Mass Debate

posted on February 20th, 2011, 9:34 pm

Simply to show up your ignorance, not that you haven't already done that yourself.

whats with the personal attack? when have i personally attacked you at any time? is your argument that weak that you can only resort to insults?

If the distances are so vast that gravitational effect is zero, how come stars orbit the centre of the galaxy? Because gravitational effect is never zero.

we are talking about the scale of scube, with little mass.

the centre of a galaxy has a very large mass, as do stars. therefore the distances required for their gravitational attraction to be small is even larger.

If infinity is not real (which is what I said too), how can you "approach infinity"? You can't.

see that just proves you have no understanding of degree level maths. the term approaching infinity doesnt imply being close to a number called infinity. it implies getting big. if you dont understand limits you're not gonna understand the ideas here. the distance measurement in the distance to gravitational force relation is measured in metres, when you get to lightyears away from the nearest source of gravity then measurements in metres become stupidly large, so large that we take the limit as they approach infinity, ie really really big on a scale you arent comprehending. the value of the force due to gravity would be infinitely small.

In freefall, you are accelerating, so yes, you are still encountering gravitational force.

thats not true, you only have weight when gravity is opposed. in freefall gravity is NOT opposed. thus there is no weight, no gravitational force. when you stand on the surface of a planet, the surface pushes back with enough force to prevent you from falling, that is when you have weight. when the hypothetical scube uses engines to oppose the gravity of a planet, then it has weight.

Wikipedia is just one place to look. You can make fun of me linking to it, but you're just making yourself look small.

that is ridiculous please explain to me how i am small because you posted a link to a rubbish source? i'd love to know how not taking the word of bad sources makes someone small. so if a crazy person on the street told me doomsday was coming and the end is nigh and i ignored them i would be small? i believe you cant find any credible sources.

You are obviously ignorant of the difference, so yes, you do need to look it up.

i am not ignorant, you are too stubborn to admit you are wrong.

How about a dictionary?

how about you get a real argument, instead of launching petty insults and sarcasm? do you really have nothing more to say than that? respond to my ideas or dont respond at all.

Oh, and btw, "deep space" is defined as anything outside a planet's atmosphere, so you might want to change your use of that terminology too.

that is a failure of words to express such distances. in this context, we are talking about a scube in interstellar space. so i will use deep space to mean in the interstellar void. where you are outside of the gravitational effect of star systems.

[Atlantis]

posted on February 20th, 2011, 9:50 pm

Last edited by Atlantis on February 20th, 2011, 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong on the most fundemental level. In inverse squared you can never reach zero. "Negligible" yes, "effectively zero" yes, "practically zero" yes, but never "literally zero".

whats with the personal attack? when have i personally attacked you at any time? is your argument that weak that you can only resort to insults?

That's how you talk to everyone else. It seems you can't take what you give out.

we are talking about the scale of scube, with little mass.

Little, but not zero.

The only way you can have zero effect is to have zero mass.

how about you get a real argument, instead of launching petty insults and sarcasm? do you really have nothing more to say than that? respond to my ideas or dont respond at all.

Read your own posts. This is how you are with everyone else. Think about that.

so i will use deep space to mean in the interstellar void. where you are outside of the gravitational effect of star systems.

You are NEVER outside that effect. Every atom affects every atom at any distance.

In inverse squared you can never reach zero. Basic mathematics. Prove that wrong.

I will quite happily walk away from this little argument. I've had my fun, and I've proven you wrong. That's all there is to it. Cya ;-)

posted on February 20th, 2011, 10:32 pm

That's how you talk to everyone else. It seems you can't take what you give out.
Read your own posts. This is how you are with everyone else. Think about that.

i'd very much like you to quote that. i have attacked only your arguments and ideas. never you. sadly you cannot say the same.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong on the most fundemental level. In inverse squared you can never reach zero. "Negligible" yes, "effectively zero" yes, "practically zero" yes, but never "literally zero".

that is incorrect. i suggest you study further into this, study the mathematical idea of a limit. and you will see that due to the rate of growth of distance squared being much faster than the rate of growth of the mass, which is obviously zero as mass is constant, implies that as distance becomes huge the weight becomes zero.

The only way you can have zero effect is to have zero mass.

that is incorrect. you can ignore distance and have something in freefall and it will have no weight. it could be 1 metre away from a black hole, if it is in freefall it doesnt weigh anything.

You are NEVER outside that effect. Every atom affects every atom at any distance.

that is incorrect because of the mathsy stuff i was talking about earlier. take an empty universe with a 1 kg mass at a distance of 1million ly from another 1kg mass, they wont ever meet, they would need an infinite amount of time to meet.

In inverse squared you can never reach zero. Basic mathematics. Prove that wrong.

as i said, go study what a limit is. its not basic maths, it's degree level maths.

the limit of something being 0 doesnt mean it is equal to 0 mathematically, but it means we can make it arbitrarily close to 0. which for anybody's purposes is 0.

