Fusion, Fission, Quarks and such nonsense.

And a paper clip.

(because everyone knows paper clips are a necessary part of breaking the laws of physics)

 

I think it's obvious, Batman really is MacGuyver.

 

We used to have a saying in college (Well technically, I had a saying in college) -- There's nothing you can't do with a sufficient amount of duct tape and high explosives. I don't know if its the same at any other college, but duct tape was so pervasive and was used for everything and anything. (I lead the building of a large walk-through maze for an interhouse party -- it was constructed almost entirely with cardboard and duct tape).
/edit oh and kite string

 

I am a rower. Our boats are very high tech, carbon fibre, lightweight - they're pretty awesome. Oh, and they're like 30% duct tape.

 

Duct Tape: It is not just for rednecks anymore.

I buy the good stuff. "Scotch Electrician's Bundling Tape". That is basically very very high end duct tape. It tears easily by hand, has a good adhesive that binds well but does not ever become a sticky and gooey mess, and only costs a slight premium over the garbage junk duct tape more commonly available.

If you have not tried it, Do. Buy a roll of it even if you can imagine no use for it. You will love it. It is to tape what "Kleenex Viva Paper Towels" are to paper towels. BTW, those paper towels cost a pittance more, and will actually save you money since they work flawlessly and require much less to do the same jobs.

Back to physics.

How many elements are there? Any guesses? No, I am not limiting my question to only those that can and do exist in our little dot of specific environmental conditions. Is Neutronium an element? Can it really exist?

Neutronium is a molecule where the electrons are packed so densely that there is no room for more between them. That would be trillions of electrons per molecule. A teaspoonful of Neutronium would weigh more than Earth Mark II's Moon.

Why do I say "Earth Mark II"? Because Earth was once larger by a chunk the size of our moon. A massive collision happened to knock the bit we refer to as the moon off and now we live on Earth Mark II.

 

The problem with Neutronium is that it wouldn't exactly have a normal spot on the periodic table. If it actually exists, It's supposed to be composed purely of neutrons (so if you tried to place it on the periodic table, would that make its atomic number zero, since it contains no protons?).

The first time I ever heard of Neutronium was in the classic science fiction story, "Neutron Star" by Larry Niven -- absolutely a great story, and part of his "Known Space" series. Niven was kind of the king of hard science fiction, way back when he was a younger man. And Neutron Star (along with Ringworld, and Protector, and "Tales of Known Space" and so on) were among his crown jewels.

 

Omni: its something like 137ish? After that stage, electron orbitals go shitty.

Also, neutronium is quark matter, not electrons.

 

Neutron Stars: They're hyper dense collapsed stars the size of a small city here on Earth, and form from a supernova of a star not big enough to form a black hole.

So, it could be any of those. Not just Quark matter, which seems like a goofy name, even for a scientific term.

Also, Omni, the Earth had 90% of it's current mass, and only after being hit by a mars sized planetoid gained the remaining 10% mass, which also formed the moon via a chunk being knocked out.
It also hit near the north pole.
This also kickstarted the Earth's rotation among other things. I think it was rotation.
This happened around 4.4 billion years ago, shortly after the Earth was formed.
We owe our existence to this impressive event.

Also, let's now talk about Monopoles. You don't need a large number of these theoretical one magnetic pole atom sized things to have half the mas of the universe in one spot.
Which would be a bad thing.

 

Earth is Gaining volume every day. So 4 billion years ago it did not have 90% of its current mass.

I never heard of monopoles. Wikipedia here I come!

*Edit* Reference:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=437422

There are references in that link that show the math and detail the amount and methods of gained mass.

On another note, I have yet to find the details of these monopoles. There are pages on Wikipedia about monopoles, but they lack details like what I thought I understood of your post. I am still searching.

 

That shows how old some of my knowledge is. I'm pretty sure that Niven wrote about Neutron stars way back before the term Quark was invented. Just looked it up and "Neutron Star" was first published in 1966, though I may have not actually read the story until a few years later. I also looked up quark, and supposedly that term was first coined in 1963 by Murray Gellman, so I'm wrong about that also lol.

/edit Then again, it probably was not in popular parlance until much later. Plus Niven has been known to make mistakes (he corrected one of them in his novel "Ringworld Engineers" when some enterprising college students pointed out that the Ringworld would be unstable.

