6 ms·

It's amazing how much they look like electron orbitals. . . . Sometimes its seems like the reason we see nature reuse the same patterns is not from any physical

It's amazing how much they look like electron orbitals. . . . Sometimes its seems like the reason we see nature reuse the same patterns is not from any physical mechanism but simply because math only has so many "shapes." I am perpetually in awe at this mysterious order to our universe. Also: if these belts block high-energy electrons, can they teach us to build a force field that does the same? And can that solve the problem of fast-moving spacecraft being destroyed by the first spec of dust they encounter? Or of radiation killing the crew? What if the only way to protect life against cosmic radiation is to build a planet-sized spacecraft? Another question due to my weak grasp of modern physics: to a fast-moving spacecraft, are all electrons "high energy"?

blueprint 12y ago
I wonder if I'll be attacked for saying this. Here goes. We always find these kinds of shapes because they are the shapes that appear through fluid mechanics. Space is a fluid, too. In a fluid, we have vortices (in the form of whirlpools, tornados, etc) because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems.
- NeverEnough 12y ago
  would you disagree with the idea that there are a lot of good ways of describing something, that are true for many cases but very wrong for others?
  - blueprint 12y ago
    I don't know what you have in mind. In order for me, or anyone else who bases his/her judgement on fact, to give you an answer which you'll be able to recognize as right, you'll need to point out a concrete problem or question that contains facts that can be independently verified, rather than something abstract and hypothetical.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  > In a fluid, we have vortices... because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems. As a Physicist, I am wary of making such statements since they put the cart before the horse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology ). I'd be more comfortable saying "In a fluid, we have vortices... as a consequence of the movement of material and energy." In your case I'm assuming it's just a turn of phrase, but there are some hypotheses which actually attribute abstract "goals" to nature, without providing any explanation in terms of mechanical processes; for example http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com In constrast, Darwin explained the theory of evolution using the mechanical process of natural selection. The principle of least action can be explained either physically, using quantum interference (eg. in optics), or mathematically, due to the mixture of inductive steps with deductive ones. In constrast, the existence of vortices in fluids because of their efficiency would be like claiming crater lakes can't exist because water flows downhill.
  - blueprint 12y ago
    Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can. Undisturbed, and notwithstanding internal vibrations, a spherical droplet of liquid will tend to stay in a sphere because not to do so would require an additional expenditure of energy, that is, in order to counteract those electrostatic forces. So the way I used the term efficient before is in the same way as how it's less costly in energy expenditure, i.e. more efficient, for a droplet to stay spherical. It's the same reasoning behind a number of other things we find in physics. So I'm not convinced that my statement about efficiency leading to appearance of natural structures is incorrect -- maybe more so a difference in how such an observation is commonly phrased.
    - chriswarbo 12y ago
      I was only commenting on the goal-attributing phrasing you'd used, not the Physics. Compare your electrostatic sphere example to my crater-lake example: lakes at a high gravitational potential are inefficient, it's less costly for the water to flow up the sides of a crater and down into the ocean. The reason that doesn't happen is because there is no mechanism for it to do so. If we look at liquid helium, there is a mechanism which allows it (the Onnes Effect) so it does happen. > Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can Yes, but the interesting part of the sentence is "as they can"; we can't just assume that a liquid's surface will be at minimal energy, since that would allow us to solve NP-complete problems with soap bubbles ( www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf ) :)
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>build a planet-sized spacecraft // We have one of those already, just need to work on the propulsion and life-support systems.
- twic 12y ago
  And we're back to the stories of Liu Cixin again: http://www.pornokitsch.com/2012/07/underground-reading-the-wandering-earth-by-liu-cixin.html http://www.pornokitsch.com/2012/07/underground-reading-the-w...
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Hmm, that sounds very similar to this 2006 sci-fi novel: http://www.amazon.com/Cusp-Robert-A-Metzger/dp/0441013015 http://www.amazon.com/Cusp-Robert-A-Metzger/dp/0441013015 It reads like William Gibson reimagined by Michael Bay but I ended being entertained despite myself.
    - twic 12y ago
      Oh wow, yes, definitely some overlap there! Judging purely from the blurb on Amazon, i'd say that the stories at least have rather different styles - Clarke-Baxter-style grand-scale hard SF vs Walter Jon Williams-style cyberpunk-tinged space opera.
mturmon 12y ago
