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How did the universe come into existence?

Porky Gorky

By Porky Gorky,
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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

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Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Lucinda Bulloch wrote:

No one has the right to take away a persons dreams, truth is an illusion, truth can only hurt as it is only required when a person is unsure, this thread came about for reasons that are not apparent, in a sense it is a trap, to uncover what many believe to be a fraud, but there again don't you think that because of it's dishonesty that it deserves nothing?

I would rather discover what I believe to be a fraud rather than to believe in a lie.

Believing in a lie works only as long as the lie is perpetuated, once it begins to crack it causes more discomfort than it soothes. 

This idea has come in here before, with respect to SL relationships. I, and at least a few others, hold to the idea that if we are going to believe a lie, it's incumbent upon the liar to keep up the game, so we don't have that discomfort at the end. For this reason, I suppose I value consistency more than anything else in the people I meet here.

Well, I was talking about societies in general. It is difficult for individual persons to remain consistent because persons are, well, inconsistent. I know I have grown a lot since I began this game, at least, I hope I have. I hope I have not remained consistent, I hope I have shown growth and not remained stagnant, but I get what you are saying, don't sell me a fantasy novel and then at the end make the main character unbelievable. At best it will cause me to dislike you, at worst it will cause me to dislike myself.

I've known you for a year. You're consistent. Thank you ;-)

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Perrie Juran

Perrie Juran

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Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Perrie Juran wrote:

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

I remember first learning that water was the only non-metallic element that expands when frozen.

 

Ice is an element?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

But any who, Ice also sublimates.

. She also said ice floats because of expansion, which is also false, everyone knows it's because of the bubbles.

A bit of bubbly can make my head float too.

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Perrie Juran wrote:

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Perrie Juran wrote:

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

I remember first learning that water was the only non-metallic element that expands when frozen.

 

Ice is an element?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

But any who, Ice also sublimates.

. She also said ice floats because of expansion, which is also false, everyone knows it's because of the bubbles.

A bit of bubbly can make my head float too.

 

 

That image of the face on the moon reminds me of all the excitement around the turn of the previous century when Percival Lowell spotted canals on Mars and popularized the belief that they were made by Martians (other astronomers were skeptical). Pluto was discovered as a result of a search for Lowell's theorized Planet X, which was thought needed to explain errors in predictions of the orbital positions of Neptune and Uranus. His theory was ultimately proved wrong. Pluto was too small to have been the cause of the errors, which were eventually attributed to errors in calculating the mass of Neptune. Both of those discoveries required satellite observations, which ties back into a previous discussion of the limitation of telescopes.

Pluto's astronomical symbol is a combination of P and L, in recognition of... Percival Lowell.

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Charolotte Caxton

Charolotte Caxton

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Aha! Thanks, very interesting, especially this part:

The XXVIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union was held from 14 August to 25 August 2006 in Prague, Czech Republic. On 15 August the Assembly decided to restore to individual members the right to vote on scientific matters, which had been removed from them at the XXVth Assembly in 2003. Among the business before the Assembly was a proposal to adopt a formal definition of planet.

During the General Assembly the text of the definition evolved from the initial proposal that would have created 12 known planets in the solar system (adding initially the asteroid, for a short time around 1801 a planet, Ceres, Pluto's present moon Charon, Eris and would retain Pluto as a planet) to the final definition of a planet resolution that was passed on 24 August by the Assembly, which classified Ceres, Eris and Pluto as dwarf planets, and reduced the number of planets in the solar system to 8.

The voting procedure followed IAU's Statutes and Working Rules. The General Assembly lasted 12 days and had 2412 participants, most of them for only part of the duration of the Assembly. 424 of the 9785 individual IAU members attended the Closing Ceremony on 24 August 2006. Following the Closing Ceremony, parts of the scientific community did not agree with this ruling, especially the specific wording of the resolution, and criticized IAU's authority to name celestial bodies. In the ensuing public debate, a number of laypersons expressed (at times strong) disagreement with the vote. Another, less vocal, fraction of the scientific community backs the resolution, including the discoverer of the dwarf planet Eris, Mike Brown.


A final decision was made, announced 11 June 2008, for acceptance of the term Plutoid and its official IAU definition:
Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a semimajor axis greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit. Satellites of plutoids are not plutoids themselves.

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

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Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Pluto was a planet and now it's not. Did it just stop existing or did the definition of planet change or what? Who gets to declare something a planet or not?

I suppose you could say the definition of a planet changed, or maybe that we finally decided to have one. The now accepted definition of planet requires that the thing was likely to have formed from the disk of stuff that revolves around the central star, and from which the star itself was formed, and in a manner similar the stars formation (accretion). There are three primary criterion...

