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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Could the universe be smaller than the visible universe?

« on: 21/11/2024 21:44:32 »

I was thinking about very distant galaxies which seem to be too developped for their age. If the universe is finite and unbounded, then we might be seeing galaxies which we coud see closer to us of we pointed our telescopes in the opposite direction. I realise that this thought must have occured to other people but I can't find an answer by Googling. So I'm asking here.

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Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution / Could we eat wood?

« on: 30/09/2024 22:06:19 »

A friend was asking me about aphids and ants a couple of weeks ago, then I was watching Putin's weatherman describing a nuclear winter.

So the aphids feed on sap. In order to get enough protein they drink excess amounts of sugary water. This is secreted and ants lap up the calories and guard the aphids. It follows that ants have another source of protein. Maybe some ants and termites get their protein from wood. It may not contain much protein but the insects eat a specific fungus which they cultivate by providing it with wood. It would make sense if they use a  fungus which fixed nitrogen and produced protein. They've had millennia to coevolve with the fungus. So could we use the same fungus to feed ourselves on wood during a nuclear winter?

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Technology / Would this fly?

« on: 07/07/2024 04:03:40 »

If you made a disc which was like a squashed WWII British army helmet on the top and flat on the bottom and set it spinning, I think it should rise because the air would move faster over the top because of its greater surface area. So suppose you made a bunch of discs on a common axis with a motor and enclosed all this in a tube. You could arange gears so that alternate discs spin in opposite directions if you wanted. Would it fly?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Home nuclear plant

« on: 13/05/2024 16:02:05 »

How much Silicon 32 would you need to power a home?

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The Environment / If we used wood for fuel, what % of our energy needs could this supply?

« on: 19/03/2024 03:34:56 »

I'm supposing we could deal with the polutants from the smoke. I mean if we kept felling and replanting. Not assuming the fastest growing but maintaining a mixed forrest.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / How much does the shape of the galaxy help keep the outer stars in place?

« on: 13/01/2024 16:26:41 »

This question has irked me for decades and I have never come across any reference to it. Even more so now that the existence of dark matter is in doubt.

Realising that gravity is not a force one could never the less draw lines, from a massive object, somewhat corresponding to electrical or magnetic lines that we are used to in diagrams.

So picture the supermassive blackhole at the centre of our galaxy with the Milky Way taken away. The lines would be straight going away from the blackhole. Now draw a second diagram with the Milky Way added. We are looking at the galaxy side on so the diagram looks like this
            -----------------------O----------------------
We ignore the lines from the stars just considering the lines from the blakhole. I think I could safely draw two straight lines - one going vertically up and one going vertically down. But because the stars in the galaxy are curving space the other lines must be drawn starting out going directly away from the blackhole but curving towards the galactic plane. The lines starting out nearly vertical would be nearly straight as we draw the lines getting moving from the vertical to the horizontal the lines would be progressively more curved towards the galactic plane.

Am I correct so far? I think this means additional gravity from the black hole the further you get from the blackhole. ie the stars at the edge of the galaxy not only get gravitational attraction from the other stars but also gravitational attraction from the blackhole but the latter would be greater than it would be if all the stars weren't there ie the gravity from the blackhole would be greater than that calculated using the inverse square rule

As I say, I have never come across reference to this. Is the effect negligible or is it nontrivial but taken into account but so rarely mentioned that I have never come across it?

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COVID-19 / Have we entered a new phase of covid

« on: 30/11/2023 23:36:45 »

Looking at the variants ciculating the charts look very different now than previously https://covariants.org/per-country

23f aka EG.5.1 https://covariants.org/ has failed to reach more than 60% of cases in most counries. Most of the exceptions to this are countries which have had least covid so far. In most countries we are seeing much more of a mixture of variants than previously.

A simple explanation for this could be that some people have an immunity to EG.5.1 (perhaps because of different outcomes of affinity maturation from previous infections & vaccinations). Different people could have differing levels of immunity to different variants, so that variants are not competing for the same hosts. Well that's what comes to my mathamatician mind. So it's probably not the only possible explanation. I'd be interested to hear other ideas.

Interestlngly this explanation makes a prediction. If the hotch potch of variants is because of immunity, it follows that each variant can only affect a subgroup of the population. This would mean a signifficant reduction in R and would predict much lower rates of infection from here on in.

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Physiology & Medicine / What is point, inflamatiom

« on: 24/11/2023 21:09:08 »

Foods which reduce inflamation is a hot topic among snake oil salesmun nutritionists at the moment. I presume inflamation serves a purpose, but I don't know what that purpose is. My guess is that it mitigates damage, so It's not a bad bet to avoid a food which causes inflamation because such food presumeably causes damage which leads to inflamation. But the converse presumption doesn't seem likely - ie the idea that foods which reduce inflamation do so because they prevent damage. In fact some nutritionists claim that they reduce inflamation by surpressing proinflamatory cortisol; that could welll be a bad thing if inflamation is part of a healing process.

