A science nerd thread.

Beej1

Senior Member
Good idea, I can slip off like that too. But not where I work now, I'm out at Glendenning. If I was still at Circular Quay could have easily done that. I like your thinking.....
It helped that Mrs Nuclear isn't the hugest sci-fi movie fan, so she was happy to care for Jr Nuclear while a friend and I had a lazy Friday arvo of burgers, beer and theoretical physics (note: they don't inspect your bag at IMAX Melbourne and thus don't notice when you take a chiller bag full of beer into the cinema).

Well worth it for switching my weekend morning ride to an arvo to give Mrs Nuclear a sleep-in (well ... 2 sleep-ins this time since I'd seen the whole Dark Knight Trilogy at IMAX 3 days earlier with same friend and more beers and Anne Hathaway in leather rather than space-suit).
 

clockworked

Like an orange
It's worth it. Well I thought so. I want to see it again once more before it leaves cinemas, and IMAX is the only way I'll see it for sure. FWIW it's playing at 3pm some days ... you could always knock of work early (he says flippantly, not knowing at all if you have the ability to do this).
Man i saw it today; I didn't like it much at all. The soundtrack is like a rick rubin album; wall of noise, and the ending scenes were not my cup of tea at all.

Not being a great one for physics I won't pass judgement on where it stands between reason and fiction, but the story was pretty weak nonetheless.
 

Beej1

Senior Member
Man i saw it today; I didn't like it much at all. The soundtrack is like a rick rubin album; wall of noise, and the ending scenes were not my cup of tea at all.

Not being a great one for physics I won't pass judgement on where it stands between reason and fiction, but the story was pretty weak nonetheless.
Yeah I'm hearing a lot of that. I was always going to like it at least a little bit because it's space travel and wormholes and all that stuff which you just don't see much of in the movies these days and which I've always been a huge fan of. It honestly took me a few days to really appreciate the film on the whole.

The science was spot on. By that I mean, as spot on as one can currently predict in regards to the plausible stuff, and mostly following known constraints for the completely sci-fi elements of the ending. At first I thought that whole ending part was just wishy washy nonsense that didn't need to be there and created a whole bootstrap paradox. But then after a while and a little reading about the theories of the perspective of time from a 5th dimension point of view, the ending grew on me and the way they tie it together for the human element (the bond between father and daughter) I think it makes for a better film than just space and suspense. Plus the tesseract scene was visually awesome. I also noticed several similarities here with 2001 : A Space Odyssey.

I've read lots of articles about the score being distracting and too loud and muting dialogue etc. I honestly can't say I even noticed it a tiny bit.

Anyway ... certainly not everyone's cup of tea. If you like space travel and movies and movies set in space and/or about space travel then this is also certainly worth a look: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/
 

bikeyoulongtime

Likes Dirt
Here's something cool I got on the credits for:

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2299.html

In a nutshell this work provides hard evidence that our understanding of Antarctic sea ice is far from complete. Anyone who has been to the Antarctic pack ice already knew that there is some crazily thick ice out there in the southern ocean - but couldn't prove it directly because it's too hard for ships to get to, and too hard to drill through. The standard view *was* that Antarctic sea ice is on average about a metre thick, and relatively flat. That view now has to change, so we update our world view a little bit. Awesome!

My role? collecting field measurements used to compare underwater robot stuff to. It was fun. and cold. and bloody hard work.
 

Bermshot

Banned
That could explain everything. He built his own Antikythera mechanism to generate his posts.
LOL, nothing that cool. Just someone that looked into everything "alternate" due to perceiving the "Book" as a lie young (said this before, I was 8 and had my great mum write a letter so that I could spend my time in the library without indoctrination, of course it was granted.) So quite simply, in the perceiving that some folk singer was singing & telling me BS from A book about god, I thought fuck you, I'll suss it all myself.

Correct I am no scientist, scholar, not even a plumber! But don't perceive me as a fool, for that i am not. Cognitive dissonant chitlins.
 

Ivan

Eats Squid
I'm watching the Manhattan TV series:

eef74afd47d16ed0d1fa8681f5ca3d8b1.jpg

and I'm slightly addicted so far. There's not a lot of science in it, but cool to watch from a science nerd perspective anyway.
 

thecat

NSWMTB, Central Tableland MBC
Largest hi res photo ever taken...

[video=youtube;udAL48P5NJU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAL48P5NJU[/video]
 

thecat

NSWMTB, Central Tableland MBC
CCC? Im not familiar?
conformal cyclic cosmology. A theory championed by Penrose that says inflation happened before the big bang, the big bang was just a form of cosmic rescaling. Ie The end of one universe cycle is the start of another with the conformal boundary at the end of one being the conformal boundary at the start of the other. bosons can move freely across the boundary but Fermions can't

For it to work mass has to decay. That's never been shown but the time frame for decay would be far longer than we can currently detect and measure. There are some clues that suggest mass may decay eg If you look at electric charge every thing is a neat multiple or fraction of 1 electron charge. Mass on the other hand is all over the place suggesting it's not a set constant.

Penrose claims to have detected concentric circles in the WMAP background image which would support the theory
 

bikeyoulongtime

Likes Dirt
yah, I was off. prime idiot. the general relativity thing is much easier and actually relevant to the question.

e = mc^2, so m = e/c^2.

I don't understand CCC, I'm not a theoretical physicist. I do understand uncertainty. What does the theoretical physics community make of this:

http://www.livescience.com/29111-speed-of-light-not-constant.html

...I guess, in bricks and mortar world it doesn't matter, light is constant enough. Being a science geek, I'd like to hear less about facts and certainty in the world, and more about 'well, shit.. we really don't know but we get by anyway...'. It's more accurate :)
 
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