1) The thing needs to be in orbit around the sun (and more specifically, in the same orbital plane as other planets or the axis of rotation of the sun (so that you can reason the sun and planets all formed from the same stuff, spinning in a big disk)). Pluto's orbit is tilted from that of the rest of the planets, which casts some doubt that it was formed by coalesced dust from the solar disk.

2)The thing must have enough gravity to pull itself into a sphere. Pluto does, but its moon, Charon, does not. (So how did Charon come to be?)

3) The thing must have cleared its "orbital neighborhood", meaning it has enough gravity and has been around long enough (prolly since the beginning of the solar system) to have scooped up or tossed out all the junk nearby. Pluto is floating in a huge junk yard of rocky things called the Kuiper belt. Another rock bigger than Pluto was found out there several years ago (Erin), so any definition of planet that includes Pluto would also have to include Erin and presumably even more big rocks as we find them.

Pluto failed one and a half of these requirements and was demoted to "minor planet" along with Eris. Nothing has changed about Pluto itself, just our definition.

Who got to decide this? The "International Astronomical Union" which is the UN of astronomy. You are free to call Pluto a planet if you wish, many still do. Just don't expect new textbooks, or people taught from them, to agree with you.

 

 

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Charolotte Caxton

Charolotte Caxton

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I really don't care whether Pluto is a planet or not, as I have no vested interest in it, plus I always thought it was a silly name for a planet, isn't Pluto a yellow dog? What I find interesting, however, is how everything was changed by a group of persons developing a new definition for something.

I hadn't know there was actually an official group that does all that though, I think that is pretty cool, like a federation of scientists or something like that.

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

I really don't care whether Pluto is a planet or not, as I have no vested interest in it, plus I always thought it was a silly name for a planet, isn't Pluto a yellow dog? What I find interesting, however, is how everything was changed by a group of persons developing a new definition for something.

I hadn't know there was actually an official group that does all that though, I think that is pretty cool, like a federation of scientists or something like that.

I think Uranus tops the list for silly planet names if you ask US men and children.

There are other groups that set the definition of things, like NIST in the US and BIPM internationally. Their definitions for things like grams and/or seconds are constantly being refined and the accuracy improved. Our ever increasing ability to accurately measure and specify things is what allows us to probe deeper and further into the universe.

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Charolotte Caxton

Charolotte Caxton

Posted
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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

I really don't care whether Pluto is a planet or not, as I have no vested interest in it, plus I always thought it was a silly name for a planet, isn't Pluto a yellow dog? What I find interesting, however, is how everything was changed by a group of persons developing a new definition for something.

I hadn't know there was actually an official group that does all that though, I think that is pretty cool, like a federation of scientists or something like that.

I think Uranus tops the list for silly planet names if you ask US men and children.

There are other groups that set the definition of things, like
in the US and
internationally. Their definitions for things like grams and/or seconds are constantly being refined.

Boys can make anything sound silly or repugnant.

Grams and seconds are constantly refined? So even mass and time are in constant flux? 

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

I really don't care whether Pluto is a planet or not, as I have no vested interest in it, plus I always thought it was a silly name for a planet, isn't Pluto a yellow dog? What I find interesting, however, is how everything was changed by a group of persons developing a new definition for something.

I hadn't know there was actually an official group that does all that though, I think that is pretty cool, like a federation of scientists or something like that.

I think Uranus tops the list for silly planet names if you ask US men and children.

There are other groups that set the definition of things, like
in the US and
internationally. Their definitions for things like grams and/or seconds are constantly being refined.

Boys can make anything sound silly or repugnant.

Grams and seconds are constantly refined? So even mass and time are in constant flux? 

Constant flux is prolly an overstatement. Every definition for a standard thing (gram, second, etc) has some uncertainty, caused by both the definition and the method of measurement. Science is constantly looking for ways to reduce the uncertainty, either by improving the method of measurement or changing the definition, or both.

For example, here's a description of the evolution of the definition of a second. You'll see that the definition changes over time, as does the accuracy of our ability to measure by any particular definition.

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Madelaine McMasters

Madelaine McMasters

Posted
Posted

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Wow, before 1967 the base unit of time was an Earth year, but then it became the second? My, how time does change. 

Charolotte, the following book has been recommended to me by two friends. I've not read it yet, but it sounds like the perfect introduction to the wild and wooly and human world of science...

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

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Charolotte Caxton

Charolotte Caxton

Posted
Posted

Madelaine McMasters wrote:

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Wow, before 1967 the base unit of time was an Earth year, but then it became the second? My, how time does change. 

Charolotte, the following book has been recommended to me by two friends. I've not read it yet, but it sounds like the perfect introduction to the wild and wooly and human world of science...

A book? I've heard of those. For 15 cents can't be too bad of an investment. Thanks for the recommendation. 

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