Nuclear Explosion [weapon] in Space - result?

[Dannyalcatraz]

FWIW, there was a discussion of the meteor thing on NatGeo tonight...

Unfortunately, the scientists in the show tended to be of the opinion that the loosely aggregated meteors were the more serious problem.

Despite the very correct analogy upthread about the ping-pong balls, the problem is that the particles in question are still fairly massive and are incredibly fast. The consensus was that the myriad of particles would tend to airburst...generating an "atomic shotgun" effect.

The heat, pressure waves and so forth, while potentially less than that generated by a cohesive meteor's strike, would be worse in that it would be harder to avoid.

That is:

1. - the damage would be spread out over a larger area. Less overall damage than the cohesive meteor's strike, but still lethal enough. Its akin the difference between a buried or surface nuke and an airburst.
2. - it would be a harder meteor to deal with. A solid one would react predictably with a nuclear strike and could be destroyed or deflected, whereas a non-cohesive one might simply spread out.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Shouldn't you switch the polarity instead?

No, you should cross the streams!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Close. IIRC Geordi from Star Trek often fixed things by switching the polarity.

Ultimately, it was an expression I used to let everyone's Sci-Fi neurons fire and remember the various techno-babble found in Science Fiction.

Polarity, Modulating, Reversing, Flows, Neutrons, Neutrinos and all that work fine for this.

 

[Pbartender]

Ultimately, it was an expression I used to let everyone's Sci-Fi neurons fire and remember the various techno-babble found in Science Fiction.

Polarity, Modulating, Reversing, Flows, Neutrons, Neutrinos and all that work fine for this.

Don't forget "inverting", "fluxes", "fields", "frequencies" and "tachyons".

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Don't forget "inverting", "fluxes", "fields", "frequencies" and "tachyons".

Dang, if I could only travel back in time to change the post!

But I don't have a flux compensator, and the tachyon field around EN World is not strong enough anway. Though maybe if I invert the field frequency, I can do something...

 

[Pbartender]

Dang, if I could only travel back in time to change the post!

Just invert the flux frequency of your tachyon field.

 

[Joker]

Dang, if I could only travel back in time to change the post!

But I don't have a flux compensator, and the tachyon field around EN World is not strong enough anway. Though maybe if I invert the field frequency, I can do something...

Are you sure you're giving it all she's got?

 

[TanisFrey]

Not especially difficult, if they really wanted to, or needed to...

Article XV

Any State Party to the Treaty may propose amendments to this Treaty. Amendments shall enter into force for each State Party to the Treaty accepting the amendments upon their acceptance by a majority of the States Parties to the Treaty and thereafter for each remaining State Party to the Treaty on the date of acceptance by it.​

Who needs an ICBM? There's a lot of other ways to deliver a nuke to an asteroid, if you wanted to.

To a large degree, it'd depend on how much advance warning you get, and how much advance preparations you make.

Most movies and most laypeople believe the ICBM is capable of delivering nukes to an incoming asteroid. In actually, most can't help the situation at all.

The treaty
If we know on a object on a collision course, I say fire one to alter it's orbit. Then we can alter the treaty. Why? The earlier we try to change course the more likely we will be successful.

Better to be alive and in court than waiting to die while diplomats try to amend a piece of paper.

 

[freyar]

Except that in all likelihood, neutrinos are their own antiparticle.

Helicity is the component of a particle's spin in the direction of its motion. The distribution of helicity is dependent on the particle's mass. If it were a massless particle, it would always have positive helicity (spin always aligned with the direction of motion). Neutrinos are not massless (this has been fairly well demonstrated), but the mass is very, very small.

If neutrinos are their own antiparticle, then we've seen loads of negative helicity neutrinos. If they aren't their own antiparticle, then we would not expect to have seen many - but the distribution would exist regardless.

My doctoral thesis work was on spin propagation in high energy jet formation. My early work used a flat positive helicity for all neutrinos in the simulation, but then I had to go back and make corrections for the rare other case.

If I hadn't been grossly oversimplifying in my previous post, that's basically exactly what I would have been saying. But that's not quite right. I'm going to delve into technical stuff for Umbran and the other physicists, but I'll set aside parenthetical explanations of what I'm talking about.

Neutrinos can't be their own antiparticles. First of all, there's lepton number (which essentially counts the number of electron-like particles). Neutrinos, which are always left-handed helicity (if they move along your left hand thumb, they "rotate" in the direction of your left-hand fingers), have L=+1, but right-handed anti-neutrinos have L=-1. This is in the Standard Model (of particle physics, and, yes, it's supposed to be capitalized ), and it's also experimental observation. But lepton number isn't precisely conserved, so you might want other reasons neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are different. The answer is that neutrinos are charged under the weak force, and the anti-neutrinos fall in the conjugate ("opposite") representation ("charge") (like the antiparticles of electrically charged particles have the opposite electric charge).

The confusion has to do with my statement about "real" vs "complex" numbers for fermions (particles like electrons, protons, etc). There are two distinct ways to cut a normal "complex" fermion into half (make it "real"). One way is to make the particle the same as the antiparticle. The other way, which applies to neutrinos is to split the regular fermion into so-called chiral fermions. Each chiral fermion only transforms under (pays attention to) half the Lorentz group (changes of velocity as well as rotations); neutrinos only transform under the "left" half. But for massless particles this ends up meaning that they are always left-handed helicity (spin as we've talked about before). As Umbran says, we know that neutrinos have some tiny mass, but the question is whether they get this mass in a way that requires right-handed neutrinos to exist or not. We don't know that yet.