ryttu3k wrote:
Heh, I assume I'm supposed to be 'Mr Science'? Yeah, guess I can get like that! I like science, I won't deny it, and I think some actual - y'know - facts would be quite handy in this thread...
...and now I will prove that reputation XD
Well... A black hole would almost certainly kill us because its gravity would be SO strong that the tidal forces would rip our bodies (and everything else) in to its elementary particles before we got too close. But true, we don't actually know what's inside it - that's something we'll probably never know, unfortunately, due to its very nature. I mean, we couldn't well send a probe in to have a look if it's going to get atomised!
And we do know many of those. It was (and these are the best available scientific theories, which I should also point out are different to the word 'theory' in that the latter is basically a guess and the former has facts to back it up) thought that Earth was formed from the accretion disc around the sun as it was forming, with matter congealing and gathering together under the influence of gravity. It's round because of gravity as well - everything is being pulled towards the centre, so anything too tall or too out of shape will get crushed down by its own weight.
The atmosphere... Well, that's something we're still working on, but we're looking at Venus and Mars (extremely similar terrestrial planets which have an atmosphere, even if it's pretty tenuous on Mars, but there's plenty of evidence that it used to be thicker) to get answers for that.
And we know how Earth stays in its orbit, thanks to Kepler's laws of planetary motion and ESPECIALLY Newton's law of universal gravitation (although you use Einstein's laws of general relativity for more specific examples), but how gravity itself works is still a bit of a mystery - it's thought to be its own particle, the graviton, but we still need to learn more about its nature, and why it's so weak compared to the other three fundamental forces, and if it, y'know, exists. That's actually one of the things that the LHC is investigating, bringing us back on topic!
Aaaand I'm going to be quiet because I'm REALLY living up to my Mr Science reputation ^_^ |