKING THEM? Am I right? Maybe they're like...I dunno...sock black holes or something, that start in the toe and eventually spirit away the entire stocking. That would explain all the orphaned socks out there. Huh? Do you know what I mean? And don't get me started on airplane peanut packs...
• Good stuff! The placebo effect variation was mind blowing..... or body...or mind..
• "If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?" -Steven Wright
• TP, I have a friend I believe to be the ultimate source of holes in socks. Or possibly the other way around, and he's the ultimate destination for holes in socks... Depending on what sort of phenomenon they are.
• Ach, it canna be! Or...can it? [mystery music] We exist in an ever-expanding and accelerating Hole in the Universal Sock! It is not a black hole, it is an Empty Hole, no-coloured, not-textured, no-fibred etc. O helphelphelp!
• mecurious, if you turn the headlights on, as far as you're concerned, they look perfectly normal and go out ahead of you at the speed of light. Of course, to an outside observer, that light's wavelength becomes nearly infinitely short and never leaves your headlights. Go, relativity! Also, that placebo effect is astonishing. I'd never seen the research showing that a morphine-blocking agent would even make a saline placebo stop working.... ! Wow!
• The wavelength only shortens so much if you're moving toward them. But then, as far as the outside observer's concerned, you don't even move: it looks like time has stopped where you are. But to you, it's just normal. Besides, you're not moving at the speed of light with respect to yourself...
• Great link!
• So if you're a non-juiced pitcher with a 90mph fastball, and you're travelling down the highway in the back of a flatbed pickup at exactly 90mph, taking as given that you are able to balance well enough to through your optimum pitch and discounting wind resistance (this is theorhetical), and you threw your fastball, how fast would the ball be going? 90mph? Faster than that? Slower? Because that's the same question, only in terms I think I might be able to understand.
• Everything has it's own unseen energy. Which affects everywhere it's been. It's like riding in a Winnebago with your uncle Frank. After he's eaten two bowls of roadhouse chili.
• "Maybe a thousand monkeys will type me a letter explaining suns and stars and quarks and quasars, how the universe is held together When the letter arrived it was just one line It said the universe is big and old and dark and cold" -Snowpony, "Monkeys versus the Universe"
• Maybe they're like...I dunno...sock black holes or something do black socks get sock black holes and white socks get sock white holes?
• TenaciousPettle, since you're going 90 and you throw 90, the ball is going 180. Technically, to an observer not on the truck, your watch slows down. There's no discernible change in the speed of the ball, mainly because the ball is bigger than a quantum of light and doesn't display any wave-like properties. But because these relativistic effects go like the square of your speed divided by the speed of light, unless you get fairly close to light-speed, it's impossible to tell the difference. Think the 20th decimal place, here, as far as the variation in the apparent speed of the baseball to you and an observer not on the truck. Back to the light question, one strange thing about relativity is that the speed of light is the same for all (non inertial) reference frames. Basically, no matter what you're doing (so long as you're not undergoing acceleration, or rotating or the like), the speed of light is the same for you and everyone else. If you're going the speed of light and turn a light on, the light goes away from you at the speed of light. But to someone watching you go by, the speed of light is still the speed of light, and you and the light beam are going the same speed. That's where it gets weird.
• The homeopathy results are encouraging. When I was young my mother took me to a homeopathic doctor who used little vials of water to test for food sensitivity. He put a vial in my hand and then pushed down on my leg as I pushed back. At this point most of your "bullshit" meters are probably going off, but I swear that some of the vials made me unable to push back against him. My leg felt weak. "Ah," he said, "you have a sensitivity to dairy. Stop drinking milk," and I did and my health problems went away. Since that day I've been trying to figure out the procedure to make homeopathic solutions to play with, but it's very hard to find how it's done. Now if I could just get access to that journal article, I'd have my answer! Of course, I can't afford it. :-(
• "If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights and notice Paris Hilton in your path, do you throw a baseball at her?"
• No. You set phasers to "kill."
• 14. Space Hitler No one is quite sure why, but it appears that one in seven of all solar systems have at least one Nazi Planet.
• I think I remember that discovery, dng. Wasn't that the topic of the book and movie Contact?
• six.oh.six, I had a similar experience. the doctor called the muscle resistance thing "kinesiology", described here. ridiculous that such a thing could work, but it got rid of a chronic sinus infection that antibiotics couldn't touch. I once worked with a pharmacist who made homeopathic medicines, it was rather complicated (anfd required very neat looking glassware). You should be able to get a kit that would work.
• I hate space nazis.
• Thanks for this kTK. My mind is reeling. )
• Nostril was gonna post this, so he tells me. Now he's slunk away, having had his anti-science paranormalism stolen from him. Bah. I wanted to post this too, for maybe the opposite reasons to Nostril's. But I found it too late. Still, very good read. It makes me feel all giddy with excitement, and makes me wanna find out the answers for all those things. Yet I'm still unable to find out how my mentos disappear from my locked-up cabinet at the office.
• Chimaera: What happens if you're with a bunch of teenage joyriders and they don't turn on their headlights and drive too fast, and then the Galactic police come after you with their revolving lights on? Can you see them coming or do they bust you for, like, a gizillion years on the planet Frold? I had a vet come out and have me hold a little vial of something while I touched my horse's hip. She told me he had a pulled muscle. Turned out he had a torque fracture of the canon bone. Why I ever called the dumb broad I'll never know. She had been a good vet until she got into the voodoo medicine. Now she's been discredited locally and has left for greener pastures. As far as I'm concerned, it's tommyrot. The results need to be duplicated and verified multiple times before I believe in homeopathy. Those of you who feel it works, good-O. Just keep your vile vials away from me.
