Monday, September 14, 2015

Very interesting....

Well, what do you know?  After giving much thought to the matter I've come across a little theory that should give the LHC a real workout.  While scientists have been racing ahead into quantam theory and back,  they seem to have missed a little something. 

I noticed that although fusing two deuterium ions,  a small amount of matter is converted into energy.  Well,  since the result is an alpha particle (helium) the two neutrons and two protons are still there.  That has to mean that the energy is coming from the conversion of quantum particles to energy.  So,  after a bit more thinking,  I've been able to conclude that it is highly probable that each element of the periodic table has protons and/or neutrons of specific quantities and arrangements of the many quantum particles they're made of.  In short,  the protons and/or neutrons of each element are different from each other element. So that the next task at hand will be to try to learn what these different compositions might be.   

The first handle into the matter,  seems to me,  will be the exact energies released or absorbed in the creation of each element and/or it's isotopes.  I also see a hint that it might be possible to cause chain reaction type changes,  which would allow for the transmutation of one element to another along different pathways that might be available,  but that's further into the future from here.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Just a few thoughts....

I had a question: "How do super giant stars form?"  No easy answer came to mind,  it does seem to be a question that no one gives much thought to.  But,  think about it for a moment,  if a gas cloud is gradually contracting,  then at some point it will have at it's center,  a star globe of about one solar mass.  Well,  that being the case,  and since stars light up at that point,  a stellar wind will begin blowing the extra gasses away.  Meaning that the accretion process should halt star formation at about one solar mass.

Then it came to me,  what if,  instead of a star simply accreting from a gas cloud,  it accreted from a cloud containing heavier elements?  The heavier elements would sink to the core and prevent the star from fusing hydrogen,  until the temperature at the surface of the core became hot enough.  That would mean that accretion could continue way past one solar mass,  depending on how big a non hydrogen core the star had.  My guess is that the process is so sensitive to interference that,  even a non-hydrogen core of a few meters would be enough to delay the onset of fusion,  until the star became several solar masses larger.  Finally,  once the fusion process did get started, the non hydrogen core would be degraded by being bombarded with protons,  until it transitioned to less stable elements or gasses which the turbulence could then carry away from the core.

Well,  if true,  this process has other implications. One being that giant and super giant stars would be relatively rare in the early universe ,  since helium was the only heavy element available, Because one solar mass stars are so stable that their lives are approximately 10 billion years, it takes too a long time before they throw off enough heavy elements to form the giants the universe needs to make the heavier elements and discharge them.  But wait,  the universe was much denser then and gas was in such great abundance,  it is possible that early stars were forming heavier elements in these gas clouds by bombarding them with radiation.  Also stars would have been in such great number and so close together,  the opportunity for stars to grow into larger,  shorter lived stars by the simple process of combining.  For this purpose I'd assume that galaxies had not yet formed because there were no black holes in existence yet.  Thus,  stars were free to roam to wherever gravitational attractions might take them.

Well,  that got me thinking about another facet of the big bang.  The early formation of matter.  Normally nature follows the path of least resistance,  so why should it do otherwise even way back then?  I'd say that after this point of pure energy began to expand and temperatures began to descend,  energy would begin to transition to matter and my guess would be that quantum particles would be the first to form.  These particles would then coalesce into photons,  then the photons would form electrons, then the electrons would collide and form protons and neutrons.  Since it takes one more electron to form a neutron than it does to form a proton,  that suggests there's a statistical  calculation that can be pursued,  that just might throw some additional light on the early universe matters. I've read that as much as a quarter of the gas in the early universe was helium.

It comes through to me that what we're probably looking at is that everything is made of just one thing,  that takes many different forms,  depending on some laws we do not yet understand. 

Documentary || The Universe Beyond The Big Bang






Monday, May 11, 2015

Faster-Than-Light Travel: Are We There Yet?

Long before the Empire struck back, before the United Federation of Planets federated, Isaac Asimov created Foundation, the epic tale of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Asimov’s Empire comprised 25 million planets, knit together by sleek spaceships hurtling through the galaxy.
I can get you there fast! Flickr: Craig Cormack
And how did these spaceships cross the vast gulf between the stars? By jumping through hyperspace, of course, as Asimov himself explains in Foundation:
Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light… and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.
What the heck is Asimov talking about? Did he know something about a secret theory of faster-than-light travel? Hardly. Asimov was participating in a grand science fiction tradition: when confronted with an immovable obstacle to your story, make something up. READ MORE
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At one point,  in the early expansion of the universe,  the expansion did,  in fact,  exceed exceed the speed of light.  So,  like most things we learn about nature,  we do have a clue as to whether or not it can be done.  Obviously,  the theories of how the "big bang" progressed,  include a clue that the speed of light can be exceeded.  Now,  the hard part will be,  determining just what those conditions were, that allowed hyper light speed way back then.  Of course,  even if we manage that,  it's no guarantee that we'll be able to duplicate it.  It may,  very well,  be dependent upon the condition of the universe at that point in time,  which we have no way of duplicating.  Or,  it may reveal that there is a way to do it.

Of course, it's a very mind bending piece of work that's probably best left to the geniuses.  Thank heavens we finally have a program afoot to find these people,  who may,  right now,  be some kid living in abject poverty in some foreign and very backward land.   

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Hmmm... Just noticed something odd about the Universe etc.,

I was watching a speaker talk about religious beliefs and while he was explaining why dinosaurs didn't live 3 or 4 thousand years ago,  he illustrated the time scale of earth,  from formation to humans using the length of his arm.  That's when it hit me.  It took almost two thirds of the time,  from the formation of earth until the more complex life forms (dinosaurs) appeared.  With humans appearing at the last end of the last third.  Isn't that about what happened with the Universe formation?  It took almost 2/3 of the time from the big bang until now,  for the complex materials (heavier elements) to form in sufficient quantity to produce life capable planets. 

If that's some sort of probability curve,  perhaps the formation of life capable planets and the emergence of intelligent life,  might be more closely grouped on the timeline of the universe,  than previously thought.  I'm thinking Carl Sagan wise,  where he speculates about how large or small the time differences might be,  between human emergence and that of any alien culture.  Where there might be some sort of distribution of habitable planet formation around stars,  that is very closely connected to the two thirds of the time the universe has been in existence. 

Obviously this is a problem of probability,  where,  if some theory,  based on theoretical "observations" were to determine,  for example,   that because of the quantity of heavy elements present at given points in time,  life sustaining planets could not form earlier than THIS = Xn.   Then from
Xn forward the probable rate of planet formation might be deduced by other statistical observations,  to arrive at a period of time, over which habitable planets could begin forming.  From there we would
then theorize that nearly two thirds of the time from formation to now,  would be needed for intelligent life to arrive. 

Of course,  this exercise if mounted,  would still leave some pretty large gaps over which intelligent life might have formed on exto planets,  perhaps on the order of millions to even hundreds of millions of years,  but nothing like the time periods over which we had to guess about before,  which would have been as large as billions of years.  By reducing the possible separation of the times during which life could have appeared anywhere in the universe,  we might just happen on an idea that might tell where best to look. 

It's not so far fetched as one might think at first glance,  after all,  we did discover the "big bang" and were were not only able to locate a time for it,  but times for the emergence of it's various  features as well.  We discovered that the speed of light was not the limit it is today,  but that,  it only imposed itself on the universe after it had cooled and/or expanded to certain proportions.