I personally cannot get over Nature. Just on earth, we are witnesses to the awe-inspiring variety of life, the beauty of everything from rainbows to cloud formations, to the Grand Canyon and scenic beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. We have seen the awesome power of Nature last week in the Gulf and with the tsunami, and we will see such fury unleashed again some day.
Many of us lose track of what happens outside of the earth. I was just reminded of this after reading a short article from Scientific American. Astronomers have directly measured a pulsar (i.e. neutron star, a superdense ball of neutrons that just missed becoming a black hole, and one teaspoon of this creature would weigh multiple tons on earth!) that is moving at over 1000 kilometers per second. Talk about impressive. To put this in perspective, human-made space probes, the fastest devices we have built, may cruise through space at several tens of kilometers per second. We have a long way to go to catch up with Nature!
2 comments:
Hi James,
Either way, it is pretty fast. What amazing energy levels we're talking about!
To anyone - is there any way to stop unsolicited ads? I highly doubt it in the comments section, but it is most annoying and does not follow proper online etiquette. Thanks for any suggestions.
Good point, Chris. It is analogies like this that Einstein thought would lead him to a unified theroy of gravity and EM. One thing to consider: If a star could ever move at relativistic speeds, the mass-energy density increases, and the result should be an increase in the gravitational field (classically) or more significant warping of spacetime (relativistically). It is fun to think about!
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