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Category: physics – Page 120

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What is the Drake Equation? We are talking about The Odds of ALIEN LIFE.
Is there life out there in the Universe?
How are the chances to find Extraterrestrial life?

We don’t know the answers to a lot of questions, for example:
How many alien societies exist, and are detectable?
Even though we don’t know how to answer such a question, we can at least try to figure it out with a little help from our beloved…Math.
First, we have to have a pretty good idea about how the universe works, and of course about the star and planetary formation, as well as conditions for life as we know it. This means we have to study and collect a lot of data. Luckily for us, we – humans — aren’t so bad. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology and all-natural sciences offer us the hints for the mathematical set of parameters that will give us an equation to calculate the number of alien societies that exist and are detectable.
Second, one has to sit down and think about which parameters should appear in the equation, and which not.
Do you think it’s difficult? I think so.
But luckily for us, in 1961 scientists Drake came up with a famous equation, that estimated the number of transmitting societies in the Milky Way Galaxy…

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Continue reading “What Are The Odds Of Alien Life? The Drake Equation” | >

An engine idea that can accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light, all without the need for propellant. That may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but it’s not. This is exactly what one of NASA engineers is developing, and it promises to break the law of physics.

How will these engines be developed? If it is going to work without propellant, then what will be its fuel? And most importantly, will a human be able to travel in a vehicle with such an engine as its thruster? Well, we will find out in just a second.

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Boltzmann brains are perhaps one of the spookiest ideas in physics. A Boltzmann brain is a single, isolated human brain complete with false memories that spontaneously fluctuates into existence from the void. They’re the kind of thing you’d find in a campfire horror story. The big problem, however, is that a range of plausible cosmological models (including our current cosmology) predict that Boltzmann brains will exist. Even worse, these brains should massively outnumber “ordinary” conscious observers like ourselves. At every moment of your existence, it is more likely that you are an isolated Boltzmann brain, falsely remembering your past, than a human being on a rocky planet in a low-entropy universe.

In this video I explain where the idea of Boltzmann brains originated, and why they haunt modern cosmology.

Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed! Please like and subscribe for more videos on amazing ideas in physics.

Winter Ride by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.. http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/308/w… rtist: http://www.twinmusicom.org …

Continue reading “Boltzmann Brains: A Cosmological Horror Story” | >

If you know anything about special relativity then you probably know that how fast you’re moving has an impact on how quickly time passes for you. What physics gives rise to this effect? Do you need to know some complicated mathematics in order to understand it?

It turns out that this effect, known as “time dilation”, can be very easily derived for a special kind of clock: a light clock. In this video, I consider a light clock moving through space and show how the postulates of special relativity entail that this moving clock runs slow.

Watch the video to learn what the two postulates of Einstein’s Special Relativity are, and why they entail that moving clocks slow down.

Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed! Please like and subscribe for more videos on amazing ideas in physics.

Continue reading “The Light Clock: How Moving Clocks Run Slow” | >

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Since the discovery of black holes, they have inspired images of the universe’s extremities in both scientists and storytellers. Their immense gravity — sucking in any matter and light unfortunate enough to come within grabbing distance — conjures images of crushing death and infinite possibility.

That same gravity, however, creates a well which consumes indiscriminately and from whence nothing can ever emerge. The only trouble is that isn’t the case. Among Stephen Hawking’s many accomplishments was the discovery that black holes actually radiate very slowly and will eventually evaporate. This discovery, while enough to make Hawking famous, threw a wrench in contemporary astrophysics by creating a paradox.

If a black hole compresses into a singular point at its center and is surrounded by a gravitational event horizon, then the radiation emerging from the horizon is necessarily separate from the matter in the middle. In short, that radiation contains none of the information related to the matter which fell inside. If that’s true, then causality essentially breaks down around a black hole and physicists didn’t like that one bit.

Continue reading “If you could see a black hole, it might look like a cosmic koosh ball” | >

Extended special relativity describes how the universe would look if you broke the speed of light.

Scientists from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore are pushing the limits of relativity with a new theory called the “extension of special relativity,” a report from Science Alert reveals.

The scientists’ new study suggests that objects may be able to go faster than the speed of light without completely shattering our current laws of physics.

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Continue reading “A new physics-defying theory describes the effects of faster-than-light travel” | >