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Category: space – Page 43
The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.
Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.
Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.
Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…
The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.
Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.
Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.
Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…
Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video-generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while.
More than a hundred years ago, astronomer Percival Lowell made the case for the existence of canals on Mars designed to redistribute water from the Martian ice caps to its lower, drier latitudes. This necessarily meant the existence of Martians to build the canals.
While Lowell was proven wrong by better telescopes, the question of whether there’s liquid water on Mars continues to tantalize researchers. Liquid water is a critical precondition for a habitable planet. Yet the combination of low temperature, atmospheric pressure and water vapor pressure on Mars means any liquid water found there would likely freeze, boil or evaporate immediately, making its presence unlikely.
Still, researchers continue to make the case for the presence of liquid water on Mars.
The Cold Moon, named for the frigid temperatures of December in the Northern Hemisphere, is also known as the Long Nights Moon, a nod to the extended hours of darkness this time of year.
It’s also called the Moon Before Yule, which refers to ancient Pagan winter solstice celebrations. The Celts also called it the Oak Moon. Native American names for December’s full moon include the Drift Clearing Moon and the Winter Maker Moon.
The next full moon, the Wolf Moon, will rise on Jan. 13, 2025.
NASA’s DAVINCI probe will be first in 21st century to brave Venus’ atmosphere as it descends from above the planet down to its surface.
And Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nikitapetrov.
00:01:27 What is Russian cosmism?
00:12:51 The religious side of cosmism.
00:17:13 Cosmism as a response to the challenges of the 20th century.
00:25:20 Nature as a temporary enemy and eternal friend.
00:40:21 Pavel Florensky, the Russian da Vinci.
00:46:08 Plant life as a spiritual ideal.
00:51:17 The father of the Soviet space program, and his weird spirituality.
01:03:59 Cosmism and transhumanism: Compare and contrast.
01:09:01 Cosmism as a Russian propaganda project.
Watch this conversation on MeaningofLife.tv http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/36257
Nikita Petrov (MeaningofLife.tv) and George Young (University of New England, The Russian Cosmists)
Recorded on 09/06/2016.
Researchers have doubled the number of known dark comets, identifying two distinct types: larger ones in the outer solar system and smaller ones in the inner solar system.
This discovery raises new questions about their origins and their role in delivering life-sustaining materials to Earth.
Dark Comet Discoveries
Could there be billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy? A groundbreaking study by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) estimates that the Milky Way might host as many as 6 billion planets similar to Earth. This calculation is based on data collected during NASA’s Kepler mission, which observed over 200,000 stars from 2009 to 2018.
High overhead, there is a layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. It is located roughly 31 to 55 miles above ground.
The mesosphere might seem pretty far removed from everyday concerns. Still, it can be disturbed by severe weather far below.
On the day Helene hit, NASA’s instruments captured signs of a type of atmospheric wave, not related to the space-time ones Einstein predicted, but rather ones formed by events like hurricanes.