Quantum Physics

But hopefully not actual terminator style robots of death.   

its funny stars though, why are there stars, why do some decide to do starry stuff and others are just rocky planets........I feel I am turning into a 6 year old.... its been growing for a week or two, first maths, then zoom icons, now stars......sorry folks going through my second childhood or maybe having more than one blonde moment.... who knows.  

Redhead moments are far more intense.   

It's all about mass. Stars are actually being smashed together by gravity so strongly at their core that it affects the temperature. Between that and the nuclei being a little closer together, the protons finally smash together close enough that they fuse (usually electric repulsion between like charges keeps them too far apart). Once fusion begins, the temperature goes apeshit, and you get a star.

The fusion process is a bit more complicated in that first you need two proton/neutron pairs to form, and then those have to meet, but the fact is that high gravity from high mass is what makes it all possible. Planets aren't big enough; if Jupiter had 10 times the mass it would turn into a dwarf star.

that makes sense.       so this light turning into matter thing, is it anything to do with photo synthesis? or is it more heat n stuff?   but heat isnt matter, so maybe not, but plants produce matter because of light.   

Nothing to do with photosynthesis. Plants rearrange matter, they don't produce it. Except in that atoms in molecules change their mass ever so slightly due to different energy states, and this accounts for the energy brought in by light.

I guess this begs the question of what is meant by producing matter. Anytime you speed something up its mass changes, but the numbers of protons, electrons and neutrons doesn't. People would say you have to change the number of these little particles to produce matter rather than just changing the mass of these particles.

Matter is just brimming with energy ready to be released, which is why going from matter to energy is comparatively easy. Photons rarely have enough energy to produce a chunk of mass, plus they don't interact with each other very well. So you need a high density of high energy photons to make matter. Even stars don't do that, or if they do it's rare enough to be hard to see against the background of other stuff going on.

The iridescent effect in the wings of the blue morpho.

The South American butterfly's shimmering wings could hold the key to new bomb sniffing technology.
Insects have provided a range of innovations, including high-tech textiles, self-cleaning surfaces, cosmetics, and security tags.
Lepidoptera is the Latin name for butterflies, which means "scaly wing".

But when an electron microscope is used to zoom in to the nano-structure of the blue morpho wing scales themselves, a new world is revealed. This is what is inspiring scientists, like Professor Peter Vukusic, an optical physicist, at Exeter University.

"They are aesthetically beautiful," he said, "But scientifically, from the perspective of the physics which underpin the colour, they are hugely interesting. They are complicated."

At the nano scales revealed by an electron microscope there are structures which can only be described as Christmas Trees, standing up from the surface of the wing scale in long lines.

Made of chitin, these Christmas Trees are just one micron high - one thousandth of one millimetre.

The iridescent effect, which changes according to the angle of vision, is produced by light reflecting off the different structures in the Christmas Trees.
This is known as structural colour, which is not produced by pigments.

The air gaps between the Christmas Tree structures can be used to trap other vapours, changing the optical appearance of the surface accordingly.

"The American military are particularly interested in explosive agent vapour detectors," said Professor Vukusic, "Can such a system be ultra-sensitive to a range of explosive materials? In the long term there is certain potential for it. The morpho wing itself would not be used, but a mimic of it, more highly applied, is currently being developed."- BBC

'The amount of light in the universe can be measured accurately by studying tendrils of hydrogen which become ionised, or charged, when they encounter ultraviolet light.
The more ionised hydrogen you can spot, the more light should exist.
But, according to a new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the hydrogen tendrils suggest there is far more ultraviolet light around than is being emitted by galaxies and quasars.
An astonishing five times too much, in fact, and it is leading astrophysicists to speculate that the photons could be coming from an ‘exotic new source,’ or even decaying dark matter.
It means that 80 per cent of light in the universe is effectively missing.' -Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10955749/Where-has-all-the-light-in-the-universe-gone.html

So not enough gravity, most of the matter is missing, and now so is most of the light. It seems there is barely any of the universe thats not missing.  

Hoyle one of the geezers who discoverd DNA said, ': the chance of the occurrence of a new characteristic –a functional new segment of DNA – from scratch is similar to the chance of a modern jumbo jet assembling spontaneously from a tornado blowing through a scrap metal yard…

All that tells me is that DNA probably isn't made from scratch then.   

This is rather incredible, rather cool, and rather weird all at once-

“When you are at 10C, with no brain activity, no heartbeat, no blood – everyone would agree that you’re dead,” says Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “But we can still bring you back.”
The procedure, so far tested on animals, is about as radical as any medical procedure comes: it involves draining the body of its blood and cooling it more than 20C below normal body temperature.

Once the injury is fixed, blood is pumped once again through the veins, and the body is slowly warmed back up. “As the blood is pumped in, the body turns pink right away,” says Rhee. At a certain temperature, the heart flickers into life of its own accord. “It’s quite curious, at 30C the heart will beat once, as if out of nowhere, then again – then as it gets even warmer it picks up all by itself.” Astonishingly, the animals in their experiments show very few ill-effects once they’ve woken up. “They’d be groggy for a little bit but back to normal the day after,” says Tisherman.'- BBC

That certainly is curious!   

