Archive for the ‘physics’ category
Apr 23, 2019
The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology — A New Book That Makes You Question The Nature of Reality but Provides You with Surprising Answers | Press Release
Posted by Alex Vikoulov in categories: cosmology, evolution, neuroscience, physics
Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)
The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “ The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?
“# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous “butterfly” effect on us modern humans.
Apr 20, 2019
Thermodynamic magic enables cooling without energy consumption
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: energy, physics
Physicists at the University of Zurich have developed an amazingly simple device that allows heat to flow temporarily from a cold to a warm object without an external power supply. Intriguingly, the process initially appears to contradict the fundamental laws of physics.
If you put a teapot of boiling water on the kitchen table, it will gradually cool down. However, its temperature is not expected to fall below that of the table. It is precisely this everyday experience that illustrates one of the fundamental laws of physics—the second law of thermodynamics—which states that the entropy of a closed natural system must increase over time. Or, more simply put: Heat can flow by itself only from a warmer to a colder object, and not the other way round.
Apr 19, 2019
Lightning Totally Does Strike Twice, And Now Scientists Know Why
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: climatology, physics
There’s something about the meandering streak of lightning that implies random chaos. Yet bolts from the blue not only hit the same places with regularity, but successive discharges often reuse the exact same channel.
It’s never been entirely clear how the path laid down by one bolt sticks around for repeat performances, but new research has discovered lingering pockets of charge in the wake of a single lightning strike, which could provide a map for more to follow.
Continue reading “Lightning Totally Does Strike Twice, And Now Scientists Know Why” »
Apr 16, 2019
[1810.11490] Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?
Posted by Saúl Morales Rodriguéz in categories: physics, space
The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.
LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti
THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.
Apr 16, 2019
The Quest for the Most Elusive Material in Physics
Posted by Genevieve O’Hagan in categories: energy, physics
Zack Geballe spent months screwing together pairs of polished diamonds at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Geophysical Laboratory. Theory predicted that squeezed between the diamonds’ tips could be one of the most miraculous substances of modern physics—a material that, at near room temperature, could transport electricity without losing power. He just needed to get the samples to Argonne National Lab outside Chicago to heat them up with laser pulses.
When Argonne beam line scientist Yue Meng turned the lasers on, all four diamonds cracked in half.
“It was a total catastrophe,” Geballe told me while I was visiting him at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC, this year.
Continue reading “The Quest for the Most Elusive Material in Physics” »
Apr 16, 2019
Physicists spot the signatures of nuclear fusion in a table-top device
Posted by Genevieve O’Hagan in categories: nuclear energy, physics
Apr 15, 2019
Gravitational echo phenomenon will become a key to the new physics, physicist says
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: cosmology, mathematics, neuroscience, physics
Gravitational echoes may be caused by the collision of two black holes, and may indicate that these objects have completely new physical properties. This conclusion was made by RUDN physicists after a series of mathematical calculations. The scientists state that if the existence of the echo phenomenon is confirmed, astrophysicists would have to reconsider their view of compact space objects. The results of the study were published in Physical Review D.
According to the theory of general relativity (GR), any massive object distorts space-time. A similar effect is observed when a heavy metal ball is placed on stretched elastic fabric. The heavier is the ball, the deeper is the depression in the fabric. Similarly, the higher the mass of an object, the more it distorts space-time. Black holes are among the heaviest objects in the universe, and therefore distort space-time the most. When two black holes collide, gravitational waves spread out from the site of collision. They can be compared to rings on the water, or sound waves, but there is one important peculiar feature. Gravitational waves do not propagate spatially—they are themselves the oscillations of space-time.
Gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes decay with time, but on their final stage, they can cause the so-called echo—additional wave scattering. It can be compared to regular acoustic echo. The existence of such gravitational echo has not been confirmed yet, and there are different opinions about its possible source. A RUDN physicist, together with colleagues from the Czech Republic and Russia, assumed that if the existence of gravitational echo is experimentally confirmed, it would be the beginning of the new physics adding to GR.
Apr 15, 2019
DIY gravitational waves with ‘[email protected]’
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: computing, cosmology, physics
Researchers hoping to better interpret data from the detection of gravitational waves generated by the collision of binary black holes are turning to the public for help.
West Virginia University assistant professor Zachariah Etienne is leading what will soon become a global volunteer computing effort. The public will be invited to lend their own computers to help the scientific community unlock the secrets contained in gravitational waves observed when black holes smash together.
LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes in 2015 opened a new window on the universe, enabling scientists to observe cosmic events spanning billions of years and to better understand the makeup of the Universe. For many scientists, the discovery also fueled expansion of efforts to more thoroughly test the theories that help explain how the universe works—with a particular focus on inferring as much information as possible about the black holes prior to their collision.
Continue reading “DIY gravitational waves with ‘[email protected]’” »
Apr 15, 2019
The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: evolution, finance, physics, space
Scientists believe that time is continuous, not discrete—roughly speaking, they believe that it does not progress in “chunks,” but rather “flows,” smoothly and continuously. So they often model the dynamics of physical systems as continuous-time “Markov processes,” named after mathematician Andrey Markov. Indeed, scientists have used these processes to investigate a range of real-world processes from folding proteins, to evolving ecosystems, to shifting financial markets, with astonishing success.
However, invariably a scientist can only observe the state of a system at discrete times, separated by some gap, rather than continually. For example, a stock market analyst might repeatedly observe how the state of the market at the beginning of one day is related to the state of the market at the beginning of the next day, building up a conditional probability distribution of what the state of the second day is given the state at the first day.
In a pair of papers, one appearing in this week’s Nature Communications and one appearing recently in the New Journal of Physics, physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that in order for such two–time dynamics over a set of “visible states” to arise from a continuous-time Markov process, that Markov process must actually unfold over a larger space, one that includes hidden states in addition to the visible ones. They further prove that the evolution between such a pair of times must proceed in a finite number of “hidden timesteps”, subdividing the interval between those two times. (Strictly speaking, this proof holds whenever that evolution from the earlier time to the later time is noise-free—see paper for technical details.)
Continue reading “The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world” »
