Category: Uncategorized

Three Perils for a Quest(ion), Part 1

On By rolcottIn Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, Uncategorized2 Comments

Eddie makes great pizzas but Jeremy thinks they stay in the oven just a little too long.  As he crunched an extra-crispy wedge-edge he mused, “Gravity aside, I wonder what it’d be like to land on a black hole.  I bet it’d be real slippery if it’s as smooth as Mr Moire says.”

Jennie cut in.  “Don’t be daft, lad.  Everyone’s read about the spaceman sliding through the event horizon unaware until it’s too late.  Someone far away sees the bloke’s spacetime getting all distorted but in his local frame of reference everything’s right as rain.  Right, Sy?”

“As rain, Jennie, if all you’re concerned about is relativity.  But Spaceman Jeremy has lots of other things to be concerned about on his way to the event horizon.  Which he couldn’t stand on anyway.”

“Why not, Mr Moire?  I mean, I said ‘gravity aside’ so I ought to be able to stand up.”

“Nothing to stand on, Jeremy.  It’d be like trying to stand on Earth’s orbit.”

“Pull the other one, Sy.  How can they be alike?”

“Both of them are mathematical constructs rather than physical objects.  An orbit is an imaginary line that depicts planet or satellite locations.  An event horizon is an imaginary figure enclosing a region with such intense spacetime curvature that time points inward.  They’re abstract objects, not  concrete ones.  But let’s get back to Jeremy’s black hole evaporation quest.  He’ll have to pass three perils.”

“Ooo, a Quest with Perils —  loverly.  What are the Perils then?”

“The Roche Radius, the Photon Sphere and the Firewall.  Got your armor on, Jeremy?”Astronaut and 3xBlack hole

“Ready, Mr Moire.”

“Stand up.  The Roche effect is all about gravitational discrepancy between two points.  The two meter distance between your head and feet isn’t enough for a perceptible difference in downward pull.  However, when we deal with astronomical distances the differences can get significant.  For instance, ocean water on the day side of Earth is closer to the Sun and experiences a stronger sunward pull than water on the night side.”

“Ah, so that’s why we get tides.”

“Right.  Sit, sit, sit.  So in 1849 Édouard Roche wondered how close two objects could get until tidal forces pulled one of them apart.  He supposed the two objects were both just balls of rocks or fluid held together by gravity.  Applying Newton’s Laws and some approximations he got a formula for threshold distance in terms of the big guy’s mass and the little guy’s density.  Suppose you’re held together only by gravity and you’re nearing the Sun feet-first.  Its mass is 2×1030 kg/m³.  Even including your space armor, your average density is about 1.5 kg/m³.  According to Roche’s formula, if you got closer than 8.6×106 kilometers your feet would break away and fall into the Sun before the rest of you would.  Oh, that distance is about 1/7 the radius of Mercury’s orbit so it’s pretty close in.”

“But we’re talking black holes here.  What if the Sun collapses to a black hole?”

“Surprisingly, it’s exactly the same distance.  The primary’s operative property is its mass, not its diameter.  Good thing Jeremy’s really held together by atomic and molecular electromagnetism, which is much stronger than gravity.  Which brings us to his second Peril, the dreaded Photon Sphere.”

“Should I shudder, Sy?”

“Go ahead, Jennie.  The Sphere is another mathematical object, not something physical you’d collide with, Jeremy.  It’s a zero-thickness shell representing where electromagnetic waves can orbit a massive object like a black hole or a neutron star.  Waves can penetrate the shell easily in either direction, but if one happens to fly in exactly along a tangent, it’s trapped on the Sphere.”

“That’s photons.  Why is it a peril to me?”

“Remember that electromagnetism that holds you together?  Photons carry that force.  Granted, in a molecule they’re standing waves rather than the free waves we see with.  The math is impossible, but here’s the Peril.  Suppose one of your particularly important molecules happens to lie tangent to the Sphere while you’re traversing it.  Suddenly, the forces holding that molecule together fly away from you at the speed of light.  And that disruption inexorably travels along your body as you proceed on your Quest.”

[both shudder]

~~ Rich Olcott

The Thin Edge of Infinity

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

Late in the day, project’s half done but it’s hungry time.  I could head home for a meal and drive back, but instead I board the elevator down to Eddie’s Pizza on the second floor.  The door opens on 8 and Jeremy gets on, with a girl.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Moire.  Didja see I hit a triple in the last game?  What if the Sun became a black hole?  This is that English girl I told you about.”

“Hello, Jennie.”

“Wotcha, Sy.”

“You know each other?”

“Ra-ther.  He wrote me into his blog a year ago.  You were going on about particles then, right, Sy?”

“Right, Jennie, but that was particles confined in atoms.  Jeremy’s interested in larger prey.”

“So I hear.”

The elevator lets us out at Eddie’s place.  We luck into a table, order and resume talking.  I open with, “What’s a particle?”

