Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dreiche2]

Well just to clarify, I'm not claiming to represent modern physics anymore. I'm just fantasizing. I haven't followed any physics since about six years either. The everything is made out of space thing is a thought I recently had, and it's only afterwards that I ran across a New Scientist article, according to which this is an idea actually explored by quantum loop gravity or whatever the name is.

As for what explains everything, well there are so many mysterious things that just call for an explanation, but unfortunately I expect the explanation to be highly involved with QM, and this is just something where intuitions might not reach anymore. Personally, I never really got into either general relativity or quantum field theory in my studies, which is kind of a shame, because I don't feel qualified to *really* think about these things. Not that I would expect to suddenly come up with a solution, of course... (ahem)... but I would imagine one could at least get an intuitive idea of some of the current theories...

[Neruz]

Werl the universe being on the surface of a multidimensional shape which i can't remember the name of is currently the most accepted theory. 'Space' 'Energy' 'Mass' etc are all how we percieve different values of the warping of the surface of this shape. String Theory then takes it a step further with superstrings.

It gets really complicated really fast, and is a bit beyond me. Suffice to say that when you have enough dimensions, there is no practical difference between mass, energy, space or time.

[shadow_slicer]

I'm not sure I want to understand what energy is currently thought to be.

And yes, for lack of a better term, it's Aether. It has a twist though, in that everything is made of it. In simple words it sounds too simple. You can dig into simple words and find fault in them. All the extra stuff I'm piling up is there to make an impression, an image that'd help understand the point. The reason I'm avoiding Aether is the same reason I'd be avoiding the terms "perpetuum mobile" or "free energy" if I ever showed you my magnarotor designs. Those words have bad rep, and whenever you mention them people go into the "not again, let's get this crap out of the way" stance, even if what you have has significant differences from what the word used to represent.

I wonder if what you're reaching for is quantum vacuum zero point energy. Even vacuum contains energy, with particles and electromagnetic fields spontaneously coming into and out of existence. This is thought to be the mechanism behind the Casimir Effect, and Hawking Radiation.

[bjlong]

Neruz, you are a brave, brave... bleeding corn on the cob.

Sean, you've confused radiated heat with some sort of energy-substance. Radiated heat is heat lost due to blackbody radiation. Black body radiation is a specific emission spectrum of photons--that is, the way photons are given off by the hot object. The energy isn't lost at all--the photons fly through space, until they're "destroyed" by interacting with something.

Then there's the problem of this energy-substance that you seem to be proposing. Energy does not work that way. It's a property of some object, not a substance unto itself. It's like saying that you're making a soup out of red, or a statue out of squishy. Both are resolved by our minds by attaching an object to the property (Tomato soup! Sponges!) rather than taking these at face value. You should be thinking the same way with energy, momentum, velocity, and many other physical properties.

If you are referencing the above, this does little to support the theory, as a propogating light beam can be thought of as the creation and anihilation of electrons and positrons along its path, but this still completely supports relativity.

[eerr]

Usually, the amount of energy in a system is calculated as E
E=KE+PE

Kinetic Energy is a the amount of change in a particle's location.
change of position. heat, movement, entropy.

Certain particles can absorb or release this energy, changing their arrangement and stifling the movement. They contain/ absorb potential energy, matching the change in kinetic.

[x2yzh9]

Huh.

Antimatter produces 5 times the amount of nuclear energy from the same amount of fuel, so if it takes 5-60 years to make a 4.2 ly journey to alpha centauri, that means it somewhere around 10-15 years for antimatter to make the trip. Considerably less.

[Neruz]

That's because Antimatter is a perfect conversion of mass to energy. Nuclear (Fission and Fusion) doesn't even come close to 100% conversion.

[Innominate]

That's because Antimatter is a perfect conversion of mass to energy. Nuclear (Fission and Fusion) doesn't even come close to 100% conversion.

For those who don't know, this is pretty much because nuclear fission and fusion produce energy equivalent to the difference in energy from start to finish. With nuclear processes you start and end with several massive particles, while a matter/anti-matter annihilation ends with nothing.

[Neruz]

Well with Fission you take a massive particle and break it up into smaller particles. With Fusion you take a non-massive particle (Hydrogen is good) and fuse it into a massive particle.

[zchris13]

That's because Antimatter is a perfect conversion of mass to energy. Nuclear (Fission and Fusion) doesn't even come close to 100% conversion.

For those who don't know, this is pretty much because nuclear fission and fusion produce energy equivalent to the difference in energy from start to finish. With nuclear processes you start and end with several massive particles, while a matter/anti-matter annihilation ends with nothing.

It ends with lots of energy, doofus.

[Innominate]

Well with Fission you take a massive particle and break it up into smaller particles. With Fusion you take a non-massive particle (Hydrogen is good) and fuse it into a massive particle.

I used the word massive to indicate that they have mass.

For those who don't know, this is pretty much because nuclear fission and fusion produce energy equivalent to the difference in energy from start to finish. With nuclear processes you start and end with several massive particles, while a matter/anti-matter annihilation ends with nothing.

It ends with lots of energy, doofus.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I should have specified that I was talking about potential energy.

We define the enthalpy of a reaction as the difference in start and end potential energy values (assuming a conservative field), where a matter/anti-matter annihilation reaction starts with lots of potential energy stored as mass and ends with no potential energy, and the difference between states is the amount of energy released. I'm certainly not claiming that we lose all energy when annihilating matter.

[dreiche2]

Well if one wants to be really nitpicky, with matter - antimatter annihilation you conserve both energy and mass. Because, you know, they're equivalent. But you do convert the original particles (electrons, positrons etc.) into photons.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to talk about potential energy here either, because it's not about forces and fields (conservative or not) in this case... it's about the intrinsic energy of particles.

[Neruz]

Basically you convert more mass into energy with Annihilation than you do with Fusion or Fission.

[dreiche2]

Ok last bit of nitpickery, but saying a reaction yields more energy because more mass is converted into (extractable) energy is a little bit of a tautology.

Basically, any system that yields energy for you to use (e.g. by means of electromagnetic radiation) loses the corresponding amount of mass in the process, and that's true for old fashioned chemical reactions as much as nuclear fission and fusion.

I guess the important distinction in between fission and antimatter annihilation is that with the latter, you actually convert all the energy into electromagnetic radiation, including the rest mass of the constituent elementary particles.

With fission or fusion, afaik, almost all of the resulting energy comes from a change in binding energy of the constituents of a nucleus. In that way, it's equivalent to chemical reactions. The rest mass of the constituents themselves (neutrons, protons, electrons) does not actually get converted (apart from maybe during some neutron - electron + proton conversions). Whereas with antimatter, that's different.

Actually, according to wikipedia, antimatter annihilation can produce a considerable amount of neutrinos as well, which in particularly also have a little bit of rest mass, so the story isn't even complete...

[DreamThorn]

I think I'll stop dividing by zero now.  Everybody seems to prefer arguing against it, rather than help me figure out how to do it.

And with relativity: I really should do the math.

I think I made a mistake with the photon.

Rest mass is zero, but the mass we perceive is the mass of its kinetic energy.  Right?

KE = m*(v^2)/2 = gamma*m0*(c^2)/2
gamma = 0^(-1/2) and m0 = 0
KE = 0^(1/2)*(c^2)/2
c^2 = 2*KE*0^(-1/2)

OK, it seems when I originally did the 0*inf thing was long before the latest version of my divide by zero hypothesis, and my current hypothesis makes a mess of the calculation.

I think I should rather spend some time trying to test my idea about why electromagnetism is so special.