Any Astrophysicists on ATS

So i am kinda clutching at straws here but i have a few questions about the universe,

i have thoughts on what is happening in space, i would like to prbably private message someone about my thoughts, mainly dont want to come across as an idiot, but there stupid questions,

so ihave been listening to some audio books recently and i understand relativity and quantum physics cant be combined, this attempted using string theory to link them hits dead ends, a missunderstanding of how the universe is expanding and at what seems to be an exponential rate is causing a block on understanding the universe, i have some questions i would like somone to answer, i dont doubt my thoughts have been looked at, i just would like somone to explain to me why what i believe cant be....


Essentially im looking for a mentor of sorts, and i think on ATS there are alot of armchair scientists who dont fully understand there choosen area of expertise, i know we can all be guilty of such things....


anyway... i ask for someone to chat too, feel free to PM me...


Thanks for your time.

reply to post by GonzoSinister

Here is a good source called "ask an astrophysicist":

This is the "Ask an Astrophysicist" service of the Imagine the Universe! web site. We are a small group of volunteers who work on space-based astronomical observations, including cosmic-ray, gamma-ray, and X-ray astrophysics. Our research subjects are often exotic, like black holes, dark matter, and the origin of the universe.

We have already answered many questions, and have an extensive archive of past questions and answers. Please consult the archive first to see if your question has already been answered. We attempt to answer as many questions as possible, but we are a small group of volunteers and cannot afford the time to answer all the incoming questions.

We will not respond to questions whose answers may be found in our archive or on our site, or questions unrelated to space-based astrophysics.

Here is another one: Ask an astronomer

Ask an Astronomer is run by volunteers in the Astronomy Department at Cornell University. There are several astronomers involved in maintaining this site and answering the questions sent in. Most of us are graduate students at Cornell, and all of us do this voluntarily, in our own time, fitting it in around our other work. ...Please take the time to browse our site and first try to use the resources online to find an answer to your question.

My advice would be to search those resources (and there are others) for the answers you seek. Some of the answers on some of the sites are written by graduate students in astrophysics, some are written by PhDs.

I'm not a professional astrophysicist, but I seem to know as much as some of the graduate students writing some of these answers. However, I don't have a lot of time to chat.

If you have a question that's not answered in the sources I cited, you can ask me and I can tell you if I know the answer or not...but if the question has already been answered there, I'm not going to be any happier than the people who run those sites, who ask you to not re-submit questions that have already been asked and answered. I suspect you'll find that most astrophysicists are busy people, unless they are retired or something, and I haven't run across any on ATS yet that I know of.

Chances are pretty good that if you have a question, you're not the first person to have it, and it's already been asked and answered, and you can probably find most such answers there if you look.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thank you very much,

i will look through these links this evening.

reply to post by GonzoSinister


the reson why ats rocks is YOU CAN ASK ANYTING LEGAL

in fact you can even start a op about anything science related,
and there are no stupid questions,
although you my not present information you know to be false as fact,

you can speculate on science and even add a conspiracy angle to it.

dont be shy just jump in

xploder

Originally posted by XPLodER
reply to post by GonzoSinister

 

the reson why ats rocks is YOU CAN ASK ANYTING LEGAL

in fact you can even start a op about anything science related,
and there are no stupid questions,
although you my not present information you know to be false as fact,

you can speculate on science and even add a conspiracy angle to it.

dont be shy just jump in

xploder

Everything Exploder said and, please don't keep your questions to yourself. We all have questions and we'd all like answers. Sure, some know-it-alls will jump in and be arrogant, but that's life.

Come on, spit them out here.

I am a particle physicist, currently working in the field, though Im more of an experimentalist than a theorist. Can PM me any questions you have, though I do only visit ATS every so often during breaks.

My attendance is sporadic for the following reason,
I find some of the posts here quite interesting because unlike some will have you think, scientists tend to be open minded. There is a limit however and as iv pointed out a few times in posts on the science and tech forum... there is a clear clear and wide separation between someone thinking outside the box and someone who just has no clue at all but wants to pretend they are keeper of great knowledge. I usually have my limit on the amount of time i can try and 'convince' or 'talk some sense into' some of the interesting people you will find here... so ill often step out for days or weeks at a time to recover from how utterly dry minded people can be.

Well since i posted i was in communication with Jacob Bekenstein who cleared up a good few things for me, i appreaciate the time he put into replying to me as he is a busy man....amongst other things i asked the question of Matter formation in the universe, i still although he explained current scientific outlook on the creation of matter within our universe feel there is somthing being overlooked... if we cannot measure or outright prove that Matter was definitivly created during the big bang, how can we be sure it is not being created an a tiny constant rate rather than one huge Matter creation event... also, instead of one big bang, could there not be many smaller bangs which happen relativley frequently that eject new matter into the universe essentially every time there is a super nova... like there was one, it exploded and ejected enough matter to create two this grew exponentially, but each time this created NEW matter rather than recycling already existing matter, i tried to explain it like a living organism making cells.... i am now rambling.....


i still have one stupid question so when the hell not.....

Space is a vaccum.....

now i'll get back to that in a minute, from my understand the time keeping mechanism in a "quartz" watch is a piece of quartz when in a vacum creates a pulse, that pulse is constant and thus is used to keep the actual time....

so if a large piece of quartz was in space, space bieng a vacum, would this not create a perpetual motion device, if the quartz is pulsing, without th eneed of any input, even if it needs an elctrical charge, could that not be harnessed from the sun to start it, then if the pulse could be contained, and the energy removed, could it allow for the device to power itself?

i appreaciate the reaoning this cant work is most likley the amount of energy needed to created the pulse is most likley greate than what could be harrnessed from the quartz pulsing and thus it would not be a perpetual motion device, however i would need somone who understands the input and output of sucha device to explain this to me....