“Well, Sy, your post with Jeremy says it’s an abstract point with a minimal set of properties, like mass and charge, in a mathematical model of a real object with just that set of properties.”

“Ah, you’ve been reading my stuff.  That simplifies things.  So when can we treat a black hole like a particle?  Did you see anything about that in my archives, Jennie?”

“The nearest I can recall was Professor ‘t Hooft’s statement.  Ermm… if the Sun’s so far away that we can calculate planetary orbits accurately by treating it as a point, then we’re justified in doing so.”

“And if the Sun were to suddenly collapse to a black hole?”

“It’d be a lot smaller, even more like a point.  No change in gravity then.  But wouldn’t Earth be caught up in relativity effects like space compression?’

“Not unless you’re really close.  Space compression around a non-rotating (Schwarzchild) black hole scales by a factor that looks like Schwarzchild factor, where D is the object’s diameter and d is your distance from it.  Suppose the Sun suddenly collapsed without losing any mass to become a Schwarzchild object.  The object’s diameter would be a bit less than 4 miles.  Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun so the compression factor here would be [poking numbers into my smartphone] 1.000_000_04.  Nothing you’d notice.  It’d be 1.000_000_10 at Mercury.  You wouldn’t see even 1% compression until you got as close as 378 miles, 10% only inside of 43 miles.  Fifty percent of the effect shows up in the last 13 miles.  The edge of a black hole is sharper than this pizza knife.”Knife-edges

“How about if it’s spinning?  Ms Plenum referred me to a reading about frame-dragging.”

“Ah, Jeremy, you’re thinking of Gargantua, the Interstellar movie’s strangely lopsided black hole.  I just ran across this report by Robbie Gonzalez.  He goes into detail on why the image is that way, and why it should have looked more like this picture.  Check out the blueshift on the left and the shift into the infra-red on the right.”

better Gargantua
A more accurate depiction of Gargantua.  Image from
James, et al., Class. Quantum Grav. 32 (2015) 065001 (41pp),
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

[both] “Awesome!”

“So it’s the spin making the weirdness then, Sy?”

“Yes, ma’am.  If Gargantua weren’t rotating, then the space around it would be perfectly spherical.  As Gonzalez explains, the movie’s plotline needed an even more extreme spacetime distortion than they could get from that.  Dr Kip Thorne, their physics guru, added more by spinning his mathematical model nearly up to the physical limit.”

“I’ll bite, Mr Moire.  What’s the limit?”

“Rotating so fast that points on the equator would be going at lightspeed.  Can’t do that.  Anyhow, extreme spin alters spacetime distortion, which goes from spherical to pumpkin-shaped with a twist.  The radial scaling changes form, too, from Schwarzchild factor to Kerr factor.  A is proportional to spin.  When A is small (not much spin) or the distance is large those A/d² terms essentially vanish relative to the others and the scaling looks just like the simple almost-a-point Schwarzchild case.  When A is large or the distance is small the A/d² terms dominate top and bottom, the factor equals 1 and there’s dragging but no compression.  In the middle, things get interesting and that’s where Dr Thorne played.”

“So no relativity jolt to Earth.”

“Yep.”

“Here’s your pizzas.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

[sounds of disappearing pizza]

~~ Rich Olcott

No-hair today, grown tomorrow

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

It was a classic May day, perfect for some time by the lake in the park.  I was watching the geese when a squadron of runners stampeded by.   One of them broke stride, dashed my way and plopped down on the bench beside me.  “Hi, Mr Moire. <pant, pant>”

“Afternoon, Jeremy.  How are things?”

“Moving along, sir.  I’ve signed up for track, I think it’ll help my base-running,  I’ve met a new girl, she’s British, and that virtual particle stuff is cool but I’m having trouble fitting it into my black hole paper.”

“Here’s one angle.  Nobelist Gerard ‘t Hooft said, ‘A particle is fundamental when it’s useful to think of it as fundamental.‘  In that sense, a black hole is a fundamental particle.  Even more elementary than atoms, come to think of it.”

“Huh?”

“It has to do with the how few numbers you need to completely specify the particle.  You’d need a gazillion terabytes for just the temperatures in the interior and oceans and atmosphere of Earth.  But if you’re making a complete description of an isolated atom you just need about two dozen numbers — three for position, three for linear momentum, one for atomic number (to identify which element it represents), one for its atomic weight (which isotope), one for its net charge if it’s been ionized, four more for nuclear and electronic spin states, maybe three or four each for the energy levels of its nuclear and electronic configuration.  So an atom is simpler than the Earth”

“And for a black hole?”

