Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2019 May 31

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May 31

Question about the formation nucleus?

How and when did neutrons with no charge find their places among positively charged protons (similar charge repel) or vice versa to form a cluster of a nucleus for revolving equal # of electrons after the big bang?2001:56A:739C:D300:5132:AF06:646A:16C0 (talk) 00:32, 31 May 2019 (UTC)eek

Big Bang nucleosynthesis. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 01:32, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

The slight difficulty is why there's so much regular hydrogen in the universe, the neutrons that didn't get into a nucleus before it was too late simply disintegrated in about a fraction of an hour as unattached neutrons do leaving lots of free protons flying around (to later mate with the electrons when it wasn't hot enough to break most hydrogen atoms into atom soup). There hasn't been enough generations of star recycling yet for "not hydrogen" to increase by much, this is why planets that aren't mostly hydrogen are such a small percent of the solar system weight. (the sun is a fairly typical star, a bit more not hydrogen than universe wide average I think) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

If a simulation of the milky way galaxy is a decent enough representative [1], that's about right. Our sun's metallicity (not-hydrogen + not-helium) is about 1.34%. And compared to the stellar neighborhood, this puts us right at the mode of metallicities for "thin disk" stars, just a bit off the mode for thick disk stars, but almost ten times the metallicity of halo stars, which stand out in part because they tend to be much older. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:45, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, and one of the big successes of the Big Bang model is its prediction of the observed ratios of light elements in the universe from independent evidence. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 00:19, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

My question is how did protons and neutrons stick to each other. What kind of action or process was involved that neutron(s) and proton(s) came closer to each other when positive charge repel each other? I want to know the causes

How did 2 protons and 2 neutrons stick to each other to form a nucleus and then found 2 electrons to form a Helium atom?

Similarly, how did 3 protons and 4 neutrons stick to each other to form a nucleus and then found 2 electrons to form a Helium atom? And so on — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:739C:D300:7074:4186:5C92:C415 (talk) 21:02, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

oh. You should check Nuclear fusion then. Basically, huge temperatures means energy high enough to overcome electrostatic repulsion and put protons close enough for strong interaction to take over. Gem fr (talk) 21:13, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

See also nucleosynthesis. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 05:15, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Ok thanks but doesn’t fusion process require a confined environment instead of expanding besides high temperature and pressure etc therefore how did strong interaction take place during high temperature (millions & billions degrees) at which aforementioned particles expanded due to collision at high speed and faster vibration. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:739C:D300:3C60:47D9:566E:4F17 (talk) 07:31, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

All that nuclear fusion requires is sufficient energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier that repels protons (or nuclei containing protons). It is useful to remember that for particles at the atomic scale, temperature and kinetic energy are basically the same thing. If the protons have enough energy, they can get very close despite the Coulomb force, close enough for the nuclear force to overpower it and bind them together. Pressure is not an inherent requirement, only temperature. It is true that pressure is a good way to get particles to very high temperatures (if you compress a gas, its temperature increases), and this is why stars produce fusion, but it is not a requirement. You can build yourself a tabletop fusor that produces nuclear fusion, without any pressure vessel, relying just on electromagnetism to accelerate protons to very high speeds. Physicists use larger particle accelerators to fuse much heavier nuclei, and they work similarly, by just accelerating particles with electromagnets. Fusion even takes place in Earth's atmosphere and crust when incoming cosmic rays (which can have proportionally enormous energies) collide with them, and this is actually where Earth's entire supply of numerous light nuclides comes from.

You state that particles expanded. I suspect a common misconception here: that when the universe was expanding rapidly, the matter in it was also expanding. This is untrue. Space itself expanded. The stuff contained in that space was unaffected. As the matter in the universe spread out over the increasingly large space, it cooled; when it got too cold for fusion to continue, it stopped. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 04:59, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

i thank you all but im just thinking shouldn't heaviour nuclei form first due to the high temperature as a requirement for fusion before cooling - may be wrong — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:56A:739C:D300:1DC8:B67F:F00B:19A0 (talk) 03:13, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

So I actually have no idea what you mean by everything that comes after "due to". Formation of heavier nuclei proceeds in a stepwise fashion from lighter nuclei. If you start with protons and unstable neutrons, why do you think those would leap directly to heavy nuclei? Someguy1221 (talk) 03:18, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

weight loss in prison

See here. What is likely to happen with that guy? I know about the Chewbacca defense but is there also a "Jabba defense" and could he have used it? (Never mind, I forgot no legal advice here). He was in the news a few weeks ago[2] and supposedly weighed even more then. Prison is usually not a good experience but I'm wondering if the guy is likely to get some medical weight loss help while there, and if so, what kind. He was not able to be brought to a courtroom dock so instead they used the building's loading dock. So I think getting him in and out of a normal jail cell would be difficult. Mostly I guess I'm just boggled by this story and am wondering how they are likely to deal with it. Thanks. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 04:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

For questions about medical conditions in the Ohio correctional system, see Medical FAQs at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

The correctional system is likely to deal with it only if the courts sentence the offender to incarceration.

