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Category: cosmology – Page 427

Trying to simplify and understand imagination isn’t that easy. Should be a great read for my tech friends trying to replicate this process.

Imagination… we can all imagine things – even things we have never seen before. Even things that don’t exist. How do our brains achieve that?

Imagine a duck teaching a French class. A Ping-Pong match in orbit around a black hole. A dolphin balancing a pineapple.

You probably haven’t actually seen any of these things but you could imagine them instantly.

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In Brief A deeper look into studies that were previously conducted by Hungarian physicists has recently uncovered evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature. If confirmed, it could stand as an explanation for dark matter.

To date, there are four conventionally known fundamental forces that hold the universe together—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But a closer look at previous studies conducted by Hungarian physicists, which hinted at a new force, has led a team of scientists to evidence that the anomaly in the data could actually be a fifth force of nature.

It should be noted that the groundbreaking claim is still a very long way from being confirmed, but the current data available is enough to push research into what this new force-carrying particle is (or may be).

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“I feel the need — the need for speed.”

The tagline from the 1980s movie Top Gun could be seen as the mantra for the high-performance computing system world these days. The next milestone in the endless race to build faster and faster machines has become embodied in standing up the first exascale supercomputer.

Exascale might sound like an alternative universe in a science fiction movie, and judging by all the hype, one could be forgiven for thinking that an exascale supercomputer might be capable of opening up wormholes in the multiverse (if you subscribe to that particular cosmological theory). In reality, exascale computing is at once more prosaic — a really, really fast computer — and packs the potential to change how we simulate, model and predict life, the universe and pretty much everything.

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One of the biggest puzzles in physics is that eighty-five percent of the matter in our universe is “dark”: it does not interact with the photons of the conventional electromagnetic force and is therefore invisible to our eyes and telescopes. Although the composition and origin of dark matter are a mystery, we know it exists because astronomers observe its gravitational pull on ordinary visible matter such as stars and galaxies.

Some theories suggest that, in addition to gravity, could interact with visible matter through a new force, which has so far escaped detection. Just as the is carried by the photon, this dark force is thought to be transmitted by a particle called “dark” photon which is predicted to act as a mediator between visible and dark matter.

“To use a metaphor, an otherwise impossible dialogue between two people not speaking the same language (visible and dark matter) can be enabled by a mediator (the ), who understands one language and speaks the other one,” explains Sergei Gninenko, spokesperson for the NA64 collaboration.

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Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that mankind will not survive another millenia unless it makes a home beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

The celebrated physicist was addressing a lecture audience at the Oxford Union debating society on Monday evening when he gave the stark warning.

“Most recent advances in cosmology have been achieved from space where there are uninterrupted views of our Universe,” he said “but we must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity.

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