musicalphysics

Nope, a mad scientist

Ha! Awesome. Happy to know that even though I’m not a professor anymore there are still places where I can inspire more physics questions.

Yep, methane creates CO2 when burned. Atmospheric methane reacts with atmospheric OH to also make CO2 and water.

I can’t help but feel like this post was generated from a physics discussion I had the other day here.

Methane was rebranded as natural gas and is used to generate electricity, heat homes, and cook food. Among other uses.

And while it’s a potent greenhouse gas it breaks down much faster than CO2 in the atmosphere

Incorrect. Methane breaks down into CO2. After it causes the atmosphere to retain significantly more heat. As CO2 it continues to contribute to climate change.

You are welcome. Thanks for the interest in physics.

Well, parts of interstellar are accurate. :) That being said, time dilation due to gravity is real. Go someplace heavy for awhile and then leave and you will travel far into the future. The spaceship-observer example is special relativity. The gravity thing is general relativity. I’m not sure I have a non math explanation here so, simply put, time dilation due to gravity is different.

You can get a similar outcome by going somewhere real fast, then turning around, and going real fast again back towards the start. In the rocket frame that may take, say 10 years, but more years will have passed by on Earth.

You may think this breaks the symmetry I brought up earlier, and it does, but that symmetry breaking occurs when the rocket accelerates a whole bunch turning around and heading back home. On the outbound journey though the rocket will think the earth clock is slow, and vice versa. Similarly, on the return journey the same thing occurs. During the acceleration phase though things gets real weird. Or weirder I should say.

Correct. Everyone thinks their second and meter are unchanged. Everyone else’s second is slower and their rulers are compressed.

Hard to explain the details without using math. Relativity is not intuitive as we don’t encounter relativistic effects in everyday human life.

Relativity build upon the fact that there are no absolute reference frames. If time was absolute then sure, one person would appear slow while the other appears fast. But it isn’t absolute, it is relative. This means outcomes need to be symmetric. So a stationary observer checking out a spacecraft going fast is the same as going fast while observing a stationary spacecraft.

Yep. Relativistic effects are generally not what we would intuitively expect.

Yep.

Another physicist here. I see that the issue of traveling at the speed of light has already been addressed. So I’ll ignore that bit. Otherwise, yes, the time dilation would make it appear to an observer that the traveler is speaking slowly. It would also make it appear to the traveler that the observer is speaking slowly.