Physicist Answers Physics Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Jeffrey Hasbun, I'm a

physicist

, let's answer some

questions

from the Internet. This is the

physics

support

in Pizazz 91. Ask how black holes influence the space-time around them. Anything that is massive will bend spacetime, so if I think of this sheet of elastic as being SpaceTime with nothing in it, as soon as I put something that has mass in there, it bends SpaceTime around it. If I then take something really small like this marble and give it a little bit of force, it will orbit around that object and following the curved SpaceTime is the reason why the Earth moves around the Sun, so if I have an object really big and look at what it looks like in SpaceTime which folds it even more, the key with a black hole is to create something that is really dense and so I increase that density that it stretches Space-Time further and further down, so much that the light can no longer escape that curvature and that is what we call a black hole in the pedals because Jack asks wait, what is Space-Time?

Space-Time is what we live in it. They are four dimensions, three dimensions of space and, adding to that the dimension of time, it is why we move while we sit still, it is why we move while we walk around our house. Afeni Smack asks how an atom splits. What you're really doing is splitting the nucleus and let's say this is the nucleus of a uranium atom and what you do is you shoot another particle at it, usually a neutron very, very fast and when you shoot it at the nucleus, the nucleus breaks into pieces. in a few different parts that are smaller nuclei and when you do that, it also, as you can see, releases a lot of energy and that's where the first nuclear bombs come from and that's where the energy that we get from nuclear energy comes from. aier 8203 asks if the sun suddenly disappeared, it would take us 8 minutes to find out, but does the Earth still orbit where the sun was or will it deorbit immediately after disappearing?

The answer is that it will continue to move around the Sun. for another 8 minutes we don't know here on Earth that the sun disappeared because it takes 8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach us, it also takes 8 minutes for any change in the Sun's gravity to reach us. to us at Mike biani asks he hasn't read anything about

physics

since high school. Hey, did you hear about gravitational waves? I've heard about gravitational waves and helped publish some of the recent results on gravitational waves in case you haven't been paying attention. Gravitational waves are these expansions and contractions of space-time that travel through space-time toward us from supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies.

One of the really interesting things about gravitational waves is that they pass unimpeded through the universe that we can actually get closer to. the Big Bang using GRA gravitational wave observations, so they will teach us all kinds of interesting things about the early Universe in just 166 years. It raises a question: how are gravitational waves detected in space-time? We first detected gravitational waves a few years ago. A while ago we used lasers in large vacuum tubes and you split a laser, shoot it through two tubes and keep track of how far apart the mirrors are. You use the lasers to tell you the distance between the mirrors, that's called ligo, the second way we use.

We have learned to detect gravitational waves by using these exotic stars called pulsars. They are stars that spin very quickly and pulse every time they enter our line of vision. We look at those pulses over time whether the pulses arrive a little later or a little earlier. We can attribute that to the expansion and contraction of space-time between us and those stars. I am part of a collaboration that observes almost 70 of these stars in all different directions and we have been monitoring them for almost 20 years at Thek Hatib. I'm really paying you $1,000 if you answer correctly is light a wave or a particle the answer is that light is both a wave and a particle we have known the wave properties of light for a long time there is a classic experiment called the double experiment Young's slit, let's show it to you right now, let's lower the lights, we're going to take a laser pointer here, which is not how the original experiment was done, I'm just going to take this plate that has a little cut in it and point the laser through him and what happens is that he splits the light into two different waves and those waves are a little bit separated from each other, they are not completely coincident because two different waves meet and this is what we call interference and that is what gives us that pattern, there are actually two waves hitting there and they are constructively interfering, so the black spots are actually the same as what you get with noise canceling headphones, one of the waves cancels out the other. wave and only a wave behaves like this lights please, light is actually something bigger than a wave or a particle, it is something we call a quantum field and that quantum field has particle-like characteristics and wave-like characteristics, and We can measure both, so I think you owe it to yourself.

