Two Stars Collided And Solved Half of Astronomy's Problems. Now What? (fivethirtyeight.com) 171
"It's hard to overstate the enormous leap forward that astronomy took on August 17, 2017," reports an article shared by schwit1:
On that day, astronomers bore witness to the titanic collision of two neutron stars, the densest things in the universe besides black holes. In the collision's wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation. They solved the origin of gamma-ray bursts, mysterious jets of hardcore radiation that could potentially roast Earth. They glimpsed the forging of heavy metals, like gold and platinum. They measured the rate at which the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They caught light at the same time as gravitational waves, confirmation that waves move at the speed of light. And there was more, and there is much more yet to come from this discovery... "Now it's a question of, do we have the right instrumentation for doing all the follow-up work?" said Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard who studies explosive cosmic events. "Do we have the right telescopes? What's going to happen when we have not just one event, but one a month, or one a week -- how do we deal with that flood...?"
The August 17 gravitational wave gave astronomers a glimpse at an entirely different universe. For most of history, they've studied stars and galaxies, which seem static and unchanging from the vantage point of human timescales... But GW170817 revealed a universe alive, pulsating with creation and destruction on human timescales... [T]he event itself unfolded in less than three human-designated weeks. This faster timescale is "pushing the way astronomy is done," Berger said... In space, the Fermi space telescope glimpsed a burst of gamma radiation. Within an hour, astronomers made six independent discoveries of a bright, fast-fading flash: A new phenomenon called a kilonova... Nine days later, X-rays streamed in, and after 16 days, radio waves arrived, too. Each type of information tells astronomers something different. Richard O'Shaughnessy, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes the discovery as a "Rosetta stone for astronomy."
"What this has done is provide one event that unites all these different threads of astronomy at once," he said. "Like, all our dreams have come true, and they came true now..." Thanks to the August 17 event, astronomers now know what to look for. Soon, they will be able to sift through an embarrassment of neutron-star mergers and other phenomena... And they are talking about how to turn their eyes to the sky, at a moment's notice, the next time the universe throws something big their way. "It's a wonderful time, it's a terrifying time," O'Shaughnessy said. "I can't really capture the wonder and the horror and glee and happiness."
The August 17 gravitational wave gave astronomers a glimpse at an entirely different universe. For most of history, they've studied stars and galaxies, which seem static and unchanging from the vantage point of human timescales... But GW170817 revealed a universe alive, pulsating with creation and destruction on human timescales... [T]he event itself unfolded in less than three human-designated weeks. This faster timescale is "pushing the way astronomy is done," Berger said... In space, the Fermi space telescope glimpsed a burst of gamma radiation. Within an hour, astronomers made six independent discoveries of a bright, fast-fading flash: A new phenomenon called a kilonova... Nine days later, X-rays streamed in, and after 16 days, radio waves arrived, too. Each type of information tells astronomers something different. Richard O'Shaughnessy, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, describes the discovery as a "Rosetta stone for astronomy."
"What this has done is provide one event that unites all these different threads of astronomy at once," he said. "Like, all our dreams have come true, and they came true now..." Thanks to the August 17 event, astronomers now know what to look for. Soon, they will be able to sift through an embarrassment of neutron-star mergers and other phenomena... And they are talking about how to turn their eyes to the sky, at a moment's notice, the next time the universe throws something big their way. "It's a wonderful time, it's a terrifying time," O'Shaughnessy said. "I can't really capture the wonder and the horror and glee and happiness."
the speed of light was old news (Score:4, Interesting)
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well a couple years old. but that's old in gravity
Not quite... a couple years ago, the gravitational waves were observed. The theory says they should be traveling at "c", but there was no way to check that this was true.
This time, seeing light at almost the same time as the GWs is an observation which says "yeah, that theory about GWs moving at the speed of light is pretty darn close to spot on". That's what the article was getting at.