• Chimaera: that was a nice explanation of relative speeds! I used to know that stuff, thanks for the quick refresh. Sometimes i think that if more people knew about relativity and quantum physics, there would be less strife in the world because people would be going around saying: "so because light goes at the same speed, time slows down.... nooooo fuckin' shit?!!!" instead of fighting.
• if you turn the headlights on, as far as you're concerned, they look perfectly normal and go out ahead of you at the speed of light. Of course, to an outside observer, that light's wavelength becomes nearly infinitely short and never leaves your headlights. No. To an outside observer, the light appears to be moving at the speed of light. Light always appears to move at the speed of light, no matter the reference speed. This is the conundrum about relativity that bothers everyone when first exposed to it.

• What happens if you're with a bunch of teenage joyriders and they don't turn on their headlights and drive too fast, and then the Galactic police come after you with their revolving lights on?

  Any self-respecting Galactic Police force would equip their cars with tachyon light bars.
• 2 The horizon problem That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old. Err, I may have got this mixed up and will gladly take any correction. If something explodes and the matter travels unimpeded in each and every direction, say 14 billion years at light speed one way and then 14 billion years at light speed the opposite way then the two edges are going to be 28 billion light years apart. So where's the 'not-makey-senseness'
• That's not a biker bar is it? I thought the Tachyon Light Bar was downtown on Milky Way? But maybe I'm thinking of the Quark on 13th and Infinity.
• NR- I'll take a shot. The microwave background is, as described, a remnant of the big bang. But it doesn't date from the very start of the BB, it's from around 300,000 years later, when the expanding universe finally got cool enough to allow electrons and protons to combine to form hydrogen - known as the last scattering. So, if you were a (hypothetical) external-to-the-universe observer you would see a space-time blob, roughly 600,000 light years in diameter. We know, from observations here on earth, that light which set off from the furthest reaches of the universe looks the same in all directions. To our external observer, light leaving from part of the left hand side of the sphere is just as intense as that from the right. In spite of there now being a 600,000 light year gulf separating them. Inside, in our universe, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So there is no obvious reason WHY the universe should look the same in all directions. Well, there is one. If the universe was isotropic (ie, the same in all directions, also known as smooth) then that would give you the observed microwave background result. But we know that it isn't - we live in a galactic sized poke in the eye to that idea. In a universe sufficiently smooth to account for the microwave observations it isn't easy to get galaxies to form. Why? Because galaxies represent fluctuations in the local density - and compared with the huge nothingness in between them, pretty damn big ones at that. That's why cosmologists are tying themselves in knots trying to get it to all work out. Personally, I think that they'd be much happier if galaxies weren't around, making trouble like that.
• Mr. K, that's actually what I said, though I don't think I made it clear. Light is moving at c. If you're moving at c and turn on your headlights, to an outside observer, since you AND the light are going at c and since your observed length becomes zero and your observed elapsed time at any duration for the observer (up to infinity, really) is zero, to an outside observer, the light never leaves your headlights. That's a combination of both the Lorentz contraction of length and time, so the light gets emitted by the filament in the headlight, but to an outside observer, the light departs the filament an infinitesmally small (close enough to call zero) distance because v = c, and v^2 / c^2 =0. Still, this isn't showing how if v = c, you can get there unless you're massless, because at v = c, your mass goes up with the reciprocal of zero, or infinity at the limit as v -> c. It makes more sense mathematically than when I'm trying to verbally explain it, but to an outside observer the light really would never leave a headlight if the headlight is moving at c.
• BlueHorse: yeah, using homeopathy to determine whether or not your horse has a broken leg is pretty dumb. The problem is that homeopathy is not practiced scientifically. The study, though, is pretty solid. The effect was demonstrated at three different laboratories by three different teams, or something. It's been in peer-review for a year (judging by the publication dates) so they've done the work to discredit it, and they can't. The effect needs to be studied, is what the paper argues I think.
• Polychrome- Wouldn't the huge amount of random shit in the universe all have gravitational fields that would warp the directions of light? If the light is warped by gravitational fields, wouldn't that change the apparent amplitude of the waves? I mean, I'm just thinking of the way that light bends around a sphere into a focal point; could that have something to do with the apparent disparity in universal age:light?
• js- I'm not quite sure what you mean. re- effect of gravity. There's a lot more space which is just empty (as near as we can tell) than there is where stuff is. So there just aren't enough opportunities for interactions to scatter the light and mix things up (which is, I think, what you are asking).
• Interesting that 10 out of the 13 Things are related to astronomy or cosmology. It's time to get off this ball and find some answers further from home. The fact that we're still faced with unanswered questions is exciting. There's nothing better than a good mystery -- or 13 good mysteries.
• Poly- Yeah, I was thinking of lensing effects that would make EM waves seem to have higher concentrations than they would otherwise. I suppose my theory would only work if the universe was truly infinite and we were in the rough center, and it's not and we're not...
• six.oh.six - almost everybody I know is dairy intolerant. If a homeopath guessed that, I wouldn't necessarily be impressed. Also, there is a huge amount of reporting bias, since people who don't like/have positive effects in concert with/trust homeopathic treatments don't stick around for further ineffective treatments. So homeopaths only see people who feel better when treated - giving them the impression that the treatment causes the positive results instead of coinciding with them. That's why I'm glad that people are doing real double-blind experiments.