Me, a thousand dollar guy at Dr. zgc Disney, asks what the difference is between fission and fusion anyway, do you want to do fission with me? I don't want to be near where the fission happens. Fission is where you take a nucleus that is really big. an atom and you break it into pieces. Fusion is where you take pieces of atoms and put them together to make something bigger. Fusion is what happens in the sun, where really small nuclei come together and that's a big explosion and we've been trying that. build something like that on Earth to produce energy we haven't been able to figure out how to control it yet shivanu 21212 asks how will the universe end the universe will end in the heat death of the universe which only means that over time the universe is expanding and all the light that we know will be degraded and absorbed by black holes, it simply becomes very cold and very dark, we will not be able to see anything in the distance and nothing, the heat death of the universe is not something to worry about because it will happen between 40 and 50 thousand millions of years into the future and we are only 14 billion years from the beginning of the universe.

Interstellar black holes are practically perfect spheres, if they are rotating, they are a little more expanded around their equator where they rotate than at their poles, but they are practically spheres, so in that classic Interstellar image you see this practically spherical black. hole in the center and then you see all this light, which is the light from the other side of the black hole that bends around it and that disk that you see in the front that tells you that the black hole is actually spinning and each black hole The hole we know rotates like any other star in the universe at 52x Max asks what is special about special relativity well, that's relative Einstein probably special relativity is special for some reasons number one it gives us a universal speed limit which is the speed of light, nothing can go faster than the speed of light and that is unique to Einstein.

He discovered it in 1905 and no one had really thought that there was any kind of universal speed limit. A couple more things that are really special about special relativity are that it tells you that if you're moving close to the speed of light, time dilates, it gets longer, so if you're moving really fast , you experience time more slowly than someone who doesn't move very fast in Cowboy Vard asks, can someone explain the twin paradox to him? In simple terms, you have two twins, both on Earth, one of the twins decides to be an astronaut, he takes off in a spaceship going super fast, almost the speed of light, it takes him 50 years to go to a star and come back when the astronaut returns, the twin that was left is 50 years older, the other twin could be only 20 years old depending on how fast he was going, so it is the person in the rocket who will see time move more slowly and will only age 20 years in AES.

Force One asks that the speed of light as a constant is false what is the slowest speed of light in water the speed of light as a constant is not false we have a glass of water and I'm going to put this pencil in there and when I put the pencil in the pencil looks bent the light that comes out that you are seeing is bent that curvature comes from the fact that when the light hits at some angle it is deflected in that direction the light interacts with the water that is receiving absorbed and re-emitted you are seeing slightly longer paths as it disperses and that is what makes the light appear bent, those interaction actions take a little time and that is why we say that it is effectively moving slower between one interaction and the other .

Next, the speed of light is the speed of light in Aquarius. Donek asks the question: how does time dilation work? Simply put, time dilation is the fact that when you move very close to the speed of light, time passes more slowly, it's pretty simple. writing down the time that passes for someone moving at a certain speed is proportional to how time passes for someone not moving at that speed and there's this weird square root down here and what matters is the comparison of how fast they move that person. what is V compared to the speed of light and on that line there and as you go faster and faster that delta T Prime factor gets longer and longer so time passes more and more slowly when you get there at the speed of light time no longer passes in Neil Cameron 78 asks if black holes are really wormholes or are wormholes really black holes huh huh # science we know that black holes exist can we see evidence of them out there We have seen light around these black holes and it seems that we have seen the silhouette of a black hole.

Wormholes are a shortcut through space-time from one place to another. The first idea of ​​a wormhole is something called a Bridge. Einstein Rosen would need to move faster than the speed of light to go through it and we have no evidence that wormholes exist, some

physicist

s have postulated that if we use some of the special features of quantum field theory, perhaps we can create small wormholes through which we can send a signal from one place in space-time to another and While these have been successful as thought experiments and as computer simulations, they have not yet been seen in the real world in a real life experiment in Matt P1 1949 asks you: do you think time travel is possible based on current understanding of physics?

