The Straight Dope on the Mayan Calendar

I like your open-mindedness, therefore I will elucidate.

We shouldn’t go beyond the photon. there are no photon particles, only quanta of energy which originate from within the photon field, which prevails throughout creation. Pull the field at one end and the other end will respond immediately, there’s superluminosity for you.

The retinas of the eyes are Em wave detectors, that’s all. They are tuned to the visible portion of the EM spectrum, and waves at that frequency stimulate electrical signals which travel along the optic nerve and are interpreted by the brain as light. Light, as we know it, is then merely an interpretation by our brains.

Professor Philip Bucksbaum of Michigan University has proved his theory that an infinite amount of information can be stored on an electron. That makes perfect sense to me, because if we were to find ourselves in an infinitely large room with an infinite number of nick-nacks lining an infinite number of shelves, we would see everything in that room, given the limitations imposed by our range of vision and field of view. The oscillations of the Em waves which we detect on our retinas are modulated by all the surface characteristics of all the objects that we see. So, Bucksbaum is right. Em waves are propagated by the particles in a medium which transmits light, and they are molecules and atoms with outer electron orbitals storing those modulations and passing them on.

Thanks, but I don’t need a lot of money to blow on high living. I’ve been doing alright without.

Fascinating theorizing, all. But you would be embarrassed at how little of the truth we actually know, as proved by your theory that the sun is not a giant hollow iron ball. it is, and all the spectroscopic evidence and sun surveys over the last few years actually proves it. NASA is acting reluctant in acknowledging the truth of that. What can you expect from a colossal institution like NASA? They’re naturally going to be the last to know. Sheesh!

Does “Burden of Proof” mean anything to you? Let’s see the spectroscopic iron-confirming data.

Wait, so if the sun is a big ball of iron, how does it burn? Iron doesn’ t undergo fusion or fission. How did the sun get so hot? How do these big balls of iron form? Where did all the iron come from? Why is it when I look at the sun through a spectrograph I don’t see any iron lines? I don’t want random links that happen to mention a few of the same words found in this paragraph, I want you to explain it.

If it’s iron, it has to be hollow. It can’t be a solid ball of iron. The Sun isn’t as massive as a sphere of solid iron the size of the Sun would be. What causes these hollow spheres of iron to form and have the specific size that they do?

It doesn’t sound to me like it would be stable, either. There wouldn’t be any gravity inside the sphere. If a piece got knocked off toward the inside of the sphere, it wouldn’t be attracted back toward the shell- it would just float around in there. There’d be nothing keeping it from hitting the inside of the shell somewhere else and knocking off even more material to float around the inside, on and on until it is destroyed.

But are all the astronomers in the world likewise reluctant? Most of them don’t work for NASA. They would all like nothing better than to totally revolutionize our model of stars. If an astronomer could do that, he or she could have a job at any university in the world with tenure, and would be famous among astronomers. They’d be fighting over the right to claim credit for something like that.

Helioseismological data would be acceptable, too, as long as it’s from a refereed journal.

Are you, sir, by any chance, a Scientologist? You know, just so we can complete the whole set.

Even after we see your data that prove the Sun is made up of iron or mostly of iron, we’ll still need more. We’ll also need some evidence that Toutatis came from another solar system and is made up partly of antimatter.

If Toutatis came from outside the solar system at a speed greater than the speed of light, what slowed it down? What put it in an orbit that resembles the orbits of many other asteroids?

If it’s made up partly of antimatter, why don’t we see any annihilation when pieces of dust and small rocks in interplanetary space hit it?

For that matter why doesn’t it annihilate with it’s matter half?

Duh, he said it was in a containment chamber. :rolleyes:

I remember reading a few years ago about a theory that there was iron in the Sun (but not a mantle…here is a pretty picture about the layers in the Sun. Warning though, it’s a NASA site!), but I haven’t heard anything more about it. So, THAT part of the OP’s theory is at least within the realm of reality, even if it’s probably wrong.

All the rest though is pure fantasy. Anti-matter asteroids? Faster than light travel? A space faring civilization with that kind of technology that needs to leech off of worlds like the Earth for a couple of years then bolt for a new world? It’s not even GOOD science fiction.

-XT

Why did theancient Mayans have the need to deal with such large numbers of years? In the West, we think in terms of the 2000-odd years since the birth of Christ-but these people were worried about time periods of millions of years-why was this?

They’re not the only ones to have a calendar that spans huge amounts of time. The Hindu calendar does that too, even more so.

Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know about the Maya, because so few of their books have survived to the present.

Ohh and how does this containment chamber work?

Well, maybe if they hadn’t made them out of antimatter…

Very well, thank you.

So, is gravitational collapse of a star’s outer layers upon hydrogen depletion in its core all just a myth, then?

My understanding is that a star like our Sun will become a Red Giant once it is burning helium in its core (and as a Red Giant, it will destroy the Earth as its outer layers expand to the point where the Sun basically fires all life on our planet), which is the result of it exhausting it’s hydrogen supply, with helium being the byproduct of hydrogen fusion.

A massive star can continue to blow through byproducts of fusion continuing on the elemental chart until it reaches Fe (our beloved iron), at which point even the tremendous temperatures and pressures of gravitational collapse can no longer sustain fusion reaction, and the star becomes a supernova, spewing forth gases and iron into the universe, to be reused as genetic material for a proto-star or proto-planet at some future point in time.

Our current understanding is that this is where all the iron in the universe came from. The only other way we can think of to get elements heavier than hydrogen is from nucleosynthesis in the Big Bang. And that didn’t produce elements heavier than lithium. Conditions for Big Bang nucleosynthesis are quite different than those for nucleosynthesis in stars. You can’t produce iron in the Big Bang.

Other stars have spectra quite a bit like that of the Sun, so whatever the Sun is, so are other stars. If the Sun is made of iron, it’s likely that all stars are made of iron. The only way we know of to produce iron is in the explosion of a star. Where did the iron for those first stars come from?

Well played sir.

No, iron is made inside stars during their lifetimes, through nuclear fusion. It’s just that elements heavier than iron aren’t made inside stars, so had to have been made in supernovas.