Sareln said:
Start talking detail man. We sorta touched on this in physics last year (Special Relativity & Classical Mechanics) but I'm intrigued.
Alright, alright. I'm not exactly an expert (yet...), but I have an uncle that does some nuclear work down in some Californian university, and I plan on entering a career that deals with this sort of thing anyway.
My previous post was inaccurate in a few respects. Firstly, some might say that talking about gravity "pulling down" on objects isn't accurate. In fact, it is the compression of space-time caused by nearby massive bodies that causes less massive bodies to be drawn toward it (or around it, in some cases). A common analogy (not entirely accurate, but I haven't studied enough to tell you accurately what's wrong with it) is to imagine space-time as a rubber sheet. Drop a massive weight onto this rubber sheet, and it bends in such a way as to draw marbles on that rubber sheet to it. If this rubber sheet and this marble had virtually no drag on each other, a marble could be rolled in such a way as to enter a stable orbit of the larger body. This would be a satellite. It's a minor point, and not the one I was thinking of when I mentioned my own inaccuracy.
Second, an object's mass isn't just influenced by the amount of matter in it. Actually, a very interesting phenomenon happens as an object increases speed. The faster an object goes, the more mass it has. I
believe this is because "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared" (or E=mc^2). In any case, a speedier object has more energy than one at rest. This energy is equivalent to a very small (in most situations) amount of mass. The effect is generally very small except at speeds very close to the speed of light, but it has been observed. As I've mentioned before, the more massive an object is, the more it bends space-time. Now an, experiment was conducted in which two jet airplanes were flown in opposite directions around the Earth. Both on them had extremely accurate atomic clocks on board. One jet's speed was increased by the rotation of the Earth, while the other's was decreased by it. After flying for a set amount of time, the two atomic clocks (which had been synchronized to almost perfect accuracy before the flight) were compared. The times shown were measurable different.
I'm pretty sure there was a third point that I didn't explain accurately, but I can't remember it for the life of me. Maybe it's just my imagination. Anyway, you probably didn't need to know all this, but now you do.
P.S. I know, Deathling. I just said "bit" as a figure of speech, I didn't mean to indicate that the weight change was small in any way. I believe the formula follows the inverse square law, actually, meaning that the gravitational "attraction" increases exponentially.
P.P.S. You're right, Sarelin, you do lose weight as you climb on the Earth's beer belly.
P.P.P.S. Looking back on it, I realize that I used the term, "speed" in my second point. That's also inaccurate by the theories of relativity, but I'm not going into that one even if you ask.
)they contribute when making a "Great Work" can make a big difference over time. If all your cities start pumping them out you will start seeing a difference in your city radii. Depending on how overwhelming your opponents culture is, you may need to to sacrifice 4-5 disciple units before you start seeing a difference.