As for not having enough UV to produce the observed ionized hydrogen, to me the major disparity is between the present and past. I have to think red shifting has something to do with the change in observations. I suspect when they figure this thing out they'll have made some of the dark matter observations go away as well, and the explanation will not be nearly so mysterious.

Strange things are happening in Uranus - TVNZ

Strange things? In MY anus? It's more likely than you think.

I'd never heard of that before.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/11apr_george/

I wonder if thats what Douglas Adams was referencing when a new planet is discovered in the solar system in the final Hitchikers Book, it goes by the name Rupert, after the astronomers dog.

This is more a magician's trick than any great science or technology. If you know very basic optics, when you see the diagram and how it's used, it's sort of a 'duh' type of thing. Very limited. Of course the media has to blow it out of proportion...

http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/watch-rochester-cloak-uses-ordinary-lenses-to-hide-objects-across-continuous-range-of-angles-70592/

Eldorion wrote:I'd never heard of that before.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/11apr_george/

Yes Eldo, i'm cleverer then i think i am

'A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light.
They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons' shape - and slowed them to less than light speed.
The photons remained travelling at the lower speed even when they returned to free space.

The collaborators - from Glasgow and Heriot-Watt universities - are members of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance. They have published their results in the journal Science Express.

One photon they left in its normal state. The other photon was sent through a special mask.
The mask forced the photon to change its shape and travel slower than the speed of light.
Dr Romero explains: "After the mask, the photon is launched into a sort of racetrack about a metre in length.
"Then we take the time in which the unshaped photon finishes the racetrack, and the shaped photon's time as well, and then compare the two times."

If they had both been travelling at the speed of light it would have been a dead heat. But the re-shaped photon came in second.
Not by much - a few millionths of a metre - but it showed that it had not just been slowed by the mask, but had continued to travel at less than light speed even after it had returned to free space.- BBC


And where would such an idea even come from you may ask? Well I believe there is a hinted explanation given by the scientists that like all great Scottish innovations it started with a few buckies-

"It's just one of those big, fundamental questions you may want to ask yourself at some point in the pub one night. And if you follow through and you actually measure it it's quite amazing, isn't it?"

I'm supposing what they have done is take a photon which is a superposition of different wavelengths, and changed the phases of the wavelengths so that the group speed appears to be different.  Not unlike Michael Jackson moon walking.  I'd think the difference would only last over the coherence length of the photon, so that if they raced it over a longer distance the effect would go away.

Amazing Halfy! That's exactly what I was thinking! {{{what the buggery did that mean? }}}}

really kind of impossible to explain without animations, I'm afraid. And lots of Fourier analysis. Suffice to say that if they had pure single wavelength photons, they couldn't do this.

if they had pure single wavelength photons- Halfy

OK for the dummies and drunks which may be the same person, can you break that innocuous phrase down a bit?

Pettytyrant101 wrote:if they had pure single wavelength photons- Halfy

OK for the dummies and drunks which may be the same person, can you break that innocuous phrase down a bit?

Don't know how easily it breaks down, but I'll take a couple chips at it.

Fourier Analysis is a branch of math that's built on the principle that any periodic (regularly repeating) wave function can be written as a sum of simple trig functions like sine waves.  

Picture what happens when two water waves of different wave lengths overlap. Think of a short choppy wind wave traveling over the surface of a long rolling sea swell.  Sometimes both peaks come together, sometimes both valleys come together (in which case you get really big peaks and valleys).  But sometimes one wave's peak coincide with the others valley (then they cancel or partially cancel each other.)  

So sometimes you can get these weird visual effects where both main waves are moving forward in the same direction, but because of their different wavelengths, the super-peaks and super-valleys as they add together or cancel each other make an interference pattern that may look like there's an even bigger wave pattern that's moving slower, standing still, or even moving backward compared to the two parent waves.

Does that make some intuitive sense?

Fourier Analysis gives you tools for analyzing waves that are made up of a whole lot more different waves than that.  It's really cool stuff but it's not intuitive to most people.  I don't think I can go any further without speaking martian

OK how'd I do?

I find youtube videos that show it, but none that explain it. I'd love to explain it, but it would take a hell of a lot of time, so let's just show it:


You see three sets of wave packets: all moving at the same speed, but the waves inside them are moving at different speeds. This is a little different from the photon experiment, but if I can explain the above video, I can explain the photons.

the video was made by adding together two waves of slightly different wavelengths, producing that pulsing pattern you see above. But the speed of the smaller waves that make up the packets are independent of the speed of the packets.

In the video they made all the packets move at the same speed, while the waves inside move at different speeds.

But you can invert it in a sense, making the small waves all move at the same speed while the packets move at different speeds.

The small wave speeds in this second situation would represent the inviolate speed of light. But by adding several of these waves together of slightly different wavelengths (but the same speed) you'd get the bigger packets you see above, moving at a different speed.

It's possible to keep adding waves of different wavelengths until you get packets that are separated by great distances, so that the speed of the packets is effectively the speed you'd see of the light travelling inside them. By dorking around you can change the effective speed of light, even making it go faster than light! (this has been done).

The trick is in adding things together just right, and to keep the packets together for a long time is an art: they tend to disperse. So it was a nice bit of manipulation, but no bending of physics.

What was described didn't say any of this, but since I can't think of any other possible way this could be done (and nobody seemed to be scratching their heads over violations of physics), I'm just assuming this is how it was done.