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Why do writers do this? (Score:1)
the densest things in the universe besides black holes.
People get immune to click-bait hype. Say "the second densest things in the universe" instead.
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It's also wrong. The singularity in a black hole is dense, but usually the term "black hole" is used to describe... well, everything from the black part inwards. The schwartzchild radius (the radius of the event horizon) increases linear with mass, as opposed to the cube-root scaling that solid objects have. A black hole with a radius equal to average orbit of Saturn has about the same density as atmospheric air.
Re: Why do writers do this? (Score:3)
I think there is some relation between what happens inside blackholes and the big bang. The Schwartzschild radius of the known universe is to close to the size of it
Re: Why do writers do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a "singularity inside a blackhole"?
Perhaps. But it is not a falsifiable hypothesis. We don't know, and we don't know if there will ever be a way to know.
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Is there a "singularity inside a blackhole"?
Perhaps. But it is not a falsifiable hypothesis. We don't know, and we don't know if there will ever be a way to know.
I think it is. Last I read, the math of how we currently understand things indicates that a black hole spinning fast enough (a Super Extreme Kerr Object ) would provide a naked singularity that would be observable in some manner (eg gravitational lensing). Many physicists dislike the idea of naked singluarities, and at this level we might not even be sure we have the math correct. However, if we found a black hole/object that had those qualities, it certianly would answer many of those questions or at least
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
A neutron star has a density of roughly 1e14 gm/cm^3.
A black hole the mass of the earth would have a radius of about 9mm and a density of about 2e27, ten trillion times denser than a neutron star.
A black hole the mass of the sun would have a radius of about 3 km, and a density of about 1.8e16, a hundred times denser than a neutron star.
A black hole with the mass of our galaxy would have a radius of about 0.2 lightyears, and a density less than air.
A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears, and a density far less than the highest vacuum that humans have ever produced.
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears
...so, the radius of the observable universe ! Is there some deeper meaning to this or is that just a coincidence ?
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
...so, the radius of the observable universe ! Is there some deeper meaning to this or is that just a coincidence ?
It is not likely a coincidence. As an object approaches a blackhole's event horizon, any light it emits undergoes a redshift, and the wavelength gets longer and longer the closer it gets. As it crosses the event horizon, the wavelength goes to infinity, and it is no longer observable. This is exactly what also happens at the edge of the observable universe. If the Schwarzschild Radius of the universe was larger, then we should be able to see further out, and the observable universe would be larger as well.
Re: Why do writers do this? (Score:3)
We could measure radiation of infinite wavelength if only we had universal ground.
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Universal ground?! I'm still looking for the universal power port, two- or three-pronged!
No. (Score:2)
In a word, "no".
Within the event horizon, there is literally no path 'outside'. It isn't that getting there involves an infinite redshift: it's that there is literally no geodesic leading out. Within the event horizon space twists in on itself such that all directions lead deeper inwards towards the singularity.
You have tremendous freedom to move about in time, but your freedom to move about in space gets sharply curtailed. It's exactly the reverse of the spacetime situation outside the event horizon, wh
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p.s.:Why do writers do this? (Score:2)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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So the universe is definitely inside a black hole?
With our current understanding of cosmology, I don't think there is much that is "definite".
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This.
Sorry.
And I should be.
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Matter falls into a black hole and leaves one universe. In another universe a big bang happens as that universe is formed. So universes bud off from each other, and the budding point is a black hole.
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Matter falls into a black hole and leaves one universe. In another universe a big bang happens as that universe is formed. So universes bud off from each other, and the budding point is a black hole.
Cool. Now prove it.
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Matter falls into a black hole and leaves one universe. In another universe a big bang happens as that universe is formed. So universes bud off from each other, and the budding point is a black hole
Cool. Now prove it
Disprove it. QED.
No, the onus is on the person who postulated the idea or as it is more popularly known "The burden of proof" [justia.com]. Very useful to know when religious people turn up at your door.
