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Physics Articles For Hackenslash

Dragan Glas

Well-Known Member
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Not wishing to clutter up other topics with these, I intend this topic as a repository of articles for Hackenslash's attention/interest.

I see the "Cosmic Crop Circle" conundrum appears to be solved: the phenomenon seems to be correlated with radio galaxies.

A more interesting discovery is that there may be anti-stars out there in our galaxy.

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Dude, you're much too good to me. I knew there was a reason I always liked you.
 
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Thank you, and you're more than welcome.

The first article made me wonder if any of the gamma-ray bursts, which had puzzled scientists recently, might be associated with the anti-stars, by being in the correct range of gamma radiation proposed for matter being annihilated by anti-stars...!?

"And there's more!", as a Northern Irish comic used to say...

Mysteriously Slow Pulses From Giant Old Stars May Finally Have an Explanation

Violent Stellar Flare From Sun’s Nearest Neighbor Breaks Record

New All-Sky Map of Milky Way’s Outer Reaches Released – Could Offer a New Test of Dark Matter Theories

“The Unicorn” – Closest Black Hole to Earth Ever Discovered

Scientists Have Discovered a Unique and Powerful Dark Matter Detector

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
The first article made me wonder if any of the gamma-ray bursts, which had puzzled scientists recently, might be associated with the anti-stars, by being in the correct range of gamma radiation proposed for matter being annihilated by anti-stars...!?
[/QUOTE]
I haven't read any yet. I've been trawling some old threads at Ratskep today looking for stuff I've written about but not covered on the blog. Found a load of stuff I'd entirely forgotten about, including a solid explanation of Supersymmetry, a plethora of posts about FTL "travel", and all manner of goodies. I have a fair bit of material to go at now, but I'll get to reading in the next day or so. I still have two posts in the works, one on propositional calculus and other representational arcana and another about the absolute limits of knowledge...
"And there's more!", as a Northern Irish comic used to say...
[/QUOTE]
It's the way I tell 'em.
Oooh, more shinies!

Thank you so much. I have a lot of catching up to to.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
It's a cracker.

I don't have much to say on the astrophysics but at least I can join in on the Frank Carson and Jimmy Cricket appreciation!
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
The paper on antistars is fascinating.

Thing is, I wasn't even under the impression we were looking for 'missing antimatter', for a couple of reasons. First, because of the anthropic principle. The more antimatter there is in the universe, the less likely it is that we'd be around to ask where all the antimatter is. Second, because of the fact that we already understand experimentally why matter dominates the universe, because we've seen CPT symmetry violation in the lab (speaking of something I haven't covered in depth on the blog).

ETA: Found this paragraph while trawling some of my old posts yesterday, which is apposite on this point:

In some experiments in the early '60s at Princeton, James Cronin and Val Fitch were studying the decay of particles known as K-mesons (kaons), and discovered that around 2 decays in every 1,000 occurred in a way that violated CP symmetry. These experiments only involved interactions of the weak nuclear force, but there were good motivations for thinking that such violations occurred with the strong force as well (though no strong violations have yet been observed, and QCD (quantum chromodynamics, the quantum field theory dealing with strong interactions) and there is no validated reason in QCD for CP violation to be conserved; this is a 'fine-tuning' problem for QCD known as the 'Strong CP Problem')*.

Further experiments have been carried out, and other violations found. In 2004, some experiments at Stanford measured B-meson and anti-B-meson decays, and found that CP symmetry violations occurred in about 13 percent of decays (out of about 200,000,000 pairs).
 
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arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Just goes to show that we're still short of a full explanation for the universe.

As regards FTL "travel", there was a recent paper proposing that certain solitons would make FTL travel possible: a set comprising solitons that can be produces with positive energy (which we can produce), and that do away with the "Twin Paradox", by ensuring that time passes at the same rate. Previous work reduces the energy requirements to achievable levels.

Another recent paper showed that Alcubierre's approach won't work for travel through space but could be used for "time-travel".

The idea being to put someone with an incurable disease in a "time capsule", and slow their clock down so that only a short time passes for them, whilst a century might pass outside the capsule when a cure might be developed.

Alternatively, by growing crops within a capsule with a speeded up clock, you could grow multiple harvests in the time it takes to grow one in normal time.

I'll have to find them for you.

Kindest regards,

James
 
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arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Thank you, James. Your timing couldn't be better. I started a new piece on FTL just an hour ago. 1619792273674.png
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
BTW, what do you think of the header image format? I've been working on something to be standardised, so that they all take a similar form, with consistency in font selection and the text and background the same colour as the blog design. Does it look good?
 
arg-fallbackName="Dragan Glas"/>
Greetings,

Yes, it's a pleasant format. The links are a lot more easy to see than on LoR.