I do love ATS

Originally posted by GonzoSinister
i appreaciate the reaoning this cant work is most likley the amount of energy needed to created the pulse is most likley greate than what could be harrnessed from the quartz pulsing and thus it would not be a perpetual motion device, however i would need somone who understands the input and output of sucha device to explain this to me....

Since you already answered your own question, I'm not sure this will help, but think of it like a tuning fork. The tuning fork doesn't do anything by itself. You have to strike it, which takes energy, then it does this:



Same thing with a quartz crystal. The technical details are different, but the principle is analogous, it just oscillates at a certain frequency when you excite it. So there is never any more energy out than in, and miscellaneous effects eventually slow down the oscillation, unless you keep adding energy like the battery of the quartz watch does.

Just about everything has effects that would prevent perpetual motion, and I can only think of one possible exception: superconductors.

Supposedly, a superconductor has zero resistance, so if you initiate a current flow in a superconductor and it really has zero resistance, it could be perpetual, however, I doubt the resistance is actually zero. The resistance may be so close to zero that we haven't been able to measure it...but not actually zero, but of course we wouldn't know about what we are unable to measure. If resistance really is zero and not just so small we can't measure it, that might be the only perpetual motion I can think of.

www.superconductors.org...

Once set in motion, current will flow forever in a closed loop of superconducting material - making it the closest thing to perpetual motion in nature.

Originally posted by GonzoSinister
so if a large piece of quartz was in space, space bieng a vacum, would this not create a perpetual motion device, if the quartz is pulsing, without th eneed of any input, even if it needs an elctrical charge, could that not be harnessed from the sun to start it, then if the pulse could be contained, and the energy removed, could it allow for the device to power itself?

i appreaciate the reaoning this cant work is most likley the amount of energy needed to created the pulse is most likley greate than what could be harrnessed from the quartz pulsing and thus it would not be a perpetual motion device, however i would need somone who understands the input and output of sucha device to explain this to me....

You answered your own question. In addition, the pulses from the shock would decrease in strength over time -- the aforementioned "tuning fork" is an excellent model.

Your next reading project should be to start on some math books (if you aren't already familiar with calculus.) Most of this becomes very clear when you can understand the formulas behind the model. The SPECIFIC answer to your question is on Wikipedia That's a spectacularly nice little section there on Wikipedia and links to the math which explains "how we know what we know."

Thanks guys,

To be honest as you both mentioned I was certain that was going to be the case
I just felt if I didn't ask I couldn't be sure, I try to avoid Wikipedia when there is an equal if not greater
Collection of knowledge on here (even if sometimes you need to weed through the rough)


Might ask questions on here more often as I usually voice my opinion but rarely ask people to clarify things for me


As I said thanks guys, muchly appreaciated

The creation of all matter in the universe, as I am sure you have read a lot into is quite problematic, however the particle physics of it, favours a hot big bang for a number of reasons. The possible holes in the theory are in the process of being tested at the neutrino beam facilities around the world.

This is, CP violation.

Particle physics says that, when you create matter from energy (gamma conversion) you must conserve certain quantum values, what these are physically are unknown, however they do effect physics at many levels so we have good reason to believe of these quantum values as existing and the laws of conservation being held (hey it works for absolutely everything observed so, its a pretty fair bet right?)

So from a gamma, you produce one unit of matter and one unit of anti matter. Essensially the problem we have is that, if this is what happened and does happen during matter creation, then the universe should be either full of just energy (matter and antimatter annihilate to produce a gamma) or we should see huge abundances of antimatter. So why dont we?

Well this is were CP violation steps in. At a very base level CP violation says that the couplings/interactions and decay rates of matter and anti matter do not have to be the same, nore the decay paths... (ie if you get a bit of matter and it decays in 5 possible routes, then the antimatter equivalent doesn't necessarily do a mirror 5 possible routes). It has been observed in the quark sector, and it can (depending on the model) produce a good matter/antimatter asymmetry, but it has been a problem for a while that the actual asymmetry that this produces is not enough to fit in with what we see today.

We need CP violation in the lepton sector also. We have seen hints of it in neutrino oscillation data, though nothing that sits well as super hard evidence, signed and sealed.

From particle physics, this is the best I can explain without going though and copying textbooks full of mathematics and i am sure that is not what you came here for.


Constant creation models I believe are problematic because the whole matter genesis and the 'removal' of antimatter from the universe requires high matter densities for amplification of oscillation effects (oscillations in particle Eigen states...) There are a few good candidates for this to be occurring at a constant rate, but these too are slightly problematic for a few reasons.

1) CRB - enormously energetic - source is unknown though a number of theories suggest plausible mechanisms, these result in creations of black holes, these objects tend to hold matter nearby rather than distributing it, this causes problems for the structure of the universe we see today.
2) Explaining the CMB, needs either a hot big bang or some horrendously complicated mechanism to produce the perfect black body curve that exists in its spectrum, bit issue for constant creation
3) Constant creation would suggest non-conservation of energy, and if not, then conversion from one to another. Any particles that spring into existence must do so following the physical laws that we have observed to be true (at the very least) and such, if matter was being created at a constant rate we would expect to see a smooth night sky of 511KeV gammas at the very least... because electron positron pairs would be constantly produced smoothly throughout the universe.

It is a very very interesting question, and many interesting theories and answers are out there to be found. We don't understand everything, and for some things we can only ponder and put together the best answers we can using the evidence we have. Keep seeking answers, to approach this how you have done speaks worlds for your attitude, which i may say is the correct one and a breath of fresh air...

Thank you...

as i said in the private message,

i appreaciate your kind words.