Category: Uncategorized

Breaking Up? Not So Hard

On By rolcottIn Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<transcript of smartphone dictation by Sy Moire, hard‑boiled physicist>
Day 173 of self‑isolation….
Perfect weather for a brisk solitary walk, taking the park route….
There’s the geese. No sign of Mr Feder, just as well….

Still thinking about Ms Baird and her plan for generating electric power from a black hole named Lonesome….
Can just hear Vinnie if I ever told him about this which I can’t….
“Hey, Sy, nothin’ gets out of a black hole except gravity, but she’s using Lonesome‘s magnetic field to generate electricity which is electromagnetic. How’s that happen?”
Good question….

Hhmph, that’s one angry squirrel….
Ah, a couple of crows pecking the ground under its tree. Maybe they’re too close to its acorn stash….

We know a black hole’s only measurable properties are its mass, charge and spin….
And maybe its temperature, thanks to Stephen Hawking….
Its charge is static — hah! cute pun — wouldn’t support continuous electrical generation….
The Event Horizon hides everything inside — we can’t tell if charge moves around in there or even if it’s matter or anti‑matter or something else….
The no‑hair theorem says there’s no landmarks or anything sticking out of the Event Horizon so how do we know the thing’s even spinning?

Ah, we know a black hole’s external structures — the jets, the Ergosphere belt and the accretion disk — rotate because we see red- and blue-shifted radiation from them….
The Ergosphere rotates in lockstep with Lonesome‘s contents because of gravitational frame-dragging….
Probably the disk and the jets do, too, but that’s only a strong maybe….
But why should the Ergosphere’s rotation generate a magnetic field?

How about Newt Barnes’ double‑wheel idea — a belt of charged light‑weight particles inside a belt of opposite‑charged heavy particles all embedded in the Ergosphere and orbiting at the black hole’s spin rate….
Could such a thing exist? Can simple particle collisions really split the charges apart like that?….

OK, fun problem for strolling mental arithmetic. Astronomical “dust” particles are about the size of smoke particles and those are about a micrometer across which is 10‑6 meter so the volume’s about (10‑6)3=10‑18 cubic meter and the density’s sorta close to water at 1 gram per cubic centimeter or a thousand kilograms per cubic meter so the particle mass is about 10‑18×103=10‑15 kilogram. If a that‑size particle collided with something and released just enough kinetic energy to knock off an electron, how fast was it going?

Ionization energy for a hydrogen atom is 13 electronvolts, so let’s go for a collision energy of at least 10 eV. Good old kinetic energy formula is E=½mv² but that’s got to be in joules if we want a speed in meters per second so 10 eV is, lemme think, about 2×10‑18 joules/particle. So v² is 2×2×10‑18/10‑15 which is 4×10‑3 or 40×10‑4, square root of 40 is about 6, so v is about 6×10‑2 or 0.06 meters per second. How’s that compare with typical speeds near Lonesome?

Ms Baird said that Lonesome‘s mass is 1.5 Solar masses and it’s isolated from external gravity and electromagnetic fields. So anything near it is in orbit and we can use the circular orbit formula v²=GM/r….
Dang, don’t remember values for G or M. Have to cheat and look up the Sun’s GM product on Old Reliable….
Ah-hah, 1.3×1020 meters³/second so Lonesome‘s is also near 1020….
A solar‑mass black hole’s half‑diameter is about 3 kilometers so Lonesome‘s would be about 5×103 meters. Say we’re orbiting at twice that so r‘s around 104 meters. Put it together we get v2=1020/104=1016 so v=108 meters/sec….
Everything’s going a billion times faster than 10 eV….
So yeah, no problem getting charged dust particles out there next to Lonesome….

Just look at the color in that tree…
Weird when you think about it. The really good color is summertime chlorophyll green when the trees are soaking up sunlight and turning CO2 into oxygen for us but people get excited about dying leaves that are red or yellow…

Well, now. Lonesome‘s Event Horizon is the no-going-back point on the way to its central singularity which we call infinity because its physics are beyond anything we know. I’ve just closed out another decade of my life, another Event Horizon on my own one‑way path to a singularity…

Hey! Mr Feder! Come ask me a question to get me out of this mood.

Author’s note — Yes, ambient radiation in Lonesome‘s immediate vicinity probably would account for far more ionization than physical impact, but this was a nice exercise in estimation and playing with exponents and applied physical principles.

~~ Rich Olcott

Big Bang│Gnab Gib?

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Anne’s an experienced adventurer, but almost exploding the Earth when she tried transporting herself into an anti‑Universe was a jolt. It takes her a while to calm down. Fortunately, I’m there to help. <long soothing pause> “Sy, I promise that’s one direction I’ll never ‘push’ to go again.”

