Recent content by Subluminal

The simulation suggests some periodic changes to the force vector and the resultant acceleration on the sun as it revolves around the solar system. One has to wonder what effect all this has on its inner parts of varying density, and on the system creating sunspots and other magnetic fields. If...

The hurricane was a bad example - in that analogy, the Earth's atmosphere is about the same thickness as the storm, but the galactic disk is very thick compared to a cloud that will form a solar system. It still makes sense to me, if no one else, that particles drawn toward the center of the...

I'm not convinced by the explanation that the initial angular momentum of the gas cloud develops by random chance, density anisotropies, or whatever, as it collapses into a disk. After reading http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0512046.pdf, it's more plausible to me that, early on, Coriolis forces...

@Sabin Ionescu, check out Doug Finkbeiner's work at http://arxiv.org/a/finkbeiner_d_1. In particular, read arXiv:1205.5852 It's my understanding that matter/energy (as we know it) never escapes the event horizon, but magnetic fields do. As a SMBH feeds on clouds and stars, the accretion disks...

Thanks DA for an instructive post on how to ask a question here. I would like to add another one to your list: Is there a way to predict the oscillation length of a neutrino? I think some variables to consider would be initial energy, initial flavor, and the transport medium (e.g. bedrock...

You might have slipped a couple orders of magnitude in your argument, it happens sometimes. The distance in question (730534.61 ± 0.20) m is not in question, the time is. They splurged for a special "time transfer" GPS receiver and an atomic clock, items not usually used by millions of...

Since the GPS uses correction factors to account for propagation delay due to atmospheric refraction, could this cause a systemic problem in comparing the expected TOF of a photon through vacuum to the measured TOF of the neutrinos? Even with the fancy receivers installed by OPERA, the GPS...

As you might tell from my handle, this subject interests me greatly, but exactly why I do not know. Hopefully I don't harbour some metaphysical notions, but if so I seek to dispell them. I am making pitifully slow progress on Steven Weinberg's Cosmology, but I do recommend this to rede96 and...

There are many references to Cosmology throughout the threads here. Having just peeked at some pages made available on retail sites I now recognize why that is. The answers I am looking for appear to be encoded in that book, with much decoding going on here and many links to arxiv. I simply did...

How about: The photon, a bit of an insecure wife, turns to her neutrino husband and asks, "Does this dress make me look redshifted?" To Bill's answer, I think of the photon crossing a bit of space during the local time she takes to oscillate from one wavelength peak to the next. So for the...

During the trip from their supernova, they passed through expanding space together. The photon says to the neutrino, "I think I've been redshifted." What happened to the neutrino?

Does this model exclude a non-zero mass particle from achieving and maintaining the speed of light?

OK I'm catching on a little bit, good to find this thread. I was convinced that if energy is lost by photons, then it had to show up somewhere else, and all that prevented our following it was an observation problem. Giving up for now on the "was energy lost and if so then where did it go?"...

I don't mean to cause any extra work, as might be measured in kg*m2/s2 (based on what we consider to be meters and seconds in this reference frame anyway). And sorry if I misquoted units, but might the 0.042/0.6 ratio still hold for the discussion? But what do you make of the 25-fold increase in...

The above is taken from a paper by Wendy Freedman (http://www.pnas.org/content/96/20/11063.full.pdf) In 1999, she wrote that the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), a project primarily focused on mapping the Milky Way and finding other Earth-like worlds, would provide parallax data that could...