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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
 Posted - 25 Aug 2010 : 05:34:01
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Hi Joe, you'll remember that I had a bit of a problem deciding on the speed of gravity being either h = c^2 / b^2 or barh = c^2 / b^2
b being the speed of gravity. All I had to do was divide the mass in E = mb^2 by 2pi but being a bear of little brain this confused me.
Then your post got me thinking about dimensionless numbers again. C^2 / b^2 is dimensionless and I want to work in nothing but those numbers. Remember that for the speed of gravity we get something very close to c^3 Now, I wanted a dimensionless number for particle masses and the obvious choice is the reduced Planck mass. I divide any mass particle by that; or multiply by the reciprocal. Just to see what would happen i multiplied C^2 by the reciprocal and then worked out what the planck mass would have to be, to give me the speed of gravity of about 2.92E 25 The reduced planck mass is approximately 4.34E-9 = Sqrt(barh c / 8pi G )
Just with a pocket calculator and only working to a few decimal places I get a Planck mass of sqrt(barh c / 15.92pi G)
Remember that when we are talking about the planck mass particle, we are talking about a micro black hole. We take the Compton wavelength and make that equal to the Schwarzschild radius,
h / mc = 2Gm / c^2
Its mass is proportionate and not yet settled, it's in the ball park for expressing masses as dimensionless though. |
Edited by - Stoat on 25 Aug 2010 05:34:40 |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
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Jim
1607 Posts |
Posted - 25 Aug 2010 : 14:58:04
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| Hi Sloat, You find great links-this one is a gem. I sent an e-mail to the author and will let you know if anything develops. |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
Posted - 27 Aug 2010 : 03:15:13
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| Hi Jim, I get the impression that the article is just a heads up. I don't think we're going to see a paper on it for quite awhile. I think the guy wants to sound out what might be causing the results, other than neutrinos, before he puts pen to paper. |
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Jim
1607 Posts |
Posted - 27 Aug 2010 : 13:53:39
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| Sloat, I'm interested in knowing if all radio active isotopes act the same way. This stuff gets so small it also might be a measuring error. The article is a bit breezy but I think thats a good thing. |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
Posted - 28 Aug 2010 : 03:14:51
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Hi Jim, it doesn't say what the rate is for any of the radioactive material they've looked at but it must have been large enough for it to have been noticed by accident. As it's partly seasonal, they will be looking at things like temperature and humidity changes in the measuring equipment. it really does sound like they've done that and are now dipping their toes in the water to see what the community thinks.
The annual energy release from earthquakes is about 1E 25 ergs, the energy release from radioactive decay is a thousand times more !E 28 ergs per year, or 1E 6 J/sec That's an awful lot of energy. Even if this variation is very slight, it will have an accumulative effect on the millions of tonnes of radioactive materials making up the earth.
I noted the almost coy way that an unknown particle was introduced into the article. They have to be thinking graviton here. Well, gravitons will be e able to go straight through the Earth as if it were glass; in fact a lot of the Earth is glasslike. Though I can't see graviton flux as varying to any great degree, over billions of years. Neutrinos yes, but then we have the problem of how they can change decay rates, they shouldn't do much of anything. Another problem is that we don't know a lot about convection rates in the layers of this glasslike rheid material at depth. A sudden change in radioactive decay rates could cause differentiated dramatic changes to the layer system. That would give us increased vulcanism, earthquakes and global weather changes.
All very interesting stuff. |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
Posted - 28 Aug 2010 : 03:36:08
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| Oh one possible bummer about this. I had hoped that the infamous Pioneer anomaly could be solved by the use of an ion rocket. There are, I believe, a few out there at the moment, constant thrust motors, so we could detect any gravitational oddities out there. If this neutrino thing turns out to be right, then I don't think we'll have constant thrust but a very slight variation. |
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Jim
1607 Posts |
Posted - 28 Aug 2010 : 12:57:50
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| Sloat, How has the annual decay rate been determined? You say its 10E25 ergs per year or 10E6 joules per sec? Which one is about right? How was the earthquake energy flux estimate determined? |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
Posted - 28 Aug 2010 : 13:46:49
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Hi Jim, No, I said it's 1E 25 ergs per year for earthquakes and a thousand times that 1E 28 ergs for radioactive decay. Earthquake activity is monitored globally and to give you an idea how accurate the equipment is, a seismological station in England picked up the sound of torpedoes blowing up on soviet sub the Kursk. Well it is possible that in any one year there might be a series of earthquakes, that kill thousands of people. Yet the yearly average stays about the same, it's just where they happen.
The data on radioactive decay obviously has to be an estimate of how much radioactive material the Earth actually contains but results from deep mines seem to confirm that estimate. 1E 28 ergs per year or 1E 6 Joules per second. I put the estimate in Joules simply for people who prefer to think in those units. Huge amounts of energy in any system of units. |
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Joe Keller
USA
747 Posts |
Posted - 01 Sep 2010 : 16:12:06
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quote:
Originally posted by Stoat
Hi Joe, you wouldn't happen to know of an "idiots guide to Lie algebra" would you? ...
Hi Bob,
My best recommendation is van der Waerden, "Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics". I've only read a little of it, but I think it's the best book for your needs (or mine) on this subject. Lie (pronounced "Lee") groups cover a lot of ground which includes commonplace things like rotations and Lorentz transformations. There's no royal road to geometry, but I think van der Waerden is the best at laying out what one needs to know to do original research. Good luck!
- Joe Keller |
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Joe Keller
USA
747 Posts |
Posted - 01 Sep 2010 : 16:28:32
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Digression on Knots
I tested some knots by tying them in braided cotton/polyester sewing thread (Coats & Clark "All Purpose Dual Duty Plus"). Using three lengths of thread tied together, with two knots, to make a triple length string, I tested the knots in pairs, one against the other. I used slowly increasing pulls, two trials for each knot pair. The results of the trials always agreed. The break was always at one knot or the other, never both, and never in the untied part. Strongest to weakest:
1. Flemish bend a.k.a. Figure Eight Bend
2. Reever bend
3. Rosendahl bend aka Zeppelin Bend
4. Carrick bend
5. Square knot aka Reef knot |
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Stoat
United Kingdom
863 Posts |
Posted - 02 Sep 2010 : 04:42:12
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Hi Joe, thanks for the info. I've been thinking about knots just lately as well. It seems that the human Y chromosome has large blocks of palindromic code. This is thought to aid its stability, as it doesn't have a duplicate of itself like the X chromosome. So I thought, we can take any "word" and duplicate the letters and reverse them. I thought, mississippi; as it has four characters. That would give us a palindrome of "mississippiip****issim"
Where the knot comes in. Mitochondrial dna forms itself into a loop. Lets make a loop of three of those mississippi palindromes, which will form a helix that joins up. It has to join up in such a way that the verticals of the dna ladder have a sugar that joins to a phosphate on each leg.
Well this is a mobius and we're going to get six crossing points, three of which are going to be a trefoil knot. The crossing points can slide over each other, so the dna in reproducing itself has to have cuts but there's no way of saying where they'll be in terms of our "words". In fact our "words" might not be meaningful code at all, all they have in terms of order might be the fact that they are palindromic. Note also that in that double mississippi word, we could drop one of the centre letter "i's" and still have a palindrome but that would mean having to put in an extra half twist, to get the legs of the ladder to meet up as sugar/phosphates.
That's about as far as I've got with it. What I've been thinking about, is the famous story of when Gauss, and his class, were told to add all of the numbers from one to a hundred. Gauss simply reversed the sequence, added the numbers, multiplied and then divided by two. A sort of palindrome.
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Requiem for Relativity
