Lawnmower Boy Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 And if we can cut their pay and benefits in the process, it's just good business! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 They don't get paid nothin'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 As for the Pluto 'controversy', science isn't science if we start making exceptions. If Pluto is a planet then so is Eris for certain, and it becomes an exercise in arbitrary hairsplitting to exclude Chiron, Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Sedna, and Orcus, as well as an unknown number of other largish Oort cloud members. It is more useful to give these smaller icy bodies their own category. Indeed. We never had a clear definition of "Planet" before Pluto got thrown out. And it was either throwing Pluto out or taking a lot of new Planets in. Up to 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet Edit: Afaik the main reason it got thrown out was that it violated Rule 3. That is what you get from not properly clearing out your neighbourhood from anything that is not your moon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lawnmower Boy Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 That is what you get from not properly clearing out your neighbourhood from anything that is not your moon. Oh, yeah. Just go right on blaming the victim. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted February 5, 2014 Report Share Posted February 5, 2014 Come on, insensate objects can't be victims. Their owners, perhaps. And the Mi-Go owns Pluto. Oh no ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted February 6, 2014 Report Share Posted February 6, 2014 And every Mi-go drives a Yugo with his amigo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted February 6, 2014 Report Share Posted February 6, 2014 So I read the article Michael linked to, and the previous article that *it* linked to about the "Firewall Paradox." Frankly, I can't understand what makes a region of high energy contradict General Relativity: There's only a paradox if the "firewall" around a black hole means you can tell the difference between accelerated motion and a gravitational field, or if it in some other way creates a privileged frame of reference. The math is probably just too difficult to explain to a layman. The upshot of it all seems to be that black holes create problems for both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics until someone figures out quantum gravity. Polchinski, Hawking, et al. have just found new levels of problem. It's all just playing with math until someone comes up with a prediction that can be tested through observation or experiment. I think it's a bad sign that most of the physicists cited in the articles are also called out as string theorists -- another area where physics seems to have gone off into mathematical La-La Land. It's why despite Hawking's fame with the general public, I hear other physicists don't consider him or his work terribly important. At least not yet. The top-ranked theoreticians are the ones who predict something that is then observed: P. A. M. Dirac predicting antimatter, Wolfgang Pauli predicting the neutrino, Peter Higgs predicting his boson, etc. When someone detects Hawking radiation, he gets to join the pantheon of physics greats. Not before then. Dean Shomshak Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tasha Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 Indeed. We never had a clear definition of "Planet" before Pluto got thrown out. And it was either throwing Pluto out or taking a lot of new Planets in. Up to 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet Edit: Afaik the main reason it got thrown out was that it violated Rule 3. That is what you get from not properly clearing out your neighbourhood from anything that is not your moon. Also, one of the found Planetesimals was actually Bigger than Pluto. Which would have further muddied the waters of what was and what was not a planet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tasha Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 When someone detects Hawking radiation, he gets to join the pantheon of physics greats. Not before then. Dean Shomshak They just have to find a Black Hole that isn't eating something. Which is a problem all by itself. Once they can do that they should be able to detect any slight trickle of Particles coming from the object. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueCloud2k2 Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 I thought Hubble or one of the other deep-space telescopes caught a picture of a blackhole eating a pulsar or some such thing? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 Oh, there are many of those -- but the trick is to decide whether the eater is an actual black hole or some other freak of nature for which we have, as yet, no name. There is one thing proposed, I forget its name, but its one step denser than neutron stars. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 Quark stars? I've read speculations about collapsed objects that are sodense the neutrons get squished into a big fluid mass of quarks and gluons. It might be strange matter, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DShomshak Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 And supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies seem well established through observation. Though if I understand the theory, they wouldn't emit significant amounts of Hawking radiation. Clearly, physicists must build a super--duper collider powerful enough to create quantum black holes for study. There'd be some danger to this, I know, but this is for Science! Besides, once we have a black hole, we can throw Justin Bieber into it. That prospect might help line up the funding. (Hwy, I'd contribute to the Kickstarter.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted February 9, 2014 Report Share Posted February 9, 2014 That'd count as both terribly cruel and very unusual punishment, Dean. ^^ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted February 10, 2014 Report Share Posted February 10, 2014 By the way black holes are established observationally ... you can't find one that is interacting with its environment only via Hawking radiation. Perhaps more correctly, you might, but you would have no reason to think or claim it was a black hole. Right now things are claimed to be black holes only when the data exists to rule all other hypotheses out. Maybe by now everyone accepts that the big ones at the centers of galaxies are there, but that's it. A black hole must be proven to be one, and the nature of the proofs precludes definite identification of isolated black holes. The micro-black holes "evaporating away" via Hawking radiation would be detectable in a statistical sense, but we aren't seeing those, AFAWCT. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted February 10, 2014 Report Share Posted February 10, 2014 They just have to find a Black Hole that isn't eating something. Which is a problem all by itself. Once they can do that they should be able to detect any slight trickle of Particles coming from the object. Afaik the most promising prospect to proove Hawkins Radiation is finding a primordial Micro Black hole that explodes*. It only works with small ones because they might be loosing more mass/energy from Hawkins radiation** then they get from eating Cosmic Radiation and had small enough starting mass to actually explode around now. *With Hawkins Radiation Black holes can exploed. Basically they loose so much mass from it that they end up having to little to stay a singularity. And they won't just expand into a Neutron Star when that happens. **Apparently small Black Holes emit more Hawkins radiation. Quark stars? I've read speculations about collapsed objects that are sodense the neutrons get squished into a big fluid mass of quarks and gluons. It might be strange matter, too. There is a theorethical class of Exotic Stars, one of them a Quark Star: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_star http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_star Basically a Neutron Star really close to the "colapse into a Black hole" massborder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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