“Even simpler.  A black hole’s event horizon is smooth, so smooth that you can’t distinguish one point from another.  Therefore, no geography numbers.  Furthermore, the physics we know about says whatever’s inside that horizon is completely sealed off from the rest of the universe.  We can’t have knowledge of the contents, so we can’t use any numbers to describe it.  It’s been proven (well, almost proven) that a black hole can be completely specified with only eleven numbers — one for its total mass-energy, one for its electric charge, and three each for position, linear momentum and angular momentum.  Leave out the location and orientation information and you’ve got three numbers — mass, charge, and spin.  That’s it.”

“How about its size or it temperature?”

“Depends how you measure size.  Event horizons are spherical or nearly so, but the equations say the distance from an event horizon to where you’d think its center should be is literally infinite.  You can’t quantify a horizon’s radius, but its diameter and surface area are both well-defined.  You can calculate both of them from the mass.  That goes for the temperature, too.”

“How about if it came from antimatter instead of matter?”

“Makes no difference because the gravitational stresses just tear atoms apart.”

“Wait, you said, ‘almost proven.’  What’s that about?”no hair 1

“Believe it or not, the proof is called The No-hair Theorem.  The ‘almost’ has to do with the proof’s starting assumptions.  In the simplest case, zero change and zero spin and nothing else in the Universe, you’ve got a Schwarzchild object.  The theorem’s been rigorously proven for that case — the event horizon must be perfectly spherical with no irregularities — ‘no hair’ as one balding physicist put it.”

“How about if the object spins and gets charged up, or how about if a planet or star or something falls into it?”

“Adding non-zero spin and charge makes it a Kerr-Newman object.  The theorem’s been rigorously proven for those, too.  Even an individual infalling mass has only a temporary effect.  The black hole might experience transient wrinkling but we’re guaranteed that the energy will either be radiated away as a gravitational pulse or else simply absorbed to make the object a little bigger.  Either way the event horizon goes smooth and hairless.”

“So where’s the ‘almost’ come in?”

“Reality.  The region near a real black hole is cluttered with other stuff.  You’ve seen artwork showing an accretion disk looking like Saturn’s rings around a black hole.  The material in the disk distorts what would otherwise be a spherical gravitational field.  That gnarly field’s too hairy for rigorous proofs, so far.  And then Hawking pointed out the particle fuzz…”

~~ Rich Olcott

Baseball And The Virtual Particle

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Al was pouring my mugful of his morning blend (“If it doesn’t wake you up we’ll call the doctor“) when Jeremy stepped into the counter.  “Hi, Mr Moire.  I’m still trying to get my head around that virtual particle thing.  Hi, Al, a large decaf, please, double sugar, three creamers.  It looks like the shorter amount of time you give a particle to happen, the bigger it can get, but that doesn’t make sense because I’d think the longer you wait the more likely it’s gonna happen.  Thanks, Al.”

“Take a breath to blow on that coffee, Jeremy, or you’ll burn your tongue.  Hmm…  Word is your batting average is running about 250 these days.  That right?”

“Yessir.  I didn’t know you’re keeping track.”

“Keeping my ears open is part of my job.  So you’re hitting about once every four at-bats.  That gives Coach an estimate of when you’ll get your next hit.  What’s your slugging average?”

“What’s a slugging average?”

“Your total number of batted-on bases, divided by your at-bats, times a thousand ’cause sports writers don’t do decimal points.  You get one count in the numerator for a single, two for a double and so on.”

“Lemme think.  If I’m doing 250 overall and about half are singles and the other half are doubles that’d give me an SA of … about 375.”

“Pretty good.  So does that number tell Coach anything about when to expect another double?”

“Mmm, no, but what does that have to do with my virtual particle question?”

“In each case you’ve got a pair of statistics that tell you some things and hide other things.  Batting averages and your wait-time notion are about when to expect an event of some sort to occur.  You could hit another single or you could tag a homer — all Coach knows is that you should be able to get on base about once every four at-bats.”

“What about the other statistics?”

“They’re the flip side, sort of.  You could think of the SA as batting potential.  If you hit homers all the time your SA would be 4000.  If you whiff every pitch your SA would be zero.  Anything between those extremes tells Coach something about your productivity but nothing about when you’re going to produce.  Energy uncertainty works the same way for virtual particles.  If you’re doing long-duration energy evaluations you can be pretty sure that any single measurement will be close to the long-term average.  You might possibly see a significant deviation from that average but only if you check just the right brief interval.”Virtual baseball

“And for the particles in that empty space?”

“If you’re looking long-term, no particles.  That’s what ’empty’ means.  When there’s definitely nothing in a volume of space it makes sense to say its energy is zero because particles have mass and therefore embody energy.  But a particle might show up and go away after a very brief interval without significantly affecting that long-term average.  Quantum theory doesn’t say it will show up, just that it might.”

“So does it?”

“Oh yes, in space, in the lab and in commerce.  One explanation for your cell phone’s NFC function hinges on virtual radio-frequency photons being exchanged between devices.”

“Wait.  If a virtual particle shows up in that empty space, then it’s not empty any more and its energy isn’t zero any more, is it?”

