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frankglennjacobs@gmail.com

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Everything posted by frankglennjacobs@gmail.com

  1. Today I tried it all out again with the string. (This is about one mm diameter nylon twine the builders use to lay out trenches and brick lines.) When I put even one KG of force on the string, it stopped making visible waves. However, it made a wave that I could not see. I could feel it coming back to my hand in about half a second. I did not get visible waves as long as the string was pulled nearly straight. It had to have visible slack to make visible waves. My null hypothesis is that my mind has gone null and that I am not seeing what I think i should see.
  2. I looked around for an A-frame. I have several as they make up the frame of my barn, but I can no longer get up to the top of them to connect anything up there. I would like to have put a pulley up there to be able to hoist, um, whatever, thirty-five feet off the ground, out of the sun and wind. I got one of those cheap "spring balance" scales and repeated the horizontal exercise. Contrary to what I had seen (thought I saw?) the other day, the string made waves when under barely enough tension to clear the ground. Not neat little horizontal waves, but only big circular waves when I moved my hand like a Hollywood movie steam-train brakeman swinging a red lantern. I was not able to make the same kind of waves as before. I tried several tensions. The only difference was the presence of the spring-scale. Maybe the spring undid the horizontal waves. Maybe my mind-set was wrong and I waved the string wrong. It sort of buzzed like a really low-pitched cello. Maybe my mind-set was wrong and I saw things that weren't there or missed things that were. I took a nap to let my mind get clear. However, the sky got clear dark and I took another nap and wrote this up.
  3. A rope will make waves as long as the tension keeps it off of the ground. My null hypothesis indicated that I believed such a lightweight string would not make waves because the air resistance would damp them out. It also made a second wave -- that was heard but not seen. I see that this is not exactly "pioneer science". Now what I need is a way to measure the tension and a way to measure the time.
  4. My advisors on Science Forum are right: Instead of just speculating, I should DO some physics thing and record what happens. I didn't have enough rope to to the rope wave thing, but, BEHOLD! here is this stick with builder's nylon twine wound on it. I measured off eleven meters of it, made loops ten meters apart, hung one end on a fence post and held the other end in my hand, hanging nearly to the ground. I even wrote a "null hypothesis": This lightweight stuff isn't going to make waves. It didn't. Not just loosly hanging like that. All it made was a parabola. So I took a step backward. The string made almost a straight line. But it made a wave. Not having a way to time it, I estimated the wave went the ten meters in less than a second. Not only that, it reflected back my my hand and then back to the fence. And back. And back. And back. The wave was plainly visible TWELVE trips -- well, anyway, six round-trips. Hot DOG! I am doing science! Seventy-five years old and doing science fit for a six-year-old. Oh. 7,000 feet above sea level. Eighty degrees Farenheit. Zero wind. Waves going east and west. Clear blue sky. No local traffic. Moderately-curious horse looking at the whole business. I repeated the exercise several times with the same results.
  5. Now that I have had time to read all of the above, I find it is "over my head". Did the apple that Sir Isaac saw RADIATE as it fell, since it was being accelerated? How does that apply to light?
  6. I was seriously hoping to see what gravity is. PLAN A: Gravity is just THERE and all we can do is measure it and make use of it. PLAN B: Gravity is an emanation of matter -- and see PLAN A. PLAN C: When we get down to what EVER gravity is, we can turn it on and off and direct it at will. PLAN D: Other. Specify. _________________________________________________ Now all I know is that whatever a lot of people think it is, it ain't. No. That's not right, either. Nor scientific, either.