“No reason to go there and big reasons not to. <long friendly pause> Hmm. You’ve told me that when you use your superpower to go somewhere, you can feel whether there’d be a wall or something in the way. That’s how you know to get to a safer location before you ‘push.’ Didn’t you get that feeling before you went to meet anti‑Anne?”

“No, it felt just like just any other ‘push.’ Why?”

“I’m curious. Could you feel for just a second in the direction opposite to anti‑Anne? For Heaven sake don’t go there! Just look, OK?”

“All right … <shiver> Now, that’s weird. There’s nothing there, except there’s not even a there there, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do, and you’ve just given us one more clue to where you almost went. Whoa, no more shivering, you’re back here safe where there’s normal matter and real locations, OK? <another soothing pause> That’s better. So, I was assuming a binary situation, an anti‑Universe obeying a Charge‑Parity‑Time symmetry that’s exactly the reverse of ours. The math allows only the two possibilities. You observed ‘no there there’ when you tried for a third option. That’s support for the assumption.”

“How could we have even two Universes?”

“It goes back to the high‑energy turmoil at the Big Bang’s singularity. Symmetry says the chaos in the singularity should have generated as many anti‑atoms, umm, as many positrons and anti‑protons, as their normal equivalents.”

“Positrons?”

“Anti‑electrons. Long story. The big puzzle is, where did those anti‑guys go? One proposal that’s been floating around is that while normal matter and our normal CPT symmetry expanded from the singularity to make our Universe, the anti‑matter and reversed symmetry expanded in some kind of opposite direction to make the anti‑Universe. You may have found that direction. Here, I’ll do a quick sketch on Old Reliable.”

“Looks like some of the banged‑up painted‑up battle shields I saw a thousand years ago.”

“It does, a little. Over on the top left is our normal‑matter Universe with galaxies and all, expanding out of the singularity at time zero. Time runs vertically upward from that point. I can’t draw three spatial dimensions so just one expanding sideways will have to do, OK?”

“No problem, I do x‑y‑z‑t thinking all the time when I use my superpower.”

“Of course you do. Well, coming down out of the singularity into minus‑time we’ve got the anti‑Universe. I’ve reversed the color scheme because why not, although I expect their colors would look exactly like ours because we know that photons are their own anti‑particles and should behave the same in both Universes.”

“They do. Anti‑Anne looked just like me, white satin and all.”

“Excellent, another clue. Anyway, see how minus‑time increases in the negative direction as the anti‑Universe expands just like plus‑time increases positively for us?”

“Mmm, yeah, but we only call them minus and plus because we’re standing outside of both of them. Looking from the inside, I’d say time in each increases towards expansion.”

“Good insight, you’re way ahead of me. That’s what I’ve drawn on the right side of the sketch. The two are perfectly equivalent except for CPT and anti‑CPT. Time direction, x‑y‑z space directions, even spin orientation, can all be made parallel between the two. However, the charges are reversed. Anti‑Anne’s atoms have positrons where we have electrons, negative anti‑protons where we have positive protons. When anti‑matter meets matter, there’s massive energy release from equivalent charged particles neutralizing each other.”

“Wait. Gravity. Wouldn’t anti‑matter particles repel each other? Your picture has galaxies and they couldn’t grow up with everything backwards.”

“Nope, you’re carrying this model too far. The only thing that’s reversed is charge. Masses work the same in each symmetry. Gravity pays attention to mass, not charge, and it’s always a force of attraction.”

“Anyway, not going back there.”

“Good.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Engineering A Black Hole

On By rolcottIn General: Fun Stuff, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<bomPAH-dadadadaDEEdah> That weird ringtone on Old Reliable again. Sure enough, the phone function’s caller-ID display says 710‑555‑1701.  “Ms Baird, I presume?”

A computerish voice, aggressive but feminine, with a hint of desperation. “Commander Baird will be with you shortly, Mr Moire. Please hold.”

A moment later, “Hello, Mr Moire.”

“Ms Baird. Congratulations on the promotion.”

“Thank you, Mr Moire. I owe you for that.”

“How so?”

“Your posts about phase-based weaponry got me thinking. I assembled a team, we demonstrated a proof of concept and now Federation ships are being equipped with the Baird‑Prymaat ShieldSaw. Works a treat on Klingon and Romulan shielding. So thank you.”

“My pleasure. Where are you now?”

“I’m on a research ship called the Invigilator. We’re orbiting black hole number 77203 in our catalog. We call it ‘Lonesome‘.”

“Why that name?”