“You’ve just discovered one aspect of zero-point energy, the quantum prediction that every system, even empty space, contains a non-zero minimum amount of energy.  People have thought about tapping that energy to power perpetual motion machines.”

“That’d be cool — the ultimate renewable.”

“Wouldn’t it, though?  But no can do, for a couple of reasons.  Virtual particles, by their nature, are random phenomena.  You can’t depend upon what kind of particle might show up, or when, nor how long it might hang around.  It’s not like NFC where antennas generate the particles.  The other issue is that ‘minimum’ means minimum.  If you could pull energy out of that space you’d lower its energy content and drop it below the minimum…. What’s the grin about?”

“Just wondering how they’d score hitting a virtual ball that disappears before the fielder catches it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Virtualosity

On By rolcottIn Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

No knock, the door just opened suddenly.

“Hello, Jeremy.  Rule of Three?”

“Huh?  No, I was down the hall just now when I saw you go into your office so I knew you hadn’t gotten busy with something yet.  Sir.  What’s the Rule of Three?”

“Never mind.  You’re up here about virtual particles, I guess.”

“Yessir.  You said they’re ‘now you might see them, now you probably don’t.’  What’s that about and what do they have to do with abstraction and Einstein’s ‘underlying reality’?”

“What have you heard about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?”

“Ms Plenum says you can’t know where you are and how fast you’re going.”

“Ms Plenum’s got part of the usual notion but she’s missing the idea of simultaneous precision and a few other things.  Turns out you CAN know approximately where you are AND approximately how fast you’re going at a particular moment, but you can’t know both things precisely.  There’s going to be some imprecision in both measurements.  Think about Coach using a radar gun to track a thrown baseball.  How does radar work?”

“It bounces a light beam off of something and measures the light’s round-trip travel time.  I suppose it multiplies by the speed of light to convert time to distance.”

“Good.  Now how does it get the ball’s speed?”

“Uhh… probably uses two light pulses a certain time apart and calculates the speed as distance difference divided by time difference.”

“Got it in one.  Now, suppose that a second after the ball’s thrown the radar says the ball is 61 feet away from the plate and traveling at 92 mph.  Air resistance acts to slow the ball’s flight so that 92 is really an average.   Maybe it was going 92.1 mph at the first radar pulse and 91.9 mph at the second pulse.  So that reported speed has an 0.2 mph range of uncertainty.”

“Oh, and neither of the two pulses caught the ball at exactly 61 feet so that’s uncertain, too, right?”

“There you go.  We know the two averages, but each of them has a range.  The Uncertainty Principle says that the product of those two ranges has to be greater than Planck’s constant, 10-34 Joule·second.  Plugging that Joule-fraction and the mass of an electron into Einstein’s E=mc², we restate the constant as about 10-21 of an electron-second.  Those are both teeny numbers — but they’re not zero.”

“So speed and location make an uncertainty pair.  Are there others?”Zebras“A few.  The most important for this discussion is energy and time.”

“Wait a minute, those two can’t be linked that way.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because … umm … speed is change of location so those two go together, but energy isn’t change of time.  Time just … goes, and adding energy won’t make it go faster.”

“As a matter of fact, there are situations where adding energy makes time go slower, but that’s a couple of stories for another day.  What we’re talking about here is uncertainty ranges and how they combine.  Quantum theory says that if a given particle has a certain energy, give or take an energy range, and it retains that energy for a certain duration, give or take a time range, then the product of the two ranges has to be larger than that same Planck constant.   Think about a 1-meter cube of empty space out there somewhere.  Got it?

“Sure.”

“Suppose a particle appeared and then vanished somewhere in that cube sometime during a 1-second interval.  What’s the longest time that particle could have existed?”

“Easy — one second.”

“How about the shortest time?”

“Zero.  Wait, it’d be the smallest possible non-zero time, wouldn’t it?”

“Good catch.  So what’s the time uncertainty?”

“One second minus that tiniest bit of time.”

“And what’s the corresponding energy range?”

“That constant number that I forget.”

“10-21 electron-second’s worth.  Now let’s pick a shorter interval.  What’s the mass range for a particle that appears and disappears sometime during the 10-19 second it takes a photon to cross a hydrogen atom?”

“That’s 10-21 electron-second divided by 10-19 second, so it’d be, like, 0.01 electron.”

“How about 1% of that 10-19 second?”

“Wow — that’d be a whole electron.”

“A whole electron’s worth of uncertainty.  But is the electron really there?”

“Probably not, huh?”

“Like I said, ‘Now you probably don’t’.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Abstract Horses

On By rolcottIn Physics: Einstein, Physics: Newton and Gravity, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It was a young man’s knock, eager and a bit less hesitant than his first visit.

“C’mon in, Jeremy, the door’s open.”

“Hi, Mr Moire, it’s me, Jerem…  How did ..?  Never mind.  Ready for my black hole questions?”

