A team of physicists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory at Applied Physics, in New York, has developed a model that shows it might be possible to create a subluminal warp drive.
Category: physics – Page 53
MIT physicists and colleagues have created a five-lane superhighway for electrons that could allow ultra-efficient electronics and more. The work, reported in the May 9 issue of Science, is one of several important discoveries by the same team over the last year involving a material that is essentially a unique form of pencil lead.
This theoretical model for space-time manipulation aligns with established laws. Imagine that.
Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away.
Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around SagittariusA* (Sgr A• the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.
The 3D flare structure features two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers (or half the distance between Earth and the sun) from the center of the black hole. It is based on data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile over a period of 100 minutes directly after an eruption seen in Xray data on April 11, 2017.
From the article by Robin Hanson, a professor of economics who also holds degrees in physics and computer science.
So this remains my worry: our rapid rates of change in unconditional choices of cultural norms are not mostly driven by reason, but instead by a cultural evolution process that has…
I’ve been reading, thinking, and talking, trying to get clearer on what exactly are the culture problems I’m worried about, and how best to describe them. I seek descriptions not only easy for an outsider public to understand, but also for prestigious insider specialists to embrace.
It seems maladaptive culture might be a better name for the problem. So that is the title of this post. Also, I tentatively see four key ways to distinguish more from less problematic cases; the big problems that I fear sit mainly in one corner of that 16-cornered 4D cube of possibilities. Here are the four dimensions:
In the scientific literature, a citation acts as a mechanism to signal prior knowledge, enhance credibility, and protect against plagiarism. But it also gives credit to the individual or team who established or discovered the knowledge in question, and citations have thus emerged as a metric to measure the impact of a work or researcher.
A new article explores the physics behind the popular party trick of infinite mirrors, explaining why it may not actually create infinite reflections. While it may seem like a never-ending loop, the reality is that the reflections eventually become too faint to see. This phenomenon is a result of the way light behaves and can be explained by the laws of physics.
With pulses of sound through tiny speakers, Cornell physics researchers have clarified the basic nature of a new superconductor.
