Black Holes

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volumetricsteve
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Re: Black Holes

Post by volumetricsteve »

27 minutes into the video that Trance posted of L. Karuss's lecture had me asking some questions...particularly why/how it's suggested there are three..and only three...types of universe, and why with absolute certainty we must be in one type. His wording seemed to dance around that, but I let it play through to see where he was going with it...I'm not sure where he went with it, now he's bled into talking about how triangles can be used to determine the 3D-ness of something, and somehow that applies to radio waves, and somehow that's proof space is curved. I appreciate what this guy is doing, but I can't help but feel he's skipping some steps. I'll have to watch it again later.

Incidentally, has anyone tried these? They're surprisingly good.

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randi
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Re: Black Holes

Post by randi »

That is awesome. Is that the actual VA from Half-Life?
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wildweasel
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Re: Black Holes

Post by wildweasel »

randi wrote:
That is awesome. Is that the actual VA from Half-Life?
I think he's the sound-alike chosen for Black Mesa Source. I don't know if Harry S. Robins does rap music, but it'd be amazing if he did. =P
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Trance
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Re: Black Holes

Post by Trance »

volumetricsteve wrote:27 minutes into the video that Trance posted of L. Karuss's lecture had me asking some questions [...] I appreciate what this guy is doing, but I can't help but feel he's skipping some steps.
Oh, most definitely he's leaving out a lot of detail. Especially in relating a two-dimensional analogy of the geometry of the universe. This is real frontiers-of-knowledge stuff that in nearly all cases is extremely unintuitive and, in some, even impossible for our human brains to accurately visualize. If you go look up the stuff he talks about on Wikipedia you almost immediately hit a wall of math.

Every time I go back and watch that lecture it inspires me to look up one of the scientific concepts he broaches, to try to gain more understanding of the methods used and discoveries made in modern cosmology. I tend to hit a snag whenever the subject matter begins to move outside the constraints of three spatial dimensions. It does help to see practical observations of these concepts such as gravitational lensing demonstrating the relativistic curvature of space due to gravity, but for a lot of this stuff we have few or no direct observations currently.

But that's the thing about science. It doesn't (yet) have all the answers, and any answers it does have aren't guaranteed to be easy ones.
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Reactor
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Re: Black Holes

Post by Reactor »

An interesting observation: every time scientist or the military are experimenting with inter-dimensional transmitter wormholes, something always goes wrong. What's the explaination for this?
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Trance
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Re: Black Holes

Post by Trance »

Wormholes have been shown to be extremely unstable when exposed to even trace amounts of plot.
volumetricsteve
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Re: Black Holes

Post by volumetricsteve »

If the union aerospace corporation had to answer that, it might be blackholes are just gateways to hell. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Re: Black Holes

Post by Gez »

Reactor wrote:An interesting observation: every time scientist or the military are experimenting with inter-dimensional transmitter wormholes, something always goes wrong. What's the explaination for this?
I think the writers have run out of plausible ways to connect our world to something completely different.
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Re: Black Holes

Post by Reactor »

Gez wrote:I think the writers have run out of plausible ways to connect our world to something completely different.
Ye, I know, it's just a bit controversial. The smartest scientists who are apparently capable of opening gateways to different dimensions never think about that something unwanted will be comin' thru...This tiny little aspect of opening wormholes is always forgotten during The Great Experiment. It's like that somebody who invented the door would design it in a way that it could open, but never ever close. Or a window for that matter. The smart-ass scientists has a very one-track mind, as they only seem to be interested in making the gateway only openable and never closable.

And of course, something goes wrong, and we get a selection of words of remorse. Choose one from the following:
- Oooh, what have we done! WHAT HAVE WE DONE! If only we know...!
- We tried to close the gateway but it just wouldn't shut down!
- We didn't do anything, it was them who opened the portal, I'm just a janitor here!
- But I only went to the bathroom for a minute!
- But everything was fine during the trials!
- If the guys at the Black Mesa could do it, who says we can't do the same?

What I never hear is that the whole thing was actually deliberate.
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