My mom sent me the new geological theories of Neal Adams. Apparently he’s given up on the hollow earth theory and is now touting the idea that the Earth is expanding, and that it is this expansion which caused the continents and oceans.
His explanation for the expansion of the Earth uses something called pair production to create more matter from energy. What energy it is that’s supposed to be coming in to create this bonus matter, he doesn’t seem to say, but anyways…
So my questions are:
What methods did we use to determine what the contents of the Earth are?
Does pair production create matter from energy? (The Wikipedia page seems to show it as creating electrons and positrons out of photons, but I’m not sure that that would be sufficient to build up a planet with.) What sort of matter is produced through such a method if it does in fact do so? Gold? Iron? Would it all be radioactive waste?
Leaving aside the whole Neal Adams segment of the question, but rather for my own edification, how exactly does energy get converted into matter (or vice versa)? E=mc[sup]2[/sup] tells us that they’re interchangable, and I know that splitting an atom releases a lot of energy, but what exactly are we experiencing? If I separate two magnets from one another, pull a moon away from it’s planet, there’s no such similar energy release. So why does disconnecting the elements of an atom create a boom? And how do you de-boom energy back into an atom?
IANAGeologist. From what I remember from geology class, most of it is based on mining, drilling and analyzing what the Earth so kindly brings up by herself.
It’s what took place in the Big Bang, if I understand it correctly. Get enough tinyons (new word, meaning “whatever it is that physicists are now using as the tiniest pieces of matter, I’m not up to date on my nuclear physics”) together and you come up with all the matter that’s now in the universe.
Those examples all transform energy that was already there into other forms or absorb energy in order to happen.
The complete equation for a “physical change” (including a chemical reaction and nuclear physics) needs to include the energy, this energy can be absorbed (think of those fizzy cold pills that when dissolved in the glass of water make it colder, of water freezing, of your own examples) or released (fire, explosions).
Disconnecting the elements of an atom does not transform matter into energy; it can release part of the “potential energy” that the atom already had in a form that’s more easily recognizable as energy, but the energy was already there.
To turn matter into energy, you’d have to break the tinyons. Since some tinyons can be treated as either matter or energy (photons, electrons)… well, it’s one of those things where the actual explanation requires some complicated math equations that not even those who work with them daily claim to understand completely.
Another take on 3) is that energy and matter aren’t “interchangeable”: they’re the same. We just differentiate them as a tool to make our calculations manageable and to be able to cook our omelettes without getting all (meta)physical about it.
So going from 1 and 2 then, if matter was being created in the middle of the earth, then we would expect that the elements coming up out of the earth would be of all the different types of matter, in a ratio consistent with whatever the universal ratio is of all the elements.
I just saw a thing on TV the other night about membrane theory. The theory that many people are looking at these days is that two membranes bonked into each other and because their surfaces weren’t smooth, the bonk got the energy all jiggy and it created matter. Or something like that.
Please don’t ask me anything more about this. The whole thing blew my mind and I’m having a helluva time wrapping my brain around the most basic pieces of it.
IANAG, but: the composition of the crust we can determine from mining and drilling, of course. The interior of the planet we guess from lava composition and analysis of seismic events (we model how different substances affect sound waves to figure out what the recorded data indicates).
