Starship Asterisk*

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/morrison.html wrote:

<<Philip Morrison, (7 November 1915 – 22 April 2005) was a member of the Manhattan Project who went on to become a vocal critic of the nuclear arms race, Morrison was widely known for his research and professional contributions in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear theory, radiology, isotope geology and, since the 1950s, in cosmic-ray origins and propagation, gamma-ray astronomy and other topics in high-energy astrophysics and in cosmology.

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo ... an___1975/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/jacksmernov/videos/1/

Morrison was among the first scientists (in 1959) to call upon the professional community to begin a coordinated search for interstellar communications using a microwave search. His many publications and speeches, beyond research and astronomy, center on two large issues: nuclear and conventional war and American policy; and the teaching and public understanding of physics and science in general. He has authored or co-authored many books on these subjects, including "The Price of Defense," which he co-authored with five other students of the arms issue. The book, published in 1979, was the first to propose a detailed alternative defense posture for the United States.

A regular reviewer of books on science for Scientific American since 1965, Morrison had also narrated and helped script films on science for Charles and Ray Eames. He appeared widely on radio and on British, Canadian and American television in a number of science programs and series, most visibly as author-presenter (with his wife, the late Phylis Morrison) of a six-part national Public Broadcasting System series, "The Ring of Truth," which first aired in 1987. He and his wife co-authored a book, "The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry Into How We Know What We Know" (Random House, 1987) as a companion to the series.

Philip Morrison was born in Somerville, N.J., in 1915. He attended Pittsburgh public schools and received the B.S. degree from the Carnegie Institute for Technology in 1936. In 1940 he received the Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For the next two years he taught physics at San Francisco State College and at the University of Illinois before joining the Manhattan Project. In 1946, Morrison joined the physics faculty at Cornell University, where he remained until he came to MIT in 1964.

From 1943 to 1946 Morrison was associated with the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for the development of the first atomic bomb. He joined the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago toward the end of 1942. He was a physicist and group leader there and later at Los Alamos from 1942 to 1946. In 1945, it was Morrison, riding in the back seat of an automobile, who brought the bomb's plutonium core from Los Alamos to the New Mexico desert site for the first test. He also was at the island air base of Tinian, from which two bombs were launched against Japan. He later witnessed the aftermath of the explosion at Hiroshima in a visit immediately following the war.

In 1984, Morrison's faculty colleagues named him the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award Lecturer for the academic year 1984-85. The citation read, in part, "Philip Morrison is more than a distinguished scholar. He represents an attitude, a way of life, a symbol for what one might call 'joy of insight' or 'thirst for knowledge.' No one has better demonstrated, or rather embodied, what it means to the human soul to perceive or recognize a new scientific discovery or a new theoretical insight. Scientific knowledge and understanding is not a purely cerebral affair; it is soaked with emotion, excitement, and nervous tension, as everyone knows who has heard Philip Morrison talk. "He has a gift for language and a wide-ranging intellect which allow him to draw upon insights from different fields to help illuminate a subject.">>

Javachip wrote:
In the first part of this movie, the side of the visible square starts at 1 meter at time t=0 seconds, and then increases by a factor of 10 every 10 seconds. For this to happen, our velocity away from the starting point must start at zero and then increase more and more rapidly. Questions: what formula gives our velocity at any time t? What formula gives our acceleration at any time t? At what time t will our velocity equal the speed of light, 3x10^8 meters/second, assuming that is possible? Thank you.

• t = 10 log(z)
  
  z = 10^t/10 = e^{(ln(10)/10) t}
  v = (ln(10)/10) z ~ 0.23 z
  a = (ln(10)/10) v ~ 0.23 v ~ (z/185) g's
  
  c ~ 3 x 10⁸ ~ 0.23 z_c
  z_c ~ 1.3 x 10⁹ meters
  t_c ~ 10 log(1.3 x 10⁹) = 91.14 seconds

León wrote:1.-I agree with Protagoras that man is the measure of all things, and the construction of the video was made on the basis of man to the maximum, and in man to a minimum..

NoelC wrote:Fun!

At what point did we exceed the speed of light? Was that what you wrote, neufer, when you expressed the following?

t_c ~ 10 log(1.3 x 10⁹) = 91.14 seconds

neufer wrote:(We would have been dead long before that from the g forces in any event.)

rstevenson wrote:Nah... Artificial gravity is a well known by-product of any technology which allows us to accelerate past the speed of light. Not to worry.

GoBears wrote:I have a used set of gravitational tenterhooks for sale on eBay if anyone is interested.

rstevenson wrote:

neufer wrote:
(We would have been dead long before that from the g forces in any event.)

Nah... Artificial gravity is a well known by-product of any technology which allows us to accelerate past the speed of light. Not to worry.

I suppose if the Earth were orbiting a black hole that there would be spiraling rocket trajectories into that black hole that would temporarily emulate exponential acceleration away from the earth (and towards the black hole) where the g forces would be close to zero.