Run and Gain Weight????

If you run really fast, you gain weight. Not permanently, or it would make a mockery of diet and exercise plans, but momentarily, and only a tiny amount.

Light speed is the speed limit of the universe. So if something is travelling close to the speed of light, and you give it a push, it can’t go very much faster. But you’ve given it extra energy, and that energy has to go somewhere.

Where it goes is mass. According to relativity, mass and energy are equivalent. So the more energy you put in, the greater the mass becomes. This is negligible at human speeds – Usain Bolt is not noticeably heavier when running than when still – but once you reach an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, your mass starts to increase rapidly.

Would a Strawberry Sun be Hot like our sun?

Why is the sun hot?  Why does it stay hot?  What if...the sun was made of strawberries?  Would it be hot?
The answer is well...yes and no.  The sun is hot because of its weight...billion billion billion tons creating vast gravity which pulls its core under colossal pressure.  This pressure leads to enormous temperature.  So if you took a billion billion billion tons of strawberries and stuck them in space it would create equal pressure and a just as high a temperature.  That is the yes part....

Strawberry Sun

Now for the NO part:  Even though the heat would be similar to the sun because strawberries are not made of hydrogen the fusion reaction that keeps the sun going wouldn't get under way and our strawberry sun would cool from its initial heat rather than burning for billions of years!

Rainbows

Looking out Jason and Maria's back window.

Simple really... rainbows.  But how beautiful!  Maybe there are a few things you didn't know.  Likely you knew that a rainbow is sunlight ... spread out into its spectrum of colors and diverted to the eye by water droplets.   But did you notice that the sun is always behind you when you face a rainbow? And what make the bow?
A question like this calls for a proper physical answer. We will discuss the formation of a rainbow by raindrops. It is a problem in optics that was first clearly discussed by Rene Descartes in 1637. An interesting historical account of this is to be found in Carl Boyer's book, The Rainbow From Myth to Mathematics. Descartes simplified the study of the rainbow by reducing it to a study of one water droplet and how it interacts with light falling upon it.
He writes:"Considering that this bow appears not only in the sky, but also in the air near us, whenever there are drops of water illuminated by the sun, as we can see in certain fountains, I readily decided that it arose only from the way in which the rays of light act on these drops and pass from them to our eyes. Further, knowing that the drops are round, as has been formerly proved, and seeing that whether they are larger or smaller, the appearance of the bow is not changed in any way, I had the idea of making a very large one, so that I could examine it better.
Descarte describes how he held up a large sphere in the sunlight and looked at the sunlight reflected in it. He wrote "I found that if the sunlight came, for example, from the part of the sky which is marked AFZ
and my eye was at the point E, when I put the globe in position BCD, its part D appeared all red, and much more brilliant than the rest of it; and that whether I approached it or receded from it, or put it on my right or my left, or even turned it round about my head, provided that the line DE always made an angle of about forty-two degrees with the line EM, which we are to think of as drawn from the center of the sun to the eye, the part D appeared always similarly red; but that as soon as I made this angle DEM even a little larger, the red color disappeared; and if I made the angle a little smaller, the color did not disappear all at once, but divided itself first as if into two parts, less brilliant, and in which I could see yellow, blue, and other colors ... When I examined more particularly, in the globe BCD, what it was which made the part D appear red, I found that it was the rays of the sun which, coming from A to B, bend on entering the water at the point B, and to pass to C, where they are reflected to D, and bending there again as they pass out of the water, proceed to the point ".
This quotation illustrates how the shape of the rainbow is explained. To simplify the analysis, consider the path of a ray of monochromatic light through a single spherical raindrop. Imagine how light is refracted as it enters the raindrop, then how it is reflected by the internal, curved, mirror-like surface of the raindrop, and finally how it is refracted as it emerges from the drop. If we then apply the results for a single raindrop to a whole collection of raindrops in the sky, we can visualize the shape of the bow.
The traditional diagram to illustrate this is shown here as adapted from Humphreys, Physics of the Air. It represents the path of one light ray incident on a water droplet from the direction SA. As the light beam enters the surface of the drop at A, it is bent (refracted) a little and strikes the inside wall of the drop at B, where it is reflected back to C. As it emerges from the drop it is refracted (bent) again into the direction CE. The angle D represents a measure of the deviation of the emergent ray from its original direction. Descartes calculated this deviation for a ray of red light to be about 180 - 42 or 138 degrees.
The ray drawn here is significant because it represents the ray that has the smallest angle of deviation of all the rays incident upon the raindrop. It is called the Descarte or rainbow ray and much of the sunlight as it is refracted and reflected through the raindrop is focused along this ray. Thus the reflected light is diffuse and weaker except near the direction of this rainbow ray. It is this concentration of rays near the minimum deviation that gives rise to the arc of rainbow.
The sun is so far away that we can, to a good approximation, assume that sunlight can be represented by a set of parallel rays all falling on the water globule and being refracted, reflected internally, and refracted again on emergence from the droplet in a manner like the figure. Descartes writes
I took my pen and made an accurate calculation of the paths of the rays which fall on the different points of a globe of water to determine at which angles, after two refractions and one or two reflections they will come to the eye, and I then found that after one reflection and two refractions there are many more rays which can be seen at an angle of from forty-one to forty-two degrees than at any smaller angle; and that there are none which can be seen at a larger angle" (the angle he is referring to is 180 - D).
A typical raindrop is spherical and therefore its effect on sunlight is symmetrical about an axis through the center of the drop and the source of light (in this case the sun). Because of this symmetry, the two-dimensional illustration of the figure serves us well and the complete picture can be visualized by rotating the two dimensional illustration about the axis of symmetry. The symmetry of the focusing effect of each drop is such that whenever we view a raindrop along the line of sight defined by the rainbow ray, we will see a bright spot of reflected/refracted sunlight. Referring to the figure, we see that the rainbow ray for red light makes an angle of 42 degrees between the direction of the incident sunlight and the line of sight. Therefore, as long as the raindrop is viewed along a line of sight that makes this angle with the direction of incident light, we will see a brightening. The rainbow is thus a circle of angular radius 42 degrees, centered on the antisolar point, as shown schematically here.
We don't see a full circle because the earth gets in the way. The lower the sun is to the horizon, the more of the circle we see -right at sunset, we would see a full semicircle of the rainbow with the top of the arch 42 degrees above the horizon. The higher the sun is in the sky, the smaller is the arch of the rainbow above the horizon.

