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A strange world full of odd facts


Beardie

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Don't forget that keeping the cow in the Greenhouse will generate all those nasty greenhouse gases.

 

Out of interest, do we have any professional cosmologists/ astro-physicists amongst our membership here? Being very much a layman who has just picked up a few things I would love to pick some expert brains on things like "How did energy change into mass?" "What is the true 'atom' of the universe? That is, as in the original model of the atom as the indivisible base unit of matter, what is really the base unit of the universe?"

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On 11/13/2019 at 7:25 PM, Pete in Lincs said:

So, in conclusion, the shiny gold we find underground is the product of shiny stars going bang and when it fell to earth it squished the forests into oil?

Or was I reading all of the above wrong?

No, got it spot on.

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Hi Dave, it's going the usual way, like one wheel has fallen off and the bearings on the rest are shot. If it was going great I would be worried 'cos I would know there was something seriously wrong! 😁

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2 hours ago, Beardie said:

"How did energy change into mass?" 

This is an easy one, which you can demonstrate with a simple - albeit life-threatening - home experiment.

Weigh yourself. And then eat nothing but fried breakfasts, 3x  a day for a month. Weigh yourself again at the end of the month, and you will see how the calories - energy  - have converted into mass.

Notice also how fat from the sausages & bacon dropped into your frying pan will spit. This is a meataphor for the big bang.

Compare the pattern of grease spots thus produced on your cooker to a random selection of stars in the night sky, and you will see that the distribution is similar. 

All of this is conclusive proof of something that escapes me just now. However, the real question (which has divided scientists and philosophers for years) is: ketchup or brown sauce?

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5 hours ago, Beardie said:

Out of interest, do we have any professional cosmologists/ astro-physicists amongst our membership here? Being very much a layman who has just picked up a few things I would love to pick some expert brains on things like "How did energy change into mass?" "What is the true 'atom' of the universe? That is, as in the original model of the atom as the indivisible base unit of matter, what is really the base unit of the universe?"

 

I wouldn't call myself a professional but I do have a BSc in Astrophysics (best bit of the course was getting drunk with Patrick Moore in the pub at lunchtimes when he came to guest lecture!) 

 

Energy and Mass are just versions of each other so the question HOW has no real answer, it just does. The classic equation from Special Relativity 

 

E = MC2

 

Is derived from a large number of other other equations and shows that mass and energy are equivalent.

 

As for Atoms, there isn't yet a 'base unit' that we have discovered. Atoms are made up of subatomic particles called Quarks, which in turn seem to be made up of other things. One of the theories that one of my old professors came up with is String Theory which to be honest I don't understand. In the end its all lumps of energy, but with different properties that interact in weird ways.

 

The big goal is theoretical physics is what is known as the Grand Unified Theory which will link General Relativity which is all about how gravity works on the large scale - ie Planets, Stars and Galaxies and Quantum Mechanics which is all about the subatomic world where other forces come into play instead of gravity. I had a friend who used to work with Stephen Hawking (and didn't  have many complimentary  words about him!) and she tried to explain this stuff to me years ago and it went over my head... theories about us actually living in a 7 dimensional space but because 3 of the dimension were really small we didn't notice them... do what?

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Thank you for your response @Kallisti

What I have been trying to come to terms with is that to my mind, if all matter is simply energy in another format, then, surely, there is a base unit of energy/matter and that everything is derived from different amounts and/or arrangements of that base unit combining to form the leptons, pions, mesons, bosons, gravitons, quarks etc. etc, and, of course, their anti-particle equivalents also. As I understand it, the current general held belief is that, up until around 350 million years after the Big Bang, there was no matter only energy and then that energy started to coalesce into the basic building blocks of matter and that begs the question, "were there different types of energy that combined to form the first building blocks of the first atoms or is energy a primal material with only one 'flavour'?" I then find myself wondering quite how in the whole wide universe, arranging the same basic 'building material' in different geometries and quantities can produce all the different flavours that are required to build everything. If you add mud to mud you get mud but, somehow, our universe seems to add mud to mud and get a rainbow as a result. 

 

I can't say I really buy string theory, superstring theory, quantum loop gravity etc. and, in particular the idea that is posited of there being additional dimensions that are, rather conveniently, too small for us to see. My gut feeling is that there are only the four dimensions we already know and love so well.

 

At times there seem to be so many conflicting and sometimes incredible but entirely theoretically possible explanations for everything that a divine deity in charge seems far more simple and sensible. Some of the theories are wild like the idea we are all in a giant alien computer programme or actually inside a black hole and then I seem to recall an idea from Quantum physics that, if I recall correctly, supposed that there is only one 'primal atom' that is the entire universe and is simply 'everywhere at once and always'.

