zmescience.com — a physicist from Austria claims that our planet experiences something which resembles breathing; gravity gets weaker and stronger; according to him it takes about 700.000 years for such a cycle to take place and we are close to the moment where it is very weak
Nov 12, 2007 View in Crawl 4
woecipNov 12, 2007
":Anything COULD be doing anything..."I could be digging you up....but Im not...
Closed AccountNov 12, 2007
Energy is mass. E = mc^2. Also, photosynthesis does not create mass, it just gives the plant energy to rearrange molecules inside itself. If you assert that a plant is mostly created out of energy obtained by photosynthesis, and that a plant has a mass of 0.10 kg or something, this gives 9 * 10^15 Joules of energy needed to generate the plant's matter out of energy. The amount of energy blanketed over the Earth is on the order of a few Joules per second, so we are talking thousands of trillions of seconds, which is > 100 million years of uninterrupted sunlight (assuming about 3 W/m^2.... and that's very liberal).As for the second one, I'm not entirely sure. Angular momentum is conserved, so my first instinct was that yes it might be possible. The effect would probably be unmeasurable, though, since the mass of all the humans on the planet is virtually nothing compared to the mass of the rest of the planet.
cjh24Nov 13, 2007
that's NOT how gravity works
tdskateNov 13, 2007
that would be awesome! it would make skateboarding so much easier
hammerattackNov 13, 2007
The moons pull also creates the tides and keeps the Earths core molten. In the latter case if the Earth's core goes cold - along with its 500 mega ampere current flow, then the Earth's magnetic field will collapse. Radiation will pound the surface, and solar winds will slowly sweep away the atmosphere. We'd be like Mars.
starmanjonesNov 14, 2007
i read down through this and i was shocked that comments completely miss the obvious. damn the field... it doesn't change the mass. the earth can expand all it wants and its not going to effect gravity in any significant way. weird.
robsayshelloNov 17, 2007
Remember when Superman flew around the earth really fast, putting it into retrograde rotation thereby reversing the flow of time ? This article reminded me of that so I'm burying it.
brentinkcNov 17, 2007
What?