High Voltage On The Moon-Comment

Here is a very interesting thought about high voltage on the moon. Thanks Bob for the contribution.

Since the moon soil is not an effective conductor, grounding is not an option. Think of the crater as a capacitor. If a conductive path were provided between the bottom of the crater and to moon's surface at the top of the crater it would neutralize the potential difference. You would need to attach a faraday grid at each end of the cable to collect and disburse the charge.  The larger the grid, the greater the discharge rate.  
Robert B. Gregory ab4al@att.net


AB4AL-Bob

A Comment on the Black Hole Post

Interesting comment from Bob.  Keep reading...you'll think big!


Neat stuff!  If you read that short deal with the picture of a red giant having its surface sucked into a black hole you will note it talks about and the picture and shows two jets streaming into space from the black hole.  At the core of our galaxy the Milky Way is a huge black hole and likewise streaming from it are like poles.  These poles cause disruption of matter the closer you get to their radiant direction.  When you influence matter you also cause the resulting gravitational field to fluctuate. 

Imagine a pond where you drop a heavy rock, the resulting ripples spread across the surface.  The closer you are to the event point the greater the ripple magnitude.  In the case of a black hole the spindles of energy radiating outward creates these gravitational ripples.  In our travel around the core of the Milky Way our solar system periodically passes through heavy gravity waves.  When the waves are strong enough they actually distort planet Earth like a tennis ball is distorted when you squeeze it.  The results of this distortion of the Earth are powerful earth quakes and resulting tsunami action. 

In 2004 when Sari Lanka was struck with a tsunami as a result of the powerful earthquake at Sumatra, it was as a result of a powerful gravity wave that struck Earth when millions of years ago a super nova exploded and over those millions of years traveling across space the gravity wave finally hit Earth in 2004. 

The waves coming from the galactic core are many times more powerful and were the driving force that broke the land mass apart and caused the separate continents to be formed. The event is often referred to as the Pangaea era.

It is possible that with our next encounter the results would be as described in the Bible, disaster beyond description.



Just thought I'd share that with you, it is all based on information gleaned from credible sources and several astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking being one.  I've been doing the research and have also discovered other things that are very interesting you will never hear in our limited society.



Interesting links:  http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/

                             http://earthchangesmedia.com/

                             http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/GRB.html

                             http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Black_holes

                             http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/are-black-holes-actually-white-stephen-hawkings-theory-says-yes.html

Watch Out HIGH VOLTAGE and the moon?

