Thread: Science!
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Sethomas Sethomas is offline
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Old Jun 6th, 2012, 01:56 AM       
I'm sorry Milhouse, I don't like to be a jerk

I kind of figured afterwards that you were probably just saying "quantum events don't manifest at the macro scale," which is something that I wish every stoner who ever quoted "What the Bleep do we Know?" would realize while shutting up forever.

FZ: Well, what's going on with the satellites that are leaving the solar system is that they were given a trajectory that was designed the in the way you're describing. I think that it wasn't until the late 90s or so that we had a reasonable guess about the average density of the current universe, but even so nobody had any reason to suspect that subatomic particles would prove to be such a nuisance in slowing the satellites down.

What you're describing sort of sounds like making something like a solar panel that uses gravitational force instead of electromagnetic force. The problem with doing that is that unlike electromagnetic force, gravity always has a fixed vector, so you're pretty limited in how you can convert potential energy to kinetic energy (or vice-versa) with gravity alone. A black hole will always pull foreign bodies towards itself, but an electron or proton can push or pull depending on what it's interacting with. If you meant something more analogous to the ability to use a rudder to harnass wind energy on a sailboat into any direction, I guess it's worth a try but that's a harder project than I'd want to tackle.

I think that I did once read about gravity producing "negative pressure" in certain situations, but it seemed highly speculative and probably only applied to the first few femtoseconds after the big bang.
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