“I’ll do what I can, Jeremy, but mind you, even the cosmologists are still having a hard time understanding them.  What’s your first question?”

“I read where nothing can escape a black hole, not even light, but Hawking radiation does come out because of virtual particles and what’s that about?”

“That’s a very lumpy question.  Let’s unwrap it one layer at a time.  What’s a particle?”

“A little teeny bit of something that floats in the air and you don’t want to breathe it because it can give you cancer or something.”

“That, too, but we’re talking physics here.  The physics notion of a particle came from Newton.  He invented it on the way to his Law of Gravity and calculating the Moon’s orbit around the Earth.  He realized that he didn’t need to know what the Moon is made of or what color it is.  Same thing for the Earth — he didn’t need to account for the Earth’s temperature or the length of its day.  He didn’t even need to worry about whether either body was spherical.  His results showed he could make valid predictions by pretending that the Earth and the Moon were simply massive points floating in space.”

“Accio abstractify!  So that’s what a physics particle is?”

“Yup, just something that has mass and location and maybe a velocity.  That’s all you need to know to do motion calculations, unless the distance between the objects is comparable to their sizes, or they’ve got an electrical charge, or they move near lightspeed, or they’re so small that quantum effects come into play.  All other properties are irrelevant.”

“So that’s why he said that the Moon was attracted to Earth like the apple that fell on his head was — in his mind they were both just particles.”

“You got it, except that apple probably didn’t exist.”

“Whatever.  But what about virtual particles?  Do they have anything to do with VR goggles and like that?”

“Very little.  The Laws of Physics are optional inside a computer-controlled ‘reality.’  Virtual people can fly, flow of virtual time is arbitrary, virtual electrical forces can be made weaker or stronger than virtual gravity, whatever the programmers decide will further the narrative.  But virtual particles are much stranger than that.”

“Aw, they can’t be stranger than Minecraft.  Have you seen those zombie and skeleton horses?”Horses

“Yeah, actually, I have.  My niece plays Minecraft.  But at least those horses hang around.  Virtual particles are now you might see them, now you probably don’t.  They’re part of why quantum mechanics gave Einstein the willies.”

“Quantum mechanics comes into it?  Cool!  But what was Einstein’s problem?  Didn’t he invent quantum theory in the first place?”

“Oh, he was definitely one of the early leaders, along with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and that lot.  But he was uncomfortable with how the community interpreted Schrödinger’s wave equation.  His row with Bohr was particularly intense, and there’s reason to believe that Bohr never properly understood the point that Einstein was trying to make.”

“Sounds like me and my Dad.  So what was Einstein’s point?”

“Basically, it’s that the quantum equations are about particles in Newton’s sense.  They lead to extremely accurate predictions of experimental results, but there’s a lot of abstraction on the way to those concrete results.  In the same way that Newton reduced Earth and Moon to mathematical objects, physicists reduced electrons and atomic nuclei to mathematical objects.”

“So they leave out stuff like what the Earth and Moon are made of.  Kinda.”

“Exactly.  Bohr’s interpretation was that quantum equations are statistical, that they give averages and relative probabilities –”

“– Like Schrödinger’s cat being alive AND dead –”

“– right, and Einstein’s question was, ‘Averages of what?‘  He felt that quantum theory’s statistical waves summarize underlying goings-on like ocean waves summarize what water molecules do.  Maybe quantum theory’s underlying layer is more particles.”

“Are those the virtual particles?”

“We’re almost there, but I’ve got an appointment.  Bye.”

“Sure.  Uhh… bye.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Wikipedia Skillz

On By rolcottIn General: Serious Stuff, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A young man’s knock, eager yet a bit hesitant.

“C’mon in, the door’s open.”

Tall kid, glasses, hoodie thrown back.

“Hi, Mr Moire, can I ask you some questions?  I’m doing a term paper on black holes and I’ve read up on in Wikipedia but there’s things I don’t understand and besides Ms Plenum said not to trust Wikipedia.”

“Hold on, son, let’s get acquainted first.  You are…?”

“My name’s Jeremy Yazzie, sir, and I’m like Richard Feynman’s archetypical intelligent high school student he wanted to explain things to except he gave up on particle spin.”

“Well, you have done your homework, though you’ve muddled a couple of his quotes.  But about Wikipedia — Ms Plenum’s mostly right but in my experience the technical articles are pretty dependable.  Those writers are usually more interested in explaining than convincing.  Have you checked Wikipedia’s Talk pages?”

“There’s, like, comments?”

“Sort of, except Talk pages lie behind articles and target what’s right or wrong and what should be changed to make the article better.  I often learn as much from the technical discussion as I do from the article itself.”

wikieyes
A riff on Wikipedia’s logo, original in Wikimedia Commons

“I’ve never seen those pages.  How do I get to them?”