“Because there’s so little other matter in the space nearby. The poor thing barely has an accretion disk.”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it’s exciting, because it’s so close to a theoretical ideal. It’s like the perfectly flat plane and the frictionless pulley — in real life there are always irregularities that the simple equations can’t account for. For black holes, our only complete solutions assume that the collapsed star is floating in an empty Universe with no impinging gravitational or electromagnetic fields. That doesn’t happen, of course, but Lonesome comes close.”

“But if we understand the theoretical cases and it nearly matches one, why bother with it at all?”

“Engineering reasons.”

“You’re engineering a black hole?”

“In a way, yes. Or at least that’s what we’re working on. We think we have a way to extract power from a black hole. It’ll supply inexhaustible cheap energy for a new Star Fleet anti‑matter factory. “

“I thought the only thing that could escape a black hole’s Event Horizon was Hawking radiation, and it cheats.”

“Gravity escapes honestly. Its intense field generates some unexpected effects. Your physicist Roger Penrose used gravity to explain the polar jets that decorate so many compact objects including black holes. He calculated that if a comet or an atom or something else breakable shatters when it falls into a spinning compact object’s gravitational field, some pieces would be trapped there but under the right conditions other pieces would slingshot outward with more energy than they had going in. In effect, the extra energy would come from the compact object’s angular momentum.”

“And that’s what you’re planning to do? How are you going to trap the expelled pieces?”

“No, that’s not what we’re planning. Too random to be controlled with our current containment field technology. We’re going pure electromagnetic, turning Lonesome into a giant motor‑generator. We know it has a stable magnetic field and it’s spinning rapidly. We’ll start by giving Lonesome some close company. There’s enough junk in its accretion disk for several Neptune‑sized planets. The plan is to use space tugs to haul in the big stuff and Bussard technology for the dust, all to assemble a pair of Ceres-sized planetoids. W’re calling them Pine and Road. We’ll park them in a convenient equatorial orbit in a Lagrange‑stable configuration so Pine, Road and Lonesome stay in a straight line.”

“Someone’s been doing research on old cinema.”

“The Interstellar Movie Database. Anyhow, when the planetoids are out there we string conducting tractor beams between them. If we locate Pine and Road properly, Lonesome’s rotating magnetic field lines will cross the fields at right angles and induce a steady electric current. Power for the anti‑matter synthesizers.”

“Ah, so like Penrose’s process you’re going to drain off some of Lonesome‘s rotational kinetic energy. Won’t it run out?”

“Lonesome‘s mass is half again heavier than your Sun’s, Mr Moire. It’ll spin for a long, long time.”

“Umm … that ‘convenient orbit.’ Lonesome‘s diameter is so small that orbits will be pretty speedy. <calculating quickly with Old Reliable> Even 200 million kilometers away you’d circle Lonesome in less than 15 minutes. Will the magnetic field that far out be strong enough for your purposes?”

“Almost certainly so, but the gravimagnetodynamic equations don’t have exact solutions. We’re not going to know until we get there.”

“That’s how research works, all right. Good luck.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Edges of The Universe

On By rolcottIn Astronomy, Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<chirp, chirp> “Moire here.”

“Um, Uncle Sy?”

“Hi, Teena! I didn’t know you knew my phone number. It’s past your bedtime. How are you? Is everything OK?”

“I’m fine. Mommie dialed you for me. I had a question she said you could answer better than her and that would be my bedtime story.”

“Your Mommie’s a very smart person in several ways. What’s your question?”

“Where’s the edge of the Universe?”

“Whoa! Where’d that question come from?”

“Well, I was lying on my bed and I thought, the edge of me is my skin and the edge of my room is the walls and the edge of our block is the street but I don’t know what any of the bigger edges are so I asked Mommie and she said to ask you. She’s writing something.”

“Of course she is. One answer is you’re smack on an edge, but some people think that’s a wrong answer so let’s talk about all the edges, OK?”

“On an edge??!? I’m in the middle of my bed.”

“Hey, I heard you sit up. Lie back down, this is supposed to be a bedtime story so we’re supposed to be calm, OK? All right, now. Once upon a time —”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Now hush and let me start. Once upon a time, people thought that the sky was a solid bowl or maybe a curtain that came down all the way to meet the Earth just over the horizon, and that was the edge of the Universe. But then people started traveling and they realized that the horizon moved when they did.”

“Like rainbows.”

“Exactly like rainbows. Eventually they’d traveled everywhere they could walk. As they went they made maps. According to the maps, the world they knew about was surrounded by ocean so the edge of the Universe was the ocean.”

“Except for Moana’s people that crossed the ocean.”

“Right, but even they only went from island to island. Their version of a map was as flat as the paper maps the European and Chinese explorers used.”

“But the world is really round like my world ball.”