Now we understand that there are a couple of ways to think about how we could travel in time. One of them is using a wormhole. Some physicists did this thought experiment and wrote down all the pieces you would need to build a wormhole that somehow changes and tunnels through spacetime back to the past you write down the math of what that wormhole looks like the kind of matter you would need to keep that wormhole open doesn't exist in our current understanding of physics the type of matter you would need to keep a wormhole open is called exotic matter, things like negative energy density, what does that mean?

It means like thinking about something with negative mass, so I don't know if we're going to build a time machine anytime soon unless we can. find out how to find and make this exotic stuff Brad Alexandre asks: is there something infinite in the real world or is infinity just a concept in our minds? Infinity is not just a concept in our minds. The most important infinite that I study is the universe. It's infinite, so that's a great example of something that is infinite. We use infinities all the time when we make predictions in physics and it turns out that the size of the universe is infinite, the amount of time the universe will be around is also infinite in one day, well, okay, ask a quick question, does anyone know the difference between particle physics and quantum physics?

Please, particle physics is a small part of quantum physics and quantum physics is the area of ​​physics that really studies small things and interactions on really small scales, but particle physics focuses on the particles that form atoms, the fundamental particles that make up everything around us in Cipher 707

questions

. I thought quantum physics was fanfic, it's not at all quantum physics is how the world works, but you have to look at a really small scale to understand what's happening if I throw a ball in the air, it falls back into my hand. , that's classical physics, quantum physics works in surprising ways, so instead of having pure predictions about what will happen on a quantum level, we just get probabilities, there's a 50% chance of this happening 20% ​​of the time. chances of this other thing happening if you watch a lot of Marvel movies I could understand why you would think it's fanfic because it's used every time you don't. do you know how to explain the science you want to do in Raven Biter asks the professor just asked what Heisenberg contributed to physics and a lot of people answered meth,that is a different Heisenberg, the Heisenberg that we know is a very famous quantum physicist who worked with the German.

He ruled during World War II, but he is very well known for being one of the people who discovered all these rules of quantum mechanics from the beginning. He came up with something called the uncertainty principle, basically, if I know one aspect of a particle, like where it is located. en I can't know how fast it's moving very well or if I know how fast it's moving I can't know where it is Tim Amberie asks I just learned about quantum entanglement and I'm shocked how can two particles be so connected that they affect each other? yes even when they are light years away?

Is this the secret to long distance relationships? # Quantum love between two particles light years apart can be absolutely connected if we have placed them in an entangled state and what that means is that we take two particles where the measurement has something to do with chance, so if I throw this given, whatever value I get on that face I'll get the same value on the other dice if that's how I've set up the entangled system and these two particles can be very, very far away from each other and that's how nature works. The strange thing about this is the possibility that, no matter how you roll the dice, whatever lands on the other dice will land on exactly the same value.

This is just one fundamental way of how the universe works in UTB asks what the hell the large hydron collider does anyway. The Large Hadron Collider is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It's a huge one. 10 km circle in Switzerland, where we take two proton streams. Protons are a type of hadron. Hadrons are really heavy particles. It takes those two proton streams and aligns them perfectly. They go almost at the speed of light, not quite, but almost at the speed of light. and smashes them together, the faster you can make those protons move, the more things will come out of that explosion when you smash them, we are creating new particles that we haven't seen before, they are part of nature, but they take so much energy to make that They haven't existed since the Big Bang, when the universe was very small and very energetic, so not only are we learning about these fundamental forces, but we're also learning about physics right at the beginning of our universe. in physics in history asks if string theory is really a dead end, no, it is not a dead end, string theory is a theory that says that, instead of the fundamental pieces of the universe being particles , are strings and these strings can vibrate in different ways. strings that are long, you can have strings that are in loops and not only do they describe all of particle physics and quantum mechanics, some parts of this actually predict what quantum gravity would look like on a really small scale, which is not a theory we have.

Right now, those are all the questions for today. Thanks for such interesting questions. Thanks for watching the physics

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.