If you feel like calling me a liar (which you just insinuated), sure. But there was no 'vantage point'. I searched the whole driveway. Nothing.
Saying that logical and paranormal 'can never be equated' is actually anti-scientific, just FYI. Further, there was no sleep paralysis. As I said, myself and my mother both saw the exact same thing. As I've also stated, I am normally a SKEPTIC. I disbelieve 99% of 'hauntings'. Strange noises and lights are not hauntings. Seeing a person that doesn't leave any footprints? That's something else entirely.
JM - please start a new thread so you can do your interesting experience justice. This thread is about the fascinating 'normal' Universe.
On the contrary, I didn't insinuate anything about you. You said the logical explanation was that it was paranormal. I pointed out alternative explanations that are also logical.
You outright stated that the witnesses could have been lying. Seeing as I'm one of the witnesses, you either insinuated that I was lying or you really didn't think that sentence through before posting it.
Can we get this thread back on topic? And respect paranormal beliefs enough to at least consider they are sincere.
Yes, please! I want to talk about planets!!!! I'm reading The Sparrow at the moment, so the conversation is very much in point. The tenacity of this other conversation needs to be taken to another venue.
Kepler Mission I noticed Wreybies mentioned the star wobble method of detecting planets and I was wondering if people knew that the new and improved method is detecting light variation when a planet transits its star. Not quite direct observation, but it's getting closer. It was overcast here some months ago when Venus transited the Sun. But I could see a break in the clouds to the south so I literally chased the hole until I got to a place to see the transit. I use wielder's glass over small binoculars to see Sunspots. I could see Venus with and without the binocs. It was so cool. It's great to see Venus when it's a crescent, Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings in a telescope. But somehow this big black circle crossing the Sun was still especially incredible. Did anyone else get a chance to see the transit?
Call me stupid, but isn't glass as we know it made from melted sand or rocks or something? How can it rain, then, I mean, how does it become glass high up enough in the atmosphere to rain down? [MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION]: the new observation method, that's the one they're using Kepler for, right? I heard it might be out of function soon, do you know if the project will die out, or if they have new telescopes planned? I remember reading something about it somewhere, but I forget.
In the paper, one possibility explaining the spectral data is silica, the main component in glass. Since the planet is very close to its star, the temperature suggests the silica would be molten, ergo 'glass'. However, the news article used a bit of poetic license in the headline as I did in the thread title. Glass Kepler telescope, yes. From my earlier link: They had some problems with the instrument but are trying to fix it and news of its demise were premature. There's a chance that NASA's Kepler space telescope can recover from the malfunction that has halted its wildly successful search for alien planets, mission team members say.
Glass is made from silicates. Melting sand is one way, historically. When it solidifies again, glass if formed. It's not really raining "glass" on this planet, since that term refers to the hardened form. Rather, it is raining silicates. The article uses "glass" to give a common frame of reference to the reader. EDIT: It looks like, from [MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION]'s link, 'glasses' can be aqueous, or other molten materials in a wider sense. So my statement above isn't correct. It is more correct to say that while the article uses "glass" to provide a common frame of reference, it is not referring to glass in solid form, as we normally think of it.
Isn't molten glass still glass? It's not the state of the matter, solid, liquid or gas that makes something glass or not glass. Glass has a specific molecular structure. People tend to think of states of matter as solid, liquid, and gas. There's also plasma and something even more energetic called Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). But there are other molecular structures to consider. Hardened glass actually has a liquid molecular structure because the molecules are all jumbled up, (however it is a myth that antique glass actually shows evidence of flow). Like liquids, the molecules in glass are not arranged in any regular order. Compare that to crystalline structures where the molecules are lined up in repeating patterns.
I thought the 'word' glass referred to the solid phase of the composition. As I noted in my edit above, that's not the case
Sorry, didn't see the edit until after I posted. But it was good for me to review the properties of glass anyway. Stuff gets all jumbled on those old memory storage shelves and it helps to clean them up once in a while.
Yep Good for me too. It has been a while since the science days, and I was more involved in molecular biology / biochemistry anyway. I've always assumed "glass" was the term for the solid state (which by my understanding still flows, although very slowly). Always good to learn something.
But this is why I remember the molecular structure of glass, this is a myth. It's one of those old myths that are ingrained in us like vitamin C does anything for a cold (Linus Pauling should have stuck to chemistry), getting cold weakens your immune system (germ theory anyone?), and lemmings follow the leader into the water and drown (only in Disney movies). Antique glass often has variable thickness but it's from the original pouring, not in any actual liquid flow after manufacture.
Interesting thing about that particular myth is that I know I first heard it from a science professor in undergraduate school. It must be a pervasive one. I actually read Dr. Pauling's book on vitamin C years ago. I don't remember much about it, except that it got me thinking about the anti-oxidant properties of vitamin C, which in turn can arguably provide some protective effects for the immune system. I think it is plausible that vitamin C can have some benefits in terms of the immune system, but I haven't seen any solid evidence that it provides a cure for the cold or even lessens the average duration of the cold.
Oh dear, I'm going to derail my own thread. Sigh.... Last point, then the rest is either a new thread or I suggest you do more research on your own. You can come up with half a dozen hypotheses why the vitamin C might work. But the problem is study after study have failed to reproduce Pauling's results. Out of hundreds if not thousands of studies, one or two showed some minimal results. Pauling did the study in 1954 (IIRC). We've had 60 years to study the conclusion. Just because you can hypothesize possible etiologies, that's not enough when you've had 60 years to find so much as a correlation and you don't find anything more than the most minimally relative results. As for the glass flowing if you give it a century, look it up. Chemistry teacher or not, it's a myth.
You can find information, here, among other places: http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/vitamins/vitaminC/ Saying there is no evidence is incorrect. Saying the evidence appears to be conflicting looks to be accurate.
How about the planet, not sure if it was a star at one time, made of carbon. Time pressure and heat have turned into "A girl's best friend." Or at least that's what my old girl friend used to sing...You know, Marilyn Monroe...Diamonds are a Girl's best Friend. One planet sized diamond, 10 to-the-google carats.
That one was soo cool! I forgot about that one. A diamond planet? What seems so odd to me, given we believe the Universe began in the singularity, even considering the unevenness one sees in the map, is how we have such a variety of elements that dominate different planets. The close in rocky planets lost their water/atmosphere, makes sense. But look at Venus! Compare Io with Titan and Europa. I wonder if a carbon planet could have a unique history of evolution of life?
Venus is rocky and large enough to hold a dense atmosphere. Big mystery now is dark matter and dark energy. Think the dark stuff significantly accounts for the unevenness of matter and really screws with the entropy law. Since collapsed stars are singularities, what would the big bang's origin have been? Could some black holes be bits and pieces of the big bang? Silly Surfer Girl! Of course carbon is key! No carbon, no diamonds. No diamonds, no sex. No sex...nothing to evolve.
Silly boy. Some girls like sex and science while jewelry and pretty dresses wouldn't interest them. Back to Venus though, want to know something incredible about Venus? The evenly distributed craters suggest a global resurfacing event took place ~300mya. The entire surface became molten and we don't know why. And the bizarre pancake bubble structures on the surface are fascinating. I don't know what to make of dark energy yet, but dark matter is a tad less mysterious if you simply think of it as something that has mass but doesn't interact with light. Like a window that visible light passes through, all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum pass through dark matter. I imagine it to be something akin to clear glass.
