Hello Zhermes!
Thanks very much indeed for the reply - that's *exactly* the sort of thing I'm after! :)
The Carbon-12 / Carbon-14 difference actually came from the Scientific American article. It's predicated on a universe where the proton is roughly 0.1 percent heavier than the neutron...
Hello everyone,
First - apologies if this is the wrong subforum for this question, I wasn't quite sure where it belonged.
Thanks to everyone last summer who helped me with my science-fiction novel "Mindjammer", where I had some questions on solar shades - the feedback everyone provided me...
Hello all,
With regard to the mathematics / mechanical aspect, the shade is itself an 'artificial intelligence', and is able to regulate itself (within reason) to accommodate the effects of solar wind, etc, on its positioning and orbit. That much is handwavium. Regarding the required tensile...
Wow, this is seriously awesome xts - thanks *very* much! I really hadn't anticipated it would look so spectacular. I'm going to get on with some rewrites to incorporate this really cool detail.
The shade in question is more of the "solar glasses" version rather than the "colander", so your...
Hello xts!
That's awesome - many thanks indeed for the information. This sounds cooler than I'd imagined! :)
Just to clarify some of your points:
So this scattered light would appear around the sun itself, or the edges of the shade? ie would the sun seem to have a kind of glowing...
Visibility of a "solar shade" from a planetary surface
Hello everyone,
I'm a fiction writer in the process of publishing my first science-fiction novel, and have a question which I'm having trouble answering, relating to the visibility of a "solar shade" placed between a star and one of its...
Hello everyone,
Thanks very much for the great replies and explanations - I shall definitely be reading up on vortices to see if that takes me somewhere near where I want to go!
I'm definitely in agreement with the show not tell principle; I'm just looking for a reasonably consistent and...
Hello everyone,
I'm a new member of the Physics Forums, and not a physicist by specialization, so please have mercy :-)
I'm a linguist by training, and by profession a writer of fiction and role-playing games. I'm currently in the process of getting my first science-fiction novel...