Science - a symposium. (Feat. SMBP)
 

I've been watching Cosmos alongside a few other specials on astrophysics and admittedly sometimes I'm not so much watching it as I am passed out in front of it with a melted bowel of ice cream in my lap, but it's all still pretty amazing.

I have some concerns regarding the age of the universe. If time moves more slowly and, practically, stands still within the event horizon of black holes, does that mean that parts of the universe are actually younger than others? We currently think the universe is about 13,000,000,000 years old but time is not as linear as we tend to think since it is affected by gravity.

Also! Did you know that if a star goes supernova in a certain way it can create a gigantic death-ray that would wipe out anything in it's path with a beam of gamma radiation? I thought that was pretty wild.

Anyway, yeah, space. It's big. Really really big, and there's a lot of weird stuff out there!

I was watching German astrodude Harald Lesch on TV some years ago and recently youtube'd his stuff because I always thought shit be fascinating. He's not one of the dudes who get boring mathy unless it's absolutely necessary. Which is kinda essential for me because my shitty education only covered Kindergarten level maths.

He also one time blamed communists for stealing his chalk.

EDIT: I made two icons because I can shit them out in five seconds with the help of google and an image editor that is not photoshop, but one didn't get saved and now the program doesn't work and I'm too lazy to make it again. Luckily, it was the serious one that got lost.

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/4839/satans.png

I think we should have a sticky for science topic. Like I pretty regularly read interesting science news which I think people would enjoy but not really long enough for a thread but doesnt' work in the links thread.

The best communist science stealing story was this visitng professor from Moscow I was talking to. He had worked in Soviet Russia on gold/TiO2/ethanol systems. He had massive chunks of gold just sitting on his desk, nobody touched it but he had to lock up his ethanol at night

On the OP title, I would be interested in a science-y sticky akin to our political sticky.

On the OP content, as you say the age of the universe is only our best estimate. The measurement is riding heavily on the assumption that the various models they use are accurate. I guess you could generalize that to like, everything in science, but they are really really riding on it.

Thread stuck.

Let this be the place for science related topics that would otherwise not warrant their own thread or something like that.

Updated thread title.

In re: post icon, these balls aren't gonna suck themselves

No I did not know that, sounds like it would hurt like a bitch if such a thing hit earth.

Don't worry, your death (and the death of everything else on the planet) would be practically instantaneous.

Heard that Higgs Boson might not be a thing after all, which, is that huge tunnel useful for anything else?