More Science Stuff

More science “stuff” to ponder.  Credit Scientific American.

If you were traveling away from the Earth at 40% of the speed of light (74,400 miles a second), and someone fired a laser beam (light beam) toward you, would the light in the laser be coming toward you at 111,600 miles a second (the speed of light minus the speed you are traveling away from the light source, or would the laser beam still be coming toward you at 186,000 miles a second?  Answer:  The beam would still be coming toward you at 186,000 miles a second.  The laws of nature are the same no matter how fast you are moving relative to anything else in the universe.

The faster you travel,; the slower time passes for you.  Additionally, the faster you travel, you become “length contracted”.  That is, you begin to flatten like a pancake along the direction you are traveling.  You also would gain mass the faster you travel.  If you could travel at the speed of light, you would lose the third dimension entirely, but would have infinite mass.

If you push a rock up a hill, it gains gravitational potential energy, and therefore also gains mass, because mass and energy are interchangeable and identical.

If you could turn the mass of an ordinary golf ball into energy, that energy would power a 75 watt light bulb for about 2 million years (about 1,300 megawatts of power).

The path of earth’s movement through space-time is called a world line.  Earth’s world line is shaped like a helix.

As GPS satellites orbit the earth, variations in gravity slow their internal clocks relatie to one another.  Scientists use Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to correct the errors.

The core temperature of the sun is estimated at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.  Every second, it crushes 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium.  The other 5 million tons is turned into energy.

Photons created inside the sun can take upwards of a million years to get to the surface, even though they travel at the speed of light.  The mass particles are crushed so tightly inside the sun that the photons constantly bounce off of them and only gradually reach the surface.

That’s it for this time.  More cool stuff in a later post.