You may already know this, but in your observation about "math having only so many shapes" has been explored in some depth. There is a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature but I first learned about it from the book, "Patterns in Nature", by Peter S. Stevens (http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Nature-Peter-S-Stevens/dp/0316813311 http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Nature-Peter-S-Stevens/dp/031...), which was recommended to me by a noted poet.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  There is a similar, but less mathematical and pretty old book called Artforms of Nature by Ernst Haeckel (1904) [1]. It’s in the public domain. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
- davidw 12y ago
  I'm glad that page linked to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli The first time I saw it in a store here in Italy I got all excited and started staring at it up close.
  - mturmon 12y ago
    My daughter loves that stuff. I was pleased.
VLM 12y ago
> to a fast-moving spacecraft, are all electrons "high energy"? Define fast. Electrons get to relativistic-ish speeds in the hundred of kilovolts-ish range. If you look at the specs for a x-ray tube thats a pretty intense / hard to shield x-ray source, not like those wimpy tens of kilovolt xrays from a CRT that don't even make it thru the glass. So if you're going fast enough for relativity to be an issue, smacking a stationary electron is going to hurt and be a pain to shield, so yeah, all electrons are high energy. On the other hand what we puny humans currently think is a fast spacecraft, is going to be a rounding error compared to solar winds and just random stuff out there, so in a different way, all the electrons that matter are high energy compared to our actual deployed slow spacecraft, sorta.
dredmorbius 12y ago
The observation of the similarity between electron orbitals and various astronomical phenomena is one that's made fairly frequently. My first recollection was during a high-school session to a local university for a science and physics colloquium for high-school students, over a quarter century ago. We were seeing slides of steller objects, and one showed as I recall a galaxy with high-energy jets radiating from both poles. One of the bright kids in the group (ergo, not myself) noted the electron orbital similarity. Perhaps it's the chagrin at not having noted that myself which has made me highly aware of the symmetry since. But yes, there's an economy of patterns in the Universe. At least at some levels.
marcosdumay 12y ago
It's a very simple shape. Things that rotate tend to have toroidal features. And the details are all different. We know how to build a force field that does the same, it's a magnet. The problem is that it does not protect against neutron radiation.
ajcarpy2005 12y ago
Well there is actually a very electrical and magnetic basis for many of the features and configurations we see in space and in star systems. There is a whole memmetic category heading known as Electric Universe, which although unfortunately contributed to by many crackpots, a very interesting and rational framework for understanding on at least a very basic level the 'why' and 'how' of what we observe in space. (why and how specific patterns or shapes are observed) Here's a fantastic first part of a video series (long but very educational and interesting; not solid science but not devoid of facts either): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI
- ajcarpy2005 12y ago
  If you downvoted I'm not angry but I would appreciate transparency about what you think about the role of electricity and magnetism in the Universe at large. I tried to distinguish my comment from naive ideology by cautioning that I am not comfortable with the level of scientific rigor used under the 'umbrella' of Electric Universe studies but that I find the cognitive paths they use to be on a track that probably leads to rigorous scientific experiments and provable/disprovable theories. I find it a good philosophical framework, far better than, say, Greek Astrology...
  - michaelsbradley 12y ago
    There is a website associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory which offers a tour of the more solidly grounded Plasma Universe ideas: http://plasmauniverse.info http://plasmauniverse.info On the books and journals page are shamelessly listed at least two titles which would be considered heretical by most mainstream space scientists: Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened and Don Scott's Electric Sky. The former critiques (still) problematical aspects of Lambda-CDM physical cosmology, while the latter explores such ideas as phenomenon like pulsars being essentially electrical in nature (not gravitational) and stars being powered by external electric currents rather than internal nuclear reactions. Will such "crazy" theories ever make it into mainstream research institutions? Maybe... maybe not... but I'm glad that some serious-minded scientists are willing to buck orthodoxy and risk ridicule in order to explore interesting alternative theories.
jaekwon 12y ago
An electron is just a miniature plaque with Carl Sagan's signature on it.

blueprint 12y ago

I wonder if I'll be attacked for saying this. Here goes. We always find these kinds of shapes because they are the shapes that appear through fluid mechanics. Space is a fluid, too. In a fluid, we have vortices (in the form of whirlpools, tornados, etc) because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems.