BTW. The first AC was correct. You, on the other hand, are not.
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Science isn't about what might seem obvious to one person. It's about proving it. There needs to be math to back it up. It's a cute plot device for Sci Fi novels, but that's about it right now.
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A bit of googling with DuckDuckGo dug up this
https://www.insidescience.org/... [insidescience.org]
A 1960s adaptation of general relativity, called the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity, takes into account effects from quantum mechanics. It not only provides a step towards quantum gravity but also leads to an alternative picture of the universe. This variation of general relativity incorporates an important quantum property known as spin. Particles such as atoms and electrons possess spin, or the internal angular momentum that is analogous to a skater spinning on ice.
In this picture, spins in particles interact with spacetime and endow it with a property called "torsion." To understand torsion, imagine spacetime not as a two-dimensional canvas, but as a flexible, one-dimensional rod. Bending the rod corresponds to curving spacetime, and twisting the rod corresponds to spacetime torsion. If a rod is thin, you can bend it, but it's hard to see if it's twisted or not.
Spacetime torsion would only be significant, let alone noticeable, in the early universe or in black holes. In these extreme environments, spacetime torsion would manifest itself as a repulsive force that counters the attractive gravitational force coming from spacetime curvature. As in the standard version of general relativity, very massive stars end up collapsing into black holes: regions of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Here is how torsion would play out in the beginning moments of our universe. Initially, the gravitational attraction from curved space would overcome torsion's repulsive forces, serving to collapse matter into smaller regions of space. But eventually torsion would become very strong and prevent matter from compressing into a point of infinite density; matter would reach a state of extremely large but finite density. As energy can be converted into mass, the immensely high gravitational energy in this extremely dense state would cause an intense production of particles, greatly increasing the mass inside the black hole.
The increasing numbers of particles with spin would result in higher levels of spacetime torsion. The repulsive torsion would stop the collapse and would create a "big bounce" like a compressed beach ball that snaps outward. The rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe. The result of this recoil matches observations of the universe's shape, geometry, and distribution of mass.
In turn, the torsion mechanism suggests an astonishing scenario: every black hole would produce a new, baby universe inside. If that is true, then the first matter in our universe came from somewhere else. So our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe. Just as we cannot see what is going on inside black holes in the cosmos, any observers in the parent universe could not see what is going on in ours.
The motion of matter through the black hole's boundary, called an "event horizon," would only happen in one direction, providing a direction of time that we perceive as moving forward. The arrow of time in our universe would therefore be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe.
Torsion could also explain the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. Because of torsion, matter would decay into familiar electrons and quarks, and antimatter would decay into "dark matter," a mysterious invisible form of matter that appears to account for a majority of matter in the universe.
Finally, torsion could be the source of "dark energy," a mysterious form of energy that permeates all of space and increases the rate of expansion of the universe. Geometry with torsion naturally produces a "cosmological constant," a sort of added-on outward force which is the simplest way to explain dark energy. Thus, the observed accelerating expansion of the universe may end up being the strongest evidence for torsion.
Torsion therefore provides a theoretical foundation for a scenario in which the interior of every black hole becomes a new universe. It also appears as a remedy to several major problems of current theory of gravity and cosmology. Physicists still need to combine the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory fully with quantum mechanics into a quantum theory of gravity. While resolving some major questions, it raises new ones of its own. For example, what do we know about the parent universe and the black hole inside which our own universe resides? How many layers of parent universes would we have? How can we test that our universe lives in a black hole?
The last question can potentially be investigated: since all stars and thus black holes rotate, our universe would have inherited the parent black hole's axis of rotation as a "preferred direction." There is some recently reported evidence from surveys of over 15,000 galaxies that in one hemisphere of the universe more spiral galaxies are "left-handed", or rotating clockwise, while in the other hemisphere more are "right-handed", or rotating counterclockwise. In any case, I believe that including torsion in geometry of spacetime is a right step towards a successful theory of cosmology.