As the solar wind flows over natural obstructions on the moon, it may charge polar lunar craters to hundreds of volts, according to new calculations by NASA’s Lunar Science Institute team.

Polar lunar craters are of interest because of resources, including water ice, which exist there. The moon’s orientation to the sun keeps the bottoms of polar craters in permanent shadow, allowing temperatures there to plunge below minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to store volatile material like water for billions of years. "However, our research suggests that, in addition to the wicked cold, explorers and robots at the bottoms of polar lunar craters may have to contend with a complex electrical environment as well, which can affect surface chemistry, static discharge, and dust cling," said William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Farrell is lead author of a paper on this research published March 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The research is part of the Lunar Science Institute’s Dynamic Response of the Environment at the moon (DREAM) project.

"This important work by Dr. Farrell and his team is further evidence that our view on the moon has changed dramatically in recent years," said Gregory Schmidt, deputy director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "It has a dynamic and fascinating environment that we are only beginning to understand."

Solar wind inflow into craters can erode the surface, which affects recently discovered water molecules. Static discharge could short out sensitive equipment, while the sticky and extremely abrasive lunar dust could wear out spacesuits and may be hazardous if tracked inside spacecraft and inhaled over long periods.
To learn more: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/electric-craters.html

Black Hole Jets

For decades, X-ray astronomers have studied the complex behavior of binary systems pairing a normal star with a black hole. In these systems, gas from the normal star streams toward the black hole and forms a disk around it. Friction within the disk heats the gas to millions of degrees -- hot enough to produce X-rays. At the disk's inner edge, near the black hole, strong magnetic fields eject some of the gas into dual, oppositely directed jets that blast outward at about half the speed of light.

To learn more: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/black-hole-jets.html

The Sun

This image of the sun was taken Oct. 28 by Hinode's X-Ray Telescope. One of three instruments on board Hinode, The X-Ray Telescope is designed to capture images of the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona. The corona is the spawning ground for explosive activity on the sun, such as coronal mass ejections. Powered by the sun's magnetic field, this violent activity produces significant effects in the space between the sun and Earth.

This image reveals, for the first time, that X-ray bright points are composed of magnetic loops. It also reveals details of structure in the polar region of the sun, along with active-region loops. The X-Ray Telescope is imaging the corona in a way that has been possible only since approximately 1960. Previously, the sun’s corona was viewable in white light only during solar eclipses.

By combining observations from Hinode's optical and X-ray telescopes, scientists will be able to study how changes in the sun's magnetic field trigger these powerful events.

Image credit: Hinode JAXA/NASA/PPARC

Learn more:  http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/solar_014.html

McCarthyism: Blacklisted by History

Here is a thought expander. I've been taught all my life this version of Joseph McCarthy. Turns out history likely was altered .... I'm reading McCarthy Blacklisted by History.... I'll let you know what I learn. But here is the "standard version" we've all been taught from Wikipedia:

McCarthyism is the political action of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term specifically describes activities associated with the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by heightened fears of communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents. Originally coined to criticize the anti-communist pursuits of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, "McCarthyism" soon took on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts. The term is also now used more generally to describe reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries.

During the post–World War II era of McCarthyism, many thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs was often greatly exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and even imprisonment. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts later overturned,[1] laws that would be declared unconstitutional,[2] dismissals for reasons later declared illegal[3] or actionable,[4] or extra-legal procedures that would come into general disrepute.

Sunspot 1084

Let me introduce you to Sunspot 1084. The dark core of this sunspot is twice as wide as the earth itself. The swirl of hot gas and magnetic fields leave a beautiful pinwheel appearance.
So what is a sunspot?
Sunspots are magnetic regions on the sun with magnetic fields thousands of times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field.

Learn More HERE

Quantim Entanglement

To step into big thinking... try this one! I was first exposed to this in an article in QST magazine. I can't find the article but the basics of the concept is that atomic particles can be entangled so that if one is changed in some way the other changes instantly in the same way regardless where it is in the universe. There is quite the stir in the computer field regarding quantum entanglement. So read on!

Quantim Entanglement discussion from the University of Cambridge:


Quantum Entanglement

by Leah Henderson and Vlatko Vedral

In the day-to-day world that is well described by classical physics, we often observe correlations. Imagine you are observing a bank robbery. The bank robber is pointing a gun at the terrified teller. By looking at the teller you can tell whether the gun has gone off or not. If the teller is alive and unharmed, you can be sure the gun has not fired. If the teller is lying dead of a gun-shot wound on the floor, you know that the gun has fired.