  7. This is me, Glenn. Catching up. This thread has grown mightily and most interesting while I wasn't looking.
  8. Again, this is not a theory. (I don't even have a theory on how to tie my shoes.) It is not a hypothesis. I looked it up so I'd know how to spell it, and found out this ain't one. It is a mere S.W.E.G. (Scientific Wild-Eyed Guess -- only somewhat above guessing which side up a coin will fall.) It is plainly established that the galaxies are moving apart. And that the farther apart they are, the faster they are moving. (Or, maybe there is a cause-and-effect here: The faster they go, the farther they have already gone?) The question to be addressed is WHAT MAKES 'EM GO LIKE THAT? PLAN A: They hate each other even more than they attract each other. Na-a-a-a-a-a-a-h! PLAN B: God got 'em started that way. (Not scientifically determinable. Forget it.) PLAN C: Random moving particles in free space smack into 'em and bump 'em along. PLAN D: Other. (Specify) ________________________________________________ Going with PLAN C right now. It is known that there are, um, particles, in the vast empty intergalactic spaces. Photons. Hydrogen atoms. Subatomic particles. Maybe grit. Possibly micrometeoroid sand. And an occasional exiled planetessimal, planetoid or full-grown planet. These particles are not standing still. They are moving relative to something or other. Some of them actually hit something. (There's a lot more space than rock out there, so the odds are not favorable.) Someone interpreted Einstein to have said that the universe was limited and expanding. Interpreting the interpretation, that might mean that the part of space that has stuff in it is expanding, or it might mean that whatever space doesn't have stuff in it isn't actually a part of our universe. Anyway, it could be that only a part of whatever counts as space and universe is occupied by matter. Without regard to whether new galaxies are coming into existence, the old ones have been there a very long time and likely the loose stuff in between has, too, and been moving rapidly. A given piece will either hit something, or not hit something. If it hits something, it may have an effect on it. If it doesn't hit anything, it might well continue right on out into actual empty space, and there would be nothing there to bounce it back. The pressure of these various particles hitting things might give them impulse momentum in any random direction. But there would be no counterpressure to push the galaxies back toward one another, because there is nothing outside of the occupied universe to fling anything back.. These are very tiny impulses, but there are many of them, and they have been active for some eleven billion years. Consider the infall to our Earth and extrapolate . . .
  9. Pardon me. Not copper ATOMS, but copper IONS. Hundreds of tons of them.
  10. From the dawn of time, every idea has started out as a speculation. (Anyone remember the old-time BC comic strip where cave-men were speculating that the moon was a hole in the sky?) I hereby officially speculate that 99% of all starter-ideas are malarkey. However, that leaves 1% that develop beyond wild guesses into hypotheses and then theories. The 99% left behind were either plausible, somewhat educational -- or maybe just plain fun. Sir Isaac Newton speculated that the apple fell because the earth pulled it. SEE what developed from that speculation! (And SEE what education y'all have given me correcting my speculations in here!)
  11. I want to see him do the rope trick.
  12. Just jumping to conclusions, I would guess that it is the calculated distance from the center of the sun to its apparent surface.
  13. Roger Dynamic Motion asked about rotation of objects. He asked if we are near "the Black Hole," and whether the sun is at the center of the Galaxy and whether the protoplanetary disk was the Galaxy itself. I am aware that I answered more than Roger asked, but he brought up the subjects.
  14. I can't quite put my finger on where I heard it, but the word is that the entire Galaxy is rotating or it would fall into itself. The Galaxy is a loose arrangement of about a thousand-million stars. (There are thousands of millions of other galaxies, too.)Somewhere there's a connection between the rotation of the Galaxy and the rotation of the protostars and their protoplanetary disks, getting down to our own planet and so on. Maybe it works the same way for really BIG dust clouds as for the "mere" cubic parsec sizes. I believe we are 25,000 light years "out' from the center of our Galaxy, but you can usually see it, edge-on, on a clear, dark night without a telescope or even binoculars. The nearest star (besides, of course, the sun) is calculated to be about four light years away. Look it up and see if the "Solar Day" is the time for the earth to rotate the same side to the sun, and if the "Sidereal Day" is the time for the Earth to rotate the same side to the same spot among the stars. These two "days" are slightly different because the earth is in orbit around the sun, covering approximately one degree a day of sky. (There should be enough material attached to those to flesh out your Thread on rotation.)
  15. The sun (or protosun) would be in the dynamic center of the rotating protoplanetary disk. Itself would be rotating in the same direction, because each item of infall would either have no angular momentum or else it would have whatever angular momentum it had until impact. This would be transferred to the sun (or protosun). (Of course, any item with some other vector of angular momentum would add its own energy to this.)
  16. Maybe if any item in the protoplanetary disk were not in orbit, it would just fall straight into the sun. So that leaves the items that are in orbit. ?No? When two such items combine, the one with the very slightly higher orbit will be traveling just a little faster. That will tend to make the combined pair rotate toward the east. (No. That is not how to say it. Clockwise? No. To the right? No. Roger, help me with this terminology.) When a billion such items have coalesced, is not their rotation combined? Is it not in the same direction as nearly everything else? It seems very odd to notice a large object in orbit -- not rotating nor revolving in the same direction as the others. (Little children point and say, "!Look, Mamacita! A retrograde satellite.")
  17. I have put silver wires into distilled water (with a little salt) and applied 28 volts of direct current. In a matter of hours, the water takes on a golden color and the silver metal takes on a corroded, abraded look. My conclusion is that actual silver atoms are being moved from the solid metal into the water. Heavier evidence: Every day flatbed trucks haul big slabs of impure copper from the smelter to someplace east of here. They are electroplated from those slabs to new ones of pure copper. The impurities fall into the bottom of the tank. Gentlemen, electrons may not move, but copper atoms do.
