General science thread

The *h to o* thing has gotten weird. water known to be on the Moon and on Mercury even. Mercury? None of this was expected a brief period of time ago.

Now that I think about it, geoscience research at UNLV is probably a natural fit for the area. I mean aside from gambling studies, entertainment and hospitality degrees or possibly the study of degenerate activity.

watched a "how the universe works" episode about the space-time fabric. A couple of things bugged me.

'they' [all these science shows] always show the Sun sitting in a two dimensional mat, distorting the fabric like a bowling ball on a trampoline. It is a 3-dimensional representation of a 2-dimensional distortion of fabric, where reality is a 4-dimensional distortion of a 3-dimensional fabric. Now, I know that is beyond what can really be represented, but still I think they should at least say that the representation is what it is and that it is misleading a bit. It has to bother more than just me.

Meh. Could have let that go, but ...

then they discussed dark energy and how it had been expected that the universe's expansion would be slowing down only to find out recently that it is accelerating. That part was fine. But then they went on to theorize that the universe may eventually collapse, form a 'singularity', make a big bang again, and this might go on infinitely. Two problems I had with that:

*this all gushed out of them like it was a new idea. Every 8 year old who ever looked into the Big Bang theory has thought of this. There are no exceptions. If that means 3 billion eight year olds pondered it, then 3 billion have thought of this. Come on!

*Not a word about how the dark energy phenomenon and the acceleration universe is compatible *now* with this theory.

Well, I think one difference between these theoretical scientist an 8 year olds is they try to back up their theories with observations and measurements, rather than just being a complete thought experiment.

As for what we observe, we basically observe a still snapshot of the universe. We can see relative velocities from red and blue shifts. They can infer acceleration from that by comparing the red and blue shifts of things that are closer and things that are farther away. They might even be able to tell if the rate of acceleration is changed through time, looking at things farther away.

For reconciling the theories, I picture us as a rifle bullet. We are being accelerated down the barrel of a rifle. The gas behind us is expanding, the distance traveled from our origin is increasing, and we are accelerating as we go, but the rate of acceleration is decreasing. The rifle barrel is very very long. Over a short section of the barrel, the rate of change of acceleration may be undetectable.

The acceleration imparted by the initial explosion should be getting smaller and smaller, and the effective gravitational acceleration of everything that spewed out in all directions should be back toward our origin.

Here is the wrinkle, though.

If the 'stuff' has achieved escape velocity from the net gravitational force of the mutual stuff attraction, there won't be a big crunch, just expansion forever.

The other thing scientists can't know, since we are basically looking at a snapshot of the universe, is if some other completely unknown as of now force starts to act on the universe. Is the thing that caused the big bang mono-directional, spewing us all outward and only acting in that direction, or will the acceleration reverse and draw us back, not through gravity, but by some other dark and unknown attractive force, to crunch us?

P.S. That's my 8 year old analysis.

well, you know, they say the center of the universe cannot be determined. Everything is just moving away from everything, not from some central spot that can be determined. I've never heard why that doesn't argue against the Big Bang.

As for acceleration, that is assumed to have a cause; whatever the Big Bang achieved would be over, nothing would be still accelerating. That is the big "dark" thing about Dark Energy - it is flabbergasting. What mechanism would that be, that would be causing acceleration?

Trust me, there are 8 year olds who understand this better than me. I just glean what I can and can be wrong. But that is why we have this thread, so we can talk about it.

Quote: odiousgambit

well, you know, they say the center of the universe cannot be determined. .

That's because it's infinite. So the
center is wherever you happen to
be. Some Indian tribes knew this.
They would designate a tree as
the center of the universe and
worship around it. They were correct,
it was the center.

I was thinking of Hawking when I watched this. We may already know the unification of theories, if we could just figure out where we've gone wrong.

Quote: rxwine

I was thinking of Hawking when I watched this. We may already know the unification of theories, if we could just figure out where we've gone wrong.

His fat ass GF is snorting and grunting
like a rutting hog. What a pleasant video.
She thinks it's hilarious that her BF is
a moron.

Quote:

Priming is a technique whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.[1][2] For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD. Priming can be perceptual, semantic, or conceptual. Research, however, has yet to firmly establish the duration (a day? a week?) of priming effects.[3][4]
Priming works best when the two stimuli are in the same modality. For example, visual priming works best with visual cues and verbal priming works best with verbal cues. But priming also occurs between modalities,[5] or between semantically related words such as "doctor" and "nurse".[6][7]

Quote: rxwine

Priming is a technique

It works best on people who
are clueless idiots to begin
with.