#WHAT IS CERN?

[msclaritea]

Stargate is a 1994 science fiction action-adventure film directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich. The film is the first entry in the Stargate media franchise and stars Kurt Russell, James Spader, Jaye Davidson, Alexis Cruz, Mili Avital, and Viveca Lindfors. The plot centers on the titular "Stargate", an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a wormhole, enabling travel to a similar device elsewhere in the universe. The central plot explores the theory of extraterrestrial beings having an influence upon human civilization.

Less than Zero is a 1987 American drama film directed by Marek Kanievska, loosely based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. The film stars Andrew McCarthy as Clay, a college freshman returning home for Christmas to spend time with his ex-girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz) and his friend Julian (Robert Downey Jr.), both of whom have become drug addicts. The film presents a look at the culture of wealthy, decadent youth in Los Angeles.

Key Takeaways:

– James Spader recollects his time working with Robert Downey Jr. during ‘Less Than Zero'.

– The co-star noticed how Downey Jr.'s destructive lifestyle influenced his performance.

– Spader admired Downey Jr.'s turnaround when they next met on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Globally acclaimed actor Robert Downey Jr. is widely acknowledged for his phenomenal roles in the Hollywood film industry. Within his illustrious career, his portrayal of Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), starting with Iron Man, stands out. However, even successful journeys have challenging beginnings. For Robert Downey Jr., his journey was marred by a period of drug abuse and legal troubles.

James Spader, co-star of Robert Downey Jr. in the 1987 drama ‘Less Than Zero', recently shed some light on his experience working with Downey Jr. during these testing times. Spader elucidates upon the heartbreaking moment he observed Downey Jr., a talented actor, struggling with destructive habits on the set of ‘Less Than Zero'. His concern for his co-star was compounded by the character Downey Jr. played – an addict.

“I'm gonna go drain the snake,” Downey Jr. would often mumble to himself during filming, leaving his co-star and others on set perplexed.

Downey Jr.'s character in ‘Less Than Zero' is often viewed as a mirror reflection of the actor's tumultuous past, with real-life drug abuse issues being mirrored on-screen. An actor of Downey Jr.'s caliber and his involvement borderline signaled a cry for help that resonated with his audience. This deep connection between his life's challenges and his screen roles turned Downey Jr. into Hollywood's dark horse at that time.

Spader retold his experience about Downey Jr.'s deplorable state during the filming of ‘Less Than Zero', “I found him heartbreaking in ‘Less Than Zero,' and I found him heartbreaking at the time.”

RDJ's physical deterioration, evidenced by patches of dead skin, only made the situation look grim.

However, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. Downey Jr. made a remarkable turnaround with his life and career. His subsequent meeting with Spader on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron as a changed person would have been a proud moment for the Blacklist actor. His journey from self-destruction to being one of the biggest stars in Hollywood is nothing short of inspirational.

In the film, the Avengers fight Ultron (Spader)—an artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark (Downey) and Bruce Banner (Ruffalo)—who plans to bring about world peace by causing human extinction.

I don't need to say ONE WORD. The crap loads of Predictive Programming from just three projects says it all. I mean... besides milking it for more sympathy, why keep bringing up RDJ's past drug use? It's pretty humiliating, but also must have a purpose.

Bonus:

[pions]

we HAVE to stop

[redswaberkez]

surely he knows something

[good--merits-accumulated]

going back to my roots (epistolary historical aus that are just ridiculously fluffy. overly so.) this time anderperry version!

[outletcrash]

do not let me in CERN cuz i’ll manage to divide 5/4 into  -3.9550339e+76 and break math so bad they’ll explode a new particle into existence (i will name it the StrapOn) 

[patchodraws]

shit now i actually wanna answer questions about the horizon characters again !!!

[nillial]

im a big fan of tiefling devo You know this . you all know this . but in addition to it being swag if the voice of the apocalypse and major figure of the fantasy catholic church was a lil blue demon guy theres this Thing in tiefling lore where a tiefling can be born from two non-tiefling parents if a) there was some fiendish blood in there somewhere down the line or b) someone made a deal with the devil and i just think itd be soooososososooso swag if perhaps SOMEONE not naming names (declan cern) tried to make a deal in an attempt to get his son back . maybe this does not make sense . but in my mind . it does

[otterknowbynow]

"he wants you to know that he loves him -- you that he loves you"

"he loves the guy who's killing him?"

