Kind of like Megamaid, only different.
Posted on 08/07/2008 7:51:29 PM PDT by 444Flyer
The video looks a bit like a scene from a low-budget sci-fi horror film. A tiny hole slowly begins sucking in bits of the Earth in Switzerland with mountains, lakes and cities quickly falling into the growing gap. And it just keeps on growing--and growing. By the end of the 38 second movie, the entire planet has been swallowed up -- and all that's left is a shimmering ring in the inky blackness of outer space.
Absurd, perhaps. But a brief look around Internet blogs, and especially YouTube, makes it clear that there are a number of people out there who believe it is a very real possibility. The gigantic particle accelerator just now being completed outside Geneva at the European Organization for Nuclear Research--known as CERN--is set to be switched on soon. And some are concerned that, once the research facility begins bashing subatomic particles together at 99.999991 percent of the speed of light, dangerous black holes could be created and spread out of control.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
It’s the .000009 percent you gotta watch out for.
Well, yea. But we didn't have one of those giant superkablooie smasher things until now. The planet that used to be between Mars and Jupiter got one of those superkablooie smasher things and look what happened to those guys.
The Europeans should stick to being snotty to American tourists and inventing large bureaucratic organizations that don't do anything but we get to chip in American tax money for.
True story-during the test of the first atomic bomb some physicists actually believed that once the bomb was ignited the chain reaction would consume the world
Forget where I heard that one
LOL. Don’t bother me about the end of the world - will the Red Sox still win the World Series??!!?
Not sure any physicists "actually believed" that -- a few discussed it as a remote theoretical possibility IIRC, but I've never seen it documented that any truly 'believed' it.
Yea, about the same time the world ends..........or hell freezes over......or the Lions win a Super Bowl. Whichever comes first......LOL!
Kind of like Megamaid, only different.
My source is on page 195 of "Darwin's Ghost" (subtitled "The Origin of the Species, updated") by Steve Jones.
There, in a chapter titled "On the imperfection of the Geological Record," Jones writes:
"We live not a hundred million but four thousand five hundred million years since the Earth was spun from dust and rock around the sun. The evidence comes not from our own planet, but from its satellite. The Moon flew off its parent after a giant impact. Because it stayed small, cold and undisturbed it gives a better picture of the past than does its parent. A quick trip by the Apollo XI mission was enough to date it. The Earth's turmoil makes it harder to trace its own origin. Its oldest rocks, found in Greenland and Western Australia, are just under four billion years old."
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/shadow/question38.html
From that source we have ...
“In the mid-1970s, scientists proposed the giant impact scenario for the formation of the Moon. The idea was that an off-center impact of a roughly Mars-sized body with a young Earth could provide Earth with its fast initial spin, and eject enough debris into orbit to form the Moon. If the ejected material came primarily from the mantles of the Earth and the impactor, the lack of a sizeable lunar core was easily understood, and the energy of the impact could account for the extra heating of lunar material required by analysis of lunar rock samples obtained by the Apollo astronauts."
In the above I've highlighted words about Earth's spin because page 231 in the before mentioned Steve Jones book (see Post 48) has in it this related statement:
"Even the days of the Earth have changed. As the moon saps its neighbor's rotational energy, the globe slows its spin. Corals have daily and annual rings of activity, and growth rings from four hundred million years ago show that there were then four hundred days a year."
Evolutionary astronomers have great trouble accounting for the origin of the moon. There have generally been three competing hypotheses, but they all have serious physical problems:
1. Fission theory, invented by the astronomer George Darwin (son of Charles). He proposed that the earth spun so fast that a chunk broke off, with the Pacific Ocean as the probable scar (or a modification of the theory that had the earth molten at the time). But this theory is universally discarded today. First, the moon is too chemically different from the earth; second, the earth could never have spun fast enough to throw a moon into orbit; and third, the escaping moon would have been shattered while within the Roche Limit.
2. Capture theory — the moon was wandering through the solar system, and was captured by Earth’s gravity. But for one approaching body to enter into orbit around another, it would need to lose a lot of energy, which is why spacecraft sent to orbit other planets are designed with retro-rockets. Otherwise the approaching body would have been ‘slingshotted’ rather than captured, a phenomenon the Voyager probes exploited. Finally, even a successful capture would have resulted in an elongated comet-like orbit.
3. Condensation (or co-creation) theory — earth and moon formed at about the same time from the same portion of the swarm of planetesimals which supposedly orbited the sun in the early phases of the evolution of the solar system. However, it’s unlikely that the gravitational attraction could have been strong enough, and it doesn’t account for the moon’s low iron content.