So there's a theory which predicts the budding off of new universes. And it makes other predictions too, some of which are testable.
Wikipedia (yeah, I know) seems to say it's not exactly dead, but something of a fringe idea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Albert Einstein became affiliated with the theory in 1928 during his unsuccessful attempt to match torsion to the electromagnetic field tensor as part of a unified field theory. This line of thought led him to the related but different theory of teleparallelism.[3]
Dennis Sciama[4] and Tom Kibble[5] independently revisited the theory in the 1960s, and an important review was published in 1976.[6]
Einstein-Cartan theory has been historically overshadowed by its torsion-free counterpart and other alternatives like Brans-Dicke theory because torsion seemed to add little predictive benefit at the expense of the tractability of its equations. Since the Einstein-Cartan theory is purely classical, it also does not fully address the issue of quantum gravity. In the Einstein-Cartan theory, the Dirac equation becomes nonlinear[7] and therefore the superposition principle used in usual quantization techniques would not work. Recently, interest in Einstein-Cartan theory has been driven toward cosmological implications, most importantly, the avoidance of a gravitational singularity at the beginning of the universe.[8][9] The theory is considered viable and remains an active topic in the physics community.[10]
Of course the speculation that black holes are new universes budding off, and the Big Bang was our universe budding off from the parent one appears quite a bit. E.g. Lee Smolin
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...so, the radius of the observable universe ! Is there some deeper meaning to this or is that just a coincidence ?
No. We are living inside a black hole.
Universe is all there is. So light can not escape The Universe, wherever it goes, no matter how far, it is still the Universe. That is the definition of black hole, a body from which light can not escape. QED.
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Then there is the whole other problem of the universe expanding vs. black holes evaporating.
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A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears
...so, the radius of the observable universe ! Is there some deeper meaning to this or is that just a coincidence ?
The radius of the known universe is 46.6 billion [wikipedia.org] light years, although the age of the universe is estimated at 13.799±0.021 billion years. You also have to remember that Universe has been expanding since the "big bang" so obviously the known universe will have a larger radius than 13.8 billion light years.
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How does "far less than the highest vacuum that humans have ever produced" compare to the density of our universe, if dark matter (and energy?), vacuum energy/particles and fields, and other stuff, is taken into account? Would the vacuum catastrophe gap the difference?
So, so..... if comparable, could that mean that the observable universe is situated inside the event horizon of a (rather large) black hole?
Are the inflation/expansion/acceleration/red shift/microwave observations compatible with such an arran
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:5, Informative)
After some quick research I found this:
http://www.preposterousunivers... [preposterousuniverse.com]
It basically says, yes, the mass and size of the universe is (remarkably) close to that of of a black hole with the corresponding Schwarzschild radius, but, no, it does not seem like we live inside a black hole. The strongest argument is that the universe is expanding, not contracting as a black hole.
It does, however, resemble a white hole, which is a time-reversed version of a black hole.
The author still seems to have a problem with an "outside" of the universe....
Re: Why do writers do this? (Score:2)
When "The Universe" has an outside, it is demoted to being "a universe", or a region within"The Universe".
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It does, however, resemble a white hole, which is a time-reversed version of a black hole.
That's what puzzled Capt. Picard in the Devron system.
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:4, Informative)
That seemed so improbable that I figured you must have slipped a decimal pace somewhere and double-checked your work. Looks good though.
Here's the math for anyone interested
Schwarzschild radius r = 2MG/c^2
Volume of a sphere = 4/3*pi*r^3
density = M / [4/3*pi*(2MG/c^2)^3] = M * 3/4pi * (c^2 / 2MG)^3 = 3/32pi * c^6/(G^3 M^2)
Galaxy Mass ~~= 10^12 * M_sol (@ 2*10^30kg) = 2*10^42kg
black hole density = 3/32/pi*(300,000,000 m/s )^6 / (6.674×1011 m3kg1s2)^3 / (2*10^42kg)^2
~= 0.0008 kg/m^3
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And the definition of a black hole is that light can't escape it, right?