"I do love cern" crying about it

[thepartyponies]

from what I’ve read the rockets aren’t actually going to go near the sun, just in its direction, but even so

nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

[gavindna]

Omg wait MIT is pro Palestine? 🤩🤩🤩🤩 I gotta narrow down what field of science I wanna do to one that MIT has like courses in and shit

[aideshou]

Due to its incredible power, before the LHC's first testing, many were worried it might open a gateway to a parallel dimension, create a black hole, or even turn the world inside out. In fact, after a test lasting a few nanoseconds, (AUDIO: Lost Souls) in 2008, (TV: Extremis) the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently opened a portal to another reality, and let out some neutron eaters, which proceeded to eat humans at CERN. When the collider started up properly, Professor Johnson and Jack Harkness had protons and antiprotons fired upon one another to cancel each other out. This closed the portal to the neutron eaters' dimension, and the Higgs particle was created as a side-effect. (AUDIO: Lost Souls)

[knightforflowers]

Ethersea hyperfixation day 815 I have started obsessing over a character who functionally does not exist within the narrative (do you guys ever think abt Devo’s mother. because I do.)

some headcanons under the cut

- I’ve been calling her Aurèlie!

- She’s a songstress from the travelling Hominine performer group that came to the shoreside, and her outfit is inspired by traditional French dresses!

- Devo looks almost just like her, and his accent derives from her too.

- Had an acrimonious parting with her Cern partner not long after the move to Founder’s Wake.

- Wasn’t entirely subscribed to the Parish’s beliefs, and was mostly there because it provided shelter for herself and her child, and kept her hidden away from the Cern family whom she wanted nothing more to do with.

- Stopped singing almost entirely after the move, only singing lullabies and other melodies for Devo and no one else.

- Was often reclusive and aloof with the other parishioners— she was uncomfortable with the strange interest they seemed to have in her child. She liked Guidance the least.

- Intended on leaving the Parish with Devo when he was a little older, but it was never able to happen.

- The reasoning for her disappearance or what became of her after is not exactly known, but it was likely not of her own volition— she loved Devo more than anything, and that likely made her a threat to what the figureheads in the Parish wanted from him.

[if-only-we-could-read-it]

Based off a bewildering conversation with my parents, i need extra opinions...

*in this case 'have you heard of CERN' just means do you know that it's a science institute that exists, you don't need to know any specifics about what they do there!

The context for this is that I mentioned CERN to my parents and neither of them had heard about it at all and pointed out they werent really science-y people. I was under the impression that most people knew about CERN, whether or not they cared about science/what happens there, just via cultural osmosis, and now I wanna see if I'm overestimating the average person's scientific awareness or if this is yet another example of my parents living under rocks, lol

[seat-safety-switch]

In the distant past, people suffered. Ordinary folks, just like you and me. They agonized from the tortures of a cruel world. Why? They didn't have project cars.

Yes, I hear all the Smithsonian historians yelling right now. It's weird that every single one of you follow me, but I get it. You know that "project horses" are not a thing. Genghis Khan didn't spend a lot of time fuckin' around with the transmission ratios on his 13th-century wooden wagons. Maybe if he had a high-mileage 1989 Civic, it would have kept him busy, and he would not have killed quite so many people. Mostly the assholes at the parts store who keep getting him the wrong thermostat gasket, which I think history could forgive anyone for.

In the absence of the automobile, a lot of enterprising busyfolx had to find other, lesser hobbies. Agriculture. Photography. Poetry. Inventing the car, with the plan to buy a high-mileage used one later and nurse it back to health. Times were tough. Back then, a yard could just be filled with useless grass, or occasionally some kind of grazing animal, and not a succession of rusted-ass Plymouths and Pontiacs from fence to peeling fence. Waste of land, if you ask me.

I don't have a solution for this. The eggheads at CERN keep talking about devising some kind of time machine that can send exactly one (1) beat-to-shit Dodge Aspen back in history. They need someone to pilot it, and of course I volunteered. They just can't agree on what famous figure to distract from their destiny by dangling a delectable Malaise Era Mopar in front of them.

