@tildal "proven" nope. There are tons of candidate quantum gravity theories that either are flawed or have not enough experimental evidence

Re: magnetism: I think I mentiomed that in one of my BH answers here. Google gravitomagnetism/frame dragging/Lense-Thirring effect

@ManishEarth What are then the guys at CERN / LHC doing? They're still ducking under their desks and didn't decide who to send to press the button? I thought that's supposed to answer a few things.... and eat all the Swiss cheese in the process, but it's for the benefit of mankind, no? :D

> What are the guys at CERN/LHC doing?

@TildalWave They are playing football ;-)

@TildalWave Collecting tons of random data. They already found the Higgs, now they're doing random stuff

I know a couple prof who work in CERN. I guess I could ask them what's going on, but they may not know the big picture

There are usually tons of experiments going on simultaneously

Well we need to know what we're dealing with here (gravity), so could you guys hurry up a bit? :P

@ManishEarth What kind of vacuum energy density are we talking of here that needs to exist to support that assertion of gravity being a result of asymmetric distributions of vacuum energy caused by the presence of matter? That's not just another one of the vacuum catastrophes, right?

@TildalWave umm, gravity=curvature of space. Curvature itself has energy

@ManishEarth Does it have ultimate tensile strength? :))) (no need to answer this, just musing a bit with words)

well, there is something called the stress-energy tensor

googling...

Very important in GTR

The stress tensor is basically a matrix like thing, where each component is the force along one axis over the area along another axis ("stress" when the axes are different, "pressure" when they're the same)

If we move into 4-space (add the time coordinate), the momentum/energy vector tacks itself on.

Ah that "fabric of spacetime", why don't you say it so? It's a checkered tablecloth damnit, why can't you guys use normal words? :P

no, that's the metric tensor

The stress energy tensor gives the distribution of particles and forces. Sorta

so a stress luminescent tablecloth then

translucent ... with glitter

Barbie Physics FTW!

/me has class

cya

lol

@ManishEarth take care ;)

@TildalWave I don't think I want to know the story behind this

hehe don't worry it's got nothing to do with Essex :)

¬_¬

so how's your day?

Busy! My phone does not stop ringing

yeah me too... not the phone tho, just stuck in some CSS/HTML

stuck?

meh I don't do that too often, although I'm supposed to be well versed in it... but is not really my primary concern usually, so it's a bit slow-ish

well, I am

ahh

the designer didn't do his job properly... long story

oooh youre one of those people! always blaming someone else ;)

this time it was really not my fault that he took nearly a whole year to stitch together maybe 5 images

...oh

The ISS crew could be eating lettuce by January!

I've added some info and links about this to my answer to "Can plants grow in microgravity?"

@called2voyage: Hmmmm lettuce (let us see) if they do ((+:

@called2voyage: But you've contributed food for thought .. (pun intended!) In microgravity how do the Oxygen/CO2 molecules mingle? I'd expect concentric globes of O2, and CO2 to smother a plant, and eventually starve it

@Everyone same problem with sleeping astronaughts, just have to have plenty of fans / extractors moving the air about

@RhysW: Cool! Ty (+:

Dropping off my one remaining piece of space knowledge that was :P

Huh. You always say that ... right before you present another 100 new pieces of space knowledge

yeah...well...but....SPAAAAAAACE!

q+: 's not empty

on the contrary, space is not empty, it contains everything that ever existed, or will exist

So... Stage 1 of the Saturn V generated 10MW equivalent of thrust?

That's semantics ... difficult to refute that without first attempting to differentiate between night and day

@Everyone night and day? what are you on about? im lost :L

@Everyone: Phew. It worked

@RhysW: Saying space is not empty is, imo, akin to saying a day is day+night when traditionally 'day' is used to mean sunlight hours between dawn and dusk

It's semantics (+:

Sort-of similar to this gynaecologist on the TV who said 'Foetus is a parasite' (+:

I haven't inadvertently hurt your feelings, have I?

@Everyone nope, i was on the walk home from work!

Can't you take the tube?

Yup! though i have to get into work 2 hours early tomorrow :/

Working across TZ again? I really ought to get myself inshape again

@Everyone TZ?

