Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 1,059

Quantum physics has just been found hiding in one of the most important mathematical models of all time

Game theory is a branch of mathematics that looks at how groups solve complex problems. The Schrödinger equation is the foundational equation of quantum mechanics — the area of physics focused on the smallest particles in the Universe. There’s no reason to expect one to have anything to do with the other.

But according to a team of French physicists, it’s possible to translate a huge number of problems in game theory into the language of quantum mechanics. In a new paper, they show that electrons and fish follow the exact same mathematics.

Schrödinger is famous in popular culture for his weird cat, but he’s famous to physicists for being the first to write down an equation that fully describes the weird things that happen when you try to do experiments on the fundamental constituents of matter. He realised that you can’t describe electrons or atoms or any of the other smallest pieces of the Universe as billiard balls that will be exactly where you expect them to be exactly when you expect them to be there.

Read more

Brainstorming New Ways To Test If Cosmos Is One Big Computer Simulation

Blast from the past. Someone in an astrobiology group seemed to question the validity of the question in my recent story on 5 Questions For E.T. about whether the universe is artificial. Here’s my response:

In the dog days of summer, when a gush of hot air from a Fifth Avenue subway grate can feel as real as it gets, take heart that the downtown traffic nipping at your heels may just be part of a cosmic-scale computer simulation.

The idea that the cosmos and everything in it could be a super-advanced civilization’s version of Xbox first came to the fore a little over a decade ago.

In a Philosophical Quarterly paper, philosophy professor Nick Bostrom at Oxford University in the U.K., posits that what we observe as our universe may in fact be a very advanced simulation designed by our distant progeny.

Read more

Science has discovered hell

Hell has an address: 55 Cancri-e is the first alien planet to have some of its surface features directly observed. And it’s no tropical paradise.

For some time 55 Cancri-e has been considered “strange.” Some felt it may be made of diamond. Others suggested it was covered in exotic fluids.

So an international team of astronomers headed up by the University of Cambridge has examined data captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope about this 40 light-year-distant “super-Earth.”

Read more

International ‘Moon Village’ Is Way To Go According To European Space Agency | Video

Sounds great — as long as we don’t call it a Moon Village. That sounds inane.

The director general of ESA, Johann-Dietrich Woerner, believes that the world should collaborate to create a permanent lunar base for “science, business, tourism or even mining.” Plans to use robotics and 3D printing for building the base have been discussed.

Read more

Planet 9 May Hail From Sun’s Stellar Birth Cluster

Planet 9, if indeed it’s out there, may have been stripped from one of our Sun’s stellar siblings, very early in the life of our solar system. The idea is that the Sun’s original birth cluster of at least a 1000 stars was pretty crowded and there was ample opportunity to gravitationally strip a planet from a stellar brother or sister. But guess stars don’t get jealous, eh?

A possible super-earth lying on our solar system’s outer fringes may have been captured from a star in our Sun’s original stellar birth cluster, Alexander James Mustill, an astronomer at Lund University in Sweden, tells me.

Even though Planet 9’s existence still remains up for debate, a growing body of evidence for nearly decade now indicates the presence of a planet some 10 times the mass of Earth that orbits the Sun at a distance of up to 900 astronomical units (or Earth-Sun distances).

Mustill says that depending on how long the Sun stayed in proximity with its stellar siblings, indeed, Planet 9 may have been captured within the first 100 million years of our star’s formation. As Mustill notes, evidence suggests that the Sun was born into a large open cluster of at least a thousand stars.

Read more