“You need a desktop view.  That’s the standard view when you use a desktop or laptop computer, but you can only maybe get to it on a handheld device.  Depends on the device, the browser, and even their maintenance levels.  Do you have a handheld in that backpack?”

“Yeah, an iPad.”

“Safari, Firefox and Chrome can all show that other view.”

“I’ve got all three.”

“Great, pull up Chrome, get to Wikipedia and look up ‘Black hole.'”

… “Got it.  Uhh… don’t see anything about a Talk page.”

“You’re looking at ‘mobile mode.’  See that three-dots icon at the top right?  Tap on it and check the pop-up menu.”

“Hah, here’s one that says, Request Desktop Site.  I’ll tap on that.  Hey, now I’ve got tabs above the text, one says Article and another that says Talk.  Whoa, here’s one that says View Source.  Whups, now there’s a box that says I can start editing.  Better not, huh?  How do I get out of that?”

“Tap your browser’s backup button.  By the way, even though in principle anyone can edit any article, the Wikipedia moderators have locked down some of the most popular or controversial just to prevent update wars.  This article’s one of those.”

“Yeah, I just backed up then tried View Source again and it says I’m not an established registered user.  No duh, right?  OK, lessee what’s in the Talk page.  Umm, how-to stuff and then organization stuff and then, huh! ‘this article has been rated GA-class on the quality scale.’ People come around and, like, check your work?”

“Absolutely, which is why I think Ms Plenum’s advice is a little too pessimistic.  Trust but verify — if you see something you’d like to quote but you don’t want to look foolish, double-check with another source.  But on the whole I’ve found the science, math and other technical articles to be trustworthy.”

“Aha, the first set of comments is about my questions, Hawking radiation and how black holes evaporate and what are virtual particles and like that.”

“So many questions, so little time.  Let’s finish off with the browser issue before we dive into physics.  Bring up your Firefox browser on that iPad.”

“All right.  Mmm, I’m going to Wikipedia, and I’m searching for ‘Black hole’ … got it, but the display doesn’t have tabs or a three-dot icon.”

“Firefox has two ways to get to desktop mode.  One way is to tap the three-bar icon at the top right…”

“YESS! the pop-up menu has half-a-dozen options and there’s Request Desktop Site.  Hey, it toggles, I can flip modes back and forth.  Sweet!  What’s the other way?”

“Press-and-hold the reload circle-arrow in the address bar.”

“A-hah, that opens a Request Desktop Site button right under the arrow.  Cool, that’s a toggle, too.  How does Safari handle this stuff?”

“They use the reload circle-arrow ploy, same as Firefox, dunno who did it first.”

“Oops, late for class.  Seeya.”

“Don’t mention it.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Questions, Meta-questions and Answers

On By rolcottIn Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Uncategorized2 Comments

<We rejoin Sy and Vinnie in the library stacks…> “Are you boys discussing me?”

<unison> “Oh, hi, Ramona.”

“Actually no, Ramona, we were discussing relativistic time dilation.”

“I know that, Sy, I’ve been reading your posts. Now I’ve got a question.”

“But how…?  Never mind.  Guess I’d better watch my writing.  What can I do for you?”

“You and Vinnie have been going on about kinetic time dilation and gravitational time dilation like they’re two separate things, right?”

“That’s how we’ve treated them, right, but the textbooks do the same.  The velocity-dependent time-stretch equation, tslow/tfast = √[1-(v²/c²)], comes out of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. The gravity-dependent equation, tslow/tfast = √[1-(2G·M/r·c²)], came from his General Theory of Relativity.”

“But there’s no rule that says an object can’t be moving rapidly while it’s in a gravitational field, is there?  That Endurance spacecraft orbiting the black hole in the Interstellar movie certainly seemed to be in that situation.”

“No question, Ramona.  General Relativity’s just more, er, general.”

“Fine, but shouldn’t they work together?”

That got Vinnie started.  “Yeah, Sy, I started this with LIGO and gravity but you and those space shuttles got me into this speed thing.  How do you bridge ’em?”

“Not easily.  Einstein set the rules of the game when he wrote down his fundamental equations.  Physicists and mathematicians have been trying to solve them ever since.  Schwarzchild found the first solution within a year after the equations hit the streets, but he did the simplest possible system — a non-rotating spherical object with no electrical charge and alone in the Universe.  It took another half-century before Kerr and friends figured out how to handle rotating spheres with an electric charge, but even those objects are assumed to be isolated from all other masses.  Mm … how do you figure velocity, Vinnie?”

“Distance divided by time, easy.”

“Not quite that easy.  The equations say that if you’re close to a massive object, space gets compressed, time gets stretched, and the time and space dimensions get scrambled.  Literally.  Time near a Schwarzchild object points inward as you approach the sphere’s center, and don’t ask me how to visualize that.  A Kerr object has a belt around its equator where time runs backwards.  Craziness.”