“Yes, it is. It took humans a long time to accept that, because it meant their world couldn’t be all there is. A round world would have to float in space. Think about this — what’s the edge of our world?”

“Umm … the air?”

“Very good, sweetie. Way up, 60 miles high, the air gets so thin that we call that height the Edge of Space.”

“That’s the inside edge of space. Where’s the outside edge of space?”

“It’s moved outward as our astronomers have gotten better at looking far away. For a long time they thought that the outermost stars in our Milky Way galaxy marked the edge of the Universe. Then an astronomer named Edwin Hubble—”

“Oh, like the Hubble Space Telescope that made the pretty pictures in my ‘Stronomy book!”

“Mm-hm, the Hubble was named for him because he did such important work. Anyway, he showed that what people thought were stardust clouds inside the Milky Way were actually other galaxies like ours but far, far away. With the Hubble and other telescopes we’ve pushed out our known Universe to … I don’t even know the name of such a big number.”

“So that’s the edge?”

“We don’t think so, but we don’t know. Maybe space and galaxies go on forever, maybe galaxies peter out but space goes on, maybe something weird. But there’s a special ‘direction’ that we think does have an edge, maybe two.”

<yawn> “What’s that?”

“Time. One edge was the Big Bang, fourteen billion years ago. We’re pretty sure of that one. The scientists and philosophers argue about whether there’s another edge.”

“Wouldn’t jus’ be f’rever?”

“Mr Einstein thought it would. In fact, he thought that the future is as solidly real as the past is and we’re just watching from the windows of a train rolling along the time tracks.”

“Don’ like that, wanna do diffren’ things.”

“Me, too, sweetie. I prefer the idea that the future doesn’t exist yet; we’re on the front edge of time, building as we go. Dream about that, OK?”

“Okayyyyyy“

~~ Rich Olcott

To Swerve And Project

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A crisp Fall dawn, crisp fallen leaves under my feet as I jog the path by the park’s lake.

“Hey! Moire! How about these red sunrises and sunsets? Remind you of Mars?”

“Morning, Mr Feder. Not much, and definitely not dawn or dusk. Those tend more to blue, as a matter of fact.”

“Waitaminnit, Moire. I seen that Brad Pitt Martian movie, him driving hisself all alone across that big plain — the place is blood‑red.”

“Think a minute, Mr Feder. If he was all alone, who was running the cameras?”

“Uhhh, right. Movie. Yeah, they were really on Earth so they could director the lighting and all. But they said they’d scienced the … heck out of it.”

“Oh they did, better than most movies, but artistic license took over in a couple of places. People expect Mars to be red, not mostly clay colored like it really is, so the producers served up red.”

“Wait, I remember the conversation about Earth is blue because of the oceans and Mars is red because of its rusty atmosphere. So what’s with the sky colors?”

“Looking up at sunlight through an atmosphere is very different from looking down at the surface. It all has to do with how what’s in the atmosphere interacts with sunlight. Take Earth’s blue sky, for instance.”

“My favorite color.”

“Sure it is. OK, the Sun’s disk takes up much less than 1% of the sky but that’s enough to give us all our sunlight photons. A fraction of them run into something on the way down to Earth’s surface. What happens depends on how big the something is compared to the photon wavelength. Much larger things, maybe an airplane, completely block the photons and we get a shadow.”

“Obviously.”

“Yeah, but life’s more interesting for smaller somethings. For things like air molecules and dust particles that are much smaller than the the wavelength of visible light, the waves generally swerve around the particle. How much they swerve depends on the wavelength — extreme blue light bends about ten times more than extreme red light for the same scattering particle. So suppose there’s a kid a few miles away from us looking at the sky while we’re looking at it here. There’s a sunbeam with a rainbow‑load of photons headed for the kid, but there are dust particles in the way. Get the picture?”

“Sure, sure, get on with it.”

“So some of the light swerves. The red swerves a little but the blue light swerves ten times as much, enough that it heads straight for us. What color do we see when we look in that direction?”

“Blue, of course.”

“Blue everywhere in the lit‑up sky except when we look straight at the Sun.”

“What about these pretty red sunsets and the red skies over the wildfires?”

“Two different but related phenomena. Sunsets first. An incoming photon with just the right wavelength may simply be absorbed by a molecule. Doesn’t happen often, but there’s lots of molecules. Turns out that oxygen and ozone absorb blue light more strongly than red light. When we’re looking horizontally towards a sunset we’re looking through many more oxygen molecules than when we look vertically. We see the red part of a blue‑filtered version of that swerve rainbow.”

“And the fire skies?”

“The fires released huge amounts of fine smoke particles, just the right size for color‑scattering. Blue light swerves again and again until it’s either absorbed or shot out to space. Red light survives.”

