ALT.SF4M

  Where's that Staircase? Name That Forumite?

   • j********o@***.com
     28/11/2000 00:00:000 UTC

     Two weird questions, one long, weird discourse.

     When you walk across the "Bridge to Nowhere" from the SB Main Library to
     the

     old Student Union, immediately after the bridge I recall that one passes
     the

     upper exit of a flight of stairs (a roofed enclosure with a pair of
     glass doors

     which were normally locked - sometimes Jingly people (Union Staff) would
     hang

     out there and smoke). (My generation will recall that you had to keep
     walking

     to the next set of doors to get into the conference room section, or
     turn left

     to head toward Sev's (7-Eleven), or make a further turn to head for
     Polity and

     the Icon office.) If you took that first flight of stairs, where would
     it

     exit?! This has been bugging me, since I can't recall any corresponding
     set of

     doors in my mental map of either the second or first floor! On the
     second

     floor, if you walked indoors from Polity to the conference rooms, you
     pass the

     non-smoker's lounge on the left, then can take the big open stairs on
     the right

     down to the main lounge, or turn left and down a few steps to pass
     through the

     doors into the conference room wing. But no stairway door appears in my

     memory. I'm not even sure this can be answered in text form. I once
     found

     (perfectly legally) found a discarded set of floorplans for the Union,
     which I

     mookishly allowed Sandy Stein to confiscate for Icon. It would have
     resolved

     this in seconds.

     There was this Forumite/fringie circa 1989 whose name escapes me: NOT
     Lincoln

     Kliman, but someone whose name always reminded me of either the name
     "Lincoln,"

     or perhaps "Kliman;" I don't know for what reason, whether it sounded
     similar

     or presidential or folksy. Carson, maybe? He was youthful, medium
     height,

     short page-boy hair cut, no glasses, a math major? He was good-naturedly
     goofy

     and most distinguishable by having a girlfriend (who was in appearance a
     female

     version of him and fairly cute and an occasional visitor to the Forum).
     He

     wasn't quite secure enough in his geekdom to ever get completely
     comfortable

     and he often made odd voices and imitations? (In that regard, he reminds
     me of

     TOAST's brother, "Blowchow.")

     We were having a discussion of supernovae and he caught me once in a
     stupid and

     embarassing error about it. I asserted that it was merely a mechanical
     rebound

     from the fusion-failure collapse, and he pointed that it was believed
     that the

     principle agency was the flood of neutrinos emitted by the
     neutronization of

     the ultra-compressed core and the sudden opacity of the surrounding
     dense

     layers to these neutrinos, and in fact, gravity being a conservative
     force,

     there's no good reason why the collapsing star would mechanically bounce
     any

     higher than where it had fallen from! "Duh," he teased me for
     misinforming my

     fellows. I then recalled the theory which I had negligently forgotten
     over the

     years, and tried to think of both how I could have been so remiss and of
     a way

     of weaseling out of that criticism, which should have been obvious to
     any

     decent physics major. I shortly conceded both points and admitted my

     foolishness.

     Well, I just realized why I was so clueless. I was just perusing my
     principal

     astro text and, reading the section on supernovae, recalled it exactly
     as it

     was: that text makes no reference to the neutrino-blast hypothesis and

     explicity endorses the mechanical bounce mechanism! Reading that must
     have

     displaced the other (more recent) theory from my then-young (and very
     foolish,

     as it turned out, for other reasons which will not be gone into here)
     noggin!

     However, I will now weasel out in the manner I failed to do so long ago:

     neutrinization is an *endothermic* process - that's why loose neutrinos
     decay

     into protons (1,000 second half-line) - presumably, a lump of neutronium

     removed from the gravity of a neutron star would rapidly decay and heat
     up.

     So, it is reasonable to assume that the core collapse in fact *eats up*
     some of

     the energy of the collapse, rather than adding to it. Thus, we are back
     where

     we started eleven years ago: how can a collapse cause the star to
     explode?