[ol][li]The contents of the upper mantle can be discerned from ejecta from geological eruptions and open faults. The contents of the lower mantle and inner and outer core can be inferred from the relative density of the planet, geophysical phenomena like resonance from earthquakes, explosions, and impacts, estimates of radioactive heating and isotope concentrations of crust/mantle material, and some general physical assumptions about the nature of elemental metals under extreme pressures and temperatures. We know more about what is going on under the Sun’s photosphere–which is virtually opaque to light of essentially all wavelengths–than we do about what goes on in the lower mantle down. However, what we do know is sufficient to state with confidence that the Earth is not hollow, and that the core is most likely a molten nickel-iron blob maintainted by radioactive decay.[/li][li]Pair production creates matter in the form of a particle and anti-particle from some input energy, more typically a fast moving, heavy particle or antiparticle intercepting a nucleus, but it could also come from a high frequency photon with enough energy to produce two particles (an electron and a positron, for instance). This isn’t some kind of foofoo bullshit theorizing; you can do it in a lab (well, one equipped with a pretty massive particle accelerator, anyway); the problem is that the free anti-particle, in an environment surrounded by normal matter, will almost immeidately recombined unless trapped and isolated. Virtual particle pairs may be continuously produced and destroyed without notice (the energy being transmitted from one real particle to another via momentary interactions with these virtual particles). Feynman’s use of perturbation theory in QFD allowed for interactions that are locally (temporally) nonconservative, though the overall energy balance for any ‘real’ unit of time is conserved. See this brief article on the Scientific American website for a precis on this. [/li][li]Neal Adams is on crack. That’s all I can say about him. The amount of energy, and more specifically, the frequency it would have to be at to create matter, would be enormous, on the scale of cosmic radiation.[/li]
As for energy that comes from fusion or radioactive decay, like beta decay, it comes from the binding energies that hold the components of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons together. (Electrons, quarks, and neutrinos are all fundamental particles which can’t be broken down.) Whether these binding energies are real mass or “virtual” mass depends upon your perspective, your philosoophical inclinations, and what color socks you are wearing; they certainly contribute mass in a sense that can be measured and affects particle interactions, but on that scale “particles” are not little bits of stuff, so trying to distinguish between what is “real” and what is, like the Cheshire cat, there but invisible inevitably gets you into endless heated late night discussions with opinionated, overeducated Nortern Europeans about collapsing waveforms, the validity of treating fields as particle interactions versus waveform interference, and so forth. It usually ends up with somebody’s friend not wanting to talk about what happened to the cat, and Caltech professers yelling at each other from opposite ends of the hallway. It’s not a good end to the night, trust me.[/ol]
For determining the composition of the Earth, two other valuable tools: First, we can measure the speed and other properties of waves which earthquakes propogate through the Earth. Whenever waves cross a boundary between regions with different properties, some of the wave will be reflected, and we can use those reflections to tell where the boundaries are, and something about their properties.
Second, we can measure the density of the Earth gravitationally. In the simplest case, you use the strength of the Earth’s gravity to measure its mass, and combine that with measurements of its volume to get the average density of the entire Earth. With more detailed measurements (often from precise measurements of satellite orbits), you can also say something (though not everything) about how the density varies with position.
This could be a little confusing to someone who isn’t up on this nonsense. What happens in plain old English is that when the nucleus rearranges itself its potential energy is converted to kinetic and electromagnetic energy, and the binding energy increases.
Feh, clearly Neal’s suggestion of pair production being the method for Earth growing in mass is a WAG he pulled out of his behind. Far more interesting is his one continent / growing planet theory. Which although is no doubt incorrect, isn’t just something he pulled out of his behind.
As his pretty videos demonstrate, for someone who doesn’t have a modern understanding of the current body of geological data, land masses on Earth and other bodies do have what appear to be “stretch marks” surrounded by older landmasses which seem to fit neatly like jigsaw puzzles. On Earth we have subduction zones, which he claims can’t subduct because granite is too light or something. But the moon, mars, and other moons seem to have stretching without obvious subduction zones.
No doubt since he isn’t a professional geologist he’s missing some key understanding that makes his theory a wash. But his basic reasoning is sound, and pretty much the same reasoning used to come up with the original theory of tectonic drift which was during it’s time very controversial and fairly recent.
I think it’s pretty cool that you can make a fairly convincing demonstration of a weird theory like this that you need more than just common sense to debunk. Any dopers know the real facts on his strange observations?
For the first… well, it would depend on the ratios at which different elemental particles were being created. But I’d WAG that in a relatively small space like the Solar Sistem, each individual body would have a similar composition… and then we get to question 4.
To which the answer AFAIK is no. Here we go into astronomy (paging our astrophysicists, I know we have at least one!) but the Earth has more of the mid-weight elements than the gaseous giants or the sun. And the smaller solid bodies (asteroids) sometimes are quite devoid of the lightest elements (H, He).
As for “where do elements come from”, again I’m going back to Stuff I Read Ages Ago, but it goes something like
Elemental particles are made at the Big Bang. Some of them are both wave and particle or particle and energy or… depending on which version gives shorter equations for whatever you’re trying to calculate or on the color of your socks.
Fusion at stars. Older stars have more of the heavier elements. This rearranges matter, does not create it.
Yup, I was going to respond to the same thing. Basically we would expect a lot of hydrogen as the primary result of matter creation from energy. Stars are what create the rest of the heavier elements. So… maybe the Earth is a big hydrogen balloon. Nobody light a match.
demonstrate, for someone who doesn’t have a modern understanding of the current body of geological data, land masses on Earth and other bodies do have what appear to be “stretch marks” surrounded by older landmasses which seem to fit neatly like jigsaw puzzles. On Earth we have subduction zones, which he claims can’t subduct because granite is too light or something. But the moon, mars, and other moons seem to have stretching without obvious subduction zones.