 

Omninecro, allow me to explain this better.
The moon was formed from an impact with the Earth 4.4 billion years ago.
The theory that the moon was formed by that massive collision has been wildly regarded as the best possible explanation for the creation of the moon.

It was a Mars sized object that smashed into the Earth, granting it 10% of it's mass.
You can't tell me that it had less than 90% of it's mass at that time.
If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Our existence is granted by the formation of the moon, and the formation of the Earth's rotation.
Both events couldn't have happened if the mass of the Earth was not increased by a Mars sized object smashing into it.
Also, the total mass from 4.4 billion years at 1.7 x 10^8 kg of space debris is around 10^17 kg.
Someone will have to do the math besides me to show what it would have been at the time.
The Earth has a current mass of some 9.575 or so x 10^24 kg
Pluto has a mass of 1.03 x 10^22 kg.

 

To be fair, we have no goddamn ideas whats actually IN a neutron star, but we do ''know'' that mathematically, the behavior of the stuff in there won't be defined by the interactions of neutrons and protons, but of the component quarks of those neutrons and protons, thus quark matter.

Edit: To be clear, this isn't on the outskirts of the star, this is at the core, where pressure + temperature are greatest.

 

Also: mass gain is initially going to be super high - thats because you still have masses of small particles and rocks that have formed about the gravitational fields of other small particles and so on - i.e. why the moon is covered with craters, but we don't observe new ones.
Using the number provided + Wolfram Alpha:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.7×10^8+kg+/+Mass+of+the+earth

That's 2.846*10^-17 of the earth's mass.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+2.846*10^-17)^(13.7+billion)

So, we're talking about a tiny increase in the earths mass over the age of the universe.

Re: Theories for moon creation:
http://www.astrobio.net/pressreleas...nity-test-says-earth-is-the-moons-only-parent
There's doubt on the 'generally accepted' collision model.

 

Nice to know about all that.
I'm just going with what I know and have read.

I did like that part.
My question is how does that explain how the moon got there. Did the Earth just attract enough mass in the right orbit that it eventually formed the moon? That seems less likely than an impact event.

Our planet was not rotating at all until that impact, mining. Without that rotation, we wouldn't have evolved here.
Now, I could be mistaken in this fact, but it's one of the key points in the impact theory. It hit the Earth near the north pole with enough force, that it ejected a large piece into space as the moon, added 10% of the Earth's mass, and kick-started the Rotation.
That's a hell of an impact against an near Earth sized object that at the time was mostly lava, more lava, and maybe a few places of solid land. Over the solid inner core of nickel-iron.

 

What is the estimated mass of the Moon? It seems this has been left out entirely. And I think some of the math above is a bit selective. I think the Earth has gained back more mass than if lost when that chunk we now know of as the Moon was knocked off. I could be wrong, but I need to see some numbers for just how big the moon is.

Earth is how massive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Mass 5.9736×10^24 kg[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
Mass 7.3477 × 10^22 kg (0.0123 Earths[1])

That looks like a whole lot less than 10%. So either the Earth was *Much* smaller 4.4 billion years ago, or something in this conversation is eluding me. It looks like 1.23% of the mass of Earth.

For a closer reference, check this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Relative_size
"The Moon is exceptionally large relative to the Earth: a quarter the diameter of the planet and 1/81 its mass.[43] It is the second largest moon orbiting an object in the solar system relative to the size of its planet. Charon is larger relative to the dwarf planet Pluto, at slightly more than 1/9 (11.6%) of Pluto's mass.[86]"

Understand David that I am not trying to say you are wrong. I just do not see it the same and I know you are smart, so I want to see what you are seeing.

In unrelated but interesting news, here are some links to read if anyone has time to read them. They look good. I never knew about the Other Moons of Earth Mark II. They say the one true moon is only that because it is relatively permanent. But relative is the operative word. If you only lived a hundred days, there may be dozens of permanent moons for you.

Did you know we are losing our biggest moon? It slips a tiny bit away every day. And in ten billion or so years we may not have it at all. Sadly I cannot find a reference to this right now. I know I read this years ago from a credible source though.

 

I think what David is saying is that a Mars sized object smashed into Earth, granting it 10% of its current mass, but it also caused some of the Earth or the object to 'break off' and go into orbit to form the moon. So the moon is not 10% of the Earth's mass, but rather the moon + 10% of the Earth's mass was the mass of the collider.

