some science questions

[8chaos]

for every thing of matter theres anti-matter hydrogen has anti-hydrogen so on, now when they come into contact they cancel each other out, now were do they go? it just makes me wounder if just one atom of anti-matter were to fall out of a tube onto the floor i wounder how bad that disaster would be.

the universe's mass is like 99% dark energy and the other 1% is like the stars and the earth, wouldn't that mean that everything in the universe is connected?

elements have a half-life when that expires.. they just disappear?

and someone told me about Bose–Einstein condensate i never ever herd of that till i googled it.. that is just insane..

[coder0xff]

Contact between matter and anti-matter causes a "matter anti-matter annihilation" where both are momentarily converted into energy and then into other particles. They don't just cancel out. If one atom of anti-matter were to fall out of a "penning trap" and were to get near enough to an atom, it would only interact with one atom (well also depending on the mass of each). It would not destroy the world or anything.

I don't know what you mean by "connected" but I don't see how that logically follows any of your premises. If by connected you mean, all in the same universe, or all came from the same place, then that may be true for other reasons.

When an atom of an element undergoes radio-active decay, it doesn't just disappear. It ejects a neutron (depending on the type of radio-active decay actually) and becomes another element. Because it's loosing a neutron, the decayed product is lighter. Also, a half-life doesn't expire. A half-life simply means that if you take a chunk of something radio active, how long will it take for half of its atoms to decay. After the first half life, you are left with 50%. After the second half life, you are left with 25%, etc.

Despite being taught that there are three states of matter in school (at least back in the day), IIRC there are 5 (am I forgetting one?). You have the condensate, gas, liquid, solid, and plasma.

If you want to know more about particle physics, I highly recommend: http://www.particleadventure.org/

[AndyMacK]

there's actually about 9-15 states I think. Hold this whilst I get the list out...

... back. Thanks. Right then:
solid, amorphous solid, liquid, gas, plasma, superfluid, supersolid, degenerate matter, neutronium, strongly-/weakly-symettric matter, quark-gluon plasma, fermionic condensate, Bose-Einstein condensate, and (my favourite) strange matter.

By connected, you mean that there is "stuff" even in the vacuum of space, yes? I suppose there is; a real "lack of stuff" would mean complete nothingness which cannot exist in our universe.

*edit* removed the stuff that coder covered.

[zombie@computer]

eletron + anti-electron = 2 gamma particles, each having the energy of (hey, this is a familiar formula) e=mc^2
dark energy is still very theoretically afaik, but i could be wrong.

As for everything connected, this is the string theory, read up on the relativity theory if you find that interesting (anything by michio kaku)

[vcool]

As for everything connected, this is the string theory, read up on the relativity theory if you find that interesting (anything by michio kaku)

I have a book of his, it's in German though and the title roughly translates to "In a parallel universe: a cosmic journey from the Big Bang to the 11th dimension".

Dark Energy is pretty much a given now. 72% of gravitational material in the universe we cannot see, and something is accelerating the expansion of the universe as shown by the increasing redshift of distant type Ia supernovae.

There are hypothesis that some fairly stable baryons like protons and neutrons have half lives. In other words, they fall apart after a given time into mesons. (or whatever, I am bound to mix up the names, there are so goddamn many of them. The difference is, baryons have three quarks that constitute them, mesons have 2) however the timescales are so incredibly large (thousands of billions of years) that not a single one could have fallen apart.

[Dionysos]

I would prefer if that apparent lack of mass was due to a yet unknown aspect of gravity itself

[8chaos]

heres a question, if the universe is expanding would it be like a bubble?, or like the void we all work with in the various engines like source, unreal.. just like a level with no limitations.. if its like a bubble then it aint infinite at one point it would come crashing back in or simply just pop..

red-shifting i thought has something to do with a cameras limitations of how far it can sense light

edit
i mean by the universe being connected, is were theres no real space it has to be filled with something.. something i mean something matter cant interact with well i guess that would be gravity, like for example planets orbit a star like electrons orbit the atom? idk theres so much more reading i need to do, but the information just goes on and on it overwhelms me

[joe_rogers_11155]

theres millions of tons of information on wikipedia. I spend hours reading on wikipedia about the universe.

/nerd

[vcool]

Particles don't orbit each other like planetary systems do. I'd explain, but I can write an essay on that and I would probably end up saying something stupid, so I suggest you read on quantum theory and the downfall of classical physics.

We cannot imagine what the outer shape of the universe is, it can be a bubble but it might as well be a bubble with instabilities, or maybe an ellipsoid. Outside the bubble would most likely be the void that would have no end, although that's arguable because as Lebniz argued - if space is uniform and infinite, why would a rational god create a universe at some specific point?

[Terr]

for every thing of matter theres anti-matter hydrogen has anti-hydrogen so on, now when they come into contact they cancel each other out, now were do they go?

E = mc^2. They become a heck of a lot of energy. Nuclear power--both fission and fusion--works by moving very very small amounts of mass into energy due to how the atoms get reconfigured. Antimatter annihilation would be both more efficient and harder to control.

Basically you can get energy by combining small elements and by breaking down large elements, until in the middle you get Iron or Nickel which you can't do so much with.

That's why almost every element you see that's above Iron in the periodic table was probably caused by exploding stars: It takes some focused energy to push them up there.

it just makes me wounder if just one atom of anti-matter were to fall out of a tube onto the floor i wounder how bad that disaster would be.

Depends on the atom. The kind they make in the lab is generally going to be Anti-hydrogen. So basically an antiproton and a positron (aka anti-electron.) Since roughly 3/4ths of a pound of antimatter would be equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb, a single atom would be... Well, practically nothing. There are a very very large number of atoms in a pound of material.

the universe's mass is like 99% dark energy and the other 1% is like the stars and the earth, wouldn't that mean that everything in the universe is connected?

Theoretically everything is by gravity anyway, even without "dark energy" or "dark matter".

elements have a half-life when that expires.. they just disappear?

They become some other elements and perhaps some subatomic particles.

[coder0xff]

Wow, there's a bit of misinformation in this thread. 8chaos, you really ought to look stuff like this up if you really want to know. AFAIK, none of us are physicists, and you're only going to get things as well as we can remember them.

Not that Wikipedia is perfect. But it still works very damn well.