Quasars, Pulsars, Novae, and Blinking Molecules…

What I am about to explain to you may be a bit confusing unless we begin with what the heck a ‘quasar’ is.

A quasar is defined as an extragalactic, super massive star-like object in that it is luminescent, but that it is the most luminescent object in the universe.

A pulsar, however (and yes, they have been found which is awesome!) is a quasar that acts sort of like a lighthouse: it blinks in a rotating fashion. However, scientists have not yet figured out exactly how this works.

But what they have found out is that some molecules actually do blink.

According to an article from August 12th, last week Neils Bohr’s prediction of molecules blinking was correct after all.

Neils Bohr had predicted this long ago, as a chemical physicist. Now physicists have found that molecules can blink due to a transition of electrons between discreet levels of energy within individual atoms at a time.

These have been coined ‘Quantum jumps’ by Neils Bohr and they have finally found how exactly this works. There are discreet interruptions when the electrons are being transferred, and so the molecules actually light up with energy when all the electrons are in it, then when the interruption is gone they all then go to the other molecule. The interruptions are caused by the emissions (of carbon and such) from the atom, blocking out the electrons.

What’s cool is that these are molecules that are blinking here. What it means is, different ways of imaging for cancer. Real time images of viruses such as HIV and soforth.

But not only for medical professionals: if blinking molecules could be controlled (which may be coming sooner than we know it), these could be used as an electricity-free way to use house-hold lights, brighter display screens on computers and gaming systems, TVs, and could change the way we see electronics as we know them.

As far as novae go, I wanted to explain why you can’t see quasars, pulsars, or supernovae (or novae) with the naked eye.

The problem is this: the closest stars to us besides the Sun take a loooooooong time to send their light to us.

If we were very close to the supernova or pulsar or quasar or whatever it is, we could see it in real time, or close to it.

But in the same way, you cannot see supernovae or quasars with the naked eye because they are so far away, that by the time the light gets here it would barely be noticeable. Any star that is massive enough to have a supernova (or a nova, which is a supernova that causes a white dwarf not a black hole), or any pulsar or quasar, is not even close to being seen with the naked eye. You even need a telescope to see all of the separate areas and craters on the moon, let alone a supernova that’s happening a thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand million light years away.

Next post: The ending of “The Time Machine” (contains spoilers!) and how probable the ideas really are about what the future will be like…

Almost the Beginning of the End, But a Fresh Start has Emerged...

 

So, I haven't updated as much as I would, but it does happen to be a very hard week for me.
Besides all that life stuff, I've been reading a few works of H.P. Lovecraft (A very old, but famous horror/sci fi writer) that included many supernatural dimensions, space, time, and many references to an 'Abyss of time' and such. I wanted to put in a quote that I just had to smile at, because his trademark is putting numerous descriptions all in a line in one large run-on sentence. This is from The Lurking Fear (pub. Necronomicon Press, 1977):
"I felt the stranging tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time." - pg. 23
I have to say, in my opinion, this is a much more awesome description, rather than just saying "I was scared, I wanted to run, and scream, but I couldn't."
Although in the second quote, these are commonly used in today's horror books, to suffice the average bowel movement, instead of attempting to stretch our imagination beyond our limits.
I had to write a paper for school in March about my favorite author, or just an author of literary merit. I chose Lovecraft because he fits both of those descriptions. We had to choose an X, Y, and Z about the author (three descriptions of his work, three pieces of literature by him, three themes he commonly uses, etc.) and argue why this author is a great author, or how in the world these three things appropriately describe his work. I chose for my thesis: "H. P. Lovecraft’s use of magic-realism, New England lore, and supernatural dimensions were made more effective in his writings by his obsession with the sciences." which actually turned out to be great, compared to some who used the old X, Y, and Z method, I just chose his three usual literary devices, and made it work with how EVERYONE who has analyzed his works says over and over how he loved the sciences, especially astronomy and physics (which is ironic, clearly).
Anyways, so I've been very distracted from my science reading, until Thursday when at the library, I stumbled upon "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero" by Robert Kaplan.
I was looking for something fresh, something besides "Blah, blah blah, can't go faster than the speed of light, blah, blah blah" and this was definitely something I was looking for: Something about the sciences that definitely showed genuine interest from the narrator, and didn't start babbling over useless things just to fill the pages.
If I had to suggest it to anyone, seriously, I'd suggest it to anyone who's interested in history, math, science, mysteries, or human nature (behavior, etc.). It talks about numbers from the beginning besides zero, too, and it says how it ties in with the cultures, how the cultures exchanged symbols, and how the symbol for zero wasn't developed until far into the development of civilization. It gives pictures, too, to give the reader a visual of what the old numbers used to look like, and how they weren't exactly numbers, such as Roman Numerals, the Indian 'Kha', and the Greek symbols for different amounts. Many of them weren't exactly numbers because they were only ten-based, not one-based. It's terribly confusing when you tried to make slightly larger numbers such as 72 or 160.
And so, I am taking a break from "A Brief History of Time" for something a bit newer and refreshed, then I'll get back down to the nitty-gritty of spacetime.