Upper image – Golden Gate Bay under fiery skies, Sept 2020
Lower image – Sunset from Gusev Crater, Mars
Credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

“So what’s different about Mars?”

“Three things — Mars dust is different from Earth’s, its atmosphere is a lot thinner, and there’s practically no atmospheric water or oxygen. Rusty Mars dust is the size of smoke particles. With no rain or snow to settle out the dust, it stays aloft all the time. Rust is red because it absorbs blue light and reflects only the red part. With less diffused sunlight, Mars’ sky is basically the black of space overlaid with a red tint. Sunsets are blue‑ish because what blue light there is can travel further.”

“Earth skies are better.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Traffic Control

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Space Travel, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Jeremy Yazzie @jeremyaz
hi @symoire, this is jeremy. ive been reading about the osiris‑rex mission to astrroid bennu and how they’re bringing back a sample – so complicated – fancy robot arm, n2 squirter, air‑cleaner thingy – y not just vacuum the dust or pick up a rock?

Sy Moire @symoire
@jeremyaz – quick answer is that Bennu and OSIRIS-REx are already surrounded by the vacuum of space. Sample collectors can’t suck any harder that that. I’ll email you a more complete answer later

Hi, Sy, can you believe this weather? Temps last week were twice today’s high.

Not to a physicist, Sis.
Those 90s and today’s 45 are just Fahrenheit scale numbers.
Can’t do ratios between them, “twice” does not compute.
I don’t suppose it would help if we went centigrade and said last week’s highs were around 35 and today it’s 5?

No, that’s worse, today’s down by 85% from last week.

Centigrade’s another scale you can’t do ratio arithmetic in. Kelvins is the way to go.
Temp in K tracks the average molecular kinetic energy.
Starts at zero where nothing’s moving and rises in proportion.
Last week’s highs ran around 308 K, today is 278 K.
Today we’re only 10% cooler than last week.

Physicists! Grrrr. However you measure the weather, it still feels cold. No picnic this weekend ;^(

From: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
To: Jeremy Yazzie <jeremyaz@college.edu>
Subj: OSIRIS-REx

Jeremy –

OK, now I’m back at the office I’ve got better tech for writing long answers.

First, the “grab a rock” idea has several issues

  • If you pick up a rock, you only have that rock, says nothing about any of its neighbors or the subsurface material it might have smacked into. Dust should be a much better representation of the whole asteroid.
  • The rock might not be willing to be picked up. When the scientists and engineers were planning the OSIRIS‑REx mission, they didn’t know Bennu’s texture — could be one solid rock or a bunch of middle‑size rocks firmly cemented together or a loose “rubble pile” of all‑size rocks and dust held together by gravity alone, or anything in between.
  • Have you ever played one of those arcade games where you try to pick up a toy with a suspended claw gadget and all you’ve got is a couple of control knobs and a button? Picking up a specific rock, even a willing one, is hard when you’re a robot operating 15 light‑minutes away from the home office.

So dust it is, but how to plan dust collection in low gravity when you know nothing about the texture? Something like a whisk broom and dust pan would work unless the surface is too uneven. Something like a drill or disk sander would be good, except to use either one you need a solid footing to work from or else you go spinning one way when the tool spins the other. (That was a problem on the International Space Station.) The Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu used a high‑velocity impactor to create dust, but a bad ricochet or shrapnel could kill the OSIRIS‑REx mission. The planners decided that best alternative was puff‑and‑grab.

So why not an astronautical Roomba that just sucks in the dust? The thing about vacuum is that it’s a place where gas molecules aren’t. Suppose you’re a gas molecule. You’re surrounded by your buddies, all in motion and bouncing off of each other like on a crowded 3‑D dance floor. You stay more‑or‑less in place because you’re being hit more‑or‑less equally from every direction. Suddenly there’s a vacuum to one side. You’re not hit as much over there so that’s the direction you and a bunch of your buddies move. If you encounter a dust particle, it picks up your momentum and moves toward the emptiness where it could be trapped in somebody’s filter.

The planners decided to capture dust particles by entraining them in a flow of gas molecules through a filter. To make gas flow you need more gas on one side then the other. Gas molecules being few and far between in space, the obvious place to put your pusher gas is inside the filter. Hence the nitrogen squirt technique and the “air‑cleaner thingy.”

— Sy

Diagram of TAGSAM in operation
Adapted from asteroidmission.org/?attachment_id=1699
Credit: University of Arizona

~~ Rich Olcott

Avoiding A Big Bang

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<fffshwwPOP!!> … <thump!> “Ow!”

That white satin dress, that molten‑silver voice. “Anne? Is that you? Are you OK?”

