Voyager 1 and 2 still alive!!!! 38,000 mph!

Yeah, I will have to respectfully disagree with him on both points. He is self contradicting. Intelligent and correct are two different things. "Scientists" that become involved with celebrity status and public image tend to pander to it. But because where "science" is now is only related to fact rather than based on you can say almost anything. We all do the best we can. But speculation is fun and sensationalism isn't limited to the press.
 
RCB beat me to one part of my rebuttal. I am with him.

On the rest, as best as i understood Elon Musk's point, he's talking about a variant of the holographic universe. I am firmly behind him with SpaceX .. not at all with the whole "Matrix" vibe.

Seriously smart people have postulated that. My feeble mind doesn't buy it though. It has the problem of another analogy. IF we are IN the simulation, HOW do we know that? And why is the "creator" hiding from us?

Ask a fish about the water he swims in, and (if he even understood you or some other fish who could "talk") he'd say "what water"? Here, Fish, take the "red pill" and wake the heck up! :)

My mind is open to all ideas .. but I am more in the "Unified Field" camp (John Hagelin, Henry Stapp, et. al). And, to be fair, there are people that think Hagelin, Stapp, et. al, are full of sh*t. :) Therefore, by the transitive property, so I may be full of sh*t too.

This picture -- complicated and I only understand it superficially after "Level 4". The top is the world you can see. Move down to smaller and smaller things .. its murky, but that's where I think the answers are.

We just aint smart enough .. yet. but a scant 200 years ago, we didnt understand hardly ANYTHING on this chart.

Get all the way to the bottom of this chart, assuming we get through "supersymetry", a TALL order, and 99.9% of the mysteries of THIS Universe are answered.

The Universe next door? Says very little about that one, OR the infinite others that "likely" exist.

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I went to Purdue for engineering (though I'd bounce around though several fields before settling on a program that I only use a portion of) and I will say the one thing that stuck with me is the uncertainty in the scientific community amongst itself. There is a lot of ego stroking in academia. But yes, like you I love hearing ideas.

The "horror" stories of college level scientific research would fill a book. It definitely eroded my trust in "science".

:D
 
I'm with you .. ah, but there's beauty in the 'uncertainty". its the excellent researcher's best friend.

It make's you ask "why", then you hypothesize, test, fail and learn, OR succeed and learn, and start all over again. Pain in the ***? it was for me. I am happy some folks choose to take it on and are good at it.

The ego part? yeah, I could do without academic snobbery. just cuz a scientest is brilliant by any measure, they still can and do act like a**holes, around each other and especially "lesser" mortals.

its just human nature though .. watch what happens here when someone with knowledge feels "dissed" talking about ... what were the options on a 1969 300 vs a 1970? a thread can go careening off the road and down a ravine within three posts.

hopefully, this one doesnt do that ... if we can just stay on the science. I am not welcome at some Thanksgiving dinners with my own family cuz i think the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.

I'll have to drop out if we have that argument here. :)
 
Slightly off topic, but funny. Know how to start a fight in a group of astronomers? Ask them how many planets are in the solar system.
 
Darnit. there's TEN! Pluto is a planet, and I don't care what anybody thinks. Free Pluto, Free Pluto! :poke::D

And then they found Planet X .. its gravity signature is there, except its 100 Billon miles away.

Seriously though, its surprising the passion some folks have around that .. both ways. You're right .. wanna see some science nerds fight?

Bring up Pluto and watch the fur fly (but nobody will get hurt in a nerd fight -- even I can survive one) :)

Honestly though, now that we have seen it up close? It does look like a Kuiper Belt object the sun captured (its not gaseous OR rocky). I have made my peace with its new standing as a "dwarf" planet.

Still, it could be a baby "rogue planet" snagged as it was passing through our solar system?

There's a thread here where we drive this topic around the block .. a few months back.

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I personally have been fascinated by Ceres. So close and fairly large, but certainly isn't a proper planet. Planet X is also interesting. But I think the introduction of "planetoids" has cooled interest in it by the public.
 
I read an interesting paper last year about what our universe might be. They suggested that our universe may be the event horizion around a 4th dimensional black hole! Blew my friggin mind.....and a lot of the observable, and mathematical details of our universe seem to agree with the hypothesis.

Again love the abstract theories and ideas out there!
 
I read an interesting paper last year about what our universe might be. They suggested that our universe may be the event horizion around a 4th dimensional black hole! Blew my friggin mind.....and a lot of the observable, and mathematical details of our universe seem to agree with the hypothesis.

