Our on-going discussion of Dr. Tom Van Flandern's theories on gravity, cosmology, and other subjects, continues. I read 30 pages of Dr. Van Flandern's book Dark Matter Missing Planets & New Comets, and we kicked around a few of his ideas (see his Web Site for background info).
The beginning of Dr. Van Flandern's book has some very interesting examples of single, dual, and multi-particle universes which demonstrate some of his ideas. George and I don't completely get it, though.
I didn't understand how Van Flandern's (from now on known as Dr. Tom) graviton particle theory could lead to enough pressure to begin stellar fusion. George, having read much further than me, points out tha Dr. Tom covers this. He says that pressure does increase as you move toward the center of a Dr. Tom star. The pressure is higher because not only are the particles near the center pushed on by the gravitons that made it that far, they are also pushed by particles which were already given a shove by other gravitons. Hmm. I guess I better keep reading.
George and I are still having trouble with relativistic time effects (a.k.a. the Twin Paradox). When we think about one twin staying on Earth and the other twin leaving Earth traveling near the speed of light (let's say for a year) and returning, we can imagine that the higher velocity of the traveling twin (relative to the twin remaining on Earth) could lead to the traveling twin being younger. But since it is relative, who is really moving? If we only consider the two twins, then they are traveling AWAY from one another near the spped of light. If it is relative, how does the one twin "know" to age more slowly? George says the only differing factor is the acceleration of the traveling twin. I agree that it is the only difference, but George also points out that Dr. Tom later eliminates acceleration from the whole relativistic time effect issue!
George found another site which discusses the Twins Paradox and also eliminates acceleration. You can read it here. George said "I don't get it. It seems to me that the guy in the caboose of one train would have to pass the engineer of the other train at the exact same time as the engineer in his train sees the caboose of the other. Consequently it would have to be obvious to the observers that the two trains are the same length. I'm obviously missing something here. Maybe Feynman can help me!"
Yikes! Gotta read more.
Dr. Tom has a dandy explanation (that I have not yet read) using four spacecraft and quadruplets. George has created his own version of the hypothetical experiment in which two 4-lightyear-long spaceships carry two quadruplets each, with them standing (perhaps sitting) at the ends of the spacecraft. I'm hopeful that george will draw a cool diagram, and I can scan it in and post it here!
I mentioned that the Video CD (VCD) which I ordered from http://www.coolvcd.com arrived from their home base in Malaysia in just a little over a week (even though their confirmation e-mail indicated that it could take 15-20 business days).
This is the first VCD I have purchased, and I'm pleasantly surprised! The Emperor's New Groove is professionally packaged, played with no difficulties in my Toshiba DVD player, and the image quality is excellent.
George and I discussed the compression issue (VCDs use MPEG-1 compression, while DVDs use MPEG-2. For more info, see The MPEG Home Page or MPEG.ORG). Since the color gradients in an animated film are much smaller, it is likely that the film could be encoded with little or no loss of image clarity. I'll need to order a live-action film with night shots-- THEN we'll see how well they can do.
George announced that Mazda has introduced a sport compact with a butt-kicking stereo system, and they have named it the MP3! (Yes, it plays MP3 music files). See First Drive report at CanadianDriver.com.
George watched a cool television show on TLC (The Learning Channel) about faces, hosted by John Cleese. It seems that human interpretation of facial attractiveness is universal! A series of photos showing human faces that represented a variety of appearances (including some with deformities) were shown to individuals from a variety of cultures around the world. These people were asked to order the photos from most-attractive to least-attractive... and EVERYONE CAME TO THE SAME CONCLUSION!
It seems that faces which have "ideal" attractiveness traits posess size ratios of various features which turn out to always be 1:1.618 (George thought that number was awfully darned precise).
For more info, see the Human Face feature on TLC.
Van Flandern theorizes that comets are NOT "dirty snowballs", but rather they are remaining debris from an exploded planet (yes, between Mars and Jupiter). He believes that the material which is "burned off" a comet as it approaches the Sun (thus producing a tail) is actually made up of millions of tiny satellites which orbit the comet.
I remembered having read an article somewhere about a European attempt to rendezvous with a comet and actually
land on it-- boy, that should tell us whether Van Flandern is right! I found a link that talks about this upcoming mission at
SPACE.COM.