Things I learned in physics class
POSTED BY: BadgersHat
UPDATED: Friday, August 12, 2005 15:00
VIEWED: 25158
PAGE 2 of 11
Quote:
Originally posted by SigmaNunki:
For example, the gun that the alliance uses does a lot to humans, but won't do a thing to a door.
The guns the alliance uses, to me at least, seem to be sonic based. Sound, no matter how focused, isn't going to do a whole lot to a heavy metal door with a solid lock. Not for a while at least. A human, however, with it's squishy fleshy bits is likely to catch the sonic wave like a sail and go flying back like a plastic bag in the breeze.
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Chief Engineer - USS SereniTREE
http://tomeofgrey.blogspot.com
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Quote:
Originally posted by ReaverMadness:
In space gravity is severly limited. Tends to act like heavy objects on a water bed. The gravitational influences only go so far.
Actually... the effects of gravity are tremendous in space travel, and extend pretty much forever. Granted, they become less and less as you get farther away from one object or another, but it never stops, and certainly isn't "severely limited." There's a reason nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, travels in a straight line in space. Everything is moving in some kind of orbit or another. Blame gravity
Quote:
Originally posted by ReaverMadness:
There is no "air" in space.
Mostly true. True, enough, anyway, for your purposes.
Quote:
Originally posted by ReaverMadness:
There are solar winds. Though the effects of those are fairly limited.
The effects of solar winds are actually huge, but not on the motion of objects. More on the electronics.
The rest of your post has been fairly well addressed by others, so I won't add to the noise further other than to note that, with any currently understood propuslion system, you'd need more fuel than you have mass to accelerate to any reasonable fraction of the speed of light, and in order to push 1G to the nearest star system, you'd pass the speed of light (which, as far as we know can't even be reached, much less passed) long before you got half way. So you couldn't do it.
Sorry if this post was a bit much, but this is actually one of my areas of expertise. I actually am a rocket scientist...
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Quote:
So, anyone suggest a SANE physicist?
I'm a physicist, and I'm sane. Well at least I was last time I checked. You can obsess over me, just don't start stalking me.
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Quote:
Originally posted by FFFan1:Quote:
Actually... the effects of gravity are tremendous in space travel, and extend pretty much forever.
When you get into the space in between the various and drastically weakened gravity wells begin to sort of cancel each other out.Quote:
The rest of your post has been fairly well addressed by others...
Really? I was talking about maintaining course speed and direction, not really talking about "what speed" or how close it gets to the speed of light.
I go for more of the Sleeper Ship or Generational Ship idea anyway.
Here's a statement for fun:
Not too worried about the "can't go faster than the speed of light" thing either. You can't "go" the speed of light. You can't fly the (exact) speed of sound. If you did you'd break apart. That doesn't stop you from going faster.
The Speed of Dark is faster than the speed of light.
Example:
"Think about how fast a shadow can move. If you project a shadow of your finger using a nearby lamp onto a far away wall and then wag your finger, the shadow will move much faster than your finger. If your finger moves parallel to the wall, the speed will be multiplied by a factor D/d where d is the distance from the lamp to your finger and D is the distance from the lamp to the wall. It can actually be much faster than this if the wall is at some oblique angle. If the wall is very far away the movement of the shadow will be delayed because of the time it takes light to get there but its speed is still amplified by the same ratio. The speed of a shadow is therefore not restricted to be less than the speed of light."
Enough for now... back to work....
When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandpa. Not screaming and yelling like everyone else in the car he was driving.NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by ColdFusion:
I'm a physicist, and I'm sane.
Interesting how the science threads bring the physicists out of the woodwork...
(Just got my MS in Physics & Astronomy in January)
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Quote:
Originally posted by FourSkys:
Interesting how the science threads bring the physicists out of the woodwork...
(Just got my MS in Physics & Astronomy in January)
Excellent, if we get enough of us physicists together we can start on a plan to take over the world, after which we can ensure that Firefly is produced again. Whoops, there goes the aformentioned sanity.
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Quote:
Originally posted by ColdFusion:
Excellent, if we get enough of us physicists together we can start on a plan to take over the world, after which we can ensure that Firefly is produced again. Whoops, there goes the aformentioned sanity.
First thing we need to do is build a rope that we can push. That's the first step to any world domination plan. Did someone say something about sanity?
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OK - three things I know about space/space travel that don't seem to have been mentioned.
1. I don't quite understand the theory, but the closer an obhect gets to the speed of light, the more it weighs - which makes it even harder to pick up speed etc. Don't ask me why - it's true though apparently.
2. Don't see how it'll help, but most of space is made up of dark matter - we can't see it - but it's there, and we know virtually nothing about it.
3. It may be possible to travel through a wormhole (aparently space is curved or something). It may be impossible though, I don't know very much about them.
There we go, thought I'd add my scientific knowledge to the pot of sanity.
Practically sane in every way FLF.
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I'm not a physicist, my degree's in computer science.
What we need to do is just find a way to find the universe's source code, then edit in a patch that lets us change our location by lightyears, and then recompile it. Voila, problem solved.
I'm also personally hoping that that whole 'mass approaches to infinity' thing isn't coded well enough, and there's a buffer overrun error we can exploit... once your mass gets too high, it just becomes negative. ;)
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Well, in an attempt to go back to the original point of this thread, let's start by illustrating how these 2 simple concepts (F=M*a and the non-pushability of rope) can be seen in the firefly 'verse:
1) F=M*a:
This is mostly cleaerly seen through Jayne. Jayne is clearly larger than the rest of the crew, and, assuming human beings are all equally dense, he has the most mass, and the biggest M. His acceleration is often controlled by his circumstances, and thus we need to look at some particular situations. Let's investigate "The Train Job". Here, Jayne is seen to fall from a substantial height onto the top of a moving train. This gives him a non-zero a. Large mass * significant a = impressive force. How do we know that the force was impressive? We go back to the ansatz posited by BadgersHat which states more mass and more acceleration yeilds a "louder crunch when it hits something". Thus, since we obviously hear a significantly loud crunch as Jayne falls onto the train, we can clearly see that BadgersHat Rule 1 clearly is applicable and significant in the Firefly 'verse.
2) The pushability of a rope is tricky in this case. At first, I was operating under the assumption that this is false, and a "pushable rope" is somehow responsible for the immense speed and artificial gravity which Serenity is able to create. Though this is, I believe, incorrect. First, we need to define what we mean by a rope. I'll chose as the working definition for this discussion "A rope is a length of flexible organic and/or synthetic material bound is such a way that it is substantially longer than it is wide." There are a number of places where rope is seen. See Jaynestown where rope is used to bundle the cargo hidden behind the bamboo forest and well as used to tie back the Shepard's unusual hair. Many other examples exist. As to the pushability, in no case has any of these "ropes" been successfully pushed. I spent many an hour pondering this question over cup after cup of Earl Grey tea only to come to the conclusion that:
1) If ropes were able to be pushed, surely they would be.
2) Our heros are living "pretty deep in the rough and tumble"*. If an effective means for pushing ropes exist, surely they would be doing it given its obvious implications for usefulness.
Thus, it can only be assumed, since we all know how useful it would be to have pushable ropes (allows the creation of such exotic devices such as fusion generators, non-dairy creamer, the ellusive quad-cycle, hyperspatial expressways, quasi-dimensional fractional statistics, etc.), we can only assume that they cannot, in truth, be pushable. Thus, BadgersHat Rule 2 must be true, merely by virtue that it would be too cool if it were false.
Bibliography
*Wash, in episode Heart of Gold
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