Again love the abstract theories and ideas out there!

See that's the thing. as wild as that seems, you can tease it outta the math. It by NO means makes it right, but it also does NOT make it wrong.

The boo birds/cat calls were deafening .. from 1790 to 1971 .. until they found a black hole. Anybody on the bandwagon up to, and a decade or so past 1915, were heretics .. it tends to be the WILD, "heretical" stuff, as long as its "elegant", that finally gets empirically confirmed.

Using Newton’s Laws in the late 1790s, John Michell of England and Pierre-Simon Laplace of France independently suggested the existence of an "invisible star." Michell and Laplace calculated the mass and size – which is now called the "event horizon" – that an object needs in order to have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light.

In 1915, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted the existence of black holes. In 1967 John Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, applied the term "black hole" to these collapsed objects.

Source: HubbleSite - Reference Desk - FAQs
 
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Now there's something you don't see everyday.

The Southern Hemisphere of Jupiter. This view may NEVER have been captured (usually its a planar view -- cloud striations are horizontal).

Juno Mission to thank for this. Launched in 2011, got to Jupiter last summer.

source: APOD: 2017 February 13 - Cloud Swirls around Southern Jupiter from Juno
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Look at that orbital path .. that's extraordinary.

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Courtesy NASA
 
We're having fun with Schrödinger's Cat. The quantum stuff aside, part of the beauty of Schrodinger's work was it was largely a "thought exercise".

He was, to be sure, a mega-brainiac physicist, and a pioneer in quantum theory, but he asked himself this question:

"If I put a cat in a sealed box with a device that has a 50% chance of killing the cat in the next hour, what will be the state of the cat when that time is up?

With one the greatest words humans ever uttered -- "WHY?" -- as a basic hypothesis, and then tortured experiments, and equations, and decades later, the answer is UNTIL and 'observer" looks, the cat she put in that box, is alive (somewhere) and dead (somewhere).

So am I and, IF you embrace the concept, so are you and everybody else. Somewhere in the infinite multi-verse, I am in an "eigenstate" where I am anything i can think of (US President, or I have 20 kids by 9 wives, or I;m 8 feet tall, etc) :)

Otherwise, there is (a) NO SUCH THING as mathematics, OR (b) there is something REALLY BIG we are ignorant of. (a) is ridiculous, and (b) is highly likely, BUT mathematics IS a reliable discipline and will help us get smarter.

If you wanna go deeper, looking into the "observer" effect. Fascinating, baffling stuff. :)
 
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Last one on "thought experiments".

I turn to Albert Einstein, famous for being able to envision complex scientific ideas by just looking at the world around him. Lemme explain with examples of his actual thought experiments.

1. What if I'm chasing a beam of a light. Can I catch it (he first thought of this when he was 16 years old btw)?

The answer is "No" (light CANNOT be "stopped" in space - it always must be moving) and led to the discovery that TIME is NOT fixed.

2. What if I'm standing on a train while my friend is standing outside the train watching it pass by. If lightning struck on both ends of the train, what would my friend see? What would I see?

The answer (you and your friend will see the lightning strikes differently) led to the discovery that time and space are relative, depending on whether you are moving or standing still versus each other. Its called Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity.

3. What if my 21 year-od twin brother takes off in a very fast rocket ship and I stay behind here on the earth? What happens after he comes back in a year or two?

The answer is (depending on how fast his ship is versus speed of light) the twin in the rocket is 22-23 yrs old. His brother is retirement age.

Time passes more slowly when you are going very fast relative to someone NOT going that fast. Time and space are NOT fixed.​

4. What if I'm floating inside a box, and I can't see outside, and then suddenly I hit the floor of the box. What happened?

The answer is either (a) I was accelerated up by a rope on the box, or (b) gravity pulled me and the box down. Since both events would put me the floor, it means gravity and acceleration are the same thing.

Now consider Einstein's previous assertion that time and space are not absolute. since motion can affect time and space, and gravity and acceleration are the same thing, that means gravity can actually "warp" space-time. That's Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Time also passes SLOWER the closer you are to a massive object. Time, therefore passes FASTER in your attic than in your living room. Rock solid science, proven thousands of times :)

Not one equation prompted the discoveries. Just an everyday question, and then theory, and then the empirical work to confirm or refute.

Beautiful stuff. :)
 
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