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10 hours ago, Beardie said:

Don't forget that keeping the cow in the Greenhouse will generate all those nasty greenhouse gases.

 

Out of interest, do we have any professional cosmologists/ astro-physicists amongst our membership here? Being very much a layman who has just picked up a few things I would love to pick some expert brains on things like "How did energy change into mass?" "What is the true 'atom' of the universe? That is, as in the original model of the atom as the indivisible base unit of matter, what is really the base unit of the universe?"

Interesting fact related to this big question (& I think you’ll need them to build not just CERN’s replacement but the one after that before they manage to get a theory even close to answering it)

 

The entire explosive force of the Hiroshima atom bomb was the result of the conversion of less than a gram of matter into energy

 

(http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jul-aug/24-numbers-nuclear-weapons-bomb-stockpile-peace & https://thebulletin.org/2015/02/the-weight-of-a-butterfly/)

 

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This is one of the reasons CERN want to build the Ever Larger Hadron Collider so they can dig deeper down into the structure of the elementary particles.

 

There are lots of theories being developed because when you get down to that level 'common sense' evaporates and you are left in the quantum realm which seems to have lots of similarities to Alice through the looking glass! Theories will come and go, its the way science works - a theory will last only so long as it will fit the available facts and can make some predictions that can be verified. As soon as it fails that test it either gets modified or abandoned. There has always been a desire for that 'Eureka' moment, but this stuff is so complex nowadays that it is unlikely to happen.

 

Even after confirmation of the Higgs Boson, a huge milestone in quantum mechanics as that DID confirm a whole set of theories that up to then had been simply conjecture, even more questions are derived from those discoveries. My head spins now on the difference in what we know now compared to when I did my degree in the early 80s! I remember the excitement of Voyager passing Saturn (I still have a signed manuscript from Patick Moore which he wrote for me 2 weeks after returning from the JPL Labs after Voyager 2 passed Saturn for the in-house physics magazine I was editing back then), but now we've had probes landing on Titan and asteroids - its simply astonishing!

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3 hours ago, Kallisti said:

This is one of the reasons CERN want to build the Ever Larger Hadron Collider so they can dig deeper down into the structure of the elementary particles.

 

There are lots of theories being developed because when you get down to that level 'common sense' evaporates and you are left in the quantum realm which seems to have lots of similarities to Alice through the looking glass! Theories will come and go, its the way science works - a theory will last only so long as it will fit the available facts and can make some predictions that can be verified. As soon as it fails that test it either gets modified or abandoned. There has always been a desire for that 'Eureka' moment, but this stuff is so complex nowadays that it is unlikely to happen.

 

Even after confirmation of the Higgs Boson, a huge milestone in quantum mechanics as that DID confirm a whole set of theories that up to then had been simply conjecture, even more questions are derived from those discoveries. My head spins now on the difference in what we know now compared to when I did my degree in the early 80s! I remember the excitement of Voyager passing Saturn (I still have a signed manuscript from Patick Moore which he wrote for me 2 weeks after returning from the JPL Labs after Voyager 2 passed Saturn for the in-house physics magazine I was editing back then), but now we've had probes landing on Titan and asteroids - its simply astonishing!

Talking about this kind of stuff (well matter/antimatter asymmetry) with a mate yesterday (yes, we’re that cool) he recommended this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00358VI00/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 which you might find interesting

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No-one got any interesting facts to impart? Come on fellows you all must have an interesting tidbit or two to relate! All aspects of our world, history, science etc. are welcomed.

 

Here's one from the world of Scottish Piping again... During the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 there were as many, if not more, highland bagpipers (Including the one labelled the 'king of pipers' Donald Ban MacCrimmon) marching with the government forces as there were with the forces of the 'Young Pretender'. It is even told that, on the capture of Donald Ban by the Jacobite forces, their pipers went on strike and refused to play while he was a captive.

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1 hour ago, Tony C said:

the Palace of Westminster is built...

And Boudicca is reckoned to be buried under Platform 9 at London's King's Cross railway station.

 

I have always wondered why the Iceni decided to bury her at a station?

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5 minutes ago, bhouse said:

And Boudicca is reckoned to be buried under Platform 9 at London's King's Cross railway station.

 

I have always wondered why the Iceni decided to bury her at a station?

Well you can get a direct train from KX to Kings Lynn, so it's commuting distance.

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There is a secret war cabinet room in the basements of Northern Ireland's Government building Stormont. 

It was fully fitted and equipped for use by the Westminster government and the Prime Minister in the event of a successful invasion of England by the Germans in 1940 or after

 

There is also a war cabinet underground bunker near Portadown which was to be used by the Westminster government in the event of a nuclear strike on the UK.

The bunker was still in use until 1999. Every month the telephone system there phoned certain observation posts for a check-in. That stopped in about August 1999.

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