  18. Mordred, Educate me here: Is a flow of electrons different from a flow of charge? How? If I wave a magnet over a coil and it motivates a bunch of electrons to move back and forth, say an inch, and that causes electrons a mile or two up the line to move back and forth, is that not charge moving? Glenn
  19. Only that I had about half-way expected that radio waves were composed of electrons somehow jumping thru space. That would not make the only time I had speculated incorrectly.
  20. You and I both remember before NASA got us those spectacular asteroid photographs that it was said that this space shot will shed some light on the history of the Solar System. (Of course, that was mere publicity, designed to pry the money from Congress.) And as far as I know, no scientist said, "If the Asteroids are all gravel-piles, we will know they were mere accumulations of space stuff. But if some of them look like they were poured hot and rotating and got all potato-shaped as they cooled, then we can suspect that maybe some of them are remnants of an actual planet." (Probably no scientist said that, but that would have made a swell model, I think.) So all we have here is that after-the-fact, the photographs turned out to show all sorts of asteroids. Until we can land on some and drill into them, we will not know. All we have is what they LOOK like. That is the evidence. It is not enough evidence to convict an ugly stray dog that you find hanging around the hen-house. But it is enough evidence to get my speculator to speculating the speculation that was discarded three or four generations ago. And it is enough evidence to make YOU wish there was more evidence one way or the other. (I, for one, would like for NASA to find even one large, solid-metal, asteroid. Now, THAT would be evidence!) Yes, I realize that it would take a " J U S T R I G H T " encounter to leave any thing at all of such a vigorously-terminated planet. But we are free to speculate on a gas-giant planet that got expelled clear out of the Solar System, and on migrating planetary orbits exchanging the places of Saturn and Jupiter.
  21. The Electric Company does not sell us electrons. It uses its big machines to make our own electrons slosh back and forth in our own house wiring at sixty cycles. We pay them to do this for us. Then we did various things with this energy and made our own privately-owned electrons slosh back and forth in resonant circuits. Since we couldn't see what was happening, we thought all sorts of things about what was making the connection between our transmitters and other people's receivers. I, for one, was surprised to find that my own collection of electrons stayed right in the final circuit and did NOT go out "thru the Aether" to the world.
  22. First off, this is a speculation, plainly labeled as speculation, in the Speculation section, so I get some leeway here. The model and the evidence is up in the sky -- mostly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter -- and somewhat spread out beyond them. With "less prose," I am speculating (again!) that the Asteroids are a tiny remnant of a former planet that got the Roche Limit Treatment. Realizing that in the ordinary course of events, there would be NOTHING left over from such a planet after such an encounter -- I speculate that on rare occasions there might be some leftovers. (For example, in the ordinary course of events, a planetary "capture" results in lithosphere-to-lithosphere impact at the end of the first orbit. Yet there have been some successful captures.)
  23. "Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a far-away galaxy . . . " Observers calculated that in just a few lifetimes the migrating orbits of two of the plainly-visible planets would bring the actual planets close enough so that the gravity/tidal/proximity effects would be worth watching. So they watched. Very patiently. Naturally they did other things, but they kept this on their calendars. Sure enough, at the predicted time, the orbits were perturbed the predicted perturbations, and the predicted encounter came to pass. Within a few heartbeats of the predicted time, allowing for the light to travel from the event to the Observers, one of the planets began visibly coming apart. Because it was rotating, the pieces coming off were flung in the directions one would expect, spreading busted planet parts out somewhat in that orbit, so that it seemed to grow about one over twelve squared in diameter in a matter of a six times twelve cubed heartbeats. As expected, the molten interior of the former-planet came apart to form more than twelve to the sixth power rotating, glowing, molten blobs. But not for long. Almost every single such blob fell onto (into?) the other planet before one could count to twelve cubed. "And this was odd, because, you know," they had not predicted that any at all would get away like that. The pitiful remainders were scattered thru space. Some remained in orbit -- wild, tilted, elliptical orbits, some turning odd shapes as they rotated and cooled. Since they looked a little like little stars, the Observers called them Asteroids.
  24. So the electric field and the magnetic field go perpendicular of each other, and of the direction of travel. (Back to the rope analogy! The wave travels perpendicular to the actual movement of the rope. "Wow! Who'da thunk it?!") Back in the Dark Ages, we used to make electrons slosh back and forth in a resonant circuit. This generated a wave that went out of the antenna in all directions. But as far as I know, the electrons in the resonant circuit didn't go out of the antenna and into space.
  25. So radio waves vibrate sideways (at right angles to their direction of travel). Any idea how they do that? Well, yes, you have pages of mathematics on that subject. I mean, anything that will educate ME?
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