I will quite happily walk away from this little argument. I've had my fun, and I've proven you wrong. That's all there is to it. Cya ;-)

you had fun personally attacking me? thats a shame.

you havnt proven me wrong, and you cant unilaterally decide you have won an argument because you have run out of things to say debates dont work like that im afraid, if only i could say "i won cya" and automatically win, i would have done that at the start

posted on February 20th, 2011, 10:39 pm

As Myles already brought up, when the distance between the objects increase infinitely the gravity force nears zero. With Newton's gravity law:

[align=center][img]http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chf=bg,s,000000&chco=ffffff&cht=tx&chl=lim_{r%20to%20infty}%20G%20frac{m_1%20m_2}{r^2}%20=0[/img][/align]

posted on February 20th, 2011, 10:41 pm

nice image zebh, yep thats the limit.

its kinda difficult to explain a limit to somebody who hasnt studied 1st year undergrad maths otherwise im sure a lot of the stuff could be cleared up.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 4:43 am

As Myles already brought up, when the distance between the objects increase infinitely the gravity force nears zero. With Newton's gravity law:

[align=center][img]http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chf=bg,s,000000&chco=ffffff&cht=tx&chl=lim_{r%20to%20infty}%20G%20frac{m_1%20m_2}{r^2}%20=0[/img][/align]

Well Zebh, now we just need an infinite distance...

posted on February 21st, 2011, 8:48 am

Okay, we are 50 km away from a target with a certain mass and we have sensors, that are working with a certain spectral resolution. If we widen this spectrum, we will lose resuolution, but gain a wider arc of analysis, if we focus the spectrum to a certain point, we get a higher resolution but a lower "margin" on what we can detect.

Its similar to the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle. We always have a tradeoff. So if we want to detect a certain mass in the noise of gravimetrical interference, we have to know, what mass we search for. So, for Fleet-Ops, we just know, we fight against an scube and set the sensors to it. Disadvantage: We cant detect any other ships than the scube, because they become invisible for the sensors, because they are out of "mass-range" of the spectrum, we want to analyse.

We can now do hard math on it, or we just try understand the basics any maybe build in a nice game mechanic, like adaptive sensor arrays, that are able to increase the hit rate of torps to certain targets. Because the sensors must be very good to detect a small mass, only scouts should have those sensors. (High resolution targetting computers... you know, those things we have on a starbase) Link this passive ability with a synergy-effect (now we have a use of "commad-ships") and you get it.

Think out of the box. And chill down everyone.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 9:55 am

Well Zebh, now we just need an infinite distance...

that is incorrect, what you need is a large distance. limits (approaching infinity) dont work by evaluating a function at infinity, there is no requirement that the function be defined at the value the limit approaches. it works by taking the distance to be large.

if u do a simple calculation you will see how quickly this function (with argument r) decays. putting 2 1kg point masses at 1ly apart, and you already are talking over 20 zeroes after the decimal point and before a significant figure. and thats only 1 ly, in a mediocre galaxy that is roughly 100,000 lys wide, in a universe with at least billions of galaxies.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 2:35 pm

nice image zebh, yep thats the limit.

its kinda difficult to explain a limit to somebody who hasnt studied 1st year undergrad maths otherwise im sure a lot of the stuff could be cleared up.

So how's this a debate?   It seems like just simple math to me and I have only a basic grasp of calculus.  There is no debating math.  It simply works or it does not.  You can debate it all you want, but in the end you will simply be right or wrong and its a lot easier to just test the math and find out.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 2:39 pm

It's a debate because there are opposing views, just being established doesn't mean everyone will automatically agree with it or not have their own interpretation.

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on February 21st, 2011, 3:46 pm

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on February 21st, 2011, 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

...and I have only a basic grasp of calculus.

Well then, I'll try to explain the limit thing that Myles and Zebh were using (for you as well as those that don't have any understanding of calculus.)

Let's say there's a hole in the graph at x=5, but the rest of the graph has the function. So, we can use a limit to say that f(x) (or y) is approaching some value as it gets to x=5.
Same can go for x=infinity, which of course we can never get to. So maybe at x=1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 y=1.99999999 and the bigger number we put in never gets to 2. We can then say that the limit as x approaches (approaches since it never can get there) infinity is 2.
Limits also apply to reachable points on the graph, but there's little use for them there.

So when they say that the limit as r approaches infinity is 0, they mean that gravity gets damn close to 0 (notice Zebh said "nears 0") when r gets really big. But in order to actually get to 0, you would need infinite r, which is impossible (hence my previous humorous post, and why we need to use a limit to say it.)

posted on February 21st, 2011, 5:08 pm

nebula's definition sounds sensible, but there is far more to limits than that, his definiton is simple to understand, but isnt mathematically rigorous.

@neb, u keep referring to infinity not being and number and needing to evaluate the function at infinity, that is irrelevant here. Thats not the concept of a limit.

The concept here is that we can make the value arbitrarily close (a concept best explained with the epsilon delta definition of the limit, which is not very complex, but actually does a lot for us) to 0 with choices of r, choices that in this case arent difficult ones to make. R doesnt need to be made very big at all compared to the scale of space.

we cant put infinity into the equation, but we can take the appropriate limit, and the result is 0. the scube has no weight because of the decay rate of the function.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 7:41 pm

Even if you take such a small weights in consideration, the object could still be weightless. The object just would need to be in a location where every gravitational force from objects around it are countered by each other.

posted on February 21st, 2011, 7:49 pm

Even if you take such a small weights in consideration, the object could still be weightless. The object just would need to be in a location where every gravitational force from objects around it are countered by each other.

thats another example of weightlessness freefall is another. being in deep deep space is another, which is under debate lol.