So back to the question, what purpose does inflamation serve and when is it a good thing to reduce it? And when is it a good idea to let it do its thing?

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New Theories / What caused inflation?

« on: 05/11/2023 01:41:29 »

I tend to think of the hierarchy of thinking in physics as idea - hypothesis - theory. Current thinking on inflation has come up with the idea that it was caused by an inflationary field and attempts have been made to describe what such a field would be like, its properties, magnitude etc. But it's still just an idea.

I have an alternative although it is only a half baked idea. It stems from the idea that given
virtual particles spontaneously flit in and out of existence at a rate per unit volume per unit time which is governed by the laws of physics then in principle one could calculate the volume of a given bit of space by counting the virtual particles over a measured time. In principle... the fact that they couldn't actually be counted doesn't matter  for what I'm going on to say. What matters here is that if there are more of them, there is more space. In a sense you can think of them as being space... much as you can think of the Euclidean dimensions of a block of space as defining space.

During the inflationary period, the number of virtual particles flitting in and out of existence per unit time in the universe as a whole must have increased dramatically. So I ask the question - where did they come from,

Suppose you meet someone who tells you about a new particle - the improbiblon, which has a mass almost 27 times that of a proton, a charge of minus two and a spin of six and a half. You explain to him that the chances of here being such a particle are nil, but they insist that virtual improboblons do exist. They go on to say that because an actual improbablon doesn't exist, its virtual counterpart can not interact with any real particle and can't be detected. In fact they claim there would be no difference whether or not virtual improbablons exist, so you can't prove they don't. It would also mean that the existence of virtual improbablons would have no effect on the volume of space (otherwise there would be evidence for their existence and they would have an effect on the universe)

From this comes the idea that virtual particles which have no real particle counterpart can exist but they do not count when you calculate the volume of space. ie they are only space if and when their real counterparts exist.

So back to the moment before inflation began. The first particle in the standard model is born and with it, all at once its virtual particles now need to be counted as space. This manifests as an abrupt increase in the volume of the universe. Consequently the number of virtual particles of the other particles of the standard model increase - at this stage their real counterparts don't exist, so they don't count as space - there are just more of them per unit time than there were before the first particle caused the expansion. Then the process repeats as each of the particles of the standard model come into existence. Taken together, this is inflation and it comes to a halt as abruptly as it started when the last particle of the standard model comes into existence.

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Chemistry / Where did earths oxygen come from?

« on: 29/07/2023 04:40:33 »

Googling this, the answer given is theat it came from photosynthesis, originally from cynobacteria. My problem with this, is that if this were the case, then there should be enough oil & fossil fuel to use up all the oxygen and there doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough to do this.

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COVID-19 / What's included in protein-based vaccines?

« on: 27/05/2023 20:43:00 »

ie which proteins. Specifically is the envelope protein E- protein included and would this be a sensible target? I'm surprised we haven't heard much about this protein. I guess there must be a good reason - anyone know why?

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The Environment / Where did all the carbon go?

« on: 22/04/2023 21:05:07 »

I seem to remeber learning that animals had to wait until photosynthesising plants had made the oxygen that they need. So on the face of it, there should be enough fossil fuel to use up all the oxygen. Limestone won't do - it only makes matters worse as it incorporates 3 oxygen atoms for each carbon.

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New Theories / Why do mamals have dangly bits?

« on: 01/03/2023 03:09:35 »

When I was at school they taught us that it was because they needed to be a couple of degrees C cooler that the rest of the body. At the time i thoughy that a load of bollocks and i understand that's how the idea is generally regarded these days. My theory was that they dangled to be exposed to radiation, presumeably for mutations of the sperm. My hypothysis was that there must be an optimal rate of mutation (no evolution without mutation, and no eveolution = getting outcompeted to extinction) and that, since life took hold on earth, the background radiation has fallen significanly - in fact hugely.
   I haven't given up on that idea but covid research has given a new possibility - a different type of radiation. The so called vitamin D paradox - hosptalised patients with low levels of vitamin D fared worse but no amount of vitamin D injection improved matters. The conundrum is claimed to have been resolved by regarding vitamin D levels as a marker of sun exposure and the benefit of sun exposure for covid patients is higher melatonin levels. So perhaps males dangle to get infra red light exposure so they can produce melatonin.

