Recent content by Medium9

So if I wanted to program a simulator application for large bodies in space (say solar systems), I'd have to account for that, and moving objects' gravity potentials would drag out behind them? (Of course, only notably if they move quite fast.) Example: I have some big sun, and some smaller...

Well, we already have strange quarks... why not? :D

I get it. I really do. My way of thinking was: It should be quite possible to build some amount of nice red balls, that repel each other magnetically, have a sensor in them that makes them blow up in close proximity to another, and have some more ways of ensuring that it won't be possible to put...

Hehe, I suspected that asking such kind of a question on these boards might fall trapped into the "not possible, not important, not relevant" pot. I was merely wondering, if I would be able to see a very tightly packed 10ccm cube of up-quarks if it stood right in front of me on my desk, or if I...

I was more thinking of an impossible scenario, in which, for example, cooling plasma wouldn't recombine. More like as if you put Legos together, seen from a distance where you couldn't make out a single brick, but once enough of the same color are put together, you could make out it's red...

JDługosz, is there a way to tell what such a plasma might look like if cooled down enough to not radiate (at least in the visible spectrum)? Neutrons are a nice question too! And I guess then, that if someone managed to press a bunch of quarks so tightly together that atoms won't pass...

Okay, from the silence I conclude, that this was in fact not a valid question :)

Hi! I am not quite sure if this is a valid question, but I'll give it a shot. What my education managed to teach me about how materials emit or reflect colors is, that it's (usually) related to electrons changing their energy levels. Though there are other causes like bremsstrahlung. Thus I...

I was well aware of that being thin is different from being short one dimension. Of course, such beings need to be purely hypothetical, as they at least couldn't be made of any known form of matter. The thought of perceiving higher dimensions is an interesting, too! Imagine, again, being such...

As for the dimensions, humans are pretty much condemned to be completely unable to picture them. I'd go by thinking of a sheet of paper as the universe. It's extent in two dimensions is rather large, compared to the thickness (3rd dimension). If we now were 2D beings living in the surface of...

Thanks for these answers, a lot! I really do get what the model intends to explain, it just was the alternative (layman's) interpretation that the rubber plays an actual role in the thing - which, with just looking at this model naively, can be misunderstood this way, that got me thinking...

I do know of this model, and how to see it. The fundamental difference that leads to my uncertainty is the question of the "fabric of space" itself. If space itself expands, one and the same region would grow in size from an outside observer in time, while for an insider it would stay the same...

What boggles my mind with the balloon analogy is, that 2D creatures living there shouldn't notice growth of their world at all, since all their "space" expands equally, so that relative distances stay the very same. Thus, by that analogy, it is not explained why we observe galaxies heading away...

That seems to be the currently favored theory by most physicists today, if my perception didn't fool me too badly.

I would actually relate it to the limit of some mathematical function that tends to zero. It'll never reach it, but get infinitely close. Something along the way of 1/x. That is, as long as there is room for speculation in this field, which I strongly hope will change within my lifetime!