Posted on 08/13/2018 3:41:56 PM PDT by plain talk
Sound has negative mass, and all around you it's drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly.
That's the conclusion of a paper submitted on July 23 to the preprint journal arXiv, and it shatters the conventional understanding that researchers have long had of sound waves: as massless ripples that zip through matter, giving molecules a shove but ultimately balancing any forward or upward motion with an equal and opposite downward motion. That's a straightforward model that will explain the behavior of sound in most circumstances, but it's not quite true, the new paper argues.
A phonon — a particle-like unit of vibration that can describe sound at very small scales — has a very slight negative mass, and that means sound waves travel upward ever so slightly, said Rafael Krichevsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Are we talking about the speed of light here, or the speed of sound? There is quite a difference at those levels, and when we are limiting our discussion to phonons (speed of sound), I think my point stands.
So, does that mean sound can travel in a vacuum? Or maybe a vacuum can travel through sound? Do blowhards weigh more or less than their actual mass?
*I* was only talking about this statement: “Mass is not a property that is affected by movement”.
Whether E=MC2 is applicable at varying speeds below that of light is a whole ‘nother matter of discussion. I weigh-in with old uncle Al that, yes, it does apply at the speed of sound as well.
Perhaps not. You might be adding to much detergent in your wash. It could be the washing machines fault!
The phonon they speak of is the equivalent of poetry to a math geek. It’s a metaphor. There is no particle, and there is no vacuum but if you looked at it as if it were a particle in a vacuum, its properties would appear to include antigravity. In truth, it is motion in a gas, the movement reduces pressure making it bouyant. Another way to create movement in gas molecules is to heat them up and if there were some way to capture them in a container, it would provide lift
Man that would be quite a puzzle to try to unravel.
With enough laborers and patience, I could envision a kind of grind-down process, using crude diamonds or another hard substance like carborundum, embedded in a metal plate that itself had first been finely ground flat.
I was talking about mass and speed in general. Once an object theoretically hits the speed of light mass is negated or inverted.
Now tell me how mass decreases (per the article) to a negative amount when it hits the speed of sound (speed of phonons).
Not my argument.
Well, that might solve the question of how you polish small stone surfaces flat, but some of those blocks are as big as a school bus.
How do you maintain precise flatness, squareness, and dimensions over the entire exterior of an object that size, unless you have the equivalent of modern cutting and measuring tools? Its just not possible to do by hand.
Even if it were, we're talking 2.3 million multi-ton blocks you'd have to quarry, cut, dress, transport, and set in place. We wouldn't attempt such a daunting project in our time, with advanced technology, but egyptologists insist that the ancients built the whole thing within twenty years, using nothing more than copper chisels, stone pounding balls, ropes, and brute force.
Not only that, it was so easy for them, they built two more giant pyramids on the same site. And just for good measure, they carved a massive labyrinth of tunnels into the solid rock under the whole complex.
To top it all off, they didn't leave a single inscription or hieroglyph upon any of these monumental structures throughout the country, nor did they record the magnificent accomplishment of these massive constructions on any papyrus, stele, or temple wall.
Who knew the pharoahs were so modest?
Taking a mere 20 years would be quite a challenge.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect that the smoothing apparatus was taken to the stone — perhaps the stone was taken to the smoothing apparatus. It would imply measuring tools of near modern quality, but not necessarily an engine as we know it.
At any rate it is a yet unsolved puzzle. If I wanted to do something like today, I’d cast the blocks, maybe even in place. But these blocks were not cast; they were cut and finished.
But if the craftsmen were told that they MUST built a pyramid out of cut stone like this, or off with their heads, I think they’d start getting VERY ingenious, if they were otherwise granted all the labor resources that the ruling pharoah could command.
If it has to be as big as a school bus, it does. But a single grinder run by means of horse or camel power might be constructed to scour one of those surfaces as a whole. Sliding the face of one such block back and forth against the face of another such block with a crude grinding compound or mud in between? What we see today has been weathered by millennia of wind-driven sand and might hide the finishing marks.
Such methods and techniques are pure conjecture. No one has ever demonstrated or recorded such methods being utilized for the task we're discussing. Not even by the ancient Egyptians themselves, who painstakingly recorded every aspect of their history, culture, and daily lives.
You'd think that an accomplishment as grand as the building of the great pyramids would rate at least a passing mention somewhere, but no. Not a word or a single image about pyramid building was left anywhere.
