I don't trust bald people.

I don't think that "astronomy/physics for everyone" is a good idea. Abandon hope now that a significant percentage of any sample of humans are going to ever understand what this means.

Because it's so dinky is what makes it so powerful.

Well, that oughta shut up my girlfriend.

I don't trust people with crotch shots for their avatar.

Not a great explanation.

Upvote for the dinky.

>> ^budzos:
Not a great explanation.


He would lose his target audience if he were to get technical. Someone has to explain this stuff at this level for most people to have any grasp of it at all. In a country (United States) where a majority believes we lived alongside dinosaurs, this guy is the first line of defense.

I wish this guy was my astronomy teacher. It would be fun to answer "Cause it's dinky" on a test =)

Yay, science for everyone.

>> ^budzos:
Not a great explanation.


It's a perfect explanation, gravity is a function of distance, object is smaller, therefore you can get closer, therefore gravity increases (exponentially).

I don't believe in Gravity. It is just a 'theory' after all. I think we orbit the Sun because God tied an ethereal chain to the Earth and Sun. Forever linking the two bodies together.

Magic is real too.

He should talk to this guy

http://www.videosift.com/video/Idiot-Judge-Says-Black-Hole-is-Racist

"He should talk to this guy

http://www.videosift.com/video/Idiot-Judge-Says-Black-Hole-is-Racist "

Yeah. He has blogged about that story a few times IIRC.

Gravity is such a weak force that the electromagnetic force in a tiny magnet can lift up a paperclip, far overwhelming the gravity from the Earths entire 6,600 _billion_ _billion_ _tons_ of mass.

It's a perfect explanation, gravity is a function of distance, object is smaller, therefore you can get closer, therefore gravity increases (exponentially).

Do you think that was explained clearly?

His explanation could be a bit better. The key to the answer to the viewer's question is that the universe doesn't recognize macro objects like stars, planets, etc; as far as gravity is concerned it's all just particles. He comes close to this when he talks about getting closer to the black hole because it's smaller, but he should have taken it a step further. If you were standing on the surface of a star, only some of the particles that make up that star would be close to you, most of them hundreds of thousands to millions of miles away from you. Since gravity's strength is dependent on distance, those far away particles would have relatively little effect on you. If you were standing on the surface of a black hole, those particles would all be only a couple miles at most away from you. That's ignoring the issue of what a black hole is really made of, which isn't relavent here; to be more accurate we could just replace of the concept of "x number of particles" with "x amount of mass".

That said, Phil Plait is good stuff. I check his blog daily.

>> ^deathcow:
Gravity is such a weak force that the electromagnetic force in a tiny magnet can lift up a paperclip, far overwhelming the gravity from the Earths entire 6,600 _billion_ _billion_ _tons_ of mass.


Actually... the magnet can do that only because its dinky.

>> ^budzos:
Not a great explanation.

I concur. It's not just that you're getting 'closer to the object', he should specify that it's because every particle in that object, each containing its own gravity, is now closer to you. Saying that you just have to be closer makes it sound like if you were touching or at the center of the Sun, you'd get as much gravity as being right outside of a black hole of the same mass, which isn't the case. Someone of a technical mind may understand this without explanation, but unfortunately the average Joe/Jane probably wouldn't. To them, closer generally ends at touching, but sometimes include being inside the object. Either way it isn't good enough to just use the words 'closer to the object'.

OK, so we do know that Dark Matter is affected by Gravity. We've observed it and have seen it in simulations of galaxies colliding. So, what do we observe (or DON'T observe) when Dark Matter is swallowed by a Black Hole? Can this observation (or lack thereof) be used to help us find out what Dark Matter is made of?