- Joined
- Aug 8, 2005
- Messages
- 11,056
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.
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.
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