Ripples in the Space-Time Continuum

[AlfredJPruffock]

Aye Eo

Hows the old Space Time Contuim thingy going ?

so where were we - oh yes,

Ripples.

My what a jealous fool is she.
Never come back - its the last time you;ll look like today.

In the beginning - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rybFnRc7H6A

[EternalOptimist]

fings.

fings aint wot they used be. Doctor

[AlfredJPruffock]

fings.

fings aint wot they used be. Doctor

I love it when you call me Doctor.

No spoliers mind !

[EternalOptimist]

I love it when you call me Doctor.

No spoliers mind !

Sometimes, you cant believe it. till you see it

[AlfredJPruffock]

Spot on there EO.

Whilst the masses fretted about Bail Outs - Banking Crises - they couldnt have imagined that the source of all Life - the Sun - would be resonsbile for the Coup de Grace for Makind.

Ironic really.

The Last Days of Mankind - would make a good name for a play.

Excuse me - Time for my afternoon Polo match.

Pip Pip !

[AlfredJPruffock]

STOP PRESS -


BLACK HOLE SONG: A black hole in the center of the Perseus cluster hums a persistent B-flat, according to telescope observations.


In the dark heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster, 300 million light-years from Earth, a supermassive black hole has been singing the same note for 2.5 billion years. Its tone registers 57 octaves below middle C and, according to scientists at NASA's Chandra X-Ray Center, is a resounding B-flat.

Yet, how is this possible in the vacuum of space?

PS B flat is the pitch of the Bagpipe Drone Pipe - but you alrady knew that - Piper at the Gates of Dawn ?

[d000hg]

Do you guys have random threads bookmarked for infrequent revival?

[scooterscot]

Aye Eo

Hows the old Space Time Contuim thingy going ?

so where were we - oh yes,

Ripples.

My what a jealous fool is she.
Never come back - its the last time you;ll look like today.

In the beginning - Genesis - Ripples - YouTube

bummer

Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.

[EternalOptimist]

Do you guys have random threads bookmarked for infrequent revival?

aye

it's the poetry of the Cosmos


the harmonic of the iniverse

[AlfredJPruffock]

Well do bear in mind that the theme of this thread is Black Holes - hence my update.

Guess what - some say that Time Travel may be possible - what are these butters on - eh - maybe they should see a Doctor.

From todays Guardian online ...

The scientists who appeared to have found in September that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have ruled out one potential source of error in their measurements after completing a second, fine-tuned version of their experiment.

Their results, posted on the ArXiv preprint server on Friday morning and submitted for peer review in the Journal of High Energy Physics, confirmed earlier measurements that neutrinos, sent through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 450 miles (720km) away seemed to travel faster than light.

The finding that neutrinos might break one of the most fundamental laws of physics sent scientists into a frenzy when it was first reported in September. Not only because it appeared to go against Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity but, if correct, the finding opened up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

The physicist and TV presenter Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey expressed the incredulity of many in the field when he said that if the findings "prove to be correct and neutrinos have broken the speed of light, I will eat my boxer shorts on live TV".

In their original experiment scientists fired beams of neutrinos from Cern to the Gran Sasso lab and the neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should if travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

One potential source of error pointed out by other scientists was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by Cern were relatively long, around 10 microseconds each, so measuring the exact arrival time of the particles at Gran Sasso could have relatively large errors. To account for this potential problem in the latest version of the test, the beams sent by Cern were thousands of times shorter – around three nanoseconds – with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them. This allowed scientists to time the arrival of the neutrinos at Gran Sasso with greater accuracy.

Writing on his blog when the fine-tuned experiment started last month, Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University, said the shorter pulses of neutrinos being sent from Cern to Gran Sasso would remove the need to measure the shape and duration of the beam. "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn," he said. "In the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over. In other words, with the short pulses you don't need to know the pulse shape, just the pulse time."

"And you also don't need to measure thousands of neutrinos in order to reproduce the pulse shape, getting the leading and trailing edges just right; you just need a small number – maybe even as few as 10 or so – to check the timing of just those few pulses for which a neutrino makes a splash in Opera."

Around 20 neutrino events have been measured at the Gran Sasso lab in the fine-tuned version of the experiment in the past few weeks, each one precisely associated with a pulse leaving Cern. The scientists concluded from the new measurements that the neutrinos still appeared to be arriving earlier than they should.