 

You did misunderstand me, but I'm also very confusing at times.
The majority of the imapct was vaporzied into energy, one small amount was launched into orbit to from the moon, and the remaining mass was absorbed into the Earth as a whole.
Imagine smashing together two balls of clay, one smaller, than the other, then rolling them both into another bigger ball, combining their mass with each other.
That's what the impact did, the smaller object, the size of Mars, added it's mass in a huge burst, for lack of a better term to the Earth as a whole.

Quarky explained it better though.
I'm fairly certain that some matter was lost into energy though, so the object probably was a bit more closer to Mars's mass than just 10% plus the moon.

 

Hi I saw you were all talking about physics and I had to jump in! I'm a graduate student in physics right now! But everything here might be out of context, since I'm typing it out while waiting (because I forgot to check my spam filter) for a verification e-mail to post etc.

Earth and moon: I'm not up-to-date on the history of the genesis of Earth, but it is not physically unreasonable for the earth to have some inherent rotation without any sort of impact at all. Momentum is a conserved quantity, and this applies separately to angular momentum (e.g. spinning). So if the sum of angular momenta of the individual particles forming the earth was nonzero, the fully-formed earth must also have nonzero angular momentum, thus spinning. Now in space, there is almost nothing. Almost nothing at all. For this reason, it's unlikely that the earth's rotation speed (proportional to the magnitude of its angular momentum) would slow down. Even if it were to slow down, angular momentum is conserved; something else must acquire that angular momentum. Finally, in order for a force to change another object's angular momentum, it must be enacting a torque. The equation for torque goes like this: Tr = F*R*cos(angle between). The takeaway from this is that if the force acts along the same line that defines the radius between the two objects, the angular momentum doesn't change. Since the biggest contribution to the total gravitational force acts in just this way, gravity alone tends not to torque.
We don't need to vaporize much matter to make a cataclysmic explosion. In fact, if you like, you can calculate exactly how much energy is released via an amount of destroyed matter with the math below! You can then go on to convert that to Joules, then to megatons of TNT. If you want an exercise to do, you can calculate how much energy would be required to elevate some portion of the earth to the moon's orbit and provide it with the kinetic energy to move at the speed that it does:
Assume the moon was formed only by elevating it from the surface of the earth in to its current orbit. Its initial velocity is the same as that of the surface of the earth. How much energy is required to do this? How many (indicate which kind) nuclear bombs would need to be detonated? How much mass would need to be converted directly to energy to produce the same effect?
Things you'll need: Gravitational potential energy: E = (GmM)/(r^2) Kinetic energy: (1/2) m v^2
Here, G = newton's gravitational constant, m = mass of the moon, M = mass of the earth, r = distance from CENTER OF MASS of the earth (not surface of the earth), v = velocity of the earth. (there are some details about mass-energy below this as well)
I hope this doesn't seem too pedantic or patronizing =( I really like teaching and helping people learn things they want to know.

Can I mention fission/fusion a bit? I like most of the things that were said so far! What I wanted to discuss was E=mc^2. So for starters, this is a simplified version of a more useful equation: E^2 = ( p^2 c^2 ) * (m^2 c^4) [here p = (linear) momentum, c = speed of light, m = mass]
That right there is huge. Totally huge. The best part is that, if you calculate things in "natural units" where h-bar = c = 1, you get that masses are a different way of writing energies; they're the same units. This is punctuated when you compare the mass of a proton to the sum of the masses of the valence quarks making up that proton (up, up, down). So what we get when we think about fission and fusion is some part of E^2. We can imagine getting part of the momentum, or part of the mass, or both. But the POWER of E^2 here is that it is a component of a Lorentz group. What this means is that we can imagine moving at any constant speed with respect to the things making up E^2 and, once we apply the proper Lorentz transformation, we will get the same results and the same physics. This means we can move to a frame of reference where there is NO total momentum at all! p = 0. NOW think about fusion and fission! What we get is a much simpler look at these systems.
Fusion: Two particles come flying together with enough energy to fuse in to a single nucleus. So in the center of momentum frame, the system of two particles has some energy, say, 2E. Once they fuse, since we don't shift frames, the energy of the TOTAL SYSTEM is the same!. Now, since it's ALSO the p = 0 (total p. each particle has some p > 0, but they point in opposite directions) frame, the final particle isn't moving (much. We can invoke Heisenberg, but at these energy scales, we're close enough). If the mass of the final particle is lower than 2E, that excess energy is given off as heat. This energy can then go on to be the kinetic energy of another pair of particles. NOW the catch. If the new particle is more massive than the sum of the two incoming particles, there isn't enough heat leftover to speed up the NEXT pair of particles. That's the case for everything heavier than Iron. BUT, for everything LIGHTER (some more than others), the new mass is LOWER than the incoming particles! That means we get MORE kinetic energy out of the reaction than we put in to it! There is LESS potential energy tied up in mass!