“Yeah, Sy, it’s me. I’m all right … I think.”

“What happened? Where’ve you been all year? Or considering it’s you I should ask, when’ve you been?”

“You know the line between history and archaeology?”

“Whether or not there was writing?”

“Sort of. Anyway, I’ve crossed it dozens of times. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen. The professionals sure wouldn’t.”

“Wait, does the dress go with you? White satin wasn’t a thing centuries ago.”

“Oh, it changes like camouflage when I travel. That’s one reason I like this era — white satin’s so much nicer than muddy homespun or deerskins, mmm?”

“Mm‑hmmm. I suppose that’s why the dress didn’t get messed up when you erupted here. What led to that, anyway?”

“I don’t know. It probably had something to do with me experimenting with my ‘pushing’ superpower, going for a direction I hadn’t tried before. I’ve always known that front‑and‑back ‘pushing’ moves me forward or backward in time. You helped me understand that a ‘push’ to the side shifts me between alternate Universes at different probability levels. ‘Pushing’ up or down changes my size. Well, this morning I figured out a different direction to ‘push’ and that was weird.”

“You’ve described all three normal directions of space, so a new one would have to be weird.”

“I know what that direction feels like even if I can’t describe it. What was weird is what happened when I tried ‘pushing’ there. Things came into focus a little slowly. That may be what saved me. What I saw in front of me was … me. Dress, hair, everything, reflected left‑to‑right like looking in a mirror but our movements were a little different. Things were sharpening up and suddenly this sheet of fire flared between us and it blew me … here, to your office. What was all that about, Sy?”

“A couple of questions first. That sheet of fire — did it have a color or was it pure white?”

“Not white, more of a bright blue-violet.”

“And did it start like <snap> or were there preliminary sparkles?”

“Umm .. yes, there were sparkles! In fact I was already ‘pushing’ away when the bad flare‑up started. How did you know?”

“Just following a train of thought. I’m hypothesizing here, but I think you just barely escaped blowing the Earth apart.”

“WHAAATT!!?!”

“It all goes back to the Big Bang and our belief that physical phenomena have fundamental symmetries. Back in the Universe’s first few skillionths of a second the energy density was so high that the electromagnetic and nuclear forces were symmetry‑related. Any twitch in the chaotic unified force field was equally likely to become a proton or an anti‑proton, matter or anti‑matter. So why is anti‑matter so rare in our Universe?”

“Maybe the matter atoms just wiped out all the anti‑matter.”

“Uh‑uh. By symmetry, there should have been exactly as much of each sort. If the wipe‑out had happened there wouldn’t have been enough matter left over to make a single galaxy, much less billions of them. But here we are. Explaining that is one of the biggest challenges in cosmology.”

“You say ‘symmetry‘ like that’s a sacred principle.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘sacred‘ but the most accurate physical theory we know of is based on the product of Charge, Parity and Time symmetries being constant in our Universe. If you take a normal atom and somehow reverse both its charge and spin to get an anti‑matter atom, the symmetries say that the reversed atom must travel backward in time. From an outsider’s perspective it’d be like the original atom and the anti‑atom rush together, annihilate each other and release the enormous amount of energy that accomplished the reversal. Anne, I think you almost ‘pushed’ yourself into an anti‑Universe with a reversed CPT symmetry.”

“Those blue-violet flashes…”

“…were atoms from the air you carried with you, colliding with anti‑atoms in your anti‑twin’s air. Good thing those micro‑collisions released enough energy to get you back here before…”

“…I touched anti‑Anne or even breathed! <shiver> That would have been…”

“…BLOOEY!”

“This is nicer, mmm?”

~~ Rich Olcott

4 Tips 4 A Young Scientist

On By rolcottIn General: Serious Stuff, UncategorizedLeave a comment

From: Robin Feder <rjfeder@fortleenj.com>
To: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
Subj: Questions

Dear Mr. Moire, I am a High School student who has a crazy theory about dark matter. I get bored often and do not learn as much as I think most believe I should in science class. I was thinking about dark matter and how it reacts oppositely of how we expect it to. We expect it to probably not follow “normal” physics. This got me thinking about other impossible things the human mind has thought of. One of them caught my mind–absolute zero. The logic connected itself in my mind and later that day I typed up a doc just to keep my ideas. I played with it and the more I thought about it the evidence started to overlap. I have finally found an end to the theory. I am now ready to send this theory with some scientists who actually have the expertise to critique me. Please give me your thoughts as I of course am not fully confident in it. I have a lot of information that I can’t fit in one email so this is all for now. Hope to improve it. Sincerely, Robin Feder

From: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
To: Robin Feder <rjfeder@fortleenj.com>
Subj: Re: Questions

My best to your Dad, Robin, you take after him and I’m glad you’re thinking about science. I hear you about the boring — classes often feel that way if the other kids don’t pick things up as quickly as you do. Maybe your teachers can point you to supplementary materials that’ll perk up your interest.

