Most of those empty spaces between the wings filled with galaxy clusters are places that haven't been mapped by this project yet.

About there being a center of the universe you could say we are at the center of our observable universe, this is because we can only see up to the places where light has been coming from (actually 46 billion ly in all directions).

However imagine a star system 15 billion light years away from us, they can also so a sphere with a radius of 46bly. This means that they can look 15 billion light years into a direction we cannot see. Furthermore this means we have no idea of how big the actual universe it. It could be tens of times bigger than we see, 10^10 times bigger, or infinite. The center of the real universe must be at the big bang so in a sense everywhere is the center because from out the big bang everything was inflated from nothing into everything. This inflation because it was faster than light has led us to be unconnected with the universe beyond 46bly.

Mind boggling cannot describe the awesomeness and ungraspability of the whole universe.

It's remarkable how cool LCARS looks and how horrible an UI it is. You get to squint at the real data while the empty spaces get lots of cool colors 'n' stuff.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be an authority on the topic, I just thought I'd share my musings for any who may be interested

I'm extremely surprised that none of the physicist could give a remotely satisfactory answer to the beam-hand interaction question. I realise that the energies involved are extreme so weird things may happen and they obviously specialise in more fundamental aspects of the physics but I would have expected all of them to know at least a little bit about the physics of interactions between charged particle radiation beams with solid objects or water.

I only learnt a bit about proton beam therapy used in radiation oncology during my Masters in Medical Physics, and I'll admit I've forgotten a lot of it and can't remember all the calculations or parameters involved, but it seems to me like this would be a similar although perhaps more extreme case. Ultimately you would be receiving some dose of ionising radiation, the amount would depend on various things.

As solid as our hand appears to be it is still mostly empty space on an atomic scale, and there is a very high likelihood that protons in the beam will not collide with anything as they pass through. This is particularly true at very high energies, I forget exactly why... either due to momentum or the time spent in close enough proximity with atomic nuclei or something, but protons interact relatively weakly until they lose enough energy through the few interactions that do occur, at which point the likelihood of further interactions rises exponentially dumping all the remaining energy very rapidly. It is interesting to note here that at medically relevant energies 100-200Mev (17-35 thousand times lower than the LHC) this energy dump requires between 5 and 20cm tissue for the initial slow down to take place before the beams slow enough to dump the bulk of their energy. Your hand is at most a few centimetres thick and barely sufficient enough to do this at 100MeV let alone 3.5TeV. Graph which illustrates this.

Anyway, energy from the beam would be deposited due to some deflections and collisions and result in ionisation of some atoms either directly by collisions or indirectly by xray/gamma rays produced in the interactions. The few direct collisions between protons in the beam and atomic nuclei would also likely result in exotic particles and radiation further contributing to the dose you receive.

Other things to consider are whether the protons that shoot through your hand are still following sensible enough trajectories for the LHC to bend them around for another pass. At near light speeds they would be shooting around the LHC many thousands of times per second so even if the chances of interactions occuring in your hand are slim, each proton that manages to make another pass rather than shoot off on a random path that takes it out of the LHC, will have many opportunities to interact and deposit energy.

So depending on just how many protons are in the beam, and how much energy they dump into your hand, the effect could be anywhere from increased chance of cancer to a radiation burn of some sort if not a hole in your hand (although I suspect that most extreme scenario is unlikely).

All of this assumes my understanding isn't completely void at the energies involved which, if it is, may explain why the physicists didn't mention any of this.

Since we're on the subject, this page show the supposed scale of an atom, and how insignificant the electron is in size, and yet their electrical forces are equal.

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Mcboinkens:
The universe into bowling ball size was actually interesting. Obviously false, but space between particles is a pretty cool concept. Mostly seen in stars. Neutron stars blow my mind.

It's probably not far off, the whole of humanity could fit into the volume of a sugar cube if all empty space was removed, so the universe is going to shrink in similar amounts.

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Mcboinkens:
The universe into bowling ball size was actually interesting. Obviously false, but space between particles is a pretty cool concept. Mostly seen in stars. Neutron stars blow my mind.

It's probably not far off, the whole of humanity could fit into the volume of a sugar cube if all empty space was removed, so the universe is going to shrink in similar amounts.


Argh... you're missing the point. It's not saying you CAN or COULD, it's merely highlighting how much of everything around us is actually empty space, it's a handy concept to get across things. I'm not saying you COULD compress the human race into a sugar cube, I'm saying that for all our 'size', most of us is nothing physical.

This does not in any way validate a word these charlatans are saying re homoeopathy... it's just a statement about the nature of things.

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Mcboinkens:
The universe into bowling ball size was actually interesting. Obviously false, but space between particles is a pretty cool concept. Mostly seen in stars. Neutron stars blow my mind.

It's probably not far off, the whole of humanity could fit into the volume of a sugar cube if all empty space was removed, so the universe is going to shrink in similar amounts.

ignoring the fact that it's physically impossible to do, it's also mathesomethingly impossible because you can't collapse electrons like that since electrons don't have a fixed physical boundary. they are more like a moving clump of fog with no exact border.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

The universe into bowling ball size was actually interesting. Obviously false, but space between particles is a pretty cool concept. Mostly seen in stars. Neutron stars blow my mind.


It's probably not far off, the whole of humanity could fit into the volume of a sugar cube if all empty space was removed, so the universe is going to shrink in similar amounts.

You know I don't think I've heard as accurate an analogy in a very long.. no wait, I've never heard quite so accurate an analogy.

Good show Mr. President! I'm hoping come November the American people will prove they don't have the hopelessly short term memory they appear to have and that analogies like this one actually rattle around in that empty space most of us call a brain in the states instead of the lies, hatred and racism that has so consumed the right.

>> ^KnivesOut:

So what's left? A person missing 75% of brain mass in a vegetative state?


I can't speak for this case, but I had a benign tumor the size of a kiwi fruit removed from the left side of my brain 7 years ago, and I'm fine (albeit on anti-seizure meds for probably the rest of my life). How damaging the tumor or cyst is to the brain I think has to do with how quickly it grows,and surely the location; it's probably generally less serious if the tumor/cyst growth occurs on the "outside" of the brain vs inside it.

The brain gets compressed to accommodate the growth, but the brain itself in some/many? cases isn't considered damaged. In my case the compression of the brain finally got to the point where I had a grand-mal seizure -- that was my first clue anything was wrong. After my surgery I basically had a dented brain, but it "bounced back" to its former size over a few months.

My guess is that this person had a similar experience, that they had no clue it was there for quite a while, even though their brain was getting progressively more squashed and they might have been having weird symptoms, like motor or behavioral oddities, or seizures, etc. Depends on the area of the brain that's being stimulated from the compression.

Oh, here's more info on the video from the link provided by Hawkinson above:
_________________

The video below uses saline to gradually "float" the cyst out of the brain. The neurosurgeon gently squirts small volumes of saline into the space around and behind the cyst until it neatly plops into the surgical pan, intact. The patient, a 16 year old girl, fully recovered.

- And, what happens to the hole the cyst left in the brain?

"The empty space initially gets filled up by the fluid which covers thr brain called CSF, then the brain which was compressed by the cyst expands to normal state filling up the space."

whats with all these video's not popping up recently? I see thumb, I click, I get empty space.

What the hell is that space? Why would you have the shelf on the left full, but an empty space big enough for a person to hide in on the right? Maybe if we saw her move some stuff out of the way, but still... unused storage space? I don't know anybody older than college age that wouldn't have filled that space with boxes of shit they should throw out but can't.

And it is way too convenient how he interrupts her and she finds a place to hide off camera.

Nope, I don't buy it.

I doubt we'll get a real estimate at this point. Even if we do, it'll be filtered through the exaggeration machine before it gets to us.

Sigh - true enough. All I can really do is go with the overhead shots of the crowds that were taken LIVE. These did not show 'light' crowds, empty space, or a few isolated lunatic groups. The news feeds of the actual events on the day it happened showed pretty dense crowds that stretched out over 17 city blocks. Say what you like, but that kind of density in that setting makes it physically impossible for the crowd to just be '60 to 70K'. That kind of crowding is well into the hundreds of thousands. I'm sticking with my guesstimate of between 150-300K. I bet I'm more accurate than most folks with that figure...

Hahaha look at all the stupid people - oooo - I'm trembling in my boots for the future of America...

I had the very same reaction when I saw all the lunatics, freaks, idiots, morons, conspiracy theorists, and other nutcases at all the Iraq War protests. It is very easy to go to these kinds of big rallies and find the lunatic fringe. As I said before - the lunatic fringe ALWAYS loves to show up at big rallies wearing tin-foil hats and saying stupid stuff to get attention. It doesn't mean anything.

What surprises me is that neolib are SURPRISED about it. I honestly think that the neolib kook fringe believes that the neocon kook fringe is 'out there' - but that they are myopically unable to see just how 'out there' that they themselves are. They honestly think they are 'mainstream'. Neolib kooks are as much (or more) insane as the neocon kooks though.

Leave us not pretend that the appearance of the neocon kook fringe as a TINY percentage of the 9/12 protesters in any way represents the larger majority of the protesters who simply are concerned about the insane spending, deficits, and rapid increases in federal power. That is a neolib LIE (channeling Wilson). Just like it was a neocon LIE (Wilson) that the Iraq war protests were nothing but kooks. Yeah, both protests have kook fringes to zero in on, but the vast majority are just normal, everyday folks who are concerned about the direction of their country. I for one refuse to accept the propoganda that my fellow citizens are nothing but a bunch of insane lemmings. I tend to think the people as a whole are better than that.

Would be awesome if they pointed it at another empty space and found something: Like my bank account.

>> ^Mcboinkens:
WHile I understand two galaxies wouldn't look like that, would you care to explain the physcis behind it? There have been no instances that we know of where two galaxies collide head on perfectly like the rings above. I'm assuming it's because galaxies are largely empty space that does not move like smoke?


It's prob because galaxies are hundreds of thousands of light years across, and the incredible gravitational pulls of each galaxy will act on each other long before they physically touch. They won't transfer all their momentum in a radial direction like those smoke rings cuz of the gravity.

That's my bs, but here is a page from the official hubble site with lots of pics of colliding galaxies:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/image

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