Light Cones... Why Make the "Not Allowed" Assumption?

NOTE: THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE POSTED FOR THURSDAY, JULY 22ND BUT COULD NOT BE PUBLISHED BECAUSE MY COMPUTER WAS BEING OBNOXIOUS. BEAR WITH ME AS I REPHRASE A FEW THINGS THAT IVE SAID ALREADY. THANKS! - Tuesday, July 27th

P.S.: THERE WERE THREE IMAGES WITH THIS POST THAT DID NOT SUCCESSFULLY BLOG ON HERE. WILL BE UPLOADING IN THE NEAR FUTURE. ONE IS THE LIGHT-CONE, THEN THE FUTURE AND PAST LIGHT-CONE, THEN ANOTHER DIAGRAM.

So, I was sitting at the library with my friend Sam, and I finally made a prioritized list of what I need to scan (or in this case, take a pic of and upload)... What these light cones represent are points, and each of the points within that shaded region of the Future Light Cone represent an event that light will eventually be reaching or affecting, but hasn't yet. As an event occurs, it moves closer toward the center, until it ends up in the Past Light Cone, where the light has already reached and or affected it. The center represents light affecting it at that exact moment.
I was talking to Sam about the fourth dimension, and I figured I should put in here how the dimensions view each other, including the second, first, and zero.
The zero dimension is a point, and apparently it cannot see, because according to the pattern it should be able to view the 'negative one' dimension, which makes no sense at the moment.
The first dimension, which is a line, views things as points.
The second dimension, as in a flat plane, views things as lines.
The third dimension, which is us, views things as flat planes.
The fourth dimension, as in hypercubes and such, views things as three dimension objects.
It's interesting the talk about the fourth dimension because a hypercube is so strange. The way Lisa Randall described it was a bit strange, because for us to view it it would be one cube at a time, not all at once.
If we were to view a hypercube, it would look like a cube inside a larger cube, with the smaller cube expanding to the size of the large one, and a smaller one reappearing inside the cube and expanding to the large cube's size again.
-----------------
Besides alternate dimensions, I was thinking about that Garbage Can Theorem again... Or Excess Energy Theorem. Whatever you want to call it...
I was reading about how Einstein figured there was an 'anti-gravity force' but didn't know what it was that was expanding the universe, and I realized:
If another universe is what's giving us excess matter to expand, then this means that it's not dark energy as defined... Read this quote from Stephen Hawking before you read any more:
"A Brief History In Time", Page 42:
"In Friedmann's model, all the galaxies are moving directly away from each other. The situation is steadily blown up. As the balloon expands, the distance between any two spots increases, but there is no spot that can be said to be the center of the expansion. Moreover, the farther apart the spots are, the faster they will be moving apart. Similarly, in Friedmann's model the speed at which any two galaxies are moving apart in proportional to the distance between them."
This would actually fit my model PERFECTLY.
Because in reality, when you're blowing up a balloon, you can figure out what is making the balloon expand: There's only one entrance to let air in and out.
And in our universe, it could be a white hole coming into our universe from another (which doesn't have to be physically and literally connected, but it would be by an Einstein Rosen Bridge with a black hole somewhere in another universe) spitting out matter and otherwise that fills up space. It could actually be spitting space-time into our universe, (I mean, black holes can even suck up light, so who knows? You can't see if it's swallowing space-time or not..)
The last thing that occured to me at the library today was that Hawking said when the universe was infinitely dense, it was a singularity. But singularities are in black holes today. So isn't that saying that at any time another universe could form inside our own, on a smaller scale???
And if this is the case, then wouldnt that pretty much prove what nikodem poplawski said, about our universe going into the future through time, coming out of a black hole? That would make it concrete, as long as one assumes our universe is the same as others.
That means that we'd be coming out of a black hole in a larger universe, probably similar to our own.
Wow. I may have caught on to something here...
I'm gonna continue with this tomorrow, and probably upload some more pics or something.

The Juiciest Part of "A Brief History of Time" So Far...