The evolutionary astronomer Lissauer affirms that these three theories have insoluble problems.1 He even cited an only half-joking statement in a university astronomy class about 20 years ago by Irwin Shapiro: since there were no good (naturalistic) explanations, the best explanation is that the moon is an illusion! This counts as strong evidence for the moon’s special creation.2,3
Lissauer’s article was actually commenting on a paper4 supporting what evolutionary scientists consider a fourth promising hypothesis for the origin of the moon, developed during the past decade. It is called the Giant Impact Hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet had a glancing collision 4.5 billion years ago. The moon subsequently formed from the ejecta. A variant of the hypothesis, the Impact-triggered Fission Hypothesis, propounds that, instead of one giant impactor, the moon formed from the debris of multiple impacts of smaller planetesimals. However, recent dynamical and geochemical analyses call the Giant Impact Hypothesis into question.
Computer models have been constructed to simulate such a giant impact. Although such computer models are simplified and depend too much on initial conditions, the results have strained the hypothesis to the breaking point. One of the new dynamical results is that the debris from the collision would rain back down onto Earth instead of remaining in orbit and forming the moon.5 To hurl the debris far enough from the earth, the impactor would need to be three times the size of Mars. The results of such a collision are hard to understand, much less model. And if the moon did form after such a collision, the orbit would likely be unstable with a distance of only 14,000 miles above the earth and circling it every two hours. Lissauer also noted the unsolved problem of losing the excess angular momentum.1
Planetary scientists are trying to work through all the dynamical problems to patch up this hypothesis by employing multiple computer simulations.6 Of course, multiple computer attempts with different initial conditions and physics are bound to come up with something plausible. But, some researchers are sceptical that such computer models are realistic:
‘However, Jay Melosh (University of Arizona) argued that we do not know the equations of state well enough to calculate the energy of such an impact and that we may have grossly underestimated them, to the point that specific dynamic models are currently unjustified.’ 7
In spite of a growing consensus in favor of the Giant Impact Hypothesis, some workers remain sceptical of the hypothesis on both dynamical and geochemical grounds.7
Ruzicka, Snyder and Taylor reviewed the geochemical data,8 especially the diagnostic elements of Ni, Co, Cr, V, and Mn. These elements have been used to argue in favor of the Giant Impact Hypothesis, but these researchers, after reviewing observed data from the moon and meteorites, conclude ‘... that there is no strong geochemical support for either the Giant Impact or Impact-triggered Fission hypotheses.’ 9 Much of the geochemical support for the hypothesis was based on genitive models, which of course are simplified with too few variables. It is the observed data that call these hypotheses into question. The researchers also add that the reason the Giant Impact Hypothesis has become popular lately is because other hypotheses don’t work:
‘This [hypothesis] has arisen not so much because of the merits of [its] theory as because of the apparent dynamical or geochemical short-comings of other theories ...’ 9
Planetary scientists won’t give up. They must have a naturalistic hypothesis for all origins, including the moon’s, so will believe almost any hypothesis to fill the void. In regard to the moon and despite a long history of theorizing, ‘The origin of the Moon is still unresolved.’ 9 The idea that the moon was specially created ex nihilo at its present distance and in its present orbit some 6,000 years ago is still the most reasonable explanation for its origin.
References
1. Lissauer, J.J., It’s not easy to make the moon, Nature 389(6649):353–357, 1997.
2. Whitcomb, J.C. and DeYoung, D.B., The Moon—Its Creation, Form and Significance, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1978.
3. Sarfati, J.D., The Moon: The light that rules the night, Creation 20(4):36–39, 1998.
4. Shigeru Ida et al., Lunar accretion from an impact generated disk, Nature 389(6649):353–357, 1997.
5. Anonymous, Recipe for a moon, Discover 18(11):25–26, 1997.
6. Halliday, A.N. and Drake, M.J., Colliding theories, Science 283:1861–1863, 1999.
7. Halliday and Drake, Ref. 3, p. 1862.
8. Ruzicka, A., Snyder, G.A. and Taylor, L.A., Giant Impact and Fission Hypotheses for the origin of the moon: a critical review of some geochemical evidence, International Geology Review 40:851–864, 1998.
9. Ruzicka et al., Ref. 5, p. 851.
An apt saying inside the technical world has it that “Beliefs belong in church”
Goos luck with your beliefs ...
Vaya con dios ...
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