Q&A 45: Solving Mysteries At The Speed Of Light? And more... Featuring Dr. Paul Sutter
In this Q&A from Iceland, astrophysicist Dr. Paul Sutter steps in to tackle some of the more complicated cosmology and physics based questions from the audience. Did the Big Bang create the matter of the Universe, how close are we do discovering what dark matter is, and more.
Q&A 45: Solving Mysteries At The Speed Of Light? And more... Featuring Dr. Paul Sutter (YouTube)
Comments (4)
You see any cool aurora there in Iceland? The Aurora Iceland trip is one of my bucket list trips. It has been cloudy where I live for... seems like months. Haven't seen any stars in a long time... including the sun.
We saw really light auroras, nothing spectacular. There was a big storm that gave us blowing snow for several days. :-(
Hi Paul/Fraser, can you expand on that conservation of energy fallacy that we all learned in high school? If COE is just a special case, why did it become a bedrock of high school physics?
The biggest problem w/COE on the universal scale is that space-time is expanding, which means the total amount of energy in the universe is not constant. Thus, for the universe at large, COE doesn't work the way we think of in high school physics, because that specifically refers to a closed system. That's not to say it's thrown out the window completely, & as Paul mentioned in the video it does still apply, just in a modified format. In terms of what we see in the everyday -- from billiards to asteroid collisions -- COE works just as we were taught in high school. Another example of this difference between how basic principles work in open & closed systems is entropy, which can go up or down w/in an open system (for example cleaning, i.e., restoring order to your room or house), but in a closed system (the universe as a completely self-contained entity, e.g.) must always increase w/time.