Does this explain what generates gravity?

[UniQ]

Happy birthday Pale Blue Dot, and happy Valentines Day. 🎂

Wikipedia: Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from an unprecedented distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.

In 2020, for the image's 30th anniversary, NASA published a new version of the original Voyager photo: Pale Blue Dot Revisited, obtained using modern image processing techniques "while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images."

 

[Galu]

...from an unprecedented distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles)

Voyager 1 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth and the power from its plutonium generator is dwindling.

The photograph prompted Carl Sagan to write a book with Pale Blue Dot as the title.

 

[system7]

Grasshopper: Master, I see Pale Blue Dot! Perhaps it is ourselves?
Master: (Hits him over the head with stick...) NO! You look at Pale Blue Dot and MISS ALL THE HEAVENLY GLORY!
Grasshopper: I wonder if I am truly cut out for a career in Zen, Master?

The serious point is you are seeing the Sun reflected by the Earth. Not the Earth itself, er, I think. 😕

On this day, February 15 and also Galileo's birthday, in 2024 I photographed the Sun reflected by the Comet:

I found the orangeness of Kappa Ophiucus particularly pleasing next to another blue dot. 🙂

 

[TNT]

you are seeing the Sun reflected

... so we just see reflections and not the object... deep Steve.. deep... you are up early this fin morning ;-D

//

 

[Galu]

I found the orangeness of Kappa Ophiucus particularly pleasing next to another blue dot. 🙂

You are just dotty about dots!

Kappa Ophiuchi is a star in the constellation Ophiucus aka the Serpent Bearer.

Kappa's surface is cooler than the Sun's which gives it its orange glow - thank you Wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_Ophiuchi

P.S. In 1604 Kepler made observations of a supernova situated at the Serpent Bearer's right foot. Galileo used its brief appearance to counter the Aristotelian dogma that the heavens are changeless. It was a Type Ia supernova and the most recent Milky Way supernova visible to the unaided eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiuchus

 

[system7]

Good Heavens. I seem to have made an error of Month for the Comet! It was December 9th. 2024. How time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana! Seems ages ago. 😛

Interestingly Voyager 1 is currently in a patch between Kappa Ophiuci and Alpha Ophiuci (Raslahague) and nearby Alpha Herculis.

I thought this Wiki snap of Giant Red Antares in Scorpio and blue Rho (that p thing) Ophiuci was rather pleasing, and am keen to get out with the camera myself in summer:

If you were wondering why I was up early this morning, it was because I was awake puzzling how many observations of the purported Death Star 2024 YR4 we must make to define its exact elliptical (?) orbit.

Clearly 3 points define a circle, as in the circumcircle of a triangle, but an ellipse must need more.

The answer is 5, as I thought:

Not too sure about parabolic comets though. I'll leave that to m'learned Banzai and mchambles, who are very good at these puzzles. 😎

 

[Galu]

I seem to have made an error of Month for the Comet! It was December 9th. 2024.

I'm puzzled why you say it is Kappa Ophiuchi that is visible in your comet photograph because from November to January in the Northern Hemisphere the constellation Ophiuchus is in the daytime sky. At least, that's how I interpret the Wikipedia information!

I read that five points are required to define a unique ellipse because an ellipse has five degrees of freedom: https://lee-mac.com/5pointellipse.html

The link includes a neat demonstration which I have attached below.

 

[system7]

Your animation is pretty much a picture of what goes on in my mathematical brain. Not many people can do this. It is a gift. 🤣

A fair point well made on the Comet dates. Maybe it was the English 9th of the 12th, or the American 12th of the 9th. I really don't know anymore.

Some evidence that this Comet thing was around 23rd OCTOBER 2024 after the Full Moon:

For sure it was cold and dark and murky, which is pretty much the story of the last few months. 🙁

 

[Galu]

Sabine Hossenfelder launches a scathing attack on particle physicists in her latest video:

WARNING! Contains sweary words!

 

[system7]

Splendid RANT by our Sabine! The comments are well-thought out too. Junk Science and now USELESS Science! 🤣

We are well qualified to judge useless CP Violation and Neutrinos research after our recent discussions. And HEP is something I know a little about.

You don't have to watch this, but Sabine beautifully debunks a complex new "Theory of Everything" with her red pen. It's garbage:

I waded through some of @Ro808 aka Roland's papers that he unhelpfully posted too. Long story short:

Surely 10^ 120? And there's 99 philosophical pages more. 🙁

Huh? 3 time dimensions? Mass as a vector not a scalar? And mostly a paper by Haug quoting Haug? 🙁


Time for bed. 😴

 

[Galu]

You don't have to watch this...

But I did!

Who could resist the lure of watching Sabine exposing mathematical rubbish at 1 AM?!

 

[TNT]

I wish she stopped constructing click-bait titles... a bad habit and signs of bad taste... content still good!

//

 

[system7]

Everyone suspects that Sir Isaac Newton's famous Bullseye on Gravity was the result of throwing many darts at the board.... 😛

Seems we needn't worry about the Asteroid in 2032 though:

Should see me out then. Now back to my quiet Sunday book:

It's really very good.

"All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

"In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."

Quite. 😎

 

[gpauk]

I wish she stopped constructing click-bait titles... a bad habit and signs of bad taste... content still good!

//

Click bait titles and content. Some are ok, but a lot of bad videos these days. All for the money...

 

[system7]

Surely this is not a new discovery?

Now back to my book. 🙂

 

[TNT]

Oh, yes... as you where....

