Friday Open Thread [6.22.12]
Yikes! We need Open Thread fodder!
As if you would need a reason to not read Politico, here is another one: a Politico reporter gets canned for telling someone on MSNBC that Mitt Romney is more comfortable around white people. How do you get fired for making an observation that pretty much everybody will make:
Williams noted that Romney’s preference for Fox & Friends, and similarly partisan settings, was interesting because it was “unscripted and it’s the only time they let Mitt off the leash.”He made the point that for Romeny to be successful he needs to broaden the range of people with whom he interacts.
Williams: Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him. That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in some town hall settings, why he can’t relate to people other than that. But when he comes on Fox and Friends, they’re like him, they’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.
Forgot. It is a firing offense for political reporters to tell the truth about conservatives.
More reasons why you shouldn’t read Politico — they are paranoid and they maintain a Hunger Games atmosphere over there. That seems to be a couple of the takeaways from a Huffington Post magazine piece (you have to pay for the app to see it) summarized in this Capital New York piece.
And here’s the Question of the Year:
What interests you today?
Blue-Gold football game tomorrow; kickoff at 7pm with pre-game activities starting at 4pm. Pick up some tickets even if you aren’t sure you are going; it’s for a good cause.
Anybody else a little weirded out that the Sandusky Jury’s still out after almost a day? I’m all for them taking their time and being totally sure so there’s no technical issues and they feel secure in their decision, but I sort of expected this verdict to be in after like 20 minutes.
V: There are 48 different counts being discussed. It’s entirely possible that they agree on some, maybe even most, but are discussing the others.
that’s an excellent point. I didn’t remember that they’d have to individually consider each count.
Trial by newspaper is always different than the courtroom version. How about the new train station in Newark? Might be enough to draw New Jersey Transit down here if we’re lucky.
I tried to get y’all interested in the Ravelympics issue, but no. :p
Well chew on this if you are bored. I often ponder over theoretical ideas of what drives the mechanics of our known universe. You know, the laws of nature etc.
I have a theory that what scientists are saying is dark matter is really just the gravitational influence of a singularity that is bigger than the black holes we hear about at the center of galaxies. They are so big that all the galaxies in it’s gravitational influence revolve around the surface tension, or heliospherical like make up of this singularity, like little dust specks .
We can only see the spheres that are small enough to emit or reflect light, black holes, which are just bigger spheres with too much gravity to emit light, are a recent discovery.
What rational is there that says we can’t have an almost infinite succession of larger spheres or singularities in the universe. Ones that are too big for our perspective but can be seen by their influence on the movement and shape of our galaxies. The consensus is that the influence is “dark matter”. I think it’s just a bigger sphere. Keep it simple, stupid.
Tom Carper and Chris Coons vote NO to mandate labeling for foods containing GMO derived ingredients. Consumers are not to be permitted to choose whether they want to buy these products or not.
“Tom Carper and Chris Coons vote NO to mandate labeling for foods containing GMO derived ingredients. Consumers are not to be permitted to choose whether they want to buy these products or not.”
What’s the matter Andrew? Don’t you like being a lab rat?
So much for the Democrats watching out for your health. I wonder how much money Carper and Coons get from Monsanto and DuPont.
– Love the thoughtful comment @ 10:57, fightingbluehen.
I guess “recent discovery” is apt in the relative terms of the universe…..I took Harry Shipman’s Black Holes class at the UD back in 1979.
– Hate to see our Senators voting against consumers on GMO labeling.
Yes Nancy, 1979 is recent, and exactly what black holes are is still theory. I don’t subscribe to the theory that black holes are formed by collapsing stars. I think they formed just like other celestial bodies. They are just bigger in that they have more mass. How do I know this? Well I don’t. That’s why it is theory.
FBH, please look up the definition of scientific theory. You’ll find that your “theory” doesn’t come close to scientific standards.
How’s this Pandora? I also don’t completely except that the universe is expanding. Light is affected by gravity right? So how can we be sure that the spectral red shift of distant bodies emitting light is proof that those bodies are moving away from us. It could be that the light is being gravitationally influenced .
Still not good enough. An intelligent person wouldn’t compare their lazy-boy musings with decades of research by qualified scientists. Your “theory” doesn’t have one thing in common with scientific theory. An intelligent person would know this – they would also know the difference between your “theory” and scientific theory. That’s the point.
“It could be that the light is being gravitationally influenced .”
Dummy, that is the point of black holes. Gravity redshifts their light all the way to black. It may well turn out that redshift created by recession is the same phenomenon as redshift created by gravity. We don’t know enough about gravity yet to say. The real structure of the universe is likely weirder than we can imagine.
The life cycle of stars from birth to black holes is well known because we have observed stars at every stage of their life cycle, and worked out exactly what is happening inside the star at each point.
Theories are proven by a preponderance of observational evidence to the highest degree possible. You are 100% correct though that all scientific observations might be clever illusions created by angels. In that sense, all theories might be wrong.
So how can we be sure that the spectral red shift of distant bodies emitting light is proof that those bodies are moving away from us. It could be that the light is being gravitationally influenced .
Scientific theories can never be proven, only disproven or invalidated. They become advanced toward be used as laws, or facts, or standard models if they consistently avoid being falsified. To be an actual theory you have to present not just an idea, but a mechanism (currently or eventually testable) that could falsify the theory.
The question you raise is a variation of Fred Hoyle’s old “steady state” universe model. For the universe NOT to be expanding, then one or more of the following would have to be true:
1. The universe would not be isomorphic in terms of cosmic background radiation, which, from our best observations to date, it appears to be.