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Cells, Microbes & Viruses / Flu crisis what crisis?

« on: 02/11/2022 05:00:35 »

We are told that two low flu seasons (due to masking etc.) leave us vulnerable - low population immunity will lead to a bad flu season. What is the basis for this? Antibodies don't last from season to season so they shouldn't be a factor. Are they saying that immune memory fades after 2 or 3 years? That would seem to fly in the face of what we saw with the Spanish flu. So what is they banging on about?

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COVID-19 / Who's taken the autumn booster?

« on: 08/10/2022 09:04:33 »

Still sitting on the fence. After Medcram I thought I would then not so sure on listening to Paul Offit.

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Physiology & Medicine / Might intermittent fasting lead to premature aging?

« on: 30/09/2022 16:17:04 »

And where should we look?

As far as I know there is no evidence whatsoever that a typical regime of two periods per week of no food for 24 hours causes premature aging, albeit that probaby nobody has looked. However I think there is good reason to look.

My understanding is that intermittent fasting works by prompting the body to "eat" cells which are a little damaged and would soon be replaced anyway. There are chemicals released and measured to support this idea. my concern is that regular fasting will lead to a premature turnover of cells, cutting the average lifetime of cells. My understanding is that cells are programmed to divide a finite number of times, so replacing cells sooner rather than later on an ongoing and long term regime may have consequences in later life.

Really what I'm asking is where to look. I guess one would need people who have followed the regime for a few years. Or perhaps somebody here can suggest specific cells that a suitable to study over a period of months. Telomere shortening looks a likely place to look but obviously I'm no expert. So any ideas.

Also please feel free to tell me the biological terms I should have used.

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New Theories / Why are we here?

« on: 24/08/2022 00:59:04 »

The fundamental constants and the laws of physics are just right for us. Our solar system populated with atypical planets and a moon, once said to be best explained as an observational error.

Add to that the surprising fact that we can understand the laws of nature, we who took 3.4 million years to get beyond a simple set of stone tools. Well OK, we haven't nailed the laws of nature but we have come a long way. And where did the laws of nature come from?

The anthropic principle works pretty well; there are many versions of it. I prefer one that uses the quantum-physics notion that an observer is an essential part of wave function collapse. It is more economical because then we don't need to be in a Goldylocks universe. The wave function of the big bang can only collapse to form a universe which gives rise to intelligent observers.

That deals with paragraph 1 and so far nothing new. I was watching Sabine Hossenfelder explaining, on you tube, that we discover rather than invent physics. It's what I had always assumed but it doesn't hurt to try and find an argument against. So we are here not just to be able to observe - which allowed the big bang's wave function to collapse but also to understand the laws of nature. In fact the laws and the fundamental constants came from our understanding. We don't, in fact discover physics, we invented it, we set the fundamental constants because they needed an intelligence to invent them. The wave function of the big bang had to collapse to a state where minds intelligent enough to come up with a physics which allows their own presence to evolve. The pretty thing about this is that it renders universe self contained. We created the universe which created us.

On the pessimistic side, our understanding of physics has not advanced a great deal in the last fifty years. (A sign of these times is a widening acceptance or at least willingness to entertain the many worlds hypothesis, despite it being intrinsically untestable.) Once we have something that we can call genuine artificial and conscious intelligence then our luck will run out, the coincidences which have kept us going so long will coincide no longer and the computers will finish the job.

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COVID-19 / Is CoV2 finding new ways to kill?

« on: 05/08/2022 19:52:22 »

See from 4 minutes in to 5 minutes in

deaths within 28 days of a positive covid test are high, higher than for instance during the Delta wave. But deaths with covid on he death certificate are up but not nearly so much - below Delta levels (in the UK).

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus excess mortality is also higher, now, than during the BA.2 wave but "covid" deaths lower for BA.5 compared to BA.2. Excess mortality looked like it was lagging behind covid deaths during BA.2, but I may be reading more than is justifiable into the graphs in this last instance.

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COVID-19 / How could we say if omicron variants are intrinsically less pathogenic?

« on: 27/06/2022 04:33:38 »

Seropositivity to CoV2 is about 99% in the UK... ie virtually everyone has been infected or vaccinated. The ratio of hospitalizations to infections is greatly reduced compared to 2020 & 2021. Is there a way to distinguish between immunity and reduced virulence as the cause. It seems quite feasible that immunity could be entirely responsible.
North Korea isn't going to give us the data we would need.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / What's the lowdown on thorium reactors?

« on: 17/01/2022 02:11:21 »

I read an article on them. It said they were a lot safer than the reactors we currently use and had been shunned in the past because they didn't yield weapons grade material. I presume that there's much more too it than that.