In the meantime, I've been tinkering on it a bit, here and there. Gotta do something to pass the time until they invent flying project cars.

[thatfrenchemoshithead]

Ahhh, i agree.

I’ve been thinking of the one line Devo tells Guidance about how the parish was treating him as a vessel for their beliefs, and I started to cling to that word vessel. The Brinarr are magic vessels for Einarr souls, and Zoox manifests in one too. Kodira and the big baby are vessels Koda possesses to continue to enact his will in the living world. Then there’s the Drynarrs’ whole thing with Orlene. Like we already know that humans can be used as conduits for the particular style of Ethersea magic because Devo channelled it in the infinite clam, so like what if the ethersea just helped tolliver do what koda did?

I'm thinking about Tolliver Cern as the embodiment of magic.

It never specifically says how that happened but I've kind of interpreted that when he went missing, he drowned in the Ethersea. Because the way that Griffin described Tolliver looking is the same as how he described it when Devo was in Ethersea water momentarily, flickeringly translucent. Because we know if you stay in pure Ethersea for too long, that'll happen to your whole body, you can't survive. So I think something like that happened but the magic responded in a certain way that just made his body incorporeal like that, but magic tied to his spirit.

[mysticstronomy]

CAN TWO SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES MERGE??

Blog#440

Saturday, September 28th, 2024.

Welcome back,

A team of astrophysicists that includes the University of Toronto’s Gonzalo Alonso-Álvarez has shown that pairs of supermassive black holes can merge together into a single, larger black hole – a major breakthrough in addressing what is known as the "final parsec problem."

longstanding astrophysics problem refers to a discrepancy between the detection of gravitational signals permeating the universe – which astrophysicists previously hypothesized had emanated from millions of merging pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) – and theoretical simulations which showed that the approach of SMBHs stalls when they’re roughly one parsec (about three light years) apart.

Not only did the final parsec problem conflict with the theory that merging SMBHs were the source of the gravitational wave background, it was also at odds with the theory that SMBHs – each billions of times more massive than our Sun – grow from the merger of less massive black holes.

The new research, published in Physical Review Letters, has shown that pairs of SMBHs can indeed break through the one-parsec barrier and merge into a single black hole. This is demonstrated by calculations showing that SMBHs continue to draw closer because of previously overlooked interactions with particles within the vast cloud of dark matter surrounding them.

“We show that including the previously overlooked effect of dark matter can help supermassive black holes overcome this final parsec of separation and coalesce,” says Alonso-Álvarez, a post-doctoral fellow in the department of physics at U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science and the department of physics and Trottier Space Institute at McGill University, who is first author on the paper. “Our calculations explain how that can occur, in contrast to what was previously thought.”

SMBHs are thought to lie in the centres of most galaxies. When two galaxies collide, the SMBHs fall into orbit around each other; as they revolve around each other, the gravitational pull of nearby stars tugs at them and slows them down, causing them to spiral inward toward a merger.

Previous merger models showed that when the SMBHs approached to within roughly a parsec, they begin to interact with the dark matter cloud or halo in which they are embedded. These models indicated that the gravity of spiraling SMBHs throws dark matter particles clear of the system.

The new model introduced by Alonso-Álvarez and co-authors James Cline, a professor at McGill University and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, and Caitlyn Dewar, a graduate student at McGill, reveals that dark matter particles interact with each other in such a way that they are not dispersed. The density of the dark matter halo remains high enough that interactions between the particles and the SMBHs continue to degrade the SMBH’s orbits – clearing a path to a merger.

“The possibility that dark matter particles interact with each other is an assumption that we made, an extra ingredient that not all dark matter models contain,” says Alonso-Álvarez. “Our argument is that only models with that ingredient can solve the final parsec problem.”

The background hum generated by these colossal cosmic collisions is made up of gravitational waves of much longer wavelength than those first detected in 2015 by astrophysicists operating the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Those gravitational waves were generated by the merger of two black holes, both some 30 times the mass of the Sun.

The background hum has been detected in recent years by scientists operating the Pulsar Timing Array. The array reveals gravitational waves by measuring minute variations in signals from pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit strong radio pulses.

Originally published on https://www.utoronto.ca

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024)

"WHERE DID MARS' ATMOSPHERE GO??"