Physics

Somewhere between 1995 and 2000, I was sent to teach a pSOS+ class to Westinghouse engineers in Savannah, Georgia.

For the past couple of years, television and popular science articles have been capitalizing this popular theory. It came about because movements on a galactic scale found Newtons law of universal gravitation (1687) as modified by Albert Einstein’s General Relativity (1915) to be inadequate. According to those theories, the galaxies do not have sufficient gravity for their observed sizes. They should fly apart.

Why do the Orionids (meteor shower) always come from Orion’s arm pit, and only just before dawn?

Inspired by “Why Does E=mc^2” by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, I admit to giving my imagination considerable free rein in this essay.

Curiosity, the biggest, heaviest and most complex rover, landed successfully on Mars this evening.

A parent, watching their child take its first steps, knows it may fall. As a result, we stand ready to catch them when they do.

Everything I can see, touch, hear, find in fossils or discern in the extreme reaches of the most distant super galaxies and quasars all tell me that everything changes according to “cause and effect”.

The “limit” of the speed of light is an observational, or relative to something else, limit. That is, if you stand in your backyard and, looking up at the sky, observe something that is moving extremely fast (relative to you), you will be unable to measure (perceive) its velocity as greater than the speed of light. Also, at that same relative-to-you velocity, you would measure its mass as approaching infinity and, if there were a clock on-board that fast moving object, you would see that clock as nearly standing still.

Taken with a tripod, manual exposure but, in the dark I didn’t record the settings, on a Fuji “too many controls” digital camera at “darn close” to the full moon moment. The image was cropped this morning and levels tweaked (well, “hammered” would be a better choice of terms) in Paint.Net, my favorite free image editing program. (Looks like I blew the focus. Or maybe, between enlargement in the camera and enlargement in Paint.Net, I’ve just run out of pixels. Regardless, it’s a done thing.)

Cool!

Einstein was noted for his thought experiments. He would think up a situation and then mentally chew on it for long periods of time. Sometimes he would come up with some really great stuff.