NeverEnough 12y ago
would you disagree with the idea that there are a lot of good ways of describing something, that are true for many cases but very wrong for others?
- blueprint 12y ago
  I don't know what you have in mind. In order for me, or anyone else who bases his/her judgement on fact, to give you an answer which you'll be able to recognize as right, you'll need to point out a concrete problem or question that contains facts that can be independently verified, rather than something abstract and hypothetical.
chriswarbo 12y ago
> In a fluid, we have vortices... because they allow material and energy to be moved much more efficiently than any of the other structures we don't tend to see in stable systems. As a Physicist, I am wary of making such statements since they put the cart before the horse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology ). I'd be more comfortable saying "In a fluid, we have vortices... as a consequence of the movement of material and energy." In your case I'm assuming it's just a turn of phrase, but there are some hypotheses which actually attribute abstract "goals" to nature, without providing any explanation in terms of mechanical processes; for example http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com In constrast, Darwin explained the theory of evolution using the mechanical process of natural selection. The principle of least action can be explained either physically, using quantum interference (eg. in optics), or mathematically, due to the mixture of inductive steps with deductive ones. In constrast, the existence of vortices in fluids because of their efficiency would be like claiming crater lakes can't exist because water flows downhill.
- blueprint 12y ago
  Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can. Undisturbed, and notwithstanding internal vibrations, a spherical droplet of liquid will tend to stay in a sphere because not to do so would require an additional expenditure of energy, that is, in order to counteract those electrostatic forces. So the way I used the term efficient before is in the same way as how it's less costly in energy expenditure, i.e. more efficient, for a droplet to stay spherical. It's the same reasoning behind a number of other things we find in physics. So I'm not convinced that my statement about efficiency leading to appearance of natural structures is incorrect -- maybe more so a difference in how such an observation is commonly phrased.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    I was only commenting on the goal-attributing phrasing you'd used, not the Physics. Compare your electrostatic sphere example to my crater-lake example: lakes at a high gravitational potential are inefficient, it's less costly for the water to flow up the sides of a crater and down into the ocean. The reason that doesn't happen is because there is no mechanism for it to do so. If we look at liquid helium, there is a mechanism which allows it (the Onnes Effect) so it does happen. > Electrostatic forces keep the surface of a liquid as taut as they can Yes, but the interesting part of the sentence is "as they can"; we can't just assume that a liquid's surface will be at minimal energy, since that would allow us to solve NP-complete problems with soap bubbles ( www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf ) :)

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

>build a planet-sized spacecraft // We have one of those already, just need to work on the propulsion and life-support systems.

twic 12y ago
And we're back to the stories of Liu Cixin again: http://www.pornokitsch.com/2012/07/underground-reading-the-wandering-earth-by-liu-cixin.html http://www.pornokitsch.com/2012/07/underground-reading-the-w...
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Hmm, that sounds very similar to this 2006 sci-fi novel: http://www.amazon.com/Cusp-Robert-A-Metzger/dp/0441013015 http://www.amazon.com/Cusp-Robert-A-Metzger/dp/0441013015 It reads like William Gibson reimagined by Michael Bay but I ended being entertained despite myself.
  - twic 12y ago
    Oh wow, yes, definitely some overlap there! Judging purely from the blurb on Amazon, i'd say that the stories at least have rather different styles - Clarke-Baxter-style grand-scale hard SF vs Walter Jon Williams-style cyberpunk-tinged space opera.

mturmon 12y ago

You may already know this, but in your observation about "math having only so many shapes" has been explored in some depth. There is a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature but I first learned about it from the book, "Patterns in Nature", by Peter S. Stevens (http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Nature-Peter-S-Stevens/dp/0316813311 http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Nature-Peter-S-Stevens/dp/031...), which was recommended to me by a noted poet.