We're talking multi-ton stone blocks here - many of them being solid granite - that can't be fashioned in the condition we find them, without the aid of massive earth moving equipment and very modern cutting and grinding tools.
Given the evidence we can see with our own eyes, simple logic doesn't allow us to indulge in conjecture about ancient people with primitive tools building these structures.
I know we’re making guesses, but at least trying to make educated ones.
Why no records of the methods? Well here’s another educated guess. It was considered a sacred art, not to be divulged to commoners or foreigners.
It’s at least as good as anything else out there. Hush-hush explains a lot.
And I still think it is a matter of scaling up the methods. Probably, the magicians of Egypt (whether or not they knew any actual magic, and maybe they did) were in charge of this pyramid building process. They’d probably kill for the fame and fortune of getting the Pharaoh to dedicate monstrous amounts of labor at their direction.
I guess ultimately... imagine that YOU were one of Pharoah’s magicians. And you wanted an absolutely impressive to-do that NOBODY else could duplicate.
I think we know the mentality, and it would look like the secrecy of the atom bomb program. We don’t go bragging about how we make these bombs by publishing a spec that anyone can copy. We set off the bombs.
Well, if we're going to postulate that it was all done by magic, then I suppose anything's possible. I don't think that's what you mean by "magician", though.
Point is, only so much can be accomplished with a given level of human technology. There are all sorts of things that we can envision, but can't accomplish, because of the limitations of our own technology.
Antigravitic propulsion. Faster-than-light space travel. Cold fusion. A cure for all disease. We'd love to achieve these things and many others, but they're outside the reach of our current technology.
Likewise, construction of megalithic structures like the pyramids, was nowhere within the realm of possibility for the ancient Egyptians. Had it been so, they would have recorded their grand accomplishments on papyrus, paintings, and stone, across the land. They never claimed they built those monuments, and neither should modern people.
Ha...that, we are. Given the scale of the mystery, I think we're doing okay ;-)
Why no records of the methods? Well here’s another educated guess. It was considered a sacred art, not to be divulged to commoners or foreigners.
Embalming was considered a sacred art, but they left records about that process.
If the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with primitive methods, hundreds of thousands of laborers would have been involved. The pharaohs would have had to kill them all to preserve the secrets of how they did it. And what of the laborers' wives, their children, the master builders, the priesthood, neighboring kingdoms, and their spies? They would have had to kill them all, too.
Surely, some would have escaped to tell the tale.
What purpose would such secrecy serve, if it required killing a substantial number of their subjects to preserve it? Last of all, if they were such tyrannical megalomaniacs, why didn't they have their names inscribed on every one of these structures?
After all that, they took no credit? I don't think so.
All the evidence points to the ancient Egyptians having moved into the Nile River delta after the Sahara dried out. Upon arriving in Egypt, they merely discovered the ruins of a lost culture that preceded them by centuries - maybe even thousands of years.
They borrowed heavily from the cultural artifacts they unearthed, and inscribed many of the monuments and structures with their own hieroglyphic writing. In later ages, scholars ascribed everything in ancient Egypt to the dynastic Egyptians, chiefly due to that fact.
It's only in recent decades that researchers and scholars have begun to look much closer, and pick apart the true story of the history of that region. That's an ongoing process which will eventually uncover a much grander picture of ancient history than we ever suspected.
“That’s an ongoing process which will eventually uncover a much grander picture of ancient history than we ever suspected.”
As a believer in the Bible, I’ve wondered if some of this seemingly supernatural stuff (like the pyramids) IS supernatural. Some Bible verses seem to point to angels living on earth and having children with humans - the Nephalim were the offspring iirc. Perhaps some angel built a pyramid to woo some hot human chick?
And then of course another angel built another pyramid and said “mine’s bigger!”.
And of course there is the NT verse about having the faith of a mustard seed that one could move a mountain!
I knew a guy that built gravity meters. Years ago he consulted with the Air Force. Their missiles weren’t behaving how they thought they would behave. One possibility was anti-gravity forces, so this guy did some studies for it. He couldn’t measure anything - but he said the low levels that a possible anti-gravity force would have was probably beyond being able to measure it in the field.
I just thought it was interesting that both the Air Force and this gravity expert both thought that it was a possibility, and enough of one to actively pursue it. The guy I knew said something like “Every other natural force has a positive and a negative - why shouldn’t gravity?”
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