     The answer is the same one I was grasping after at the time, but was
     mentally

     blocked by my assumption that the explosion was both spherical and left
     no

     remnant (which my normally reliable text said could occur). (FYI, in
     most

     cases, a neutron star core is left behind - the stars in question start
     out

     with 3-100 solar masses and the remnants never exceed 3.) One way or
     another,

     the energy of the collapse of the whole must be getting concentrated on
     a

     smaller mass. Assuming a spherical explosion (which I'll dispute
     momentarily),

     momentum must be displaced from the core and transferred to the much
     larger

     outer bulk of the star which is about to be ejected. The neutrino flood

     provides a nice mechanism to do this, since they can travel some
     distance

     before hitting anything, even at those densities. But shock waves and
     other

     mechanical effects could provide the basis for this bounce (in mechanics
     terms,

     inelastic, although perhaps superelastic is a better term here).
     Nonetheless,

     something must be left behind: that is, as the energy liberated by some

     effective contraction of the remnant core provides the energy to eject
     the bulk

     of the star with escape velocity, there must always be some unexploded
     remnant.

     Considering a non-spherical process doesn't really change the scenario,
     except

     that the star might explode in two or more jets, and nearby stars might
     reduce

     the effective escape velocity of the streamers (the supernoa would
     effectively

     be stretched out so that it could be pulled apart by other bodies, while
     it

     would have eventually recollapsed absent outside interference). While
     this

     surely happens to supernova remnant clouds (which are quite irregular
     and

     non-spherical), unless the other star were a close binary, it couldn't
     be a

     significant factor, and could never remove the necessity of something
     being

     left behind at the original center of mass.

     So there, what's-his-name!

     Gorno

       • s******j@f****.**o.com
         05/12/2000 02:40:54 UTC

         These stairs let out in the lobby of the Union. They continued down
         to

         the basement.

         The entrance from the lobby was between the windows in the lobby
         that

         looked over the courtyard and the corridor that ran along the back
         of

         the auditorium (and eventually to the cafeteria).

         More or less opposite the entrance to the stairs was the door which

         let out to the corridor to the Union loading dock, the back door of

         the snack bar, and what was once and may still be the I-Con office.

         On 28 Nov 2000 08:06:00 GMT, JohnGorno wrote:

         >Two weird questions, one long, weird discourse.

         >When you walk across the "Bridge to Nowhere" from the SB Main
         Library to the

         >old Student Union, immediately after the bridge I recall that one
         passes the

         >upper exit of a flight of stairs (a roofed enclosure with a pair of
         glass doors

         >which were normally locked - sometimes Jingly people (Union Staff)
         would hang

         >out there and smoke). (My generation will recall that you had to
         keep walking

         >to the next set of doors to get into the conference room section,
         or turn left

         >to head toward Sev's (7-Eleven), or make a further turn to head for
         Polity and

         >the Icon office.) If you took that first flight of stairs, where
         would it

         >exit?!

         --

         +-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+

         SeJ@ay-oh-el-dot-com ~ stefanj@eye-oh-dot-com

         http://www.io.com/~stefanj/

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       • n4t3B3rrY
         09/01/2001 04:46:33 UTC

         JohnGorno wrote:

         > When you walk across the "Bridge to Nowhere" from the SB Main
         Library to the

         > old Student Union, immediately after the bridge I recall that one
         passes the

         > upper exit of a flight of stairs (a roofed enclosure with a pair
         of glass doors

         > memory. I'm not even sure this can be answered in text form. I
         once found

         > (perfectly legally) found a discarded set of floorplans for the
         Union, which I

         > mookishly allowed Sandy Stein to confiscate for Icon. It would
         have resolved

         > this in seconds.

         I don't know how far back you're talking, here, but back

         when I was regularly going to ICON (8-9-10) which is around

         1990, I was having a blast playing Warhammer with author

         Ken Rolston and seeing greats like Steve Jackson and Robert Bloch

         speak. I kept my books from back then and found this: (see

         link) http://home.att.net/~comyntdb/images/sb-union.gif

         which is a map of the union! I wonder if this will help you?

         I know how crazy things like that make ME...

         --

         Nate Berry ---------> ***@***.net

         http://in8.home.att.net/links.htm