This means that it's impossible for something inside a black hole to affect anything outside a black hole, right?
So then it's utterly impossible for our universe to ever affect anything outside it, right? Because not even light can escape the Schwarzschild radius of our universe, right?
And the converse would also be true: other universes couldn't affect ours.
So the m
Re:Why do writers do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Right
Right - mostly. Though things like Hawking radiation can "escape", and there may be geometric oddities that allow information to escape as well
Getting iffy - it's not altogether clear that the "inside" of a black hole even exists to begin with - some theories have all inflow stop at the the event horizon itself, from where it could theoretically escape. All we know about the "inside" of a black hole, is that normal physics doesn't work there.
Nope - you're assuming our universe is a black hole or otherwise has an event horizon.
Nope - one of the defining qualities of (many classes) of alternate universes is that they have fundamentally different physics.
Nope.
Well,it depends on the *specific* multiverse theory you're referring to. There are a *lot* of different multi-universe theories, and many of them may be true simultaneously, giving rise to several fundamentally different classes of alternate universes.
Some are indeed a little "unscientific" in the sense that they could not be directly tested - such as the idea that our universe is one bubble among countless that formed during the inflationary phase of the universe, in which case (barring FTL) we can never contact any others, because we're all sharing the same coordinate system, and the boundaries of all our universes are expanding at almost lightspeed, while the space between them is still inflationary and expanding much faster than light. We could however conceivably create a "child universe" based on the same principles - though doing so would essentially create a new big bang, destroying everything in the observable universe as the new one expanded at light speed converting false-vacuum to new mass-energy. There's also the possibility that we could detect the "fingerprints" of early shockwaves within such a primordial bubble universe, which would validate the theory, but not provide any mechanism for inter-universe contact. I.E. the theory could be validated, but still be useless.
Many other theories postulate that our 4-dimensional universe is embedded in a multi-verse with a higher-order geometry, and that other universes (4-D or otherwise) are likewise embedded. Picture many sheets of infinitely thin paper floating in a pond as an analog for 2D universes in a 3D multiverse. In which case contact between such universes are theoretically possible if we could figure out a way to send signals in directions we're not yet aware of. Impossible to test today, but not fundamentally unscientific. And unlike universes which exist within the same 4D-space as ours and thus must lie somewhere beyond the bounds of the observable universe, parallel universes might be arbitrarily close. In fact, there's currently work being done to look for evidence of our universe colliding with others - an event which could occur anywhere in our universe since unlike the edges of a bubble universe, higher-order edges are omni-present.
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Same way it fits here - as verbose nonsense. Even with an infinite number of universes having an an infinite range of different physical laws, there's still no room for that gibberish.
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Look at the end of the paragraph - they CAN test whether the hypothesis is true - if certain events occurred early on they'd leave distinctive evidence. Those events may not have happened, so we may not be able to *disprove* the hypothesis, but it *is* possible to prove it true. Or at least find evidence for it, which is all science ever really does - Truth is the realm of clerics and philosophers. It would likely be useless knowledge since those other universes are now forever out of reach, but it would
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Black holes are spherical in space, not in space-time.
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A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears, and a density far less than the highest vacuum that humans have ever produced.
Wait, what? Then how is our universe different from a black hole? Given that it apparently has the same size, mass, and density...
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You version contains less information.
Seems like we'll also get new ideas from old data (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the great results of this flood of unified information, is that it seems like it may help a lot in analyzing previously collected data - either looking for particular events or knowing how to filter out some cosmic noise that may be obscuring other things.
The most exciting thing long term to me, is a better ability to determine in the end what might be the most appealing interstellar targets to send manned or unmanned craft to explore. I'll be long gone but it's nice to think about.
