Strange

Is spontaneous parametric down conversion closer to "splitting" a photon?

I have seen this sort of logic quite a few times ending up with with people thinking that the Higgs boson, for example, must be the graviton. But it just is not a logical connection. I am struggling to explain why, partly because it so obviously isn't! I think the fallacy is assuming that if A causes B then B must be a cause of A. Perhaps this will help: Nutrition is to do with food Food is to with peanut butter Therefore nutrition is made of peanut butter. Basically, your chain of logic is backwards, it should be: Particles (both fermions and bosons) make up matter Matter has mass (because of the mass of those particles and the energy binding them together Mass causes gravity Changing mass can cause gravitational waves. You can't go backwards and say that therefore gravity is made of particles.

SimonFunnell, have you read this, and more importantly, all the referenced sources? Do you still think you have something that has not been considered before?

It may not show what you are trying to say because what you are trying to say is wrong. What does that mean? That animation pauses (at about 0:50) when the black holes are in contact. It shows that at that point, not surprisingly, the curvature of space-time also merges. It is just too complex and I can't do the animations myself. Of course you can't. These take hours (probably days) of supercomputer time.

Here it is again: http://cplberry.com/2015/09/12/monty-carla/ It is a blog post called "LIGO Magazine: Issue 7" by Christopher Berry, "Gravitational Wave Astronomer" (so I guess he knows what he is talking about!)

Fixed. Searching for general relativity barycenter on Google scholar produces 17,000 results. I have no idea if any of them describe what you want to know.

I find the discussion of "truth" in relation to science rather worrying....

Yes. Because the model works better than the old one. In other words, because of the math. BTW, that is why none of the cellular automata models have been accepted so far. Although ideas like loop quantum gravity and causal dynamical triangulation are conceptually similar in some ways.

They don't orbit a geodesic. The paths they travel on, like any body in free fall, is a geodesic. Some of the simulations (particularly the one I posted before: http://cplberry.com/2015/09/12/monty-carla/) have representations of the curvature of space-time around the merging black holes. No.

How did anyone know it was "the truth"? That can only come from testing the model against reality. For various reasons, I won't be watching the video. But I look forward to the discussion.

Post #29 From the graph in the paper, it looks like Rs of the combined black hole (which is pretty much 2xRs of each of the initial BHs).

Well, subatomic particles are (perhaps obviously) not made of atoms. And there are some of those that are not components of atoms, either. E.g. neutrinos or muons.

But no one accepted the heliocentric model just because it sounds nice. It is because it turned out to be (mathematically) a better model. After all, without some sort of evidence, it might be that your idea is akin to saying that the Earth revolves around Saturn.

The LIGO paper has graphs showing things like frequency and distance against time. They say:

The problem is, if you don't have any mathematics then you can't make quantitative, testable predictions. In which case, how do we tell if your idea works (matches reality) or not? (And Hawking, not Hawkings.) It is not about Einstein (although that could just be metonymy). It is the fact that the mathematics he developed produces results that match experiment and observation.

I have read (skimmed) quite a few of the papers related the LIGO result but haven't come across anything that directly relates to your questions. However, as the mass of the final black hole was ~3 solar masses less than the sum of the two black holes. So much of the energy released came from that. What I can't tell you is exactly when that mass was lost. I think you would have to read a some of the (many) papers that have been written over the years about modelling black hole mergers. (Or find a forum/blog where there is an expert on the subject.)

If you look at the diagrams of how gravitational waves distort space, you will see that they cause space to stretch in one direction(x) and shrink in the other (y), then shrink in x and stretch in y. And so on. Maybe that helps you make sense of needing two components.

I'm not convinced. UTC+10 is mainly places like Guam, Austrlia, PNG, etc. But maybe he is in Vladivostok. Or, more likely, this is all part of the 50% of made up stuff.

I've got my fingers crossed ... Just noticed that last bit. I don't approve of that sort of thing on forums, so there it is preserved for posterity. Only 50%? You are too modest. Yes, it was obvious you were trolling from your very first post.

That is because of the resistance of the electromagnet: you need to supply energy to keep the current flowing. That energy is dissipated as heat. If you use a superconducting coil, then it requires almost no energy to maintain the magnetic field.

Radioactive decay can produce electromagnetic radiation. And you are correct that this is results in a (tiny) loss of mass. But really it is the conversion of energy in one form (binding energy in the nucleus) to another form (gamma ray photons). Both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion use the fact that the products of either splitting large atoms or fusing small ones results in a lower total mass and thus the release of energy. And, yes, the kinetic energy of particles in particle colliders can create various massive particles (perhaps most famously, the Higgs boson in the LHC). But any process that adds energy will (very slightly) increase mass. So the water in your kettle gets heavier when you boil it (but that is massively offset by the loss of water as steam!) Actually, black holes don't pull in nearby bodies any more than any other object with the same mass. So, if the Sun suddenly turned into a black hole, the planets would carry on orbiting as if nothing had changed. (Although it would get very dark and cold.) Although, when matter does fall into a black hole there are complex process of heating and interactions of the resulting plasma that result in the release of large amounts of energy: either just blowing away the infalling material or, in the extreme, generating polar jets. I assume that is the sort of process you are referring to?

But that separation speed is from the point of view of someone "stationary". From the point of view of people of the craft, there is no difference between light going in any direction. This is wrong. The observers will measure a speed of 0.995c for the other craft receding from them. No one can ever measure anything moving at more than c.

Can you say what exactly you are referring to here? Cyclotrons have been used since long before 1997. What conditions are you thinking of? Can you explain what this means?

Time dilation and length contraction are a consequence of the speed of light being invariant, so your question doesn't make much sense. Again, I don't really understand what you are asking. "distance per sec" is known as speed and so all observers will see light moving at the same "distance per sec".

It doesn't matter how they measure it, or even if they don't (it is a thought experiment, remember). I doubt there is any way of measuring the speed of light from a laser. Although, I suppose you could reflect it off something at a known distance and time it.