I bet this guy can hear light.

Catch Up Post

Everything in the electromagnetic spectrum is 'light', and travels at the speed of light. This includes visible light, light that's just outside of our visible spectrum (IR and UV) and all the other crazy stuff like radio waves, and all the various kinds of radiation. The upper end of the spectrum is bad for us since it has a HUGE amount of energy, the lower end is harmless (it has less energy than light).

PRO TIP: If you're going to travel at relativistic velocities, sit at the BACK of your spacecraft.

Whilst light can be viewed as a wave (or ray), it can also be viewed as a particle. This is called wave-particle duality and is very cool. Technically wave-partical duality applies to everything but we don't notice its effects.

The particle form of light is called a photon, it is the smallest possible unit of light, or quantum. This is typically the way people get introduced to quantum physics (which is also very cool).

I haven't done any of this in over 7 years, to please feel free to correct any errors.

Still, nothing actually travels faster than C. Imagine two laser beams crossed. You can move the source of the beams such that the point where they cross changes faster than C, but nothing is actually going faster than C - all the light involved is still only going C.

friend14! friend14! friend14!



I lol'd.



Correctamundo. Although, some people don't like to call EM radiation that is outside the visible range 'light'; otherwise, they assume you are only talking about the visible part of the EM spectrum. EM Radiation works just fine.

Always was told to call it EMR at school and always have.

Dammit! This only got linked to me yesterday so I shared it here without checking dates.
Sorry for the belated news, or non-news as it seems to be going by the thread.
But at least we got a discussion out of it

but doesnt the front of your spaceship start to become the back (to an outside observer) at reletivistic speeds?

....no

I made a mistake, this statement was not accurate. I apologize.

Aw man, you took all the fun out of it by coming back and owning up like a real human being. You're supposed to leave in a huff and ignore us until the next physics discussion when you submit the same exact idea and the cycle repeats. You're no Friend14.

That's pretty cool of you, though.

alpha, I think you're thinking of length contraction, where the closer you get to the speed of light, the shorter (in the direction of your moment) you will appear.

The irony is that I work for a telecommunication company that performs work on towers all the time. In fact, I try to get out in the field at least once a week. The last two sites I went to were roof tops, I'm hoping tomorrow to be able to actually climb a tower. I'm hoping for a Monopole or Guyed tower since I've already been on a Self-Support tower and I think those would play more against the fear of heights I used to have.

PS, the reason you don't want to be at the front of your ship is that the EMR in front of you gets blue-shifted to lethal levels. You want to be at the back of a ship that has decent EM shielding between you and the front.

Ohh, I never thought of the blueshift being dangerous, but I guess it'd essentially be like staring into a nuclear explosion as far as blasting you with gamma rays.

Haha. Out of curiosity I looked up some friend14 posts to get all the references. Simultaneously the saddest and funniest thing ever.

Quanta is what i heard.

So why MUST u sit at the back Spacecraft there, to what were u referring?

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Because the EMR infront will blue shift to lethal levels, or atleast that's what I think he said.

Ok, you're officially more awesome.



Yes, it's quanta.

Quanta is the plural of quantum.

You're right, I'm an idiot.

What the hell is this? The unprecedented maturity thread? What happened to good old childish stubbornness?

Here is the original paper (as that article is shockingly ****e)
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0405062
but I could find no peer-reviewed journal where it was ever published.

The intensity of spherically symmetric radiation is usually proportional to 1/r^2 (like gravity), but the beam intensity of Singleton's device appears to be proportional to 1/r. This is pretty cool, but it won't explain anything about pulsars unless it can be shown to maintain this over long distances. The device has only been tested over 600 metres, it would have to be tested over several kilometers to show that non-spherical effects are not dominating.

YOU'RE A ****.

The sun orbits earth, Prove me wrong using only what you can find in your basement.

Fine, lemme just download some things and move my computer to the basement.


But first I must build a basement.

Proven wrong with a star chart and a Spirograph

Okay how about this: Prove the existance of the Atom with only what's in your basement.

Gold leaf and the Americium out of a smoke detector.

Next.

Hmm, Uhhh.
Weak Nuclear force.
You're pretty good at this, but mind telling me how that one worked?

Alpha particles are deflected by gold at a measurable rate meaning mass and charge are not distributed evenly in matter.

Most people don't keep beta emitters in their homes so I don't know how you'd demonstrate the weak force.

you use the americium decay to fire alpha particles at the gold leaf. If matter were not condensed into the atomic form we currently accept to be true, there wouldn't be any reflected alpha particles.

As it happens a small number of alpha particles will **** into gold nuclei and rebound towards the BOLD SCIENTIST.

Joncy is quick.

How would you evacuate the vessel using only household items? It's probably possible, maybe using parts from an old television and a vacuum cleaner, but I'm not sure how

Either way could technically be considred correct. They are spinning around each other, although the center of rotation is much closer to the sun than the earth. (Possibly inside.)