Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[Bambi]

[Dave Lane]

But but the earth is the center of everything and the only important spot in the universe. Somebody with a really old book told me so. We can't be a speck.

[Pants]

Originally Posted by Bambi

Jesus.

[AussieChiefsFan]

[AussieChiefsFan]

Not that sciency, but interesting.

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by mikey23545

I grew up in the shadow of history, about 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, during the birth of the space program. I hung on every launch, every tiny step we took, as we clawed our way up and out of the cosmic gravity well that was the planet of our origin.

The day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their spindly little craft down to the surface of the moon, I was overwhelmed with an emotion that to this day I still can't name. I was positive that it wouldn't be but another 10 or 20 years before I would go through the same feelings of awe and wonderment when another astronaut left another set of footprints on the surface of Mars.

I didn't realize at that time we would begin to turn our back on the universe to dwell on the fantasy of having utopia on earth before we could spend money on the ancient urge to explore. Fifty years and trillions of dollars later, we have the same percentage of poor as when we started, and our space program has learned to settle for playing in the same stagnant bathwater known as low earth orbit for decades.

And in those same decades I came to the realization that those first steps on the lunar surface that had left me so breathless was not man clawing his way up from his origins - it was man clawing his way back to them...

Well written, rep

[Dave Lane]

[kepp]

Originally Posted by AussieChiefsFan

Really interesting stuff.

[New World Order]

I actually have a friend, Rainbow Jeremy who reject everything to do with science. He just chill at home, he smoke his own home grown and check this, he don't have a tele.

[Beef Supreme]

Originally Posted by New World Order

I actually have a friend, Rainbow Jeremy who reject everything to do with science. He just chill at home, he smoke his own home grown and check this, he don't have a tele.

Sounds like a gay pRon name.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Dave Lane

@ 7:40. That's some evil shit....

[frankotank]

Originally Posted by mikey23545

I grew up in the shadow of history, about 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, during the birth of the space program. I hung on every launch, every tiny step we took, as we clawed our way up and out of the cosmic gravity well that was the planet of our origin.

The day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin guided their spindly little craft down to the surface of the moon, I was overwhelmed with an emotion that to this day I still can't name. I was positive that it wouldn't be but another 10 or 20 years before I would go through the same feelings of awe and wonderment when another astronaut left another set of footprints on the surface of Mars.

I didn't realize at that time we would begin to turn our back on the universe to dwell on the fantasy of having utopia on earth before we could spend money on the ancient urge to explore. Fifty years and trillions of dollars later, we have the same percentage of poor as when we started, and our space program has learned to settle for playing in the same stagnant bathwater known as low earth orbit for decades.

And in those same decades I came to the realization that those first steps on the lunar surface that had left me so breathless was not man clawing his way up from his origins - it was man clawing his way back to them...

wow!

[Fish]

Imagine having an idea, that's incredibly advanced for its time. An idea that's completely different than anything currently known on the subject. A declaration of observable facts that still remains true hundreds of years after you're gone, amidst incredible scientific advancement..

Einstein's Gravity Theory Passes Toughest Test Yet



A strange stellar pair nearly 7,000 light-years from Earth has provided physicists with a unique cosmic laboratory for studying the nature of gravity. The extremely strong gravity of a massive neutron star in orbit with a companion white dwarf star puts competing theories of gravity to a test more stringent than any available before.

Once again, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, comes out on top.

At some point, however, scientists expect Einstein's model to be invalid under extreme conditions. General Relativity, for example, is incompatible with quantum theory. Physicists hope to find an alternate description of gravity that would eliminate that incompatibility.

A newly-discovered pulsar -- a spinning neutron star with twice the mass of the Sun -- and its white-dwarf companion, orbiting each other once every two and a half hours, has put gravitational theories to the most extreme test yet. Observations of the system, dubbed PSR J0348+0432, produced results consistent with the predictions of General Relativity.

The tightly-orbiting pair was discovered with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT), and subsequently studied in visible light with the Apache Point telescope in New Mexico, the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. Extensive radio observations with the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and the Effelsberg telescope in Germany yielded vital data on subtle changes in the pair's orbit.

In such a system, the orbits decay and gravitational waves are emitted, carrying energy from the system. By very precisely measuring the time of arrival of the pulsar's radio pulses over a long period of time, astronomers can determine the rate of decay and the amount of gravitational radiation emitted. The large mass of the neutron star in PSR J0348+0432, the closeness of its orbit with its companion, and the fact that the companion white dwarf is compact but not another neutron star, all make the system an unprecedented opportunity for testing alternative theories of gravity.

Under the extreme conditions of this system, some scientists thought that the equations of General Relativity might not accurately predict the amount of gravitational radiation emitted, and thus change the rate of orbital decay. Competing gravitational theories, they thought, might prove more accurate in this system.

"We thought this system might be extreme enough to show a breakdown in General Relativity, but instead, Einstein's predictions held up quite well," said Paulo Freire, of the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany.
That's good news, the scientists say, for researchers hoping to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves with advanced instruments. Researchers using such instruments hope to detect the gravitational waves emitted as such dense pairs as neutron stars and black holes spiral inward toward violent collisions.

Gravitational waves are extremely difficult to detect and even with the best instruments, physicists expect they will need to know the characteristics of the waves they seek, which will be buried in "noise" from their detectors. Knowing the characteristics of the waves they seek will allow them to extract the signal they seek from that noise.

"Our results indicate that the filtering techniques planned for these advanced instruments remain valid," said Ryan Lynch, of McGill University.
Freire and Lynch worked with a large international team of researchers. They reported their results in the journal Science.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

[Pants]

Originally Posted by New World Order

I actually have a friend, Rainbow Jeremy who reject everything to do with science. He just chill at home, he smoke his own home grown and check this, he don't have a tele.

Ali G rep, breh.

[Pants]

Originally Posted by Fish

Imagine having an idea, that's incredibly advanced for its time. An idea that's completely different than anything currently known on the subject. A declaration of observable facts that still remains true hundreds of years after you're gone, amidst incredible scientific advancement..

He was obviously an alien in disguise.