Before we get into your topics I’ll give you some tips that may help your future. The first is, keep an idea notebook. It could be a physical book you keep in your pocket or it could be a directory of files on your phone or computer, doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you record all your ideas as they occur to you so you don’t forget one that might become important later on. In science and other fields, ideas are your stock in trade so you want to preserve your inventory. That absolute‑zero doc is a good start.

Second tip is, after you’ve written down an idea, take a long look at it and ask yourself, “How could I disprove this?” and write that down, too. The essence of science is that it relies more on disproving things than proving them. Get into the habit of thinking about disproof — it’s a powerful way of filtering out incorrect thinking. Works better in some areas than others but in general there’s forward progress.

The reason I highlighted “after” up there is that the first thought, even if it’s wrong, often leads to second and third thoughts that are better. If you discard ideas too quickly you limit yourself. Think of it as an ongoing one‑person brainstorming session. So write first, maybe cross off later, OK?

Third tip is, read up on what your idea is about. A lot. Every field of study has its own “language,” a set of words and concepts that people in the field generally understand. You need to have some command of those if you’re going to ask them clear questions about your idea.

That’s for two reasons. The most important is that using the correct terminology speeds up communication — neither you nor they will have to stop and explain a term or concept. But in addition, if you use the words and concepts properly that tells your conversation partner that you respect their time enough to have done your initial reading.

Fourth tip is where to look for that initial reading. Most textbooks, even shiny freshly-printed ones, are decades behind the current research frontiers. You need to go deeper. You’ll Google your topic, of course, to find popular science articles. Here’s another path to more recent work. Start at a good Wikipedia article. Follow the links to its key recent footnotes and Google the names of the paper’s authors. Many of them will have blogs that they write for a student audience. Follow those blogs.

Looking forward to reading those two files.

Regards,
Sy Moire.

~~ Rich Olcott

Free Energy, or Not

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Physics: Entropy and Thermodynamics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

From: Richard Feder <rmfeder@fortleenj.com>
To: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
Subj: Questions

What’s this about “free energy”? Is that energy that’s free to move around anywhere? Or maybe the vacuum energy that this guy said is in the vacuum of space that will transform the earth into a wonderful world of everything for free for everybody forever once we figure out how to handle the force fields and pull energy out of them?

From: Sy Moire <sy@moirestudies.com>
To: Richard Feder <rmfeder@fortleenj.com>
Subj: Re: Questions

Well, Mr Feder, as usual you have a lot of questions all rolled up together. I’ll try to take one at a time.

It’s clear you already know that to make something happen you need energy. Not a very substantial definition, but then energy is an abstract thing it took humanity a couple of hundred years to get our minds around and we’re still learning.

Physics has several more formal definitions for “energy,” all clustered around the ability to exert force to move something and/or heat something up. The “and/or” is the kicker, because it turns out you can’t do just the moving. As one statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics puts it, “There are no perfectly efficient processes.”

For example, when your car’s engine burns a few drops of gasoline in the cylinder, the liquid becomes a 22000‑times larger volume of hot gas that pushes the piston down in its power stroke to move the car forward. In the process, though, the engine heats up (wasted energy), gases exiting the cylinder are much hotter than air temperature (more wasted energy) and there’s friction‑generated heat all through the drive train (even more waste). Improving the drive train’s lubrication can reduce friction, but there’s no way to stop energy loss into heated-up combustion product molecules.

Two hundred years of effort haven’t uncovered a usable loophole in the Second Law. However, we have been able to quantify it. Especially for practically important chemical reactions, like burning gasoline, scientists can calculate how much energy the reaction product molecules will retain as heat. The energy available to do work is what’s left.

For historical reasons, the “available to do work” part is called “free energy.” Not free like running about like ball lightning, but free in the sense of not being bound up in jiggling heated‑up molecules.

Vacuum energy is just the opposite of free — it’s bound up in the structure of space itself. We’ve known for a century that atoms waggle back and forth within their molecules. Those vibrations give rise to the infrared spectra we use for remote temperature sensing and for studying planetary atmospheres. One of the basic results of quantum mechanics is that there’s a minimum amount of motion, called zero‑point vibration, that would persist even if the molecule were frozen to absolute zero temperature.

