Lifeboat Foundation

Although it might not be observable, if our current theories of physics are correct, the multiverse must exist.

I don’t feel any different being 77 years old, though I know I’m not going to be here forever. On a day-to-day basis, I still write papers, solve physics problems and interact with other physicists. I may be the only one in the world that doesn’t know that I’m senile, but I continue to contribute to physics. The principle thing is that I am still having fun.

The next act: Life stories | A taste for life.

Do you remember all the hoopla last year when the Higgs Boson was confirmed by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider? That’s the one called the ‘God particle’, because it was touted as helping to resolve the forces of nature into one elegant theory. Well—Not so fast, bucko!…

First, some credit where credit is due: The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets interspersed by accelerators that boost the energy of the particles as they whip around and smash into each other. For physicists—and anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of what goes into everything—it certainly inspires awe.

Existence of the Higgs Boson (aka, The God Particle) was predicted. Physicists were fairly certain that it would be observed. But its discovery is a ‘worst case’ scenario for the Standard Model of particle physics. It points to shortcomings in our ability to model and predict things. Chemists have long had a master blueprint of atoms in the Periodic Table. It charts all the elements in their basic states. But, physicists are a long way from building something analogous. That’s because we know a lot more about atomic elements than the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. _{[continue below image]}

Continue reading “Fundamental Particles & Forces: What do we know?” »

Will A.I. take us over, and one day look back on this time period as the dawn of their civilization? Richard Dawkins posits an interesting idea, or at the very least a premise to a good science-fiction novel…

When we come to artificial intelligence and the possibility of their becoming conscious we reach a profound philosophical difficulty. I am a philosophical naturalist. I am committed to the view that there’s nothing in our brains that violates the laws of physics, there’s nothing that could not in principle be reproduced in technology. It hasn’t been done yet, we’re probably quite a long way away from it, but I see no reason why in the future we shouldn’t reach the point where a human made robot is capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. We can feel pain, why shouldn’t they?

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Might Run the World Better Than Humans Do” »

Despite sounding like the most egregious contradiction in physics, hot water appears to freeze faster than cold water under certain circumstances. The phenomenon can be traced back to Aristotle himself, but after centuries of experiments demonstrating this phenomenon, no one’s been able to explain it.

Now physicists are pointing to strange properties of hydrogen bonds as the solution to one of the oldest mysteries in physics — but others are claiming the so-called Mpemba effect doesn’t even exist at all.

Continue reading “The Claim Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water Is Even Weirder Than You Think” »

“Aging is a consequence of physics, not biology.” Dr. Aubrey de Grey believes that the aging of any machine with moving parents is fundamentally the same, whether that machine is alive or not. He states that the SENS Foundation doesn’t work on longevity and immortality — it works on health. “The only way we are going to live substantially longer is by staying truly youthful for substantially longer.”

For it to work it actually has to break the laws of physics.

On Thursday, 31 August, 2017, a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the SST-1M, recorded its first events while undergoing testing at the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Krakow, Poland. The SST-1M is proposed as one of CTA’s Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs), which will cover the high end of CTA’s energy range, between about 1 and 300 TeV (tera-electronvolts).

A crew in Krakow worked for two days to install the camera on the telescope and spent another two days monitoring it to ensure it could be safely switched on in the high humidity conditions. Watch the camera installation in the video below.

Continue reading “CTA Prototype Telescope, the SST-1M, Catches its First Glimpse of the Sky” »