Re: [DMCForum] Re: Consider this: The sun is hollow.

[Andrew <aos+yahoo@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 15 May 2005, therealdmcvegas wrote:

> They glow because the tungsten particles inside have become excited by 
> the flow of electrical current. This causes them to move rapidly, and of 
> course glow.

Not quite.  If we're being serious about science (which Walt clearly 
wasn't), let's at least get it right...

The incandescent light bulb is to a first approximation an example of 
blackbody radiation.  In the late 1700s, Thomas Wedgwood noticed that 
objects in his china oven (yes, that Wedgwood) glowed the same color at 
the same temperature no matter the composition of the object.  Josef 
Stefan came along and somewhat formalised Wedgwood's discovery, but it 
wasn't until Max Planck a few years later that we finally discovered that 
light is quantized and quantum theory was born.

Your statement that the tungsten molecules move rapidly is in the 
microscopic sense of course correct, in that the resistance of the 
tungsten to the flow of conduction electrons causes some of the energy to 
be lost in the form of heat, causing the average kinetic energy of the 
molecules to rise.  (We measure average molecular kinetic energy 
macroscopically as temperature.)  As the temperature rises, the blackbody 
filament boils off photons in proportion to the fourth power of this 
temperature, creating (from this particular material) light within the 
visible spectrum.

> A byproduct of this exertion of energy is heat.

The relationship is actually the other way around.  The filament glows 
because it is hot.

See these URLs for some simple explanations of the topics relating to 
blackbody radiation:

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/BlackbodyRadiation.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/ThermalRadiation.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Stefan-BoltzmannLaw.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/PlanckLaw.html
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/PlancksConstant.html

> Such is how a "Black Hole" operates. It's magnetisim is so great, that 
> it attracts both mass, and light photons...

Wrong.

Magnetic fields are generated by moving electric currents or moving 
charged particles.  If current theory on black holes is correct (which it 
probably isn't), they are singularities, that is particles with no size. 
It is obviously impossible to move an electric current or charged particle 
across something with infintesmial size.  Black holes do not produce 
magnetic fields.

To be more specific, we can actually measure some magnetism from black 
holes, but only due to the presence of fast moving ionized particles in 
the accretion disc, but these fields tend to be very small.

Furthermore, magnetism doesn't attract "mass."  It attracts ferromagnetic 
matter, which light isn't.

Black holes have extremely high gravity, and the gravitational field is 
what attracts the light.  Gravitational fields are produced by anything 
with mass and attract anything with mass.  Interestingly, light is 
massless and yet it is still attracted by gravity.  This is an effect of 
relativistic effective mass, which causes a massless photon to behave as 
if it has a mass of hf/c^2, h Planck's constant, f frequency, c speed of 
light.

By the way, Walt was kidding.

-andrew

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