There are other kinds of zero‑point motion. We know of two phenomena, the Casimir effect and the Lamb shift, that can be explained by assuming that the electric field and other force fields “vibrate” at the ultramicroscopic scale even in the absence of matter. Not vibrations like going up and down, but like getting more and less intense. It’s possible that the same “vibrations” spark radioactive decay and some kinds of light emission.

Visualize space being marked off with a mesh of cubes. In each cube one or more fields more‑or‑less periodically intensify and then relax. The variation strength and timing are unpredictable. Neighboring squares may or may not sync up and that’s unpredictable, too.

The activity is all governed by yet another Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle trade‑off. The stronger the intensification, the less certain we can be about when or where the next one will happen.

What we can say is that whether you look at a large volume of space (even an atom is ultramicroscopicly huge) or a long period of time (a second might as well be a millennium), on the average the intensity is zero. All our energy‑using techniques involve channeling energy from a high‑potential source to a low‑potential sink. Vacuum energy sources are everywhere but so are the sinks and they all flit around. Catching lightning in a jar was easy by comparison.

Regards,
Sy Moire.

~~ Rich Olcott

Question Time

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Cosmology, Crazy Theories, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen unmutes her mic. “Before we wrap up this online Crazy Theories contest with voting for the virtual Ceremonial Broom, I’ve got a few questions here in the chat box. The first question is for Kareem. ‘How about negative evidence for a pre-mammal civilization? Played-out mines, things like that.‘ Kareem, over to you.”

“Thanks. Good question but you’re thinking way too short a time period. Sixty‑six million years is plenty of time to erode the mountain a mine was burrowing into and take the mining apparatus with it.

“Here’s a different kind of negative evidence I did consider. We’re extracting coal now that had been laid down in the Carboniferous Era 300 million years ago. At first, I thought I’d proved no dinosaurs were smart enough to dig up coal because it’s still around where we can mine it. But on second thought I realized that sixty-six million years is enough time for geological upthrust and folding to expose coal seams that would have been too deeply buried for mining dinosaurs to get at. So like the Silurian Hypothesis authors said, no conclusions can be drawn.”

“Nice response, Kareem. Jim, this one’s for you. ‘You said our observable universe is 93 billion lightyears across, but I’ve heard over and over that the Universe is 14 billion years old. Did our observable universe expand faster than the speed of light?‘”

“That’s a deep space question, pun intended. The answer goes to what we mean when we say that the Hubble Flow expands the Universe. Like good Newtonian physicists, we’re used to thinking of space as an enormous sheet of graph paper. We visualize statements like, ‘distant galaxies are fleeing away from us‘ as us sitting at one spot on the graph paper and those other galaxies moving like fireworks across an unchanging grid.

“But that’s not the proper post-Einstein way to look at the situation. What’s going on is that we’re at our spot on the graph paper and each distant galaxy is at its spot, but the Hubble Flow stretches the graph paper. Suppose some star at the edge of our observable universe sent out a photon 13.7 billion years ago. That photon has been headed towards us at a steady 300000 kilometers per second ever since and it finally reached an Earth telescope last night. But in the meantime, the graph paper stretched underneath the photon until space between us and its home galaxy widened by a factor of 3.4.

“By the way, it’s a factor of 3.4 instead of 6.8 because the 93 billion lightyear distance is the diameter of our observable universe sphere, and the photon’s 13.7 billion lightyear trip is that sphere’s radius.

“Mmm, one more point — The Hubble Flow rate depends on distance and it’s really slow on the human‑life timescale. The current value of the Hubble Constant says that a point that’s 3×1019 kilometers away from us is receding at about 70 kilometers per second. To put that in perspective, Hubble Flow is stretching the Moon away from us by 3000 atom‑widths per year, or about 1/1300 the rate at which the Moon is receding because of tidal friction.”

“Nice calculation, Jim. Our final question is for Amanda. ‘Could I get to one of the other quantum tracks if I dove into a black hole and went through the singularity?‘”

“I wouldn’t want to try that but let’s think about it. Near the structure’s center gravitational intensity compresses mass-energy beyond the point that the words ‘particle’ and ‘quantum’ have meaning. All you’ve got is fields fluctuating wildly in every direction of spacetime. No sign posts, no way to navigate, you wouldn’t be able to choose an exit quantum track. But you wouldn’t be able to exit anyway because in that region the arrow of time points inward. Not a sci‑fi story with a happy ending.”

“<whew> Alright, folks, time to vote. Who presented the craziest theory? All those in favor of Kareem, click on your ‘hand’ icon. … OK. Now those voting for Jim? … OK. Now those voting for Amanda? … How ’bout that, it’s a tie. I guess for each of you there’s a parallel universe where you won the virtual Ceremonial Broom. Congratulations to all and thanks for such an interesting evening. Good night, everyone.”

~~ Rich Olcott