Here's a research paper from NIH on helping inmates who have special medical or psychosocial needs: Specialized Prisons and Services: Results From a National Survey. Whether any individual inmate has special needs is a matter that really only concerns them, and their families, and their defense attorneys, and the court and correctional system; so in the spirit of following official Wikipedia policy, if you're actually serious about getting answers, I'd simply direct you to the contact telephone numbers for the DRC; and if you're just boggled by the concept of incarceration, perhaps some light reading will help clear your mind.

Nimur (talk) 15:54, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Studies keep providing evidence that weight loss surgery is by far the most successful treatment for severe obesity, often producing rapid weight loss and remission of many associated diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Countries with respect for prisoners' rights will generally make such medical treatment available to prisoners, if they desire it. The U.S. tends to have issues with this, with a lot of variation between states, as most U.S. prisoners are prisoners of state governments. Identification and treatment of any co-morbid diseases such as mental health disorders is also important. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 00:09, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

I would assume that most prisons would have a set ration for each person per meal, give or take a percentage. Thereby I would fully expect that dramatic weight loss will occur, as if I was the governor of the prison I would not be willing to pay for additional rations to allow the inmate to sustain his current weight. He would be forced to diet. This in turn would inevitably lead to Human Rights questions and a law suit, considering the American prevalence for Litigation, but by the time this has been resolved he would almost certainly have lost a considerable amount of weight. Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 10:27, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Maybe you are right but it hadn't occurred to me that someone that heavy wouldn't welcome any help he could get in losing weight. The article about bariatric surgery was also informative. I hadn't realized it was mostly about restricting digestion, and that liposuction was as unhelpful as the article about it describes. I thought maybe they could just amptutate a few hundred pounds of fat. Oh well. It seemed like a case where the guy might have been happy to go to prison where he could get some treatment. According to an earlier news story, iirc, he was effectively already incarcerated since he could no longer fit through the door of the trailer he was living in. When they arrested him, they had to rip out a wall to get him out. I guess he had someone bringing him food. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 03:10, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

I would expect he would go directly to the prison infirmary, as he has a life-threatening condition. Whether they would authorize bariatric surgery depends on the prison policies and state law. If not, then they would use conventional means like proper diet and exercise, and perhaps appetite suppressant drugs. Once his weight was no longer life-threatening, he would be returned to the general population. SinisterLefty (talk) 03:22, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Singularities and Dilation

Is it possible that a black-hole singularity doesn't actually exist and is only required as a hypothetical device to explain external observations?

Consider this:

1. A local observer records the core of a collapsing star, and notices that as the gravitational field strengthens exponentially, a clock that is far away from the gravitational well is accelerating ever faster.
2. He also observes that when the escape velocity equals the speed of light, the total mass of the collapsing core starts to decrease at an ever accelerating rate.
3. Essentially, the collapsing core evaporates away as Hawking radiation in a matter of seconds before it can become a singularity, which thanks to time dilation, lasts trillions of years for the external observer.

-Plasmic Physics (talk) 12:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

If there is another observer inside what will become the future event horizon, and that observer sends messages to you, then you'll not get any messages from that observer after a while, even if you wait for an infinitively long time. So, your argument does not demonstrate that a singularity does not exist. Count Iblis (talk) 14:19, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

The local observer I was referring to is actually one and the same as the one that you suggest here. I'm proposing that the observer within what would become the future event horizon never observes the formation of a singularity because the matter that comprise the actively collapsing system evaporates to completion before it is able to form a singularity. Compare it to the analogy of a meteor that burns up in the Earth's atmosphere, never able to reach the ground. Plasmic Physics (talk) 03:57, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Can't we just say, "The Reference Desk does not engage in speculation...", and point you to resources where you can read about black holes?