I was wondering if it might be an idea to put the topic group headings in parallel as tabs, where clicking on each tab shows the list of related articles. At present a visitor has to scroll down the full length of the page to reach the last articles. As you write ever more, it'll take even longer to scroll the full list.

Just a thought!;)

Kindest regards,

James
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
I have been giving that some thought. When I started the blog, I knew precisely nothing about web design, and didn't give as much thought to the overall structure of the blog as maybe I should (which is to say that I thought briefly about it but was too keen to get on with the actual writing).

I've been doing a lot more thinking about things like SEO, and that sort of thing, and the layout is something I've been thinking hard about. I suspect I'll have a, index page links to sub pages, categorised as on the front page (although that needs some work as well, because a lot of those posts cover more than one topic, or at least there is crosstalk between posts. Where do I put the post that deals with entropy as position on an energy gradient? it's physics, but the topic of entropy rarely comes up in talking about physics, unless it's directly about thermodynamics, it's usually related to other areas like evolution, because misunderstanding the physics impacts understanding of evolution more than it does the understanding of the physics, if that makes sense.

I'm also working on a way to automatically cross-link from a given post to other posts directly relevant to the topic. I never bothered with this sort of thinking before, for the simple reason that it simply wasn't a problem when I only had a few posts to reference between. As the content has grown, it's become more of a chore to make certain that the relevant material is all linked at the bottom.

This is something I'm learning as we speak and I'm trying to rekindle interest in the blog. Turns out there's a shitload I didn't know about how to do that. The blog has grown in readership entirely organically and without any real strategy and, where I've done things right, it's generally been in ignorance and more by good luck than good management. For example, link-sharing, which I do only because it's quicker to link to something I've already written as an explanation than to write fresh each time (and it also cuts down the errors through occasional lack of rigour in my language).

I have some good ideas going forward, and I'm constructing a brand new template for the blog offline as we speak. It's slow going, and I'm taking my time, as there's not really a rush to get it done. When I started the blog, I never intended to do any design work at all. It wasn't ever supposed to be a permanent thing, just somewhere to gather my thoughts while trying to cobble together enough material for a book, somewhere my extremely knowledgeable friends could see it and pick it apart for errors. Once it started getting readers (at one point, I was touching 2K hits per day, which is not crap for an extremely niche blog grown organically), I did some rudimentary redesign based on feedback, and added things like pdf download functionality for those who struggled with the then colour scheme and wanted to see black on white.

Anyhoo, sorry for the ramble, and thanks for the suggestion.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Oooh, shiny!

Worth noting that the failure to deal with baryon acoustic oscillations has been the fatal flaw in every proposed alternative to the Lambda-CDM model.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Shinies!

Spent most of today making diagrams. Probably just short of halfway through the piece on warp drives.

I've also been faced with an interesting challenge by @Sparhafoc :)
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Not my place to reveal, since @Sparhafoc goes by a different moniker there, but:

1620199140721.png
I have to say, this inline pasting of images is something about the new LoR I really like. Let me share one of the fruits of yesterday's labour. My diagram-fu has really come on.

1620199188215.png
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
There's a backstory though which connects the 2 ideas.

There was a guy on RS who became increasingly crotchety and antagonist as he got older, and started playing these self-inflating routines where he'd put other people down according to beliefs he said they had - he was the One True Scientist - so he knew, regardless of what scientists were discussing, whether an idea was true or not in advance.

So even if people were merely discussing some aspect of FTL, he'd chime in to call them Trekkies, suggesting they were stupid and believed in fantasy. Even when no one had actually said 'FTL is possible' he decided that was their position anyway.

On completely unrelated threads, he repeatedly tried to call my legitimacy into question by saying no one should believe what I said when I wasn't even aware that pllesiosaurs weren't mammals. Of course, I'd never said anything of the sort. I challenged him to source his accusation, he carried on making the accusation, others challenged him by searching my post history and noting I'd never once talked about plesiosaurs across thousands of posts, and in response he started concocting all these fantastical stories to continue claiming he was right - maybe the mods had deleted the thread to spare me the embarrassment, maybe I'd changed user name so I wasn't shown wrong by his mastery. This went on and on for months across multiple threads.

It was a long time ago now, but it did become a source of long-term amusement. Thus, Hack's challenge, to find some way to refer to or discuss the concept of plesiosaurs being/not being mammals in an entry on FTL.
 
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