Ask a physicist anything. (7)

[mzungu]

^ Thanks!

Hey, one other question.

If there are virtually as many stars in the heavens as there are grains of sand on the Earth, why doesn't the night light up like a Christmas tree?

It would seem like the night sky should be a glowing heaven of pure, white light from everywhere if there are almost an infinite amount of stars in the universe.

This is a very good question indeed and has been adequately answered by CHALNOTH!

I wish everyone for a healthy and happy 2012!

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Can water travel at super sonic speeds?

Could it be possible to create a lethal water bomb?

What would be the ideal method of detonation so that the water wouldn't immediately vaporize?

Cheers.

 

[Chalnoth]

Can water travel at super sonic speeds?

Of course. It may be a little difficult to propel it that fast, but it's just an engineering challenge, not a fundamental one.

Could it be possible to create a lethal water bomb?

If you mean, "Is it possible to make water explode?" then the answer to that is an unequivocal no. However, water is used alongside explosives. This is particularly effective at blowing things open.

What would be the ideal method of detonation so that the water wouldn't immediately vaporize?

Very little of the water vaporizes in an explosion. The part of the water that does vaporize adds to the pushing power of the explosive, which is why using water alongside explosives is so effective at blowing things open.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Neato.

I don't think that I have ever heard about water being used with explosives before.

Thanks for the response.

 

[Chalnoth]

Neato.

I don't think that I have ever heard about water being used with explosives before.

Thanks for the response.

Yeah, it's some pretty cool stuff. Here's one example of water being used alongside explosives....to disable other explosives:
Water blade to disarm bombs - Technology & science - Science - DiscoveryNews.com - msnbc.com

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

About how fast would one need to clap their hands to create a sonic boom?

Would the bones in the hands even be viable after such an impact?

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Also, one other thing.

Does anyone have a possible theory as to why, in the King James bible, a unicorn is mentioned 9 times all together?

This is God's holy word and the truth in all things.

So is it possible that at one point in time these creatures actually existed?

 

[Chalnoth]

About how fast would one need to clap their hands to create a sonic boom?

Would the bones in the hands even be viable after such an impact?

I'm not entirely sure. I think that the normal sound of clapping may be from a sonic boom from the air between your hands being forced out at faster than the speed of sound. Of course, you're never going to be moving your hands themselves at faster than the speed of sound: that would most certainly shatter your hands even if you could build an apparatus that would bring them together that fast. But as long as your hands are well-aligned, it shouldn't be hard at all to make a sonic boom with them.

Consider that a sonic boom occurs when something moves through the air at faster than about 340m/s. If your hands are aligned to within a millimeter across the width of the hand, then that means the air has to move across half the width of your hand in the time it takes for your hand to cross one millimeter in the clap. So if the width of your hand is, say, 80mm, then the air has to move 40 times faster than your hands with 1mm misalignment, so you only need to bring your hands together at 8.5 m/s. That's fairly quick, but not unbelievably so. And if you have your hands aligned well, you don't have to move them as fast. So it seems completely reasonable to me that the sound of a clap could come from a shockwave caused by forcing the air from between your hands at faster than the speed of sound.

 

[Chalnoth]

Also, one other thing.

Does anyone have a possible theory as to why, in the King James bible, a unicorn is mentioned 9 times all together?

This is God's holy word and the truth in all things.

So is it possible that at one point in time these creatures actually existed?

I'd say the most reasonable guess is that it's talking about a very real creature, such as a rhinoceros or antelope. There is no conceivable way that a horse with a horn actually existed.

Edit: Looks like in Wikipedia it's suggested that it was what we call today an auroch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn#Biblical

Basically a mountain bull.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Thank you again.

It sure would be neat to do a super hero, power sonic boom move to terrorize criminals.

 

[ChristianT]

How fast would a person have to travel (with the assistance of machinery, as a human couldn't possibly move fast enough on foot) to seemingly move faster than time? would they have to go near/at the natural speed limit: s.o.l.? Would it be possible for people to go anywhere fast enough to escape the "barrier of time" and come to a place in less time than (talking about space travel) ionic reaction engines?

Is wormhole travel the only option for time/space travel? Would such a thing exist on the inside of a black hole (as that is basically what one end of the wormhole is right?), or simply be the creative talent of those who enjoy the idea of time/space travel?

