A SERIOUS THREAT TO THE EARTH

[Professor Smarmiarty]

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/
Forget 2012. Forget global warming. The earth is being eaten by space-time. You heard it here first.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

How exactly is this a threat? It's just how gravity works.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Because it's a VORTEX. Look at the picture. It is EATING THE EARTH.

[Pip Boy]

Are you sure this isn't just a political ploy to draw attention away from the fact that Donald Trump has been secretly putting gay zombies in our army?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Surely NASA, being funded by Osama, would want to draw attention to that fact.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Because it's a VORTEX. Look at the picture. It is EATING THE EARTH.

Well it's been eating the earth for 4 billion years. I think we're cool.

[rpgdemon]

Is that all acceptable as true then? That's really cool.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Well it's been eating the earth for 4 billion years. I think we're cool.

IT'S BEEN GATHERING STRENGTH. All thist ime and we didn't notice! It has probably infilitrated all our governments crippling us into inaction!

Is that all acceptable as true then? That's really cool.

Well this doesn't prove anything that was controversial, it's pretty hard to deny that this would happen - without rewriting ALL THE MATHS but it pretty sweet to measure it.

[Bells]

Put a spinning gyroscope into orbit around the Earth, with the spin axis pointed toward some distant star as a fixed reference point. Free from external forces, the gyroscope's axis should continue pointing at the star--forever. But if space is twisted, the direction of the gyroscope's axis should drift over time. By noting this change in direction relative to the star, the twists of space-time could be measured.

In practice, the experiment is tremendously difficult.

The four gyroscopes in GP-B are the most perfect spheres ever made by humans. These ping pong-sized balls of fused quartz and silicon are 1.5 inches across and never vary from a perfect sphere by more than 40 atomic layers. If the gyroscopes weren't so spherical, their spin axes would wobble even without the effects of relativity.

According to calculations, the twisted space-time around Earth should cause the axes of the gyros to drift merely 0.041 arcseconds over a year. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree. To measure this angle reasonably well, GP-B needed a fantastic precision of 0.0005 arcseconds. It's like measuring the thickness of a sheet of paper held edge-on 100 miles away.

"GP-B researchers had to invent whole new technologies to make this possible," notes Will.

They developed a "drag free" satellite that could brush against the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere without disturbing the gyros. They figured out how to keep Earth's magnetic field from penetrating the spacecraft. And they created a device to measure the spin of a gyro--without touching the gyro. More information about these technologies may be found in the Science@NASA story "A Pocket of Near-Perfection."

This.... is Fucking Awesome.

[Magus]

Man, this has been bothering me for years, as you all know: Why is "-time" always added onto "space"? Can we have some observable stuff here in our science, people? It's a human, subjective concept of measurement. You will never find an ounce of time, ever! I can dig gravity warping space, sounds cool, but people already have a hard enough time grasping that reality, and what we observe as the total lack of something (space)...is made up of something, without pretending that time is a "thing". Our subjective experience of "time" slows down to zero at light speed, I get it...doesn't mean time is a "thing".

EDIT: Experiment is pretty cool, though. Thought they already proved that gravity warps space by observing space around black holes, though? Just more proof, I guess, that's always good.

ANOTHER EDIT: Wait, I think I found an article that will clear things up for m (http://www.wbabin.net/physics/sorli.htm)e:


In the Theory of Relativity time is an imaginary quantity that can not be observed; it is a multiplication of a number that indicates duration of material change and number i that is an imaginary number. I on the square is -1. Time t * i is a mathematical time that describes the speed and the duration of material change. In the Universe one can observe physical time only as a stream of material change. It is not that change runs in physical time, change itself is physical time. Distinction between imaginary mathematical time and visible physical time opens some new perspectives into interpretation of the Theory of Relativity.

See you science types should have linked an article like this forever ago for me to read.

[Aldurin]

Meh, it's one doomsday after another. No big deal.

[MuMu]

I don't understand a percent of what's in the article but those scientists gained a lot of points when they used a metaphor using a fat person.

[Magus]

I dunno, the metaphor was confusing, wouldn't it be more like a fat person spinning in water, the metaphorical "water" being whatever space is actually made of?

[Bells]

yeah... that's a lot less convoluted