Nimur (talk) 16:06, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't think this is a speculative question. GR predicts a singularity but GR is a classical (i.e. non-physical) theory. Whether there is an actual singularity is an active theoretical topic. So OP's question has a reasonable answer saying what the main alternatives are. I don't happen to know what this answer is though. I agree that the black hole article is a reasonable place to start looking, but it's not an optimal refdesk answer, any more than referring all math refdesk questions to the articles on the Peano or set theory axioms is optimal. Generally we want to narrow things down if we can. OP might find arXiv:1609.01421 to be interesting regarding singularities, though it's only partly about black holes. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 20:08, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

• The term singularity just means "a place where the maths breaks down", i.e. division by infinity or something like that. That's what singularity means, it's where the theory breaks down. Physicists are undecided whether the prediction of singularities means that they actually exist (or existed at the start of the Big Bang), or that current knowledge is insufficient to describe what happens at such extreme densities.. Not only is it possible they don't exist, it's agreed that it is quite likely they don't exist.--Jayron32 22:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Singularities are "required" only in that the metrics describing stable black holes always have them. Those metrics appear to be excellent predictors of black hole behavior insofar as we can probe them, but we cannot probe the inside. So whether singularities exist, or do not exist, doesn't really matter right now, as we would not be able to tell the difference. It would not be remotely surprising if the black hole metrics, like certain other one, are not actually physically realizable. A very curious thing to me about black holes, however, is that event horizon of a large one is predicted to lie in a region of space where nothing unusual should be happening, from a quantum perspective, aside from a tiny amount of hawking radiation. That is, the matter we watch falling into ultra-massive galaxy-eating giants should behave like ordinary matter right up until we can't see it anymore. If there is a quantum effect that prevents collapse to a singularity, you probably wouldn't even predict it to be visible. Someguy1221 (talk) 23:39, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Matter falling into a BH from its own perspective wouldn't notice anything unusual, but a stationary outsider would see it getting more and more redshifted as it approaches the event horizon, iirc. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 05:40, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Wouldn't matter falling in notice everything outside on approach being blue-shifted due to time dilation? Plasmic Physics (talk) 12:36, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Just so we're clear - you're asking extraordinarily specific questions about a very difficult topic of theoretical physics - gravitational redshift, and its difficult corner cases; meanwhile, you're failing to demonstrate even cursory, basic knowledge of the prerequisite theory. As I have said many times here on the science reference desk, it is typical for a very intelligent person to spend something like four or five years of full-time study in mathematics and physics before they tackle the general theory of relativity and its applications to "black holes." This formal preparation - in which the student gains knowledge of methods and prior art - is a major part of what separates real scientific study from random nonsense technobabble.

Here is a long list of introductory textbooks that you should read, and fully understand, before you go diving into speculations about this topic.

It is not going to be fruitful for us, or for anyone, to try to guess correct answers to hypothetical scenarios - let alone for us to put correct answers into sentences that you can understand - unless you have put in a lot more work in preparation.

For perspective, if this were a different field of study, like literature, your question would be paramount to asking detailed questions about specific comparative literary criticisms on the diction of authors whose works are in a language you do not speak. Or, you might ask for detailed procedural techniques of complicated surgeries, when you haven't yet shown even an elementary knowledge of the first principles of medicine.

How can we meaningfully satisfy your question? Even if we answer correctly, will you understand what we say? Will you then use that knowledge of a correct answer for a practical fruitful purpose, without bungling things up?

Shall we begin with broad instructions for how you might begin your lengthy course-of-study? Here's a link to APS's resources for undergraduate students.

Of course we want you to succeed; and it's wonderful for you to have enthusiasm about physics; but your questions demonstrate that you don't understand the basic material; and I strongly doubt that even a correct answer would actually help you understand anything better. You may as well be asking us to write answers in a language you expressly cannot read.

But if you actually prefer technobabble, I can write a long and meaningless sentence for you that includes several very exciting words:

The gravitational red shift at the event-horizon of the singularity, when studied in the context of the Calabi–Yau manifold, is expressible in a manner analogous to the virtual anti-particle's femoral Einsteinian blue-shift conjugate to its jugular precession, so long as its characteristic polynomial is Hermite.

Does this help, in any way?

Nimur (talk) 19:12, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

_{Femurs? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:14, 1 June 2019 (UTC)}

I can do without the patronizing tone. I have in fact completed a degree with an emphasis on mathematics, including a paper on cosmology, and I am by no means claiming to be an expert. It is my prerogative to decide whether or not I find the answers here useful, as it is the right of all users here to decide for themselves how valuable their time is with regard to how much explanation they deem necessary to respond to a simple yay or nay question. Furthermore, your definition of 'technobabble' is wanting - I'm not purposefully making use of obscure or highly technical language to obfuscate the other users here. A technical subject requires technical language. You're final remark on the other-hand is obviously intended to obfuscate. Not in good faith. Plasmic Physics (talk) 01:36, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Nimur, I don't think OP was asking how to compute Ricci tensors or anything like that, and there are tons of science popularizations that address this kind of question without being technobabble and without being mathematically demanding. Hawking's own A Brief History of Time is well regarded, and it has 2 chapters on black holes. That might be a good place to look. This site has a cool animation of falling into a black hole and what looks like good exposition. And I had an elective astronomy class that had fairly detailed discussions of black holes (no Ricci tensors but it had Kruskal diagrams), and it didn't have 4-5 years of prerequisites. I admittedly don't remember much of it. But, it's a topic that can be understood in a very deep and technical way or alternatively at a not-so-technical overview level. There's nothing wrong with the latter unless you're trying to do research. Theories of what happens inside a black hole are unscientific (i.e. non-falsifiable) since there is by definition no way to observe what happens in a BH anyway. So it's just math, the physical models come and go, but in the context of classical GR I think not much is happening and the stuff in the popular writeups is probably pretty well worked out by now. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 01:56, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

I apologize if my tone was inappropriately abrasive; I will also apologize directly to the OP, User:Plasmic Physics. I am sorry. My response was not polite and it fell short of my own standards for tone.