All this new insight (Score:5, Funny)
better lead to more accurate horoscopes.
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All astronomically accurate horoscopes are themselves completely accurate, but usually begin and end with "something will happen today"
Very occasionally they may be further clarified with some details like "A large meteor impact will ignite global firestorms and likely trigger a 'nuclear winter'", or "Much of the planet's surface will be incinerated by a nearby supernova", but those are rare enough that there weren't any (human) astronomolgers around to make the prediction last time.
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"something will happen today"
Thanks. I will prepare. You didn't even need to know I'm a Capricorn! This new insight into the stars is amazing.
A sample of one (Score:4, Interesting)
In the collision's wake, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation
So the scientists have "solved" half of their research questions.
If I was an astrophysicist I would be rather worried about my future job prospects at that announcement. Though I would be more concerned with the sloppy science behind doing a single experiment and assuming that every next time it repeats, the results will be the same.
I would be fervently hoping that the next time there is a neutron star collision, the data that comes in is very, very, different. Thus showing that all this conjecture means we don't really understand those "major questions", after all. Predictable science is so very dull.
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If something very different happens the next time two neutron stars collide, that just means there are different types of neutron start collisions. And that's not going to be a surprise, any more than it would be surprising that there could be different types of supernovae or different types of automobile collisions. The exact behavior may depend on the rotational speeds, masses, and so on.
If the next collision is different, maybe they'll call the last one a Type I and the next one a Type II. They'll say th
Questions answered = new questions discovered (Score:1)
The usual result of questions being answered in science is the discovery of new questions,
Thus Isac Newton could say he accomplished much because he stood on the sholders of giants,
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Are you assuming there's a finite amount of things we aim to analyse and understand? I wouldn't worry.
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Are you assuming there's a finite amount of things we aim to analyse and understand? I wouldn't worry.
In a particular field? Sure. When did we last add any element to the periodic table? Discover a genuinely new chemical reaction? Not that it hits a brick wall or anything, but without producing any significant new science funding will eventually try up. Same with manufacturing, I'm sure we'll always want something more. But not necessarily the product you make.
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When did we last add any element to the periodic table?
2016. Four new elements.
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When did we last add any element to the periodic table?
That is discovery based, not work based. There are still very many people working in the field looking for new elements etc. The same goes for the rest of your post. Absence of discoveries doesn't mean absence of work in the field.
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Not necessarily - we may eventually develop such an accurate model of the universe that there are no longer any measurable inconsistencies to drive further research.
At that point all that's left is engineering and "stamp collecting" - exploring and cataloging new locations, organisms, etc. And barring FTL even that will eventually become impossible as the expansion of the universe carries the last of the unexplored stars beyond the limits of the observable universe.
a sample of two (sentences) (Score:3)
I can tell from this post that you wouldn't be an astronomer, so you can rest in peace on that front.
Slow dissolve.
Imagine, if you will, writing those exact thoughts back in 1968. (And why not?—your objections are perfectly generic.)
SL [sigmapisigma.org]
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If I was an astrophysicist I would be rather worried about my future job prospects at that announcement
Why? It does not follow. An astrophysicist would know all the planetary positions well, and has studied the effect of Saturn moving into the seventh house or whatever better than any one. So they know exactly what to do, they know exactly what would happen. That is why you find them to be the richest and most influential persons in the world.
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It seems that every time I've seen scientists talk about a solution to a problem, they say that it spawns more questions. Humans seem to like to push limits.
Weaks (Score:2)
âoe [T]he event itself unfolded in less than three human-designated weeks.â
Unless another species has defined weeks (and in a conflicting manner), I donâ(TM)t think we really need to specify that the weeks were human-designated.
Cthulhu out.
In other words ... (Score:2)
... two neutron stars, the densest things in the universe besides black holes.