 

[Chalnoth]

How fast would a person have to travel (with the assistance of machinery, as a human couldn't possibly move fast enough on foot) to seemingly move faster than time?

That doesn't make any sense to me. Time isn't something you move past. It's something you move through. Traveling across space affects how quickly you move through time. But that's about it.

Basically, the slower you move in space, the faster you move in time, and vice versa...so if you're sitting still, you're moving through time at the speed of light, whereas light doesn't move through time at all: a photon is, in a sense, frozen in time.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

Time traveling is so possible.

It's been happening since 1928.

Here's a short video that will be a complete waste of your time.

Chaplins Time Traveler - YouTube

 

[Chalnoth]

Time traveling is so possible.

Well, in the sense that we all travel forward in time, yes.

It's been happening since 1928.

Here's a short video that will be a complete waste of your time.

Chaplins Time Traveler - YouTube

Hahahaha, seriously? His evidence is somebody holding their hand to the side of their face in an old movie? That's not really a hard thing to do.

There's also the point to be made that even if there was a time traveler, there were no cell towers, so even a time traveler can't explain that.

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

^ I know.

It's like, who the heck is she even talking to on the phone?!?!?!!

 

[mzungu]

About how fast would one need to clap their hands to create a sonic boom?

Would the bones in the hands even be viable after such an impact?

The higher you go (lower atmospheric density) the lower the speed of sound will be. Sound travels faster in denser materials, so you will need a rarefied atmosphere in order to achieve lower speeds. This still will not be low enough to allow your hands to travel slow enough to avoid injury while also creating a sonic boom. It is always a give and take situation. But when all else fails then sheer ignorance and brutal force is required or just call Superman for a demonstration.Here check this site out: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0112.shtml

 

[Zippy the Wonderslug]

So I've asked this before, just recently.

It was about viewing a past event with a telescope from a far off distance.

I'm sure that God has no problems seeing such things.

My true curiosity though, is how could it be possible for Him to see future events as well if they haven't already happened.

The book of Revelation is pretty descriptive on this.

The only logical conclusion would be that none of us truly have free will so He already knows what each of us will do in our lives and can somehow add it all up together and see the ending of it all.

Are there any other theories of remote viewing into the future that might explain this without having any control over every event possible?

 

[CounselorForChrist]

Why do tv shows always save the "shocking" ending for next season? ::cries::

Seriously though. Whats your view on this "God Particle" thing they are trying to find?

 

[mzungu]

Why do tv shows always save the "shocking" ending for next season? ::cries::

Because they want to hook you like a fish!

Seriously though. Whats your view on this "God Particle" thing they are trying to find?

In order to understand how the universe came to be and to understand fully the physical world we need to further our knowledge of the quantum world and refine our theoretical models to more accurately predict and explain the physical world. The more we know the more accurate our predictions become and the more able we are to conclude the cause that gave birth to our universe.

 

[Chalnoth]

Seriously though. Whats your view on this "God Particle" thing they are trying to find?

Ugh. I positively despise that name for the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson has nothing whatsoever to do with any god, nor does it have any qualities which we might even remotely think are related to any god. Leon Lederman was a real jerk for associating that horrible, misleading name with the Higgs.

As for what the Higgs really is, well, it's the last piece of the standard model of particle physics. The standard model of particle physics, which is a model describing the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces in one unified construct, represents our best knowledge of quantum mechanics. It has been in place in more-or-less its present form since the mind 1970's, with experiment after experiment confirming its features since then.

But there is one piece that has remained elusive. You see, when the standard model was being developed, they realized that if they tried to associate a fundamental mass with any particle, they reached a contradiction. The math seemed to be saying that the idea of fundamental mass was nonsense. The solution instead seemed to be that the masses of particles come from interactions. And it is the Higgs boson that provides this interaction.

However, nobody had seen the Higgs boson. And its search was one of the reasons why the LHC was built. One cool thing, however, is that it's basically impossible for the Higgs to be so massive that the LHC can't see it, so either the LHC will find it, or it doesn't exist. And not long ago, they reported some hints that seemed to indicate they were starting to see its signal. While these hints weren't overly-significant, they did see the same hint of the Higgs at two different experiments at the LHC. Apparently they expect to see a definitive confirmation or disconfirmation of this detection by the end of the year:
ATLAS Experiment
CMS search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson in LHC data from 2010 and 2011