//

 

[Galu]

Seems we needn't worry about the Asteroid in 2032 though

The resurfaced letter from Isaac Newton is breaking news.

One analysis suggests that "Newton’s prediction wasn’t about fiery destruction or global annihilation. Instead, he envisioned 2060 as a spiritual reckoning - a shift from corruption and chaos to peace and divine order. While the language may seem dire, his forecast was more about transformation than catastrophe".

https://economictimes.indiatimes.co...ll-you-need-to-know/articleshow/118257746.cms

 

[system7]

I think little more needs saying about Sir Isaac Newton's "predictions" at this point, this isn't the eighteenth century.

Sabine Hossenfelder writing in "Nature" in 2017, and she thoughtfully gives the reference:

Some of my colleagues will disagree we have a crisis. They’ll tell you that we have made great progress in the past few decades (despite nothing coming out of it), and that it’s normal for progress to slow down as a field matures — this isn’t the eighteenth century, and finding fundamentally new physics today isn’t as simple as it used to be. Fair enough. But my issue isn’t the snail’s pace of progress per se, it’s that the current practices in theory development signal a failure of the scientific method.

Let me illustrate what I mean.In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass2,3. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn’t look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal.

Many of these papers were published in the field’s top journals. None of them describes reality.Now, the particle physics community has always been subject to fads and fashions. Though this case was extreme both in the number of participants and in their haste, there have been many similar cases before4. In particle physics, jumping on a hot topic in the hope of collecting citations is so common it even has a name: ‘ambulance chasing,’ referring to the (presumably apocryphal) practice of lawyers following ambulances in the hope of finding new clients

Ambulance chasing is not apocryphal, and I am well informed on this desperate and shameful practice:

Goes back to Physics book. 🙂

 

[Galu]

I've written about "ambulance chasing" before:

"Ambulance chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in particle physics", says Sabine.

Namely, after every announcement of a preliminary experimental result there is an explosion of theory submissions explaining it.

It often turns out that the result happened to lie within an experimental error bar and can not be confirmed by future measurements.

However, even when wrong, the theory papers receive a fair number of citations, which is clearly advantageous to the careers of the theorists.

https://lemeshko.blogspot.com/2016/04/ambulance-chasing-in-particle-physics.html

 

[system7]

My mind was quite in a whirl after discovering an astonishing fact in Mr. Feynman's rapid survey of the State of Physics as it was known in 1962: Six Easy Pieces.

He is very clear on what was not known then, but this fact is still true, I believe, unless the charge on the electron has waned in recent years:

"To give an idea of how much stronger electricity is than gravitation, consider two grains of sand, a millimeter across, thirty meters apart."

OK, I can consider this. 😎

"If the force between them were not balanced, if everything attracted everything else, instead of likes repelling, so that there were no cancellation, how much force would there be?"

OK, I can do this, let's see, the square of the charge, divided by the square of the distance and 4 Pi Epsilon nought.... 😕

ANSWER:

Spoiler

"Three Million Tons."

Is that a lot? 🤔

Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?​

Developing quantum-gravity technologies may elevate us to a “class A” civilization, capable of creating a baby universe.​

The biggest mystery concerning the history of our universe is what happened before the big bang. Where did our universe come from? Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein searched for steady-state alternatives to the big bang model because a beginning in time was not philosophically satisfying in his mind.

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen ... an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes. If that happened, then not only could it account for the origin of our universe but it would also suggest that a universe like our own—which in this picture hosts an advanced technological civilization that gives birth to a new flat universe—is like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations.

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence. One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

With this perspective, the technological level of civilizations should not be gauged by how much power they tap, as suggested by the scale envisioned in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev. Instead, it should be measured by the ability of a civilization to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to its existence.

As of now, we are a low-level technological civilization, graded class C on the cosmic scale, since we are unable to recreate even the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. Even worse, we may be labeled class D since we are carelessly destroying the natural habitat on Earth through climate change, driven by our technologies. A class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. A civilization ranked class A could recreate the cosmic conditions that gave rise to its existence, namely produce a baby universe in a laboratory.

Achieving the distinction of class A civilization is nontrivial by the measures of physics as we know it. The related challenges, such as producing a large enough density of dark energy within a small region, already have been discussed in the scientific literature.

Since a self-replicating universe only needs to possess a single class A civilization, and having many more is much less likely, the most common universe would be the one that just barely makes class A civilizations. Anything better than this minimum requirement is much less likely to occur because it requires additional rare circumstances and does not provide a greater evolutionary benefit for the Darwinian selection process of baby universes.

The possibility that our civilization is not a particularly smart one should not take us by surprise. When I tell students at Harvard University that half of them are below the median of their class, they get upset. The stubborn reality might well be that we are statistically at the center of the bell-shaped probability distribution of our class of intelligent life-forms in the cosmos, even when taking into account our celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider.

We must allow ourselves to look humbly through new telescopes, as envisioned by the recently announced Galileo Project, and search for smarter kids on our cosmic block. Otherwise, our ego trip may not end well, similarly to the experience of the dinosaurs, which dominated Earth until an object from space tarnished their illusion.

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, and the former chair of the Harvard astronomy department (2011-2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He has published more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers and is the bestselling author of Extraterrestrial and Interstellar and a co-author of the textbooks Life in the Cosmos and The First Galaxies in the Universe.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/was-our-universe-created-in-a-laboratory?

Trusted source in Scientific American. I checked the date and it is not April the First. But it is extremely funny in many diverse ways. And full of bogus links. Is Spoof Science getting back to the good old days of Adequacy and Slashdot an' all that? I hope so. 🙂