Timezone (+:

ah right

nah, just need to check stuff works before everyone elses day begins

or there will be more than a few annoyed clients...

I can relate to that. Just made an interesting discovery here ... which showcases how rampant the copy-paste technology is in web-site development - pity the IS audit scene in this part of the world is so underdeveloped

c'mon I need 17 more questions... what are question marks doing in our chat? ... oops

Why that august number 17?

@Everyone What's that interesting discovery? You were not using TinyMCE and tried copy/pasting from a Word document, did you?

@Everyone So i can get the 1st gold badge on the site ;)

Haha. Try a google search for " would like to associate ourselves as providing services in all areas related to logistics."

problem is, they shouldn't be my questions, I can't vote on my own posts LOL

@TildalWave: 17 qn here on SEx.SE?

@Everyone AIRNET that is infected with loads of trojans?

@Everyone yes

@TildalWave: No idea about Trojans but my point is this. What are the odds of 10 different companies coming up with the same damned paragraph word-to-word?

@Everyone it might actually be a product of infections ... think "botnets" and "spam" or "phishing" e.t.c.

j/k. I had one, but it fit better on the physics SE

@Everyone I've noticed it a few times before, but does your SHIFT key get stuck on occasion? You reply to two posts with a single one, and am thinking since SHIFT+RETURN is a new line, maybe that's it? :O

@TildalWave: You got me - trying to save the main 'return' key so I use the S-Returnwhenever I can ... and with my left-hand still not recovered ...

Looking through my list of answers, and I noticed I tend to avoid "far out" questions, kinda limit myself to those that are actually answerable and at least remotely make sense... I only have a single answer that attempted to calculate something that's a ridiculous notion from the start, and of course ended up in a "fight" about who's right ... like it matters LOL

A fake fight for fake internet points caused by real ego (+: Happens all the while

@Everyone Oh, what's with your hand? I remotely remember something about some arm, but it might not have been yours LOL

@Everyone No no... I was just a bit lazy (i.e. my brain refused to cooperate) to calculate something to a few thousand decimal points precise for something that cannot possibly be anyway... the space elevator ... on Earth... going all the way down...

Nothing much. Stabbed myself at the base of the little finger trying to get the meat out of a coconut - Weird tactile messages from that hand, and typing is reduced to scientific on the right, and index finger typing on the left. It's fun q+:

I might have an answer for that fuel line tho that might work... once we are able to build materials that defy physics

... i.e. I probably won't bother :)

@Everyone Oh, yup I had a few of those days

What if the space elevator were to be a space ring? Does the ring on ringed planet rotate, or is it tidally locked?

I always fiddle with some stuff at home, my hands are like sandpaper

@Everyone and you'd squash all the poor folks living around the equator just to realize it's not just the Earth's gravity affecting it?

@TildalWave Callosities?

Sorry.

@Everyone not THAT bad ;)

@Everyone Funny I was still pinged, I thought it has to be 4 letters at least

Last time I took an axe the handle took the skin off my hands; that's how sensitive mine are

@TildalWave: Didn't get that bit about squashing the equator

@Everyone your ring's orbit would be like a hoola hoop

@TildalWave: Hm? Does the ring on the Giants go hoopy too?

@Everyone good question, but yes they certainly did when they were forming, with what's remaining more or less stable... but I believe we're still studying that and don't even know what their mass is? plus, they're not really connected into a ring, they just happen to orbit with more or less same radial velocity to not collide too frequently to destabilize their orbits. I.e. if something is tugging a part of it on the opposite side a bit off center, the "ring" doesn't have to keep same radius

@TildalWave: I knew that... really. The bit about them being co-orbiting debris, I mean

to think of it as a connected ring is just wrong... reminds me a bit of that downvoted and I believe now deleted answer on the stable orbits around black holes

'cept I forget )+:

Eek

2*Pi*r*LOL

That's when a ring is homogenous

@TildalWave: Could a scramjet match velocity with part of the lower space-ring ? Assuming some kind of balancing mechanism could keep the lower from getting below, say, 100km?

'o @called2voyage

@TildalWave This one?

