octoperson

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octoperson , to Ask Science in Why were dinosaurs huge?

🐋

octoperson , to Ask Science in If it were possible for some event to destroy the fabric of spacetime at the speed of light, could we still observe and be safe bc expansion?

If the sphere of destruction is propagating at the speed of light, then any observable effect reaches you at the same time as the sphere itself. Either you don’t observe it because you’re far enough away to be safe, or you don’t observe it because you’re dead the instant it becomes observable.

Incidentally, you might be interested in looking up the idea of false vacuum decay - although if you tend to get anxious about end-of-the-world hypotheticals you might prefer to give it a miss.

octoperson , to xkcd in xkcd #2821: Path Minimization

Path that maximises time would be some kind of space-filling curve. Maybe it does that off panel?

octoperson , (edited ) to Ask Science in Area of gravity at the center of large, dense celestial bodies...

Yeah it’s a pretty counter intuitive result. I’d expect a greater pull of gravity towards the nearer side, but it turns out to be exactly cancelled out by the greater mass on the further side.

E: oops, looking at your edited comment, I should stress this is only for hollow bodies. Your comment pre-edit was correct for non-hollow bodies. If you’re part way to the middle of a planet, you can think of the planet as two sections, a small sphere for the part that’s below you, and a larger hollow shell for the rest. You experience no gravity from the outer shell, so only feel gravity of the smaller mass below. 10m from the earth’s center, you feel equivalent gravity to if you were on a 10m radius iron sphere.

octoperson , to Ask Science in Area of gravity at the center of large, dense celestial bodies...

If you had a planet that was hollow in the center*, the entire hollow region would have zero gravity. You could have a thin-skinned planet with the entire interior an empty weightless void. I doubt any planets like this actually exist.

  • Assuming radial symmetry. If you can represent the planet as concentric spherical shells then you’re good.
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