...Or if you want to hear what a field botanist sounds like in real life (yeah right,*)...
...you can waste hours on the You Tube channel Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Okay, the Chicago/Italian accent's layered on artistically thick, as is the pose that he's an amateur botanist. This guy's a really, really well-educated pro. But worth watching. Kinda fun too.
I'm envious of the millimeter scale ruler he's got tattooed on his middle finger. I was never brave enough to get one of those myself. Kinda regret it now.
*No one I know uses their technical vocabulary with quite such abandon or artistry. It's fun to hear it outside the classroom.
]]>(Human time perception changes such as tachypsychia, e.g. "leaves bobbing gently in the gale" are also interesting, though not (generally suspected to be) related; the neuroscience on these effects is not very good, yet.)
]]>The trick is to find a treat that the light is really keen to get...
]]>Well, no. But it is cool.
]]>Also, a different type of relativistic paradox-question (I‘m using this: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html):
1) An object accelerates, and its length diminishes relative to its rest length, and its mass increases (Although, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/tdil.html Problems with variable mass) v= 0.8660254037844386 c, l = 0.5, m=2.0….
I then posit a derived quantity called “relativistic density” (Rp) which at v= 0.8660254037844386 c, Rp= 4….
2) Let’s say I have an ultra-relativistic “light-squeezer” (Sorry, Alastair Reynolds) which can approach c so closely so Rp increases by a factor of more than 2E16, more than the density required to create a blackhole….
3) As it’s going by Terra, someone on the light-squeezer sees this San Jose Earthquakes ball and says: “Oy, we’re all Manchester United here!” and chucks it out the airlock. (Yes, I know you wouldn’t do this in reality, but this is a thought experiment.) ISTM that a Terra-side observer would see a small black hole (and not a bunch of Hawking radiation) which should presumably immediately evaporate coming out (at v very close to c) of another, larger black hole also moving very close to c...
I’ve not heard this brought up anywhere, so I’m clearly misunderstanding something. Could someone explain (in as lay terms as possible) what I’m misunderstanding?
]]>This, I think, may have been the basis of the suit to stop the Large Hadron Collider. Someone posited that it would spawn black holes that would Swallow The Earth (David Brin got there first), but anyway, the lawsuit was dismissed. However, the LHC did in fact go looking to see if it would generate low-mass black holes, and apparently it didn't generate any.
The lack of tiny artificial black holes sucks for multiple reasons. One is that they can't be used as a kewl new power source (see David Brin), nor can they be dropped into the Earth by accident (see David Brin), nor can they be quantum entangled and turned into traversable black holes.
Rather worse, there's a Randall Sundrum model of Brane cosmology that posited large extra dimensions as a way to deal with all the freaky dark matter/dark energy/hierarchy problem stuff on the way towards a Nobel. For our purposes as wacko SF writers, this flavor of Brane Cosmology looked like it would have been convenient for both hyperspace and warp drives. Alas, the lack of tiny, artificial black holes also apparently was a coffin nail for that theory.
Oh yeah, the hierarchy problem: gravity's a lot weaker than the other fundamental forces, and some people see that as a problem. Brane cosmology posits that the reason it's weaker than the others is that unlike the others, gravity's leaking into other dimensions (hence also dark matter). One test for the presence of curved hidden dimensions would be if gravity (moving at its C) arrived significantly faster or more slowly than did photons (moving at their C). Alas, the first test of this happened in 2017, when a merging neutron star was caught by all the LIGO detectors and detectors of photons of various frequencies at pretty much the same time. That's the other coffin-nail in the Randall-Sundrum brane cosmology.
However, if you want to get into alt-cosmology, you've got a clear path, if LIGO detects gravitons going faster than photonic C, LHC spitting out micro black holes, and the ability to entangle holes and then inflate them. That gives you hyperspace, warp, and wormholes, all through one Brane-y model. With a bit of handwaving, of course.
Apparently we don't live in that universe though. I'm sad.
]]>What's "UHC"? ... not that it matters now since she's dropped out and endorsed Biden, although I guess his stance on UHC now matters.
]]>My guess is it's barely within the realm of possibility. I won't be surprised if they do, I won't be surprised if they don't.
]]>I believe the "twins" are a reference to Heinlein's "juvenile" novel Time for the Stars. In that story identical twins are chosen because they can form an instantaneous telepathic link over interstellar distances. One twin goes on the ship & the other stays home. They don't rely on interstellar lasers for communications.
One problem they face is the twin who stays home ages & dies while the traveling twin remains young. If the traveling twin cannot establish a telepathic link with one of the stay behind twin's descendants, communications are lost. At the end, a Faster-Than-Light ship was developed in the interim and is dispatched to collect the crews of the Slower-Than-Light exploration ships & return them to Earth after many years have passed, but the crew has aged much less than those who remained on Earth. For them less time has passed than for those who stayed on Earth. Tom, the twin who traveled to the stars finds that he is now the same age as his own great-grandniece with whom he has been telepathically communicating since she was a child.
]]>Let's assume that they both agree to send a birthday greeting every year, and that the twin that leaves sets out on the initial birthday, at half the speed of light (as perceived by the stay-at-home).
The first signal takes no time at all.
A year later, the travelling twin sends out the message. But it's got half a light year to cover, so the stay-at-home sees it arrive 6 months after he's sent his message out. But for his own message to get to the traveller, it has to cover the half light year. So it's going to arrive later than the one the traveller sent.
So both are sending out their birthday greetings, only to have to wait longer and longer each year for their twin's message to arrive, because the gap continues to increase. Each sees the other 'living more slowly'.
(The above is not mathematically rigorous, but it should show the general idea.)
]]>I'm reading a university copy obtained through interlibrary loan.
]]>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
If so, it seems to me that NOBUS is a synonym for HUBRIS, which brings on NEMESIS.
]]>