Lifeboat Foundation

Perhaps looking at our Universe as three dimensions of space is too restrictive. What if we were more — and less — all at once?

Until now, art historians dismissed some doodles in da Vinci’s notebooks as “irrelevant.”

But a new study from Ian Hutchings, a professor at the University of Cambridge, showed that one page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contained something groundbreaking: The first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.

Although it has been common knowledge that da Vinci conducted the first systematic study of friction (which underpins the modern science of tribology, or the study of friction, lubrication, and wear), we didn’t know how and when he came up with these ideas.

Continue reading “Engineer finds a huge physics discovery in da Vinci’s ‘irrelevant scribbles’” »

A new paper asserts that a physical body might be able to pass through a wormhole in spite of the extreme tidal forces that are at play.

A physical object, such as a person or a spacecraft, could theoretically make it through a wormhole in the centre of a black hole, and maybe even access another universe on the other side, physicists have suggested.

Continue reading “Physicists Say They’ve Figured out How Spacecraft Could Make It Through a Wormhole” »

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet if the flow of time is an illusion, how do we account for the distinction between past, present and future? In June, 60 physicists gathered for four days at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to debate this another questions about the mysteries of time.

Scientists have conducted the world’s first successful time travel experiment, proving once and for all that time travel is possible.

Science and the internet have an uneasy relationship: Science tends to move forward through a careful and tedious evaluation of data and theory, and the process can take years to complete. In contrast, the internet community generally has the attention span of Dory, the absent-minded fish of “Finding Nemo”(and now “Finding Dory”) — a meme here, a celebrity picture there — oh, look … a funny cat video.

Thus people who are interested in serious science should be extremely cautious when they read an online story that purports to be a paradigm-shifting scientific discovery. A recent example is one suggesting that a new force of nature might have been discovered. If true, that would mean that we have to rewrite the textbooks.

As a physicist, I’d like to shed a disciplined scientific light on the claim.

Continue reading “A Fifth Force: Fact or Fiction?” »

Scientists have captured new images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancers. The three-dimensional structure could help researchers develop novel therapies and diagnostic tools for diseases that are caused by a malfunction in calcium adsorption.

Alexander Sobolevsky’s lab at Columbia University Medical Center is studying a family of proteins called “Transient receptor potential (TRP)” channels. These proteins line surfaces inside the body, such as the intestine, and form pores that help calcium cross a dense barrier of lipid and protein called the membrane to reach the interior of the cell.

Continue reading “New images of a calcium-shuttling molecule that has been linked to aggressive cancer” »

“Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“
–Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)

I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.

On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional.
In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.

Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion.
Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.

Continue reading “3 Reasons You Are Living in the Matrix / How to Make a Red Pill” »

A new model shows how the universe could survive a “big bounce” rather than a big bang, without the need for complex new physics.