You're right. That's why I haven't really started drinking yet. I save that for later, when I'm so pissed off by everything that I need a dose of "send it all to hell".
The astrophysicist Martin Rees has pointed out that gravity is 1036 times weaker than the electromagnetic force. Accordingly, he argues, if gravity were a million times stronger, and "only" 1030 times weaker than the electromagnetic force, complex life in our Universe would probably be impossible.
His argument is that if gravity were that strong, even planet-sized objects would have enough gravity to ignite fusion reactions in their cores. Consequently, galaxies would be smaller and more compact, and stars would be so close together that it would be all but impossible for planets around them to have stable orbits. That is, gravitational interactions between the stars in galaxies would all but guarantee that any planet orbiting any of those stars would either be ejected from its orbit or be drawn into a star.
Elaborating on that, I would imagine that if gravity were anywhere near as strong as the electromagnetic force (say, only 1010 weaker), the collective gravity of the Universe's matter would easily have overwhelmed any expansion pressure, and so the Universe would have collapsed upon itself soon after the Big Bang.
In short, if gravity weren't many, many orders of magnitude weaker than the other fundamental forces, it seems all but certain that the Universe simply couldn't exist, as it would almost-certainly have collapsed upon itself soon after it came into existence.
Cheers,
Michael
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
If we had to believe in things like causality, we would have to believe in miracles, just take a look at the apparent value of the cosmological "constant". I would argue that causality is in its essence an illusion caused by light that has enough time (or a long enough path) to travel between points in spacetime often enough to cause strong correlations between the apparent state of objects. It is uncontroversial that simultaneity of events only makes sense relative to the momentum of an observer, which contradicts notions of a complete collapse of state vectors, which is still a popular interpretation even though it contains internal contradictions.
Hey, I have a question for The Lone Ranger. I saw the trailer for the new Disney movie with Johnny Depp, and it finally dawned on me. How is he The Lone Ranger if he has Tonto with him?
In fairness, it was established in the original series that Tonto himself gave TLR his name. John Reid had been a member of a 6-strong party of Texas Rangers searching for Butch Cavendish and his gang. The Rangers were betrayed and ambushed, and all of them were killed except for John, who was badly wounded and left for dead.
John's childhood friend, Tonto, found the dying Ranger and nursed him back to health. He made a mask from the vest of John's older brother, Dan, who had been the leader of the Ranger party, so that John could conceal his identity. [They felt that if Cavendish and his gang were aware that John had survived, they'd hunt down and kill Dan's wife and son.] Tonto and John dug six graves, to look it look like the entire party of Rangers had been killed.
Tonto then noted that John was the last-surviving member of his Texas Ranger party -- "You Lone Ranger now."
And a legend was born.
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Quite a few trees have similar reproductive strategies, as it happens. Consider oak trees, for example. Typically, in a given region, all the oaks of a given species will produce only a relatively small number of acorns during a particular year. But every so often -- and again, how the trees coordinate this isn't really understood -- all the local trees will invest a huge amount of resources in reproduction and produce simply huge numbers of acorns.
This is called "masting," and the effect is similar to what happens during a cicada emergence. There are such huge numbers of acorns produced that squirrels, bears, and other predators simply can't eat all of them.
Is there such a thing as masting pecans? There are commercial and private and even abandoned pecan orchards around that seem to produce every year, however the pecans in my backyard and neighboring yards have produced once in the 7 years I've lived here, and when they did it was raining pecans for like 10 days. We scooped them up by the handsfull
Quite a few trees have similar reproductive strategies, as it happens. Consider oak trees, for example. Typically, in a given region, all the oaks of a given species will produce only a relatively small number of acorns during a particular year. But every so often -- and again, how the trees coordinate this isn't really understood -- all the local trees will invest a huge amount of resources in reproduction and produce simply huge numbers of acorns.
This is called "masting," and the effect is similar to what happens during a cicada emergence. There are such huge numbers of acorns produced that squirrels, bears, and other predators simply can't eat all of them.
Is there such a thing as masting pecans? There are commercial and private and even abandoned pecan orchards around that seem to produce every year, however the pecans in my backyard and neighboring yards have produced once in the 7 years I've lived here, and when they did it was raining pecans for like 10 days. We scooped them up by the handsfull
Pecans (Carya illinoensis) are actually a species of unusually thin-shelled Hickory nut, and like other hickories, pecans do indeed mast. Several studies have shown that the trees produce relatively low numbers of pecans most years, but every third or fourth year, on average, they'll produce very large numbers of pecans. (It varies from tree to tree; some produce mast crops with a period of only 2 years, while others have a period as long as 7 years.)
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
If my quick-and-dirty math is correct, assuming the Flash is 100 meters away and running at a right angle to my visual field, he must travel 3.5 meters in less than 0.003 seconds to be invisible to me. That works out to about 1,167 meters per second. Let's call that 1,200 meters per second. That's about Mach 3.4.
Pretty fast.
Minor Iron Man 3 spoiler to follow.
In a late scene of Iron Man 3, Tony Stark is imprisoned in the Mandarin's mansion in Florida. Because of story reasons the Iron Man Mk42 suit was recharging in Rose Hill, Tennessee. I map googled the distance and was returned a result of 992 miles. That's along the roads so not necessarily the as the crow flies distance. In the movie a helpful goon says that distance is 100 miles less - 892 miles. Thanks to Starkomancy Tony is able to call and control the suit. I did some quick and dirty counting during my second viewing. Different pieces arrive at different times, but the approximate average time of travel is one minute. The pieces are able to fly at speeds up to 53,520 miles per hour.
I heard on the radio that there are some four-eyed fish that have sex organs which are either left or right handed: so the right handed males can only mate with the left handed females or vice-versa.
So at first I thought maybe it was a hoax - I thought fish mated by just swimming near each other and depositing their eggs and sperm in the water - but then I remembered that there are some 'live bearer fishes' so maybe those kind do mate?
But if the 'handed' fish can only mate with the 'correct' match of the opposite sex, does that mean there are really two separate species of fish - or perhaps the baby fish born to both kinds of parent are a mixture of the right and left handed varieties?
I was going to search on line for the answer, but then I decided I'd ask our resident expert - and that maybe other readers would find the topic interesting.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
Re: A Question For The Lone Ranger
readers would find the topic interesting.
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