“Well, how about if I’m not that close?”

“That’s easier to answer, Ramona.  Suppose the three of us are each flying at safe distances from some heavy object with mass M.  I’m farthest away so I’m holding the fastest clock.  We’ll compare Vinnie’s and your clocks to mine.  OK?”3-clocks

“Sure, why not?”

“Fine.  Now, Vinnie, you’re closer in, resting on the direct line between me and the object.  You’re at distance r from it.  How fast does your clock run?”

“Uhhh…  We’re both on that same radial line so we’re in the same inertial frame, no kinetic effect.  I suppose you see it ticking slower because of the gravitational effect.”

“M-hm, and my clock ticks how often between ticks of yours?”

“You want the equation, huh?  All right, it’s tvinnie/tsy = √[1-(2G·M/r·c²)].”

“You’re reading my mind with those subscripts.  Now, Ramona, you’re at that same distance from the object but you’re in orbit around it.  Measured against Vinnie’s position you’ve got velocity v.  How fast is his clock ticking compared to yours?”

“Mmm…  We’re at the same level in the gravity field, so the gravitational thing makes no difference.  So … tramona/tvinnie = √[1-(v²/c²)].  Aaand, he’d see my clock running slow by the same amount. That’s weird.”

“Weird but true.  Last step — Ramona, you’re deeper in the gravitational field and you’re speeding away from me, so tramona/tsy=(tramona/tvinnie)*(tvinnie/tsy)=√[1-(2G·M/r·c²)]*√[1-(v²/c²)] covers both.”

“OK, that’s settled.  Back to Vinnie’s original question.  LIGOs are set in concrete, their velocities are zero so LIGO signals are all about gravity, right?”

“Right.”

Ramona links arms with him.  “Let’s go dancing.”  Then she gives me the eye.  “Sugarlumps, Sy?  Really?”

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, high above the city, one man still tries to answer the Universe’s persistent questions — Sy Moire, Physics Eye.

~~ Rich Olcott

Weight And Wait, Two Aspects of Time

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

I was deep in the library stacks, hunting down a journal article so old it hadn’t been digitized yet.  As I rounded the corner of Aisle 5 Section 2, there he was, leaning against a post and holding a clipboard.

“Vinnie?  What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you.  You weren’t in your office.”

“But how…?  Never mind.  What can I do for you?”

“It’s the time-dilation thing.  You said that there’s two kinds, a potential energy kind and a kinetic energy kind, but you only told me about the first one.”

“Hey, Ramona broke up that conversation, don’t blame me.  You got blank paper on that clipboard?”

“Sure.  Here.”

“Quick review — we said that potential energy only depends on where you are.  Suppose you and a clock are at some distance r away from a massive object like that Gargantua black hole, and my clock is way far away.  I see your clock ticking slower than mine.  The ratio of their ticking rates, tslow/tfast = √[1-(2G·M/r·c²)], only depends on the slow clock’s position.  Suppose you move even closer to the massive object.  That r-value gets smaller, the fraction inside the parentheses gets closer to 1, the square root gets smaller and I see your clock slow down even more.  Sound familiar?”

“Yeah, but what about the kinetic thing?”time-and-the-rovers

“I’m getting there.  You know Einstein’s famous EEinstein=m·c² equation.  See?  The formula contains neither a velocity nor a position.  That means EEinstein is the energy content of a particle that’s not moving and not under the influence of any gravitational or other force fields.  Under those conditions the object is isolated from the Universe and we call m its rest mass.  We good?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“OK, remember the equation for gravitational potential energy?”

“E=G·M·m/r.”

“Let’s call that Egravity.  Now what’s the ratio between gravitational potential energy and the rest-mass energy?”

“Uh … Egravity/EEinstein = G·M·m/r·m·c² = G·M/r·c². Hey, that’s exactly half the fraction inside the square root up there. tslow/tfast = √[1-(2 Egravity/EEinstein)].  Cool.”

“Glad you like it.  Now, with that under our belts we’re ready for the kinetic thing.  What’s Newton’s equation for the kinetic energy of an object that has velocity v?”

“E=½·m·v².”

“I thought you’d know that.  Let’s call it Ekinetic.  Care to take a stab at the equation for kinetic time dilation?”

“As a guess, tslow/tfast = √[1-(2 Ekinetic/EEinstein)]. Hey, if I plug in the formulas for each of the energies, the halves and the mass cancel out and I get tslow/tfast = √[1-2(½m·v²/m·c²)] = √[1-(v²/c²)].  Is that it?”

“Close.  In Einstein’s math the kinetic energy expression is more complicated, but it leads to the same formula as yours.  If the velocity’s zero, the square root is 1.0 and there’s no time-slowing.  If the object’s moving at light-speed (v=c), the square root is zero and the slow clock is infinitely slow.  What’s interesting is that an object’s rest energy acts like a universal energy yardstick — both flavors of time-slowing are governed by how the current energy quantity compares to EEinstein.”

