A Big Surprise from the Edge of the Solar System

Depending on what you give him credit for I do ultimately think he may be able to hold his own with any of the above, not in terms of coming up with novel theories, but in terms of being able to see what's important and set the agenda for humanity for the next 500 years. But again like Socrates (perhaps Plato) he came up with a lot of bullshit too, so it's important not to throw critical thinking out the window.

Thanks for the reply...it was very interesting.

So its like every other position in academia then? Also like most private sector jobs in a recession/depression. Really having more opening then applicants is a rarity. Engineers, doctors, some other high demand professions, are all a minority in terms of total labor force in the economy.

This is probably not as direct as what you do now, though. I am glad you have found something that works better for you :)

You seem to be saying that, since one can't persuade the average person on the street to pay you to write a research paper[1], the research that gets done is "over-sold" through "advertising." In other words, the work is funded not on its own merits, but as a popularity contest. I'd argue, though, even within astrophysics alone, some research is more important than others: maybe it answers more fundamental questions, or could enable a unifying explanatory framework for a broader class of phenomena, or is actually of near-term importance to us on Earth (asteroid location, space weather).

Science is a human endeavor. Yes, there is often hype and trends as people advocate for funding for their next big thing--but there's a lot of that here on Hacker News, too.

If you launch a vessel towards a planet (so that you come near but don't collide with it), then in the reference frame of the planet your vessel will leave with the same velocity going away from the planet as the velocity of your approach. However, since the planet was moving with respect to the Sun, you will have gained or lost velocity with respect to the Sun, depending on whether your space craft approached from behind or in front of the moving planet. Typically in these assist maneuvers, you wait for a large planet to be a bit ahead of the Earth's orbit. You launch towards that planet, and the gravity assist accelerates the space probe. Some of that acceleration will be tangential (mostly useless to you) but some will be radial, increasing your velocity from the Sun.

The Voyager probes took advantage of a once-in-every 180 year planetary alignment, with all of the outer planets mostly aligned. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_path.png for a good illustration. All the outer planets are traveling in a counter clockwise direction, and you can clearly see the outer planets accelerating Voyager 2 tangentially. It should be clear that there will be a radial component to that acceleration as well.

I don't think you can use the Sun in these circumstances; it doesn't have any angular momentum for you to steal.

Incidentally, the discovery of this method is sheer brilliance; without using gravity assists it would have taken prohibitively long and required a prohibitive amount of propellant to reach the outer planets.

"astronomical units per day: 173"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit#Examples

"94 AU: Termination shock between Solar winds/Interstellar winds/Interstellar medium"

I think astronomers would prefer data move back and forth faster, but they're used to waiting that long and more for things to happen.