2. Gravitational lensing would work differently in a universe where redshift was accounted for mostly by gravity and not by expansion; to date all data collectible regarding gravitational lensing is consistent with an expanding universe.
3. The existence of larger galactic structures like the “great wall” and the “dark river” cannot be adequately explained in a steady-state model, particularly as the observational data on the “dark river” since 2009 is consistent with a super-structure of galaxies moving with a different directional vector than the general expansion of the visible universe. The existence of a major component of the visible universe with a different directional vector is inconsistent with the gravitational operations necessary for a steady state, gravitational redshift universe.
That’s the point.
Like I said… there is a difference between FBH’s “theory” and scientific theory. A big effing difference.
“We don’t know enough about gravity yet to say”- tell my 40something body that, it seems to know a lot about it.
FBH, it sounds like a ‘guess’ not ‘theory’, that’s all.
You guys are pretty cranky. FBH made a discussion starter remark, he/she didn’t invalidate peer-reviewed science as a construct.
World needs more de-caf, on a pretty Saturday morning, 😀
Heragain, this isn’t the first time FBH has compared his “theories” to peer-reviewed scientific theories – he’s an expert on climate change denying, as well. He took a UD course once, ya know. This isn’t a discussion starter. And I’m through pretending it is.
Puck, I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing. I’m talking about the ‘red shift’ as it relates to the Doppler effect. A black hole would only effect the reading of the red shift if it was between the object and earth.The gravitational influence that I allude to has to do with my theory (guess) that a much larger body or mass is influencing the reading of red shift.
Good point heragain. Sorry FBH, “dummy” was over the top and wasn’t necessary in my comment.
As far as gravity goes. Gravity and time are the most influential forces in our known universe, but I don’t know which one is more important. In space they could actually be considered the same thing I believe.
If the origin of the universe was a big bang, theory says that there were equal amounts of matter and anti matter generated (symmetry). Presumably some of the matter and it’s opposite collided and were annihilated. However, if we and the visible universe are matter, where did all the anti matter go?
I led a team at SLAC in CA a number of years ago to build a particle accelerator and detector that sought to answer that question. While the project went as planned, it raised more questions The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is also involved in that research. There is speculation that dark matter may be a partial answer to where all the anti matter went.
There is a theory (CP Symmetry) which postulates that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle. But experiments have demonstrated violations of this law for certain particles (CP Violation). So matter and anti matter do not appear to be a mirror image of each other for all particles, which brings into question the big bang and equal matter and anti matter thing. So, no answers yet but more information to digest.
I think it’s turtles. Turtles on top, turtles on the bottom, turtles all around.
Now to get even deeper and question Einsteins theory that time stops when the speed of light is reached. Why are the objects that are drawn into black holes not visible in the event horizon. They should be frozen in time sitting there, reflecting light. Maybe they never reach the speed of light as they enter the black hole.
Pandora, I never denied climate change. How the hell did we ever come out of the last ice age if the climate didn’t change.
“They should be frozen in time sitting there, reflecting light.”
Uhh. No. Any light coming from an object near an event horizon will be highly red shifted. Even though the time it takes to get that light out from the event horizon approaches infinity, the total amount of light is fixed.
…therefore it is not sitting there reflecting light. Despite having all the time in the world, there is no time for that.
Some say that the universe is like a big heartbeat. Expanding to the gravitational limits of it’s momentum, only to be pulled back again. Some call this the “BIG Bounce”. When it gets pulled back, the pressure builds and it expands again like water in a coffee percolator. It never actually becomes a singularity in it’s pulled back state. More like a liquid in a pressurized state.
@fbh “Some say that the universe is like a big heartbeat.”
Yea. Some said that. But with the discovery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, a lot of scientists stopped saying that.
Yeah LE, but the event horizon is still outside of the actual light killing gravitational influence of the black hole. So we should be able to see the light of the objects frozen there. Like I said. Maybe the objects never reach the speed of light so they never sit there, they just get pulled in with no fanfare.
“Expanding to the gravitational limits of it’s momentum, only to be pulled back again.”
The Oscillating Universe was a strong theory. Until 1998, when it was observed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.
I think the real answer is so weird we can’t conceive it yet.
@fbh “So we should be able to see the light of the objects frozen there.”
Uhhh. No. Your choice of words is poor.
Consider this situation. A space ship is in a black hole dive. As it travels from one mile above the event horizon to the event horizon (in very little time) it is sending off SOS signals and emitting light waves. These represent a FINITE number of photons (remember wave particle duality).
Now a distant observer can “see” those photons including the SOS signals for a very long time. The space ships appears to stop at the event horizon and never go in. But as time goes on, the signal gets weaker and weaker. Eventually, you’ll only get one photon per minute and then one per hour and then one per day coming from the ship. From your perspective, the ship never enters the black hole. It just fades away at the horizon.
@FBH. Since CERN recently measured a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light (unvalidated and unrepeated) it calls into question even that absolute limit.
I, for one, agree that the real answer(s) are so weird we do not have the ability to either conceive or comprehend it. With all we do know, there is even more that we don’t know (Stephen Hawkings notwithstanding).
@Liberal Elite – Nice analogy!
@FBH – Check out some of the computer modeling that people have done (Bolshoi Simulation). The fact that the observable universe lines up so closely with the results of the simulation means that they are very close on the parameters an variables set in the simulation, validating many of the more popular models. The space for radically different theories of the universe is rapidly contracting (pun!).