I met a guy called Big Al on a family camping trip and he was pretty cool. He was the first hippy I ever met, living out of a van and trailer, solar panels all over the roof and making some money selling bags made from men's ties.
I don't really remember what he did other than maybe teaching me a fishing knot, maybe feeding me and showing me some cool stuff. At the very least, it's a very positive memory and possibly part of why I love the off grid dream.
No clue where the image is from, sorry.
Yeah, figured it would be something relativistic like that, I was just looking at overall power to do that back of the envelope calculation. Considering how high the energy is at ~0.25c, it makes me wonder what the average particle spacing is in the jet at that diameter.
I expect a lot wider too, the jets will diverge of course so it's going to depend on how far away from the star you're measuring. I just took 0.05lyr because it's a size I had a very shitty source for hahaha.
Same, I was a couple weeks shy of 1500, I think. Can't say I really miss it, I wasn't getting anything out of it except big number.
I did a little snooping and found someone claiming to have a source on the diameter of a jet, but their link went nowhere. I think it's this though. Anyway, at 0.05 light years across and presumed circular, a human body purposefully over estimated to have a cross sectional area of 2m^2, would be subject to 28.5 gigawatts.
Wolfram Alpha very kindly points out that this is the equivalent of nearly two and a half space shuttles blasting you, boosters and all. Good luck!
I've no idea how accurate this is, but googling gave me an estimate of the energy required that suggests it would take a little less than three seconds to vaporize an entire body. If it can create a plasma, that counts as subatomic in my books, but I've no idea what that would take.
Nuclear would depend more on the particle kinematics and I've got no intuition there tbh. I'm sure it's certainly possible though, especially if you get close.
Thanks, I appreciate that a lot ❤️
I'm going through some really awful stuff at the moment, and it's hard to feel proud of anything when I absolutely despise myself, but these are things I managed to convince myself are okay:
Haha yeah EEAAO was a trip and I barely understand it either
Sorry to nitpick a bit, dark matter isn't connected to the expansion of space (as far as we're aware) but dark energy is probably what you meant. My answer to your question is at the end.
Full disclosure: While I have studied this, my expertise was in a tangentially related field. However a buddy of mine has a PhD in measuring this stuff so I've got some second hand knowledge.
It's a confusing hurdle for any student of physics to understand that spacetime doesn't exist inside another bigger thing into which it can expand, it just kinda exists on its own. Mathematically we don't even treat the expansion quite like growth, it's a bit easier to understand it as our rulers getting shorter, the labels we give to distances changes over time. Personally I like the analogy of a sheet of grid ruled paper.
If you choose two points and count the number of squares between them, divide that grid into a smaller one and then count them again, the "distance" has gone up. Those squares look smaller to us so it seems like the true distance is the same, but the universe doesn't have an external view to make such comparisons from, all we have are the squares and physics obeys them. The point is you can cut squares up forever without running out of squares to cut up, nothing runs out this way.
In spacetime maths (general relativity aka GR) we usually start by defining distances, and when it comes to the expansion of the universe we literally just have a number in that definition that changes over time.
This kind of "our rulers and clocks are dodgy and unreliable" is unfortunately the backbone of this sort of physics. It's a huge pain in the ass, but it's cool af if you're a huge maths nerd.
🤷
Anyone who can tell you how dark energy works beyond "it has a negative pressure" is full of it. It's a theoretical idea and has never been observed, we just know that if something with negative pressure existed everywhere then it would cause space to expand. Don't quote me, but it's kinda like the opposite of how a black hole squishes spacetime down into a singularity, dark energy pushes out on everything everywhere all at once. (Couldn't help myself it's a great movie go watch it)
There are a bunch of possible things that fit the bill, it could just be a number in Einstein's field equation, it could be a specific type of quantum field that has a constant value everywhere, hell I've even seen models where it's just caused by black holes existing. It's also possible that Einstein got some stuff wrong and that expansion is just what space do. Either way, I don't think these things require more stuff to be created, it's just stuff that's already there.
If I had to make a mostly uneducated guess, I'd say it's probably just a feature of quantum gravity, for which we have no proven theories. Loop quantum gravity just demands it exists for the theory to even be useful, I'm sure string theory has it's own crazy nonsense to explain it too. If we ever do work this out, I fully expect it's just going to be a thing we have to accept exists without an obvious cause, much like how the universe exists but we have no idea why or why the rules it follows are those specific rules and not some others.
OP You should watch (or read if you like manga) Fire Force. The hook is that people randomly catch fire and society kinda has to deal with it, it's a fun show.
And yeah it's cooler than funerals, the Fire Force brings along nuns to pray for the person when they need to put them out.
I'm just being silly, but I mean that if everything can be represented as a matrix then there's a point of view where things like complex numbers are just "names" of specific matrices and the rules that apply to those "names" are just derived from the relevant matrix operations.
Essentially I'm saying that the normal form is an abstract short hand notation of the matrix representation. The matrices are of course significantly harder and more confusing to work with, but in some cases the richness of that structure is very beautiful and insightful.
(I'm particularly in love with the fact one can derive spinors and their transforms purely from the spacetime/Lorentz transforms. It's a really satisfying exercise and it's some beautiful algebra/group theory.)
Matrix representations in general, if that counts?
Complex numbers, polynomials, the derivative operator, spinors etc. they're all matrices. Numbers are just shorthand labels for certain classes of matrices, fight me.
The few times I've been around for the organising of live streams, we've either done it directly to our own socials and/or an independent journo might come and either stream or record some stuff, but I don't think I ever got their names when that's been organised ahead of time.
At one I attended, the organisers provided burner phones for people to livestream an action, I believe to their personal accounts? I never saw the footage of it though.