“Wait — kinetic energy depends on velocity, right, which means that it’ll look different from different inertial frames.  Does that mean that the kinetic time-slowing depends on the frames, too?”

“Sure it does.  Best case is if we’re both in the same frame, which means I see you in straight-line motion.  Each of us would get the same number if we measure the other’s velocity.  Plug that into the equation and each of us would see the same tslow for the other’s clock.  If we’re not doing uniform straight lines then we’re in different frames and our two dilation measurements won’t agree.”

“… Ramona doesn’t dance in straight lines, does she, Sy?”

“That reminds me of Einstein’s quote — ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.‘  You’re thinking curves now, eh?”

“Are you boys discussing me?”

<unison> “Oh, hi, Ramona.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Goldilocks Zone and The Three Gazillion Bears

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Crazy Theories, General: Fun Stuff, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Tell me a bedtime story, Uncle Sy.”

“OK, Teena, what kind of story?”

“One with bears in it.  Nice bears.”

“Hmm…  How about ‘Goldilocks Zone and The Three Gazillion Bears’?”

“Gazillion?  Is that what kind of a bear they are?”

“No, that’s a number word.  It means ‘more than you could ever hope to count.’  Like a million but way way more.”

“But if you can’t count them, how do you know there are three times that many?”

“You’ll see, have patience.”

“Little girls don’t have patience, Uncle Sy, I wanna hear the story.  Wait, water bears?”

“Mm-hm, they’re a different kind of bear.”

“What’s different about them, and what do they do with water?  I bet they swim.”

“Why yes, they do.  In fact, they spend most of their time in water or at least being wet.  Another thing that’s special about them is that they’re tiny, about the size of the smallest dot you can see on your Mommy’s computer screen here.”
waterbear 1“If they’re so small, why are they called bears?”

“Take a look.  Doesn’t she look kind of like a nice bear?”

“She’s got too many legs.”

“She’s got just the right number for water bears.”

“And she’s green.”

“Well, yes, but the picture’s kind of pretend and doesn’t show proper colors.  She’s so small she’s almost transparent.  She eats particles of algae and such, so maybe in real life she might be sort of green.”

“I like the way she’s smiling.  She reminds me of …  the fat man in the Laurel-n-Hardy movie you showed me last Saturday.”

“Oliver Hardy?  Yeah, I can see that.  Except the smiley bit is actually a wrinkle.  Her mouth is the round thing that looks like a nose.”

“That’s silly.  If her nose is her mouth how can she breathe?”

“Through her skin.  Animals can do that if they’re very small.”

“How else is she different?”

“Well, her kind’s one of Earth’s oldest animals.  Scientists have found water bear fossils over 500 million years old, twice as old as the oldest dinosaur.”

“Older than dinosaurs!”

“But the big thing and the big puzzle is, they’re amazingly rugged little beasties.  They live all over the world — high on mountaintops, at the bottom of the sea, next to ice at the South Pole and next to boiling hot springs.  In experiments, water bears have survived doses of chemicals and radiation that would kill most other creatures.  Astronauts on the ISS even exposed dried-out water bears to the vacuum of space.  The little guys just got happy-active again when they were brought back inside and dunked in some water.”

“What’s the puzzle?”

“Why are they so tough?  They make special molecules that protect them against dehydration and radiation and toxins even though they live in wet environments that don’t get irradiated and rarely get poisoned.  Fish and insects that evolved in lightless caves stopped using energy to make eyes they don’t need.  Why or even how have water bears held onto all that specialized protective DNA for hundreds of millions of years?”

“Does anybody know the answer?”

“Nope.  Some people have guessed that because water bears can survive exposure to space, maybe they came to Earth from another planet somewhere.  Maybe some advanced civilization sprayed water bears out into the Universe to spread life around.  Doesn’t that sound spooky?”

“Ooohh, yeah.  I like that.  Water bears from space!”

“But it gets better.  Maybe there’s different kinds of water bears for different kinds of planets.  That’s where Goldilocks Zones come in.  What did Goldilocks say about the porridge?”

“This bowl’s too hot and this bowl’s too cold, but this bowl is j-u-s-t right!”Water bears and planet“Yup, and that’s one way astronomers can classify planets.  Earth’s in the Goldilocks Zone for liquid water, essential for life as we know it.  Saturn’s moon Titan might support some other kind of life in its cold hydrocarbon seas.  If that’s the case, there’d be a much colder Goldilocks Zone for that kind of life.  Maybe there’s another, hotter Goldilocks Zone for life that’s happy in molten silica.  And maybe there’s water bears designed for each kind of Goldilocks Zone.”

“Mommy, Uncle Sy’s being silly again.”

“Nighty-night, Teena-girl.  Sweet dreams.”

“Nighty-night.”

~~ Rich Olcott