3rd3 12y ago
There is a similar, but less mathematical and pretty old book called Artforms of Nature by Ernst Haeckel (1904) [1]. It’s in the public domain. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
davidw 12y ago
I'm glad that page linked to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli The first time I saw it in a store here in Italy I got all excited and started staring at it up close.
- mturmon 12y ago
  My daughter loves that stuff. I was pleased.

VLM 12y ago

> to a fast-moving spacecraft, are all electrons "high energy"? Define fast. Electrons get to relativistic-ish speeds in the hundred of kilovolts-ish range. If you look at the specs for a x-ray tube thats a pretty intense / hard to shield x-ray source, not like those wimpy tens of kilovolt xrays from a CRT that don't even make it thru the glass. So if you're going fast enough for relativity to be an issue, smacking a stationary electron is going to hurt and be a pain to shield, so yeah, all electrons are high energy. On the other hand what we puny humans currently think is a fast spacecraft, is going to be a rounding error compared to solar winds and just random stuff out there, so in a different way, all the electrons that matter are high energy compared to our actual deployed slow spacecraft, sorta.

dredmorbius 12y ago

The observation of the similarity between electron orbitals and various astronomical phenomena is one that's made fairly frequently. My first recollection was during a high-school session to a local university for a science and physics colloquium for high-school students, over a quarter century ago. We were seeing slides of steller objects, and one showed as I recall a galaxy with high-energy jets radiating from both poles. One of the bright kids in the group (ergo, not myself) noted the electron orbital similarity. Perhaps it's the chagrin at not having noted that myself which has made me highly aware of the symmetry since. But yes, there's an economy of patterns in the Universe. At least at some levels.

marcosdumay 12y ago

It's a very simple shape. Things that rotate tend to have toroidal features. And the details are all different. We know how to build a force field that does the same, it's a magnet. The problem is that it does not protect against neutron radiation.

ajcarpy2005 12y ago

Well there is actually a very electrical and magnetic basis for many of the features and configurations we see in space and in star systems. There is a whole memmetic category heading known as Electric Universe, which although unfortunately contributed to by many crackpots, a very interesting and rational framework for understanding on at least a very basic level the 'why' and 'how' of what we observe in space. (why and how specific patterns or shapes are observed) Here's a fantastic first part of a video series (long but very educational and interesting; not solid science but not devoid of facts either): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPlyiW-xGI

ajcarpy2005 12y ago
If you downvoted I'm not angry but I would appreciate transparency about what you think about the role of electricity and magnetism in the Universe at large. I tried to distinguish my comment from naive ideology by cautioning that I am not comfortable with the level of scientific rigor used under the 'umbrella' of Electric Universe studies but that I find the cognitive paths they use to be on a track that probably leads to rigorous scientific experiments and provable/disprovable theories. I find it a good philosophical framework, far better than, say, Greek Astrology...
- michaelsbradley 12y ago
  There is a website associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory which offers a tour of the more solidly grounded Plasma Universe ideas: http://plasmauniverse.info http://plasmauniverse.info On the books and journals page are shamelessly listed at least two titles which would be considered heretical by most mainstream space scientists: Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened and Don Scott's Electric Sky. The former critiques (still) problematical aspects of Lambda-CDM physical cosmology, while the latter explores such ideas as phenomenon like pulsars being essentially electrical in nature (not gravitational) and stars being powered by external electric currents rather than internal nuclear reactions. Will such "crazy" theories ever make it into mainstream research institutions? Maybe... maybe not... but I'm glad that some serious-minded scientists are willing to buck orthodoxy and risk ridicule in order to explore interesting alternative theories.

jaekwon 12y ago

An electron is just a miniature plaque with Carl Sagan's signature on it.