Jim Kalahalliwalli or whataver

[mistermack]

Space Elevator, that's what we need.

Mount Everest would do.

Build a tube inside it, with linear motors accelerating the rocket.
So you do the first five miles of lift and acceleration without carrying the fuel for it.

[Brian Peacock]

Or if you had a really long bungee rope, a pretty heavy duty one, you could pull the manned unit down inside the mountain and then twang it up into the air, like a giant trebuchet, a space trebuchet, a spabuchet if you will.

[mistermack]

Or if you had a really long bungee rope, a pretty heavy duty one, you could pull the manned unit down inside the mountain and then twang it up into the air, like a giant trebuchet, a space trebuchet, a spabuchet if you will.

You could do it better with compressed air.
Just have twin tubes. One with the space craft at the bottom. The other has a giant weight at the top.
You winch the weight up to the top, and drop it. It forces air downwards, where it transfers to under the rocket.
So the up tube is the barrel of a gigantic air gun, and the rocket is the slug.

It would make quite a bang, as the rocket popped out at the top. That would be the time to search for Yeti shit.

[piscator]

[JimC]

The Horizon thing about controlling gravity was good, but I was dozing off as I tried to watch it.

Little bit I remember is that they are hoping to make some antimatter at CERN, so that they can find out if it is repelled by mass, rather than attracted to it.

If it's repelled, it could be the takeoff fuel for rockets of the future.
You put the energy into making antimatter here on earth, and then load it into the rocket. Unlock the rocket from it's base, and it just shoots off up into the sky, without any exhaust, and without needing to carry it's own fuel.
So on takeoff, you don't need to lift off the weight of the fuel, which is about 95 percent of a rocket's weight.

It might be a runner in 200 years time I suppose. If you need something the size of CERN to make the antimatter, I think it might work out a bit expensive.

Everything I've read about modern physics suggests that gravity is a force which makes no distinction between any and all forms of matter, given that essentially acts by altering the underlying vectors of space-time itself...

[pErvinalia]

[Tero]

Time to set up the restaurant yet? At the end.

[mistermack]

Everything I've read about modern physics suggests that gravity is a force which makes no distinction between any and all forms of matter, given that essentially acts by altering the underlying vectors of space-time itself...

Yeh. I'm not pushing this idea. It's just how they explained it on Horizon. ( bearing in mind that I was dozing off while I watched it ).

In their defence though, I don't think antimatter is matter, so it might not follow the same rules. I don't think we've been able to see any, or make any, or measure any. (as far as I know, that is).

From my recollection, without doing any reading up, it's theorised that for every bit of matter, there's somewhere an equivalent bit of antimatter. If it behaved the same way as matter under gravity, there would be antimatter all around us. There would be stars made of the stuff.
But if it's repelled by matter, then there would be no sign of it. So if it is repelled in some way by gravity, the current appearance of the universe would fit with that.

But anyway, if they can make some in CERN, they will presumably get answers.

[mistermack]

I just watched a bit of the Horizon " The quest for gravity control" again to see if I'd remembered it right.

What I said is roughly what is going on.
CERN have a separate lab called "the antimatter factory" where they are building a machine to make anti-hydrogen. And they are planning to see whether it falls up, or down, under gravity. So there is clearly some uncertainty there, even among physics professors.

I would think that, if it falls up, it would need a hell of a lot of energy input, to create enough to give a decent lift.
Because you are basically giving it the power to accelerate right out of the solar system. Although most of the work would be done leaving the pull of the Earth.
So if you could make a metric ton of anti-hydrogen, you could accelerate a half-ton space vehicle with a force of 500kg. Which would be like falling upwards at half the rate that we normally fall downwards.

Or you could make a one-ton plane effectively weightless. Which would do away with the helicopter as we know it. And runways.
That's if you could design something that would contain anti-hydrogen, without annihilating itself.

[klr]

My best friend at work has a PhD in physics, and despite all Jiim Alkali's communicating skills, my friend is none the wiser about the ultimate fate of the universe. As am I

[Brian Peacock]

Therefore God.

[mistermack]

Anyway, it's the most useless and purely academic question in science.
What's going to happen in fifty or a hundred billion years time.

I suppose if you can work out what will happen at the end, it might give some sort of clue as to what happened at the start.

Six thousand years ago . . . when god said, "let there be light" . . .

Maybe that's it ! At the end, in another six thousand years, god will just say, "put that fuckin light out"

[Rum]

I'm not sure it is a useless question at all. Theoretical physics - exploring the cutting edge has led to many other discoveries - some practical. The atom bomb for instance...

[JimC]

I'm not sure it is a useless question at all. Theoretical physics - exploring the cutting edge has led to many other discoveries - some practical. The atom bomb for instance...

A warp drive is just around the corner!

[Rum]

It seems that every time there's a new cosmology, whether it be Galileo's, Newton's or Einstein's - not to mention the religious ones - there is a period where it becomes the orthodoxy and people who challenge it risk looking foolish - and even come to harm in some cases. Perhaps the current orthodoxy is about to experience as big a shift.