So, tonight, I wasn't going to post, because my throat is killing me, as well as my stomach... But besides feeling like crap, I did happen to read more of "A Brief History of Time", and it was amazing!
I'm at the part where Hawking begins to talk about Einstein and the French guy (Can't remember his name) making the Theory of Relativity, and I was just getting into the part that most applies here, about the Theory of Special Relativity, which is the formula I had used originally to show why I thought I could pull through with "This does not mean you can't go faster than the speed of light, this means it is inconceivable to us because we are moving into the future, but when you go faster than the speed of light, time flips over relative to you, and you begin going BACK in time!"
Now, I didn't really get to explain the whole theory, so I'll say some more about the diagrammed aspect of it. Yes, I have a diagram, but unfortunately I couldn't find the energy to draw up a good one for the website...
It consists of an hourglass-shaped drawing with a little square near the top left corner of the page, and an arrow showing the square (representing matter) spiraling into the black hole, going straight through an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and spiraling out of a white hole near the bottom. On the side there are two markings, positive infinity (the black hole) and negative infinity (the white hole) representing the direction of time away from zero, where you'd be meeting the speed of light, as if represented by a number-line of some sort.
Now, my next goal is to come up with some sort of equation to represent time according to when it flips over, and such. I was thinking of playing with the d=rt formula, kind of, only mixed with E=MC^2, and possibly even more mixed with the Special Relativity formula (which is a bit confusing when put into typing), and making it something of my own.
The Garbage Can Theorem (haha) keeps coming to my mind, and I'm thinking of what Stephen Hawking said too, about how the Creator of our universe (if there was really one Creator, who knows?) didn't have time: That time is only a dimension of our universe, but that maybe time has always happened with the Creator, too, we just don't know. He said that the common sense-way of thinking about time not being connected to space somehow may have to be altered (I mean, it was in 1990 but still), this may solve some of our problems. For instance, time could be a thing of reality outside our universe, too. Or it could only be for this universe, in this dimension. I mean, time doesn't really exist for the second dimension, so why should it exist for the fourth, the fifth, the sixth?
It's interesting to think about what the fourth dimension looks like: according to Lisa Randall, we already know. You see, to the second dimension, you can see one side of something 3 dimensional at a time. So to us, we can see a three dimensional figure that's one side of a four-dimensional object at a time.
Let's look at the hypercube. It consists of two large cubes connected by six smaller cubes making a ring around the middle of the two. If this were to pass into our plane, we'd see one cube appear, and that one disappear, then another cube, then that one would disappear, and so on...
So you see, it's very hard to visualize (I mean, obviously it'd be pretty weird if some random cubes appeared in the night sky and disappeared one after the other...)
But it makes sense, if you think about how if you're only looking at one side of cone, and you make cuts through it (like the plane barrier does) then you can only see slices of the cone at a time. It's sort of like that. You can only see one part a time, because of the way the planes of the dimensions work, slicing the objects so you can only see one part at a time.
Anyways, for tonight, I'm done.. I was going to talk more but I still feel like crap. It was great posting though!
Also, thanks for the follow, nick!

The Old Binder... I Need to Change It, For the Second Time

 

Originally, my project was turning into a binder, consisting of a drawn cover with a rocket and two different titles:
The Modern Time Machine Project by Madeleine Michaud and Kyle Oelofse, and The SIEMEN's Math, Science, and Technology Competition by Madeleine Michaud and Dean Thurston.
Of course, my interests have taken a huge turn from first, writing a book with Kyle, and second, adding on a project to do with all of this information. But that would be terribly difficult for someone going into junior year... I mean, you can't prove my theory, so what good would an experiment do for me if I can't go to the large hadron collider??
This picture was version 2.0 of the project, as it turned into not a book, but just the project and THEN writing a book later..
Of course, my partner for the project was not as interested as I thought he was. And to enter the Siemen's competition before you're going into senior year, you HAVE to have a partner.
So, to my dismay, the project was dismissed, as well as the book.
So for a couple of weeks I had absolutely nothing, except ideas, which is all I had begun with.
As far as my theory went, that stupid stuff with "Brian" (the one from the previous post) had distracted me from everything... Because he wasn't interested in it.
So, I made a big mistake. But I've learned from it, which is the important piece of it.
And so, here I am, writing this post for today...Awesome!
And that wasn't sarcastic. Writing a blog is possibly one of the best ideas ever come up with for blooming writers and people who want to share ideas and information with the world!
It's much less intimidating than writing a book, because all it is, is whatever you want to say for the day, and it doesn't have to be writting in a certain way. You can write it any way you want, and it doesn't have to be over 100 pages to be considered to show to the world (to be printed and sold)....
All it is, is typing stuff in a somewhat-entertaining way and and clicking a button.
How easy...
Anyways, I wanted to tell you all about this dialogue that happens every single time I meet someone new or catch up with a relative:

Person: "Are you thinking about college yet?"
Me: "I want to get my Ph.D in Astrophysics at Cambridge University"
(With a look of surprise)Person: Wow! That's (insert 'wonderful' or 'intense')!
Me: "Yeah, it's in England..."
(Still looking astonished)Person: "Well, that sounds (insert 'wonderful' or 'fascinating')!"

I wonder if a conversation like this happens with anyone else with one of their relatives or when meeting someone new....

As far as science goes, I was thinking about my theory on the way to my family reunion in the car today, and I realized that if the theory is called Modern Theory, and if our universe is actually another universe's waste disposal system, shouldn't that part of it be called the Garbage Can Theorem? I laughed, what a funny name... I suppose it could be called the Excess Energy Theorem or something good-sounding like that?

It's funny because I'm still reading "A Brief History of Time", and I realized that String Theory didn't exist until after this book was released in 1989/1990.
This means that String Theory has only been around for, at the most, 19 years!
Really, I would like to meet the scientist who came up with it, and analyze their brain for a plethora of psychological issues....
Haha, just kidding.
Anyways, next time I'm posting a diagram of the time-travel aspect of my theory, so stay tuned!