♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

was looking for a more detailed story about the one of the early engineering images from JWST and ended up on phys.org. good site!

two delightful stories

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-gaia-snaps-photo-webb-l2.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-asteroid-impact.html

Gaia snaps photo of Webb at L2

best spacecraft friends

maybe not useful for caek, but the sixty symbols youtube channel did just post a little bit of discussion about the calibration image.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbj8pMfK9Ek

I wrote a paper with that guy!

cool! i had wondered if he was someone you'd run into before

good livestream

At their worst, the Nautilus dive streams are fascinating. At their best, you watch new species being discovered live. Particularly recommended if you enjoy space launches. https://t.co/VcjPcWKmCT

— Charlie Loyd (@vruba) March 23, 2022

hi caek, nice corner!

feel free to ignore any or all of this, which starts the chilling words, "i have a comment and then a question"

the comment is that the james webb telescope ("the webb?" <-- a question inside the comment) has helped me understand, more concretely, some familiar old ideas about relativity and time travel in a more concrete way. i've understood that the light that we see from distant objects like stars are images of a previous time, since the light emitted has to travel for years (a "light year", if i may coin a phrase) before it reaches us. but i never really thought about the ramifications of capturing the light of more distant stars than ever before. it's just "light" but it's also an image of the distant, distant past.

that got me thinking (yes this is still the comment - i am seriously replicating a real life "comment and then a question") about what it means to travel along the path of that light, back toward the origin of the star, realizing that in a way it would be like accelerating into the past. if you stood on earth and received the light at normal speed (light speed), you experience the past of that distant star at a steady, human/earth rate. but when you begin to travel into the light, your experience of their past happens more rapidly - it's all in there, it's just more compressed (?). and that, if you could travel against the light quickly enough, you experience all of the billions of years of its history in the time that it takes you to travel from earth to the star.

and then (comment!), in the other direction, that you could could effectively freeze one's experience of time by "riding along" the path of the distant star's light at the exact same speed, always seeing it in the same way. and that in a sense you could "reverse" time if you could move even faster than the speed of light, and traveled back to an earlier form of the light/image. it's cool that the images from the webb make that kind of idea of more understandable and real (at least to me).

*loud booing from a 4th year grad student*---alright alright so here's my question! jfc.

all of that got me thinking about where the origin of the big bang is supposed to be, and how seeing more distant stars could help us understand our own galaxy's position in the universe. i've had the idea that the big bang is in the "middle", with matter generally heading outward ever since. that might be wrong in itself, i don't know. [coughs directly into mic, saliva sounds]. would the webb's ability to see farther than ever before provide additional data about the previous celestial coordinates/paths of existing stars/objects that we already knew about? is it possible to "see" that an existing galaxy briefly obscured another galaxy or affected its gravity/path at some point in the past?

i don't know, you can disregard and ad lib freely, i'll take my answer off the air, thank u caek

"if you could travel against the light quickly enough, you experience all of the billions of years of its history in the time that it takes you to travel from earth to the star."

"effectively freeze one's experience of time by "riding along" the path of the distant star's light at the exact same speed, always seeing it in the same way."

these things are not possible, because, however fast you go, in whatever direction, light travels at the speed of light relative to you. that's special relativity baby.

"the webb's ability to see farther than ever before"

i think you're a bit confused about the way in which it is true. imagine a sailing boat. the webb telescope doesn't see further by moving the horizon away from us. things still drop below the horizon when they drop below the horizon. the webb allows us to see further by having better eyesight. i.e. at a given distance, the webb can see fainter things than existing space telescopes. in the case of telescopes, the horizon is set by the speed of light. it is essentially the speed of light x the age of the universe away from us. no innovations in telescope design will ever change this.

if I may throw some of my thoughts in the air here

what we see is long gone - it either doesn't exist anymore or it's far away from where the light started its travels (point at the Sun: you're wrong, you're pointing at where it was 8 minutes ago)

the big bang happened everywhere. the whole universe was there when it happened. (/it's still happening)

thanks caek!

i do want to say that for a brief time, i felt like i could barely understand time travel and how it might work, and in that moment i was standing on the shoulders of nincompoops

Time does slow down for you the faster you travel though (i.e. In your subjective experience, external events speed up). This is the probably the second easiest way to travel forward in time, the first being cryogenic freezing (pending first successful thawing of human subject).

Time does slow down for you the faster you travel though

This is definitely true in Nebraska

but the very easiest way of all to travel forward in time is to do nothing special at all and just let it happen

I knew i should have specified faster than one second per second.

faster than one second per second

but cryogenic freezing doesn't alter the pace of time itself; it merely suspends one's perception of its passage even as time galumphs along at its normal rate.

If I pass through a wormhole or race off and back at light speed or accidentally fall into a cryogenic freezer, what's the difference when I appear/arrive/wake up in the year 3000?

there is no difference in your perceptions, but there is a major difference in the physics

first of all, techno

xp

i hold that the techno would be extremely different and immediate

besides that, energy lasers have replaced bullets, every door requires a digital key card, and your name is cobra19

cobra19? What is this, the 2500s?

haha, otm it's true

iirc if you can hit warp 10 you will experience being everywhere all at once, but then you turn into a lizard

The W boson appears to be heavier than expected:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0101

Yeah I've seen skepticism on this from people who know more than me, gonna need a ruling from caek.

Not my area at all but here’s a couple of posts on it by reliable scientists

https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/04/09/massive-excitement/

https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/04/08/a-few-remarks-on-the-w-boson-mass-measurement/

oh! thanks!

The James Webb Space Telescope analysing sound from the heart of the galaxy is amazing. I had no idea this was possible
(film courtesy of NASA) pic.twitter.com/mrOQ0LnlB6

— Chris (@justachrisaway) March 29, 2022

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098472567/image-black-hole-milky-way?t=1652362048265

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/05/12/black-hole-milky-way-bb0124cb43ed0a77533657759baa424f5d5fce7c-s800-c85.webp

itt: stanm posts hole

pictured: the day after spicy food

how many billions of years do I have to wait before I'm pulled into the giant black hole?

make it now, please

dynamically extremely difficult for anything other than dust and gas to get pulled into a black hole, sorry for your loss.

you might get lucky when we collide with andromeda in 5bn years, but both galaxies are almost entirely empty space, so probably not.

i can wait

fun fact: you could easily fit all the other planets in the gap between the earth and the moon.

cannot stress enough how empty space is.

Andromeda, the closest galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away. 2.5 million years ago, the first homo habilis started to evolve. If humans could travel at the speed of light (in stasis, I suppose), look around a bit, make friends with some andromedans and then come back, what species would they report to, 5 million years in the future? (if they managed to find the solar system and Earth again and something was still alive here, that is).

And that is our closest neighbouring galaxy, remember.

there's a lot of space in space.

[cue Hawkwind's "Space Is Deep"]

dust and gas

ease yourself into
a body bag

A perspective view on Jupiter with artificial vertical relief applied. Processed using @NASAJuno imagery from Perijove 26https://t.co/5EVEk1zX8c pic.twitter.com/N5qlmYLCwT

— Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) August 20, 2020

beautiful!

no.

uh oh, downvotes for Jupiter

"Upset stomach? Try Pepto Bismol."

"Upset stomach? Try Pepto Bismol."

*hiccup*

I stand with mookie

jwst about to do it

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

me after a few pints

https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GFRYYRTCTMX197BY86MBFCR9.png

that's where Tar Trek happens