Another nail in the coffin of FTL communication (Score:2)
I remember there was some talk of gravity waves being a FTL phenomenon, which could potentially allow for FTL communication...so much for that.
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Well, that is still on the table as a possibility. As long as the speed difference is less than about 1 part in 10^18.
FTFY (Score:3)
FTFY.
Actually, I'm not sure about the black holes.
Looks like it's time to explore... (Score:2)
Re: Now we stop wasting money on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why are you wasting time reading and responding to this article? Put down the keyboard, go forth and do good.
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Any place or time in history where science was actively discouraged or forbidden, the people have lived miserable lives. Coincidence?
Re:Now we stop wasting money on this (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the summary, it sounds like astronomy just got much more efficient and less wasteful. I do agree that every so often now people, especially adults with their basic education long behind them, need a remainder how observing the sky and the human survival are related to each other, all the way from the stone age to the early agricultural societies and the present.
Re:Now we stop wasting money on this (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. Let's just sit around not learning anything about the universe which created us and is completely integral to our existence. Staying ignorant and uneducated is the way to go!
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and instead we're building telescopes to watch past things.
Your comment is a past thing, too.
Re:Now we stop wasting money on this (Score:5)
There are people on this planet that need help to survive, and instead we're building telescopes to watch past things. Pointless and wasteful.
All basic research seems pointless until, suddenly, a need arises for it.
If ne of those telescopes were to spot an asteroid impacting us in one hundred years, we would be motivated to develop the ability to deflect it.
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>If ne of those telescopes were to spot an asteroid impacting us in one hundred years, we would be motivated to develop the ability to deflect it.
Any attempt at deflecting the asteroid would probably be stopped by religious fanatics, anti-scientists, and social justice warriors.
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>If ne of those telescopes were to spot an asteroid impacting us in one hundred years, we would be motivated to develop the ability to deflect it.
Any attempt at deflecting the asteroid would probably be stopped by religious fanatics, anti-scientists, and social justice warriors.
but given those circumstances, nobody would mind if we took the Chinese approach of just driving tanks through their protest barricades.
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There are people on this planet that need help to survive
Yes, and we should be doing more to thelp them.
instead we're building telescopes to watch past things.
No, we are, and should be, doing that, too.
Pointless and wasteful.
You have no grasp of what science has given, is giving, and may give us.
It is fortunate, for the whole world including those who suffer, that you are in no position to make decisions in these matters.
I suggest that if you can help, that you do so. Simple.
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There are people on this planet that need help to survive, and instead we're building telescopes to watch past things. Pointless and wasteful.
Funny how dickheads like you get annoyed about telescopes but give aircraft carriers a free pass. Stupid cunt.
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Last I checked, there was more than one person on this rock, and individuals do indeed have limited multitasking ability. Therefore, it would appear possible for the human race to do more than one thing at a time.
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lol I'm actually quite flattered, I only post occasionally. Amazing.
You a little Trumpflake or something?
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Just look who's in first place now, haters.
And I want to thank first and foremost my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the members of the Academy and my mom, who always told me I could accomplish anything I set my mind to.
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Both ears and the tail for that one.
Re:Yawn. Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone is going to die at some point, none of this matters.
Sounds like someone hasn't procreated yet
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Procreated? I haven't even had my morning coffee, yet. Baby steps.
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I would love to see a Left Vs Right Survivor series. I bet you the right wins!
There would be no-one left.
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That's something that only Pinky would say.
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With an attitude like that, how do you find the energy to get out of bed and post?
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He actually said 66% or so, I don't know where you're getting 98%.
Re:cold thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a deeply flawed understanding of both rationality and human nature. Hint, there's no such thing as a rational human - only humans that are capable of thinking (mostly) rationally when they need to. Nobody goes into science for rational reasons - the hours are long, the pay sucks, and the odds of monetizing a discovery make the lottery look like a good investment.
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To quote Einstein:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Though I've seen slightly different variations to this, they all express an identical sentiment.
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