This is elementary detective work. On the other hand, by examining the gun to see whether it has fired, you can find out whether the teller is alive or dead. We could say that there is a direct correlation between the state of the gun and the state of the teller. 'Gun fired' means 'teller dead', and 'gun not-fired' means 'teller alive'. We assume that the robber only shoots to kill and he never misses.

In the world of microscopic objects described by quantum mechanics, things are not always so simple. Imagine an atom which might undergo a radioactive decay in a certain time, or it might not. We might expect that with respect to the decay, there are only two possible states here: 'decayed', and 'not decayed', just as we had two states, 'fired' and 'not fired' for the gun or 'alive' and 'dead' for the teller. However, in the quantum mechanical world, it is also possible for the atom to be in a combined state 'decayed-not decayed' in which it is neither one nor the other but somewhere in between. This is called a 'superposition' of the two states, and is not something we normally expect of classical objects like guns or tellers. Two atoms may be correlated so that if the first has decayed, the second will also have decayed, and if the first atom has not decayed, neither has the second. This is a 100% correlation. But the quantum mechanical atoms may also be correlated so that if the first is in the superposition 'decayed-not decayed', the second will be also. Quantum mechanically there are more correlations between the atoms than we would expect classically. This kind of quantum 'super-correlation' is called 'entanglement'.

Entanglement was in fact originally named in German, 'Verschrankung', by Schrodinger, who was one of the first people to realise how strange it was. Imagine it is not the robber but the atom which determines whether the gun fires. If the atom decays it sets off a hair trigger which fires the gun. If it doesn't decay, the gun doesn't fire. But what does it mean if the atom is in the superposition state 'decayed-not decayed'? Then can it be correlated to the gun in a superposition state 'fired-not fired'? And what about the poor teller, who is now dead and alive at the same time? Schrodinger was worried by a similar situation where the victim of the quantum entanglement was a cat in a box where the decaying atom could trigger the release of a lethal chemical. The problem is that in the everyday world we are not used to seeing anything like a 'dead-live' cat, or a 'dead-live' teller, but in principle, if we expect quantum mechanics to be a complete theory describing every level of our experience, such strange states should be possible. Where does the strange quantum world stop and the ordinary classical world begin? These are problems which have now been debated for decades, and a number of different 'interpretations' of the quantum theory have been suggested.

The problem was brought into focus by a famous paper in 1935 by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, who argued that the strange behaviour of entanglement meant that quantum mechanics was an incomplete theory, and that there must be what came to be known as 'hidden variables' not yet discovered. This produced a famous debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who argued that quantum mechanics was complete, and that Einstein's problems arose because he tried to interpret the theory too literally.

However in 1964, John Bell pointed out that for certain experiments classical hidden variable theories made different predictions from quantum mechanics. In fact he published a theorem which quantified just how much more strongly quantum particles were correlated than would be classically expected, even if hidden variables were taken into account. This made it possible to test whether quantum mechanics could be accounted for by hidden variables. A number of experiments were performed, and the result is almost universally accepted to be fully in favour of quantum mechanics. Therefore there can be no 'easy' explanation of the entangled correlations. The only kind of hidden variables not ruled out by the Bell tests would be 'non-local', meaning they would be able to act instantaneously across a distance.

More recently, from the beginning of the nineties, the field of quantum information theory opened up and expanded rapidly. Quantum entanglement began to be seen not only as a puzzle, but also as a resource for communication. Imagine two parties, Alice and Bob who would like to send messages to one another over a distance. In 1993, Bennett et al. showed that if Alice and Bob each hold one of two particles which are entangled together, a quantum state can be transmitted from Alice to Bob completely by sending fewer classical bits than would be required without the entanglement. This process has been called 'quantum teleportation'. It involves not only bits for sending information, but 'e-bits', or entanglement bits, which consist of a maximally entangled pair of particles. Other ways in which entanglement can be used a an information resource have also been discovered, for example, dense coding, cryptography and applications to communication complexity. Entanglement was found to be a manipulable resource. Under certain conditions, states of low entanglement could be purified into more entangled states by acting locally, and states of higher entanglement could be 'diluted' to give larger numbers of less entangled states.

Investigation of quantum entanglement is currently a very active area. Research is being done on measures for quantifying entanglement precisely, on entanglement of many-particle systems, and on manipulations of entanglement and its relation to thermodynamics.

LEARN MORE HERE