This will also make it apparent why you can't fuse two particles, split them, fuse them, split them etc. E is the same in, for instance, the p = 0 frame. If we do this perfectly, it's just switching between part of that E being mass-energy or kinetic-energy. What we GET out of fusion is a little piece of that 'm' in E^2 = p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4

Aside: the reason we usually see E=mc^2 is because for slow speeds, e.g. bullet trains, supersonic jets, incoming meteorites, our speed relative to the sun, p^2 c^2 is really really small. It barely counts for anything.

OK Fission!
It's basically the reverse process of fusion, but now the single particle's mass is HIGHER than the two pieces that "break off." Again, we're getting at part of that 'm' in E^2 = p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4. This is also why heavier elements are better at fission than lighter ones. Technically, we'd get energy out of fission down to Iron, just like getting it out of fusion up until Iron.

Neutron stars:
Part of what supports them is supposed to be "fermi pressure." This is a cool thing. In a rudimentary sense, it is simply the fact that fermionic particles (protons, neutrons, leptons [electrons, muons, tauons]) can't exist on top of each other and in the same quantum state. This is in contrast to bosons (photons, for instance) which can (this is what a laser is, for instance). The physics going in to neutron stars is far too complicated for me to go in to much detail, though. I only remember a few things. There's some weird mathematical inversion of the wavefunctions of the neutrons in neutron stars. I remember learning about it briefly, but not in a way that would allow me to understand it.

Is that clear? It's a lot of stuff!

Some more notes: Protons and neutrons are made of quarks. Electrons aren't, as far as we know. In fact, as far as we've been able to experimentally measure, electrons are fundamental particles. They're just "electrons." They're not 'made' of anything.
Also, electrons are not part of the nucleus of an atom. They sort of exist around the nucleus. This lets them do a lot of cool things, like form molecules between atoms! If you were to strip the electrons off of a molecule, you'd destroy that molecule immediately.

So that's some cool stuff! Hope you've enjoyed reading!

 

Thanks for the post .
I have a question though. I posted something similar earlier. I know that what I posted was incorrect (I think I said that you don't see naturally occurring radioactive elements that are lighter than Iron, and someone rightfully pointed out my error, using Carbon 14 as an example). So my question is, what's the deal with Carbon 14 and any other radioactive elements that are lighter than Iron? As the resident (almost) physicist, I suspect that you may be the right person to ask that question.

 

It is all about chance. ANYTHING can be radioactive. All it requires is it to be unstable. Water can absorb radiation, can it not? Can your body be irradiated? Yes it can. And I doubt much in your body is heavier than iron. The term "Naturally" radioactive is misleading. As I said, anything can be radioactive. It is extremely unlikely that most things lighter than iron will be so without being exposed to something more radioactive. Note that iodine is heavier than iron., but still far from the heavy elements usually considered radioactive. (Iron = 26, Iodine = 53, Plutonium = 94)

Radiation is just that. Energy is lost in a radial range to whatever can absorb it. There are types of radiation and decay models much more specific, but you should read up on that for a better answer.

An example is the natural decay chain of 238U, which is as follows:

• decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 4.5 billion years to thorium-234
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 24 days to protactinium-234
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 1.2 minutes to uranium-234
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 240 thousand years to thorium-230
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 77 thousand years to radium-226
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 1.6 thousand years to radon-222
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 3.8 days to polonium-218
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 3.1 minutes to lead-214
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 27 minutes to bismuth-214
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 20 minutes to polonium-214
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 160 microseconds to lead-210
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 22 years to bismuth-210
• which decays, through beta-emission, with a half-life of 5 days to polonium-210
• which decays, through alpha-emission, with a half-life of 140 days to lead-206, which is a stable nuclide.

Note that more than 208 electrons/protons means it is radioactive in all cases Humans have observed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay