Topic: God was behind Big Bang, universe no accident: Pope

[Kale]

that pebble analogy is a bad one... as I think it is possible for the weight to be extremely high due to an incredibly high density. As dense as it make it weigh thousands of tons, probably not, it sounds theoretically possible.

That said, a proton weighing billions of tons seems far fetch.

[Evil_Tim]

that pebble analogy is a bad one... as I think it is possible for the weight to be extremely high due to an incredibly high density. As dense as it make it weigh thousands of tons, probably not, it sounds theoretically possible.

Um, it's a very high density of atomic nuclei, the particles that make up those nuclei don't have to be dense. Imagine a mile-square field covered in a hundred bricks and a very thin layer of mortar. Now, build a sphere out of them in the middle of the field. The result is hugely more dense, but every brick still weighs the same as it did before and there isn't any more mortar.

Same with a neutron star; the matter is compacted to form it, but the elementary particles in that matter aren't any more massive than they normally are, there's just a lot more of them than would normally be in a given volume because a normal atom is composed mostly of empty space.

[Kale]

Um, it's a very high density of atomic nuclei, the particles that make up those nuclei don't have to be dense. Imagine a mile-square field covered in a hundred bricks and a very thin layer of mortar. Now, build a sphere out of them in the middle of the field. The result is hugely more dense, but every brick still weighs the same as it did before and there isn't any more mortar.

Same with a neutron star; the matter is compacted to form it, but the elementary particles in that matter aren't any more massive than they normally are, there's just a lot more of them than would normally be in a given volume because a normal atom is composed mostly of empty space.

wtf are you talking about.

[Evil_Tim]

wtf are you talking about.

What you were using is called the Fallacy of Division, where you imagine that something true of a whole is also true of any part of it. Here, that anything dense must be composed of things which are themselves dense (and you mistake density to mean they would contain more mass than they normally would rather than having the same mass but occupying less space, too), rather than a great density of things which are not themselves dense. In the example of bricks in a field, you change from having only a handful distributed around an entire field, to a compact sphere with none of the spaces between; the resulting sphere is denser, but simple measurement will tell you the bricks themselves have not changed aside from getting closer to each other than they were.

This, on a much, much greater scale, is what is happening in a neutron star; the atoms in it are compacted to the point there's virtually no space between nuclei rather than the atoms being mostly empty space as they normally are. This correspondingly hugely increases the density, but it doesn't mean the subatomic particles that form the nucleus have themselves got heavier; there are just many, many more of them in a given space than in normal matter. Even if they have got denser, this will mean the protons have become smaller than they normally would be, not that they somehow weigh more than they normally would.

This is what I meant with the example of the mountain; imagining a proton from a neutron star must be incredibly heavy because a neutron star is dense is like imagining a tiny pebble from a mountain must be incredibly heavy because the mountain is heavy. It's the same fallacy.

To give an easier example of why density doesn't make a given object heavier, when you crush a car you turn it into a small cube. That cube weighs as much as the original car. If you then stack them together you can fit multiple car-masses into the space occupied by an uncrushed car, but none of those cubes would weigh more than the cars they were originally; they're just smaller, which allows you to put more of them in a given space.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

To simplify what Evil_Tim is saying (and I hope I can do it justice):

The word "Density" seems to be used incorrectly here.  As he said, "Density" relates to the relatively close proximity between the atoms of an element or compound.  However, all of the elements are still made of three parts: An electron, a proton, and a neutron... and as far as I know, they are relatively constant in size and weight, regardless of the combinations that they make.

That is to say, if you take the building blocks of Hydrogen (one Proton, one Electron, no Neutrons), and measure each one, they have the same 'weight' as the building blocks of, say, helium (two electrons in orbit around a nucleus containing two protons along with either one or two neutrons, depending on the isotope), those individual blocks are still the same weight and size (there are just more of them bound to form the system of particles that what we call 'Helium').

If I read correctly, that one scientist is claiming that every Neutron weighs a Ton... well by that train of thought, then what is he using as a unit of measurement that he arrives at "Ton"?

[Kale]

To give an easier example of why density doesn't make a given object heavier, when you crush a car you turn it into a small cube. That cube weighs as much as the original car. If you then stack them together you can fit multiple car-masses into the space occupied by an uncrushed car, but none of those cubes would weigh more than the cars they were originally; they're just smaller, which allows you to put more of them in a given space.

This is what I was going for.

Where a mineral that has a 2 inch radius can be heavier than lets say a  Styrofoam car if it's density is higher.

Following your example quoted above, a car is... lets say 10 foot wide, while a crushed car is 4 foot wide. True, that the crush car does not weigh more than the uncrushed one, maybe even less because of gases that may be in the car. But the same area hold 2.5 crush cars which would make that heavier.

To put it in the example used earlier, if that half inch pebble held something heavy and had 10,000,000 of whatever that is (Lets link Futurama into it and say Dark Matter =P) it would weigh more than the mountain when it is less dense because it only holds 5,000 of that dark matter but more spread out. Get what I'm getting at?

EDIT: Should say that, I'm not any sort of scientist nor am I too particularly interested in most scientific things, just the cool stuff like lightsabers lol, but I'm going on what I think is common sense. So how right or not right it may be...... well whatever anyone wants to see it as. It's not like we have that billion ton nuclei to do tests with anyway.

[Joachim]

that still wouldn't affect the weight of an individual proton.

[Evil_Tim]

Following your example quoted above, a car is... lets say 10 foot wide, while a crushed car is 4 foot wide. True, that the crush car does not weigh more than the uncrushed one, maybe even less because of gases that may be in the car. But the same area hold 2.5 crush cars which would make that heavier.

Let's explain this a little more clearly. Say a car weighs 1 ton, and we crush it to be one-tenth the size it usually is. Now we can fit ten car-cubes into the volume of the original car, so a set of cubes with the same volume as one car would weigh ten tons.

The thing is, this ten-ton object would still contain ten one-ton cars, not one ten-ton car; the volume contains more things, but the things themselves are no heavier than they originally were.

In much the same way, a given volume of neutron star matter might contain a huge number of protons, but those protons are no heavier than they would normally be.

[Kale]

Oh, I wasn't arguing that. I was arguing space & density vs weight.

And on that note, I don't know if a proton can change in any of it's characteristic... even if current science seems to say so. New facts come about with more tests... but I do doubt that a single proton would be that drastically different if at all different.

[Evil_Tim]

Oh, I wasn't arguing that. I was arguing space & density vs weight.

Yeah, but like a car, a proton is a thing with given characteristics. You might have insanely dense matter that has atoms compressed to the point there's almost no space between them (one of the hardest things to visualise about subatomic physics is that apparently solid objects still consist mostly of empty space), but that still just means you have a lot more protons in a given area, not that they're heavy protons.

Regardless, Nassim Haramein doesn't think that some protons might be heavier, he's far more out to lunch than that. His thesis is that the strong nuclear force doesn't exist, and he models his "Schwarzschild proton" as a black hole (!). For a black hole to be the size of a proton, it would have to weigh 885 million tons. His ideas would also mean one proton would radiate enough energy to light 60,000 average US homes, that protons would be so unstable an orbiting pair would eat each other within a few trillionths of a trillionth of a second, that a proton would have an event horizon and thus would be impossible to look inside (we've looked inside them, so, um, yeah)...

Basically, he's the standard guru type who dresses up his platitudes with incredibly bad science.