@AndyD273 If it's stationary (IE just hanging) you get regular gravity. It's not as strong as surface gravity (obviously) but it's still up past 90%, IIRC.
'outside the gravity well' isn't a thing. If there's just you and Earth in the whole universe then you will always feel earth's gravity, it just drops off to being negligible. The only way you can get around it it by going fast enough sideways to keep missing the earth (orbit) or fast enough upwards that the force pulling you back diminishes faster than the distance you get away (escape velocity)
Q: Military branch organization in soft Sci-Fi
I'm trying to build a military for a soft Sci-Fi universe that's in a state of near total war. Thousands of worlds are being fought over by highly mobile military forces where all branches of the military would be operating in close support of each ...
what's the best way to preserve a dead soul?
The souls doesn't ascend to heaven after death. Over the course of a person's life, the soul builds certain connections to the body that it inhabits. It remains attached to it after the body dies, but in a comatose-like state. The soul is preserved in...
@James Morning James. I have bad news. One 50 mile high mountain sitting on top of another 50 mile high mountain still isn't going to be above geosynchronous orbit, and so won't float away with Nex on it.
@dot_Sp0T Is it going to bother you if no one finishes the joke?
@AndyD273 I was only testing the waters, it's like holding your feet into an empty pool - it bothers you somewhat that they don't get wet, but secretly you expected it all along
@dot_Sp0T Ok, so the Higgs boson does not give atoms mass, as some reports have said. Instead what gives atoms mass is how they interact with the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a quantum field that is everywhere all the time. Think of it like the ocean. Some atoms, say hydrogen, are like hydrofoils. They only weakly interact with the surface of the ocean, don't get much drag, and so don't have much mass.
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Other atoms, like plutonium, are like supertankers. They interact very strongly with the Higgs field, and so have a lot more mass. Photons are massless. they are like seagulls, floating along above the surface and not interacting with it at all.
@James I'm thinking you'd need some kind of magnetic linear accelerator. If you made a hyperloop style tube starting at the bottom of the mountains going up past the top of the atmosphere and evacuated the air, then used all 100 miles of length to get it up to speed, you could probably get Nex into orbit. But not the mountain.
@AndyD273 I’m trying to work through some fun mathematics for an unusual universe where mass comes in a variety of flavours, which actually matches their interactions with various fields. It’s quite tricky!
@AndyD273 I guess you could actively support the mountain?
@JoeBloggs I mean I don't think you could accelerate the 50 mile high mountain enough to get it into orbit without divine intervention, magic, or a lot of explosive force.
@AndyD273 aaah, that’s the trick. Inside the mountain is actually just a load of magnetic loop struts: the outer skin is just thick enough to look like mountain. If you take a geologists hammer you can make the whole thing echo.
@JoeBloggs I kind of wonder if a theory of everything will come out of the idea that all of the fundamental forces are actually fields, and then someone just needs do the math to figure out how the fields interact. So Higgs/gravity field, EM field, Weak Atomic field, strong atomic field... Or something like that.
@JoeBloggs So if the Higgs boson is actually just a ripple in the Higgs field, then the other bosons are probably ripples in other fields. Bosons are what bind quarks together to make protons and neutrons, so the idea that they are responsible for the strong and weak forces make sense. I get that these are probably well considered ideas for physicists, but I've only been thinking about it since this morning so I have a lot of catching up to do. :)
Shower thoughts: when your brain is looking for any excuse to stay in the warm water for just a few more minutes.
@AndyD273 yeah, you should look into quantum mechanics. It’s been a while since I thought about it but I think the way quantum mechanics treats degenerate matter is a good introduction to treating mass not as points but as waves in a field of likelihood’s for where a particle might be. Turns out there’s no real physical distinction between the field of likelihood’s and an actual field: it’s just nicer to think in discrete objects rather than partly imaginary wave functions.
@James Could be... I think rail gun has an advantage in that you could technically start at a lower acceleration and build up, and so be less likely to turn you into jelly. But maybe the same could work for a catapult. Someone should calculate the size of the arm needed and to reach escape velocity while staying under 10G's.
Except where it isn’t. The QM description of a photon passing through three polarising plates at 45 degrees to each other is still one of the most amazing pieces of maths I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of revising. It’s simultaneously complex, astonishingly simple, and perfectly describes an intuitively impossible real phenomenon.
@JoeBloggs Yeah, it's kind of a side interest of mine, but I don't have the math skill needed to really get into it. It does make me wonder though... if particles are essentially waves in a field, is there anything stopping you from creating particles out of nothing simply by exciting the right fields in the right ways? (Other than the fact that we don't know how to do that, of course)
So if we could create the right waves in the right way to make our own particles, then matter could be created from nothing one quantum particle at a time, so a quantum 3D printer with no feed stock, and voilà! You have a Star Trek style replicator.
The first model took 10 years and a billion dollars to make a cup of tea. It might have been Earl Grey, but it wasn't hot.
@AndyD273 ever heard of the quantum foam? It’s exactly that. Particles are capable of jumping up energy levels, and mathematically allowed to jump down energy levels, spontaneously. Particle/antiparticle pairs are allowed to pop into existence at random, essentially as fluctuation in the mathematical description of their probabilities of being (which is equivalent to a field). I simplify, and there’s a lot more to this than I know, I know, but... yeah. Science!
@AndyD273 well, therein lies the rub. Same but of maths that shows how those virtual particles can exist also shows why they have a maximum lifetime. It’s theoretically possible to get around, but it needs some serious sci-fi handwaving.
Which is the downside to science. It’s very cool and then dashes your dreams on rocks of mathematical modelling.
It's also similar to the ideas of Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion, where e.g. an atom in a crystal absorbs a photon of laser light and emits 2 photons of a different wavelength. It's a different type of 'field' but the same idea
@AndyD273 This is known as 'second quantisation' and leads to things like QED and QCD, which are subsets of Quantum Field Theory (QFT, quite different to a 'Quantum Fourier Transform', which is also a QFT). This solves things, except for gravity, which can't be renormalised and so the numbers just become infinite and it's suddenly impossible to solve things with gravity involved
"the math[s] to figure out how the fields interact" is known as The Standard Model
unfortunately, it turns out that things aren't quite so simple (even ignoring gravity) and neutrinos oscillate between different 'flavours' (think different variants of the same particle), which can't be explained by the Standard Model and so, we need physics beyond the Standard Model to explain this as well as some way to explain quantum gravity.
The most well known of these is String Theory, but this has numerous issues. The next most well known is Loop Quantum Gravity, which makes more intuitive sense to me, but progress is slow
@dot_Sp0T No and yes? Technically speaking yes, the more protons, the more mass, But the mass doesn't come from the protons. The more protons, the more it interacts with the Higgs field, and so more mass. I am not a physicist, I just read a lot, so take that with a bit of salt. :)
@Mithrandir24601 What can't lasers do? Just read about a new method of creating photonic matter using a laser. And the photons even got a little mass once they were entangled.
@AndyD273 It's interesting: laser light is a quantum state (technically, is taken as an initially coherent state that decoheres, hence terms like 'coherence length'), however, it doesn't violate the Bell/CHSH inequality by itself, so doesn't do a lot of the 'quantum 2.0' stuff (along the lines of 'build a quantum computer'), but is necessary for a lot of said quantum 2.0 stuff
@dot_Sp0T You have to start somewhere! Keep it up :)
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor