BoingBoing reader Paul Camp says,
Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine's Explainer in Residence, has posted a list of submitted but unanswered questions from the preceding year. Many are truly unhinged, such as the one from a guy with apparent connections in Nigeria seeking advice on how to fence gold and gems. Mr. Engber has unwisely promised to answer the one that gets the most votes. Given the demonstrated ability of boing boing readers to bring web servers to their knees, I'm thinking this is a battle we can win.
Link. Here's a sample of the items up for voting:
# Given the exchange and dispersion of matter, how likely is it/how often do we inhale/consume and/or incorporate into our own protein structure molecules that were once in some historical figure, say Abraham Lincoln?
# Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?
#I have been pondering this situation for as long as I can remember (maybe age 7-8) and it drives me nuts. It makes me feel like my head will implode if I think any harder. Is the universe infinite? It must end somewhere. But when it ends… there must be something on the other side… right?
# If a group of passengers on a hijacked plane wanted to, could they bring a plane down by all of them using their cell phones at the same time?
# Can you tell me how long it will take if you eat rat poison to see if it is going to affect you? Please e-mail me back. Because my niece ate some.
# Hi. I just wanted to know if our eyeballs roll back when we are sleeping (or closed) or do they shake? Or…
# PYGMIES: How/when/where/still in existence/do we mate with them?
Reader comment: Anonymous says,
Greg from The Talent Show has already taken a pass as explaining most of the "Unexplained Explainer" questions. A sample :
"If we taught animals to talk, how would that affect the world?"
There would be more vegetarians, but we'd get definitive proof that cows are complete dumbasses.
"What would happen to the stock market if a meteor impacted the earth? What would happen to the global markets and the U.S. market? Say a meteor hits inside U.S. borders and takes out two states."
The insurance industry would crash, but the U.S. government would bail them out. Unfortunately the same won't be done for the millions of refugees created by the meteor strike. But at least the trillions of dollars wasted on the "war against meteors" will create a few more jobs, right? Also, we *must* abolish the death tax.
Tom Mathews says,
I think I know the answers to two of the questions. If you don't read anything else, check out the Stavatti's TIS-1 proposal. The future is now (or, at least, coming soon).
For "breathing in other people", I read an article in (I believe) Science News around 1993. I've forgotten the specifics, and I've tried to track it down on the web, but have been unable to. It involved statistical modeling of gaseous dispersion in the atmosphere, and found a single exhalation would disperse after several hundred years. I believe the example they used was that, in every breath you take, you're breathing in Napoleon's last breath. Now it isn't protein or particulate matter, but it does give an upper bound to the answer.
For the Laser Rifle, check out Stavatti's Tactical Infantry System-1. It's a proposal submitted to the US Army for a gasdynamic laser lethal at over 1000 meters and up to 170 bursts/minute. Lethal lasers with a fast recharge and long life require a lot of energy, so you usually end up talking nuclear. Section VI of the proposal covers the challenges and risks to laser weapons… mainly that of cheaply producing large quantities of Polonium-210 (currently produced only in microgram quantities, and extremely lethal). It's interesting to note that Po-210 is the same thing that the assassin used on Mr. Litvinenko.
The military is also researching non-lethal laser weapons (dazzlers), but that's a touchy area, as blinding weapons are banned by the Geneva convention. The workaround is in Article 3, which states that it's ok to blind as long as that's not the purpose: "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."
Dever says,
BB reader Tom Matthews mentioned the Stavatti TIS-1 and gave a brief description of it under "The Unexplained Explainer". I'm writing to provide you guys with the actual PDF from the company who "makes it" — PDF Link.
Salvador Rodríguez says,
Another one of the unexplainables, explained.
Current theoretical physics indicate the the universe is finite. Let's start with an obvious example:
Is the Earth infinite? Obviously, no. However, if you are a creature tat only moves along the surface of Earth, you might go on endlessly and end up where you started, since the earth is curved. For a two dimensional being the Earth might seem infinite, though it is not. You need to break through a third dimension and fly out to space to really understand that the Earth is finite.
This happens to us when thinking of the Universe. If we think in three dimensions, then the Universe seems infinite to us. However, if we understand that space-time is a third dimension and that the universe is curved along this dimension, we might understand that we might travel endlessly through the Universe only to end up on the other side. If we were to travel through space-time, we might very well find ourselves outside our Universe.
As to the second part of the question, the string of theories (pun intended) is so long we're better off letting the physicist duke it out for a while.
Scott Willoughby says,
We here at Drivl couldn't resist answering Slate Magazine's 40 Unanswerable questions. Link
Paul Camp, of the Spelman College Department of Physics, says,
OK, what I actually had in mind was forcing Engber to address a question that was clearly unanswerable, but this is good too.
Since my academic background is in relativity and cosmology, though, I have to address the "finiteness of the universe" comment. Drawing an analogy to the surface of the Earth is pretty good as far as it goes. Essentially, you let two spatial dimensions represent space, suppressing the third because it has to do duty representing time. Pursuing that analogy, in a closed spacetime the "direction toward the center of the Earth" is playing the role of time and the center of the expansion is the big bang event. That is a rather roundabout way of saying that there is no spatial center just as there is no center to the surface of the Earth ("Mediterranean" notwithstanding).
However, the comment that current belief is that the universe is finite is no longer operational. As of the last 5 years or so, with highly refined measurements of the distances to very distance galaxies, we actually detect that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating due to the presence of dark energy. This necessarily implies that the universe is open and the whole idea of a spherical topology is moot. Not only that, but it means that the universe has always been infinitely big and is expanding only in the sense that the curvature is changing.
This whole discussion revolves around a misunderstanding of what the big bang theory actually says. People think of it like they think of a normal explosion — there is space, and somewhere in it a big boom occurs, and from the boom stuff goes flying out into the existing space. Doesn't work that way.
The stuff (galaxies, etc.) is not flying anywhere. To be more precise, the local motion of any particular bit of stuff is approximately zero. You only see relative motion on cosmological distances, not locally, but that is because the space in between the stuff is changing. The stuff is only going along for the ride.
So a more accurate, if puzzling, picture is that, open or closed, the entire universe has always been full of stuff. The big bang did not happen at some center and stuff is flying out. No, the big bang happened everywhere, all at once, and nothing "flew out." Rather, the geometry of the spacetime in which the stuff exists began to change. Things get further apart because there is more and more space being created between the things, not because the things are flying in any particular direction. Think of it like a bunch of paper clips connecting rubber bands together. If you stretch the rubber bands, the paper clips get further apart, but not because they actually moved around on the rubber bands. The paper clips (galaxies) stayed put. It was the rubber bands (geometry) that changed.
There. Maybe I can work for Slate.