In the future I will try to make my statements more polite. Meanwhile, please consider some of the further reading material linked from our article. I can personally recommend A Brief History of Time for light reading, and Chandrasekhar's book, The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes, for detailed study. That book is thorough, authoritative, and current; but it is truly difficult to revisit the later chapters. And if you like videos more than books, our article links to 24 hours of classroom lecture on general relativity: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Redshift is covered in Lecture 12.

Please believe me when I say this: if I thought this stuff was easy, I wouldn't be trying to make it sound hard simply for my own amusement.

Nimur (talk) 02:28, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Nimur, thanks for posting that. I agree with you (and can affirm to OP) that learning this stuff in detail will be a long hard slog. But, black holes are now part of everyday culture, so popularizations like A Brief History of Time can make us a bit better informed without subjecting ourselves to the heavy math. Studying general relativity actually seems kind of sterile to me at this point, since it's just a geometric abstraction and there's no real physical theory of gravity that answers interesting questions about black holes at the moment. See here for a trendy current direction, but there are many others and it's all pretty woo-woo. I think all the current stuff is even more difficult than GR, and on top of that, none of it has made successful predictions and any of it could collapse at any moment. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 04:52, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

I accept. Thank you for making amends.

Thank you to everyone for suggesting reference material. Plasmic Physics (talk) 10:14, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

I think the original question is philosophical and doesn't require advanced knowledge per se. In general, "singularities" tend to be taken to mean that the math breaks down, not that the universe breaks down. It's generally assumed there's some other effect that will take over that we don't know about. There have been some famous singularities like the ultraviolet catastrophe and Olbers paradox that have been resolved. Sometimes there's a singularity, or at least an infinity, on paper, like in Keplerian orbits going from ellipses to parabolas to hyperbolas, that doesn't really amount to much when you look at it. A lot of physics has to pick its way carefully between singularities - renormalization theories. Some of the above commentary focuses on specific ways to extend physics to the black hole singularity, which given a certain paucity of measurements from that location can be contentious and somewhat difficult to prove. I have seen mention of disagreements between the perfect point or other mathematical shapes derived using general relativity and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to be resolved by quantum gravity or other such means that may or may not exist at this time. Event horizons are surprisingly easy to access using the Unruh effect -- the existence of radiation in an accelerating frame of reference that is not present in a rest frame definitely raises some fundamental and interesting questions about the nature of energy and of particles, and is far beyond my understanding. But to address singularities themselves (at least without a known route of access to a naked singularity or "black hole remnant" or evaporating primordial black hole or an artificial black hole) seems at my guess like it might have to be done with advanced physics worked out from some other context.

Also, the description of "infinitely blue shifted radiation" is common in some descriptions - see this well known illustration [3] of a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. That site credits the claim to Roger Penrose in 1968. I'm not in a good position to critique that... Wnt (talk) 21:27, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Another recent "hotness" (pardon the pun) is the black hole firewall question. This is from 2012 but was interesting. 173.228.123.207 (talk) 08:20, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Our article there is weird. It talks about getting inconceivable amounts of energy by breaking entanglement, which is certainly something I'd like to see demonstrated at a power plant on the other end of a long, long transmission cable. From that description this sounds different than Penrose's infinitely blue-shifted light coming out of the past or future of the universe. I think some of this stuff I'm seeing was garbled in transmission ... or production... but I don't know enough to say. Wnt (talk) 12:50, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

It's not trivial to calculate the observed shift in light frequencies because the observer is moving and accelerating relative to the distant sources of light. This paper presents code that allows one to compute what stars would look like to an observer near or within a Schwarzschild black hole. Indeed, blueshift/redshift are very dependent on the observer's trajectory, but while they claim extreme blueshift as an observer infalling from infinity crosses the horizon, they also claim it's not infinite, only reaching that value near the singularity. Though, I guess just try to read the paper or run the code yourself, there's a crapton of variation depending on the setup. An observer at rest on the event horizon might see infinite blueshift, but it would take infinite power to keep him there. No comment on the firewall. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:03, 7 June 2019 (UTC)