@Everyone maybe, but you ring will have to rotate a lot faster than the ground does (radially)

@Everyone hello

@called2voyage Ah yes, there is still that answer there, currently with -2 (and no, I didn't touch it LOL)

-2? But I upped it - aeons ago.

@Everyone There are no upvotes on it. Are you sure you're looking at the same answer?

Oh. Did you mean the one from AJ Mansfeld?

Yes

No. I thought TildalWave meant _his_answer with the reference to Sag A*

@Everyone "to think of it as a connected ring is just wrong... reminds me a bit of that downvoted and I believe now deleted answer on the stable orbits around black holes" He was referring to AJ's

@Everyone well that "area around a black hole is crowded" is simply not true... first, there is so much space you can't even describe it in light years any more, second, if you followed one object "in" with the same vector and 5 minutes later, you'd end up following it with constantly increasing distance, and third, black holes are like small babies and really difficult to feed, making the mess of anything you'd throw at it

Why is everybody throwing 'babies' arguments at me today? :x

Now I see another answer arguing there's no sch thing as a stable orbit... in cosmological terms. OK, it's true ... but do we really care? You can achieve stable enough orbits you could see the end of the Universe many times over, if it didn't collapse on you LOL

@TildalWave Are you referring to Mark Adler's answer? I think he's just trying to be precise.

@called2voyage Well yes, and I'm not trying to mock anything, just thinking out loud...

I do agree though that it doesn't really answer the heart of the question.

in practical sense, you can have "stable" orbits ... and in cosmological sense, we really shouldn't care

not on this site at least

Inane question alert. When both bodies radiate gravitational energy, where does that go? Does it merely contribute to the entropy of the universe, or is it utilized by both/any participant/s to increase velocity?

well, according to one theory

In other words, matter acquires energy to balance itself in a vacuum - sort-of like the Archimedes bathtub discovery?

@Everyone eureka!

/me eyes @TildalWave auspiciously

We really don't know tho, I was torturing @ManishEarth with that before, you can scroll up for transcript

hm?

@ManishEarth oups

Lurker alert!

@ManishEarth EC2?

EC2? you mad bro?

Institute has its own clusters

@TildalWave the amazon platform?

Manish, Are you at Powai, or IISc Blr?

@ManishEarth here's a relevant quote: "you need to recalibrate your sarcasm sensors" :P

lol

@Everyone Powai

@ManishEarth: Just asking

@Undo hey I thought of a way for you to collect more helpful flags - flag "too chatty" comments. There ought to be quite many (and I guess a lot of them my own LOL) :)

@TildalWave Sounds like a good idea! Could you give me an example or two to get my flagger calibrated on?

there's a few comments that kinda wanted to "expand the question" and I somewhat obliged in the comments... they should probably be deleted tho, it wouldn't go amiss rather posting more questions... and I'd feel more comfortable modhammering them, if someone flagged them 1st

@TildalWave OK, I'll flag some of them. Give me feedback on whether I hit the right ones.

@Undo Well those that aren't directly relevant to the post they're under ;)

I think the last three can be easily considered as such

@TildalWave Yes, I think I'm getting the hang of this. Did I flag any wrong ones?

Aack, that one flag says obsolete - I meant too chatty. So many obsolete flags, and your mouse decides that it likes that kind.

I'm not sure it's good to have this kind of comment-flag to post-flag ratio:

@Undo It's OK, you'll get a hang of it. You missed one tho (one of mine) that was orphaned then. Basically, you wanna eradicate the weed, so all the roots and all the stems coming out of them too

you can leave some seeds tho and add a comment that it would make a fine new question... if it actually would at all, you be the judge

@TildalWave So I should flag all obsolete comments in a group on a post? Wouldn't it be better for me to use my limited supply just pointing out the groups themselves, and letting you perfect mods figure out which ones should come out with it?

@Undo you'll collect less flags then, but sure I'm fine with a single flag per thread... or flag all, as you wish

OK, makes sense! Now to head to my secret weapon: TildalWave > Activity > Comments :D

I'm off to bed tho, so you might wanna flag them so other mods will know what you meant even if they didn't read this chat here

was a long day...

Bye!

good night ;)

Night

OK, here's another attempt at an ad: