so apparently im weird!

[The Snark]

You people are really dragging me back through my astrofizzies of many years ago. Okay, to dumb it down. You see a key on your keyboard. It's a gigantic glop of molecules. Now smack that key with a powerful energy. The individual molecules in the key each have their own unique 'signature' and the energy bounced off it into appropriate sensors reveals the molecular composition of the key. This is how all astronomical observations are made today. They actually go quite a bit beyond that into the atomic level, the subatomic and on down to quarks. They now have the instrumentation to get the image of a quark which is mind boggling in itself.

So it is feasible to bombard the objects in say, a room, and with powerful enough sensor acquisition equipment, analyze the returned energy and sort it into it's molecular components. The limitations are the amount of energy that can be applied and the sensitivity of the sensor arrays. In it's most primitive explanation, that is exactly what the LHC at CERN is doing. Accelerating particles to almost the speed of light, smacking them into each other, then the resultant zeebles that bounce out of the collision are gathered in stupendously large and powerful arrays of sensors. If you were to limit the LHC to large object acquisition, it could return the entire molecular composition of an office building.

One thing that people don't think about. They view solid objects as solid. In the higher energy regions, that chunk of granite you stubbed your toe against is composed of only 1 quadrillionth, 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, of solid matter and the rest is empty space. So higher energy particles pass easily through matter and the effects of the matter on the energy as it passes through reveals the composition of the material.

 

[viper69]

You people are really dragging me back through my astrofizzies of many years ago. Okay, to dumb it down. You see a key on your keyboard. It's a gigantic glop of molecules. Now smack that key with a powerful energy. The individual molecules in the key each have their own unique 'signature' and the energy bounced off it into appropriate sensors reveals the molecular composition of the key. This is how all astronomical observations are made today. They actually go quite a bit beyond that into the atomic level, the subatomic and on down to quarks. They now have the instrumentation to get the image of a quark which is mind boggling in itself.

So it is feasible to bombard the objects in say, a room, and with powerful enough sensor acquisition equipment, analyze the returned energy and sort it into it's molecular components. The limitations are the amount of energy that can be applied and the sensitivity of the sensor arrays. In it's most primitive explanation, that is exactly what the LHC at CERN is doing. Accelerating particles to almost the speed of light, smacking them into each other, then the resultant zeebles that bounce out of the collision are gathered in stupendously large and powerful arrays of sensors. If you were to limit the LHC to large object acquisition, it could return the entire molecular composition of an office building.

One thing that people don't think about. They view solid objects as solid. In the higher energy regions, that chunk of granite you stubbed your toe against is composed of only 1 quadrillionth, 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, of solid matter and the rest is empty space. So higher energy particles pass easily through matter and the effects of the matter on the energy as it passes through reveals the composition of the material.

This is funny for a few reasons. First you dumbed it down too much for me, so it's a bit hard to follow, I wasn't looking for layman language hahah. Second, you are writing about subatomic science, in your previous message you wrote molecules, those 2 areas are quite different. I thought you meant molecules.

 

[klawfran3]

You people are really dragging me back through my astrofizzies of many years ago. Okay, to dumb it down. You see a key on your keyboard. It's a gigantic glop of molecules. Now smack that key with a powerful energy. The individual molecules in the key each have their own unique 'signature' and the energy bounced off it into appropriate sensors reveals the molecular composition of the key. This is how all astronomical observations are made today. They actually go quite a bit beyond that into the atomic level, the subatomic and on down to quarks. They now have the instrumentation to get the image of a quark which is mind boggling in itself.

So it is feasible to bombard the objects in say, a room, and with powerful enough sensor acquisition equipment, analyze the returned energy and sort it into it's molecular components. The limitations are the amount of energy that can be applied and the sensitivity of the sensor arrays. In it's most primitive explanation, that is exactly what the LHC at CERN is doing. Accelerating particles to almost the speed of light, smacking them into each other, then the resultant zeebles that bounce out of the collision are gathered in stupendously large and powerful arrays of sensors. If you were to limit the LHC to large object acquisition, it could return the entire molecular composition of an office building.

One thing that people don't think about. They view solid objects as solid. In the higher energy regions, that chunk of granite you stubbed your toe against is composed of only 1 quadrillionth, 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, of solid matter and the rest is empty space. So higher energy particles pass easily through matter and the effects of the matter on the energy as it passes through reveals the composition of the material.

I don't want to sound stupid again, but what does the composition of the material have to do with the patters of light reflected from the spiders eye? i know a little bit of QM, but like viper said these really layman laymans terms make it a little hard to follow.

 

[The Snark]

Simple. EnergyX smacks MassY it will produce Z in a spectrum analysis. All mass has unique atomic signatures. Say I smack aluminium with gamma rays the energy bounced off must produce an algorithm that can only be produced by a metal with the exact number of atomic components of aluminium. Alter the 'target' one electron and something else, or something unidentified, will be sensed instead.

---------- Post added 11-24-2013 at 02:35 PM ----------

In the beginning there was the bang and the bang was with bang and the bang was BANG.

Let's take a stroll down the cosmic memory lane. Out there, and there... and over there, are two doobers. One of glop and the other is what makes glop glop, energy. Energy can exist without glop but glop cannot exist without energy. There is no such thing as no energy. You can't bring anything to a complete stop and absolute zero temperature, total stasis, just isn't going to happen. So far so good.

So Higg's little doober came and went and other doobers went wobbling out into everywhere. That wobbling is vitally important as will be seen later. At first it was a humongous fart. The fart to begin and end all farts. A gaseous conflaberation far beyond stupendous proportions. This fart was composed of 4 things. Neutrons, protons, electrons and quarks. And energy. Don't forget that stuff. They all went wobbling, periodically banging into each other.

Now let's zoom in. Way way way WAY WAY over on the left of fart central, or right, and elsewhere, energy was playing tricks with the protons, electrons and neutrons in several different ways. When they arrived at the correct place at the perfect time, like catching a train, the big bad energy called the strong force smooshed them together. Most of the time this only formed the most rudimentary of glops, the hydrogen atom. But a whole lot of this was going on. Lots and lots and lots and lots of glops.

So way way etc. over, as well as a few other places, the great clouds of fart got glopped. Now, energy is energy. It goes away, somewhere else, after a while but pretty slowly and very predictably. So as the glops glopped they kept their bang energy and some became pretty darned hot. Some of these glops squished and squished, eventually forming superduper glops we call suns. It's the sun over there, here, that we are most interested in.

At first, this sun, Sol, was pretty typical of high energy glop glops. It was blueish white or whitish blue, your choice, and very very very hot. Marshmallows brown in a nanosecond at 100 million miles hot. Along with the strong force energy, sun glop had three other kinds. Electromagnetic, weak force, and the weakest, gravity. Well, even gravity is pretty darned powerful. Using that the sun got to pulling little glops towards itself which glopped together and got seriously cooked. Like, boiling hot hot. That blue white-white blue ball was not to be messed with.

The light coming off of Sol was pretty high up the energy scale, called wavelengths. A little infrared, some visible, and quite a lot up in the ultraviole(n)t. Nasty stuff that converts organic life into not life by the future standards of the boiling glop that has started rotating around Sol.

After a little while, Sol started losing energy. You can only give the universe so much sun tan before the energy bill becomes enormous. The energy coming from it went down and a lot of it's color changed to light blue to greenish then yellow. The glops circling around it cooled down. And cooled. And cooled. They began to get so cold they started to change from the third state of matter, liquid, into the second, solid. Sol of course is over there about 96 million miles away from glop 3 in the fourth state, plasma. Hot hot hot.

This glop 3 got all crusty and lumpy. Gasses formed. The energy forces banging things together were having a great time. All sorts of different glops, liquid and solid were coming together. Eventually some things banged together so exotically they we able to duplicate themselves in just the right playgrounds. The strong force and friends were really having a field day we can safely suppose. At first these playgrounds were in a liquid called water, what is now sometimes known as the primordial soup.

And Sol continued to cool. Some self replicating glop products, glomps, decided to climb out of the soup. They needed to cope with their environment. They developed sensory abilities. At first, simple neurons that would make them ouch, then more sophisticated thingies called eyeballs. These eyeballs were matched to the commonest energy from Sol that was able to get down to the ground through the atmosphere. For the two legged, biped, critter that was incredibly inept at surviving, it's eyes oriented to be able to detect things that were about to eat it from significant distances. This was most effective in the yellow light spectrum that Sol was really pumping out about then.

Now let's take a trip into the future. We will assume that the bipeds suddenly came to the realization that trapping a lot of the energy coming from Sol was not what a whole heck of a lot of the living thingumies on this glop were designed for by their evolution. Things were supposed to gradually cool down, warmer clothing was created and everything would truck along in greased grooves. So the bipeds cleaned up their act and the planet. The EPA managed to shake free of political manipulation, PETA was finally given full veracity and sufficient funding and critters continued to survive.

Sol, remember Sol? Well, it continued to cool down. A lot of it's energy has been burned off into space. It's color changes to orange. To the casual observer it appears to be putting on a lot of weight. It's getting bigger. And as it slowly turns red, it gets a LOT bigger. The critters on glop 3 evolve. Their photo receptors, eyeballs, start growing larger. Like Anime eyes. Their brains change a bit to handle a change in what the heck they are looking at. They also develop much warmer clothing and start growing fur. Sol just isn't keeping things as warm as it used to. In fact, it's running out of gas.

Something is really wrong with Sol. It's starting to look like those bipedal beached whales that fall asleep in the sun on Coney Island. It's a really dark red and it's a major porker. The little itty bitty glops that made Sol Sol have lost a lot of energy. Lost a lot more energy than glops. It has become a Red Giant. And still, being a pretty nice sort of glopped glop, it keeps on pumping out energy for the baby glops going around it for a while longer.

All of a sudden, a span of a few cosmic weeks, a few million years, force number four proves itself to be a major turkey. Sol is nearly all fart and very little energy. Mean Mr. Gravity starts taking over, pulling all the glops into the middle of things. Sol shrinks to a really small glop. What energy is left now blasting out of it is mostly in the white spectrum as things get squished very very tightly together. Poor old Sol has shrunk into a White Dwarf.

But gravity, like Rush, just doesn't know when to quit and shut down or up. Little white Sol keeps on going as best it can but it's days are numbered. Very little energy is left but it still has a lot of glop. Then one sad cosmic day or two, it collapses in on itself. The glops and their remaining energy don't like this much. A tipping point is exceeded, known to the former life forms on mini glop 3 as critical mass comes down and WHAM!

Sol now has a new name. Nova. Since it wasn't a very big or energetic glop to begin with it's a pretty minor explosion on the cosmic scale. The explosion sends all it's glops every which way out into the great beyond leaving a little speck of nothing. But the universe has certain rules. One of it's rules is there is no nothing. A lack of glops it can stand, a vacuum. But a nothing nothing is another matter. Mean Mr. Gravity is still there after it's three friends have left the station. Sol has become a black hole. It sucks. A nothingth of an inch deep and a few hundred microns, inches, feet, yards, miles across with a gravity so powerful it starts to suck in any glops near it. Even assorted wavelengths of light get bent towards it as they pass by. As these glops get sucked, they sometimes slam into each other. Sometimes so hard they form exotic new glops and all sorts of weird energy plorps.

So how do we know all of this? Because energy is energy and mass is mass. When they bang away together the basic building blocks, glops, or the glops the blocks have glopped together, they emit some of that energy. And thanks to a few little reasonably reliable mathematical equations like Einsteins nifty gizmo, those energy emissions, from the little itty bitty teeny weeny quarks to suns smushing each other produce signatures. Fingerprints, and as spectrum analysis and quantum mechanics progresses we recognize more and more of those signatures. After all, Energy=glop times the known constant, k, quantified. Or, energy equals the mass of an object times the speed of light, squared.

My sincere apologies to the hundreds of fizzicks scientists rolling over in their graves.

 

[Hanska]

Watched that documentary a few weeks ago. It's great. Here is another one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dugl3tbCroI
Never knew how intelligent a small spider can be.

 

[The Snark]

I don't want to sound stupid again, but what does the composition of the material have to do with the patters of light reflected from the spiders eye? i know a little bit of QM, but like viper said these really layman laymans terms make it a little hard to follow.

Okay, glance around the room you are in. You just did a spectrum analysis. Light bounced off various surfaces, your sensors took them in, they were analyzed in your data bank against known objects and you identified wood, plastic, metal and so on. Depending on the light, how trained your eyes are and your data banks you were able to tell various kinds of woods, metals, and plastics etc.
Now instead of visible light let's use a much more powerful wavelength. Say X-rays. Their energy passes into the material and bounces off the molecular components. Some of the x-rays then escape and are captured by sensors many times more sensitive than an eye. The same data analysis takes place but the results identify molecules. Now a computer with sufficient data can report information down to the atomic level.
So the computer is fed the reflection of a spiders eye. Using various wavelengths the lens reflects a certain wavelength, the retina another and so on. You can keep right on going using more powerful energy, looking into the spiders brain and what it had for lunch. Each molecule has a unique signature. Even when wavelengths are only very poorly reflected, that is a signature as well. The location of the light source(s), the sensors and changes in the wavelengths can be used as well, creating a composite image for <ONE BIG EYE> all the way out to something is missing in that molecule which renders atomic structure data.

 

[viper69]

Have you been talking about X-ray diffraction for the past two posts, geez, I know one of the world's leaders in this field.

I hope you aren't comparing an X-ray diffraction pattern to the human visual system, because they aren't related at all. The problem with overly simplistic explanations is one can often relate 2 different processes which have little to do with each other.

Re: what you said here > Quote Originally Posted by The Snark View Post
"Composite photographs to the molecular level become quite possible in the future." If what you were thinking was X ray diffraction, forget it, I'm not interested. That's not the "photograph" I was thinking of.


I already know about a ton of methods used to identify molecules, the atoms within molecules, ways to visualize molecules (structurally, temporally and spatially), protein modifications etc etc etc. What you fail to mention in any of the last 2 posts is specific information regarding how new advances will allows us to image molecules. What new advances or rather what were you thinking of when you wrote that post a few ago>> "Composite photographs to the molecular level become quite possible in the future."

 

[The Snark]

Have you been talking about X-ray diffraction for the past two posts, geez, I know one of the world's leaders in this field.

I hope you aren't comparing an X-ray diffraction pattern to the human visual system, because they aren't related at all. The problem with overly simplistic explanations is one can often relate 2 different processes which have little to do with each other.

Re: what you said here > Quote Originally Posted by The Snark View Post
"Composite photographs to the molecular level become quite possible in the future." If what you were thinking was X ray diffraction, forget it, I'm not interested. That's not the "photograph" I was thinking of.


I already know about a ton of methods used to identify molecules, the atoms within molecules, ways to visualize molecules (structurally, temporally and spatially), protein modifications etc etc etc. What you fail to mention in any of the last 2 posts is specific information regarding how new advances will allows us to image molecules. What new advances or rather what were you thinking of when you wrote that post a few ago>> "Composite photographs to the molecular level become quite possible in the future."

You are quite right. There is no x-ray imaging of that nature right now. What I was referring to was the next generation to Chandra's present array. I'll be darned if I can find that info again. They have been working on drastically increasing the capability of the H/LEGTS. Sorry to confuse.
PS, if you find it, could you post it or PM me?