A new scientific study says the universe may actually change its own laws of physics to achieve stability and evolution, called “The Autodidactic Universe.”
Category: space – Page 637
James Webb Space Telescope launch date, time, and how to watch NASA’s livestream
Here’s what you need to know.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb for short) is scheduled to launch on December 24, 2021, at 7:20 Eastern Standard Time.
It will blast off from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 ECA rocket, headed for an orbit around the second Lagrange point, or L2, where the gravitational pull of Earth is equal to the gravitational pull of the Sun.
Webb’s launch has to be carefully timed to put the telescope on the right path. It needs to leave Earth when our planet’s axis is tilted in the right direction, and when the launch site is pointed toward the right area of space. In other words, the James Webb Space Telescope launch has to happen during the right season and at the right time of day. On launch day, those requirements allow just a 30-minute window in which Webb will have to launch — or it will have to wait for another day.
NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Confirmed for December 24 Launch
The James Webb Space Telescope is confirmed for the target launch date of December 24, at 7:20 a.m. EST.
Late on December 17, teams at the launch site successfully completed encapsulation of the observatory inside the Ariane 5 rocket that will launch it to space. Webb’s final launch readiness review will be held on Tuesday, December 21 and, if successful, roll-out is planned for Wednesday, December 22.
Two-time interpretation of quantum mechanics
We suggest an interpretation of quantum mechanics, inspired by the ideas of Aharonov et al. of a time-symmetric description of quantum theory. We show that a special final boundary condition for the Universe, may be consistently defined as to determine single classical-like measurement outcomes, thus solving the “measurement problem”. No other deviation is made from standard quantum mechanics, and the resulting theory is deterministic (in a two-time sense) and local. Quantum mechanical probabilities are recovered in general, but are eliminated from the description of any single measurement. We call this the Two-time interpretation of quantum mechanics. We analyze ideal measurements, showing how the quantum superposition is, in effect, dynamically reduced to a single classical state via a “two-time decoherence” process.
This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet—and Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth
It’s often said Earth’s resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.
Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, comets, and asteroids—and it hardly cornered the market when it comes to the valuable materials we use to make smartphone batteries or raise skyscrapers.
A recent study puts it in perspective.
Earth’s resources are finite, but shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.
The Right Stuff
Astronauts have one of the most competitive jobs in the world — 18,300 people applied to be part of NASA’s 2017 class of astronauts, and only 12 made the final cut. But the process of finding astronauts with “the right stuff” has changed over time, and a lot of us Earthlings have the wrong idea about what NASA is looking for.
“I think a lot of the public conception is that we choose super-geniuses or super-jocks or super-pilots,” says Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and physician. “I would say that the astronaut office right now is full of people who are comfortable to be with. I mean, don’t get me wrong — we’ve got a couple of super-geniuses, but the main [goal] is that we’ve chosen well-rounded, well-behaved, professional people who are adaptable and resilient, and just someone you could see exploring a brand new world or locking yourself in a garage with for six months.”
NASA’s Juno Spacecraft “Hears” Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede — Listen to the Dramatic Flyby of the Icy Orb
Jupiter mission’s Ganymede flyby offers a dramatic ride-along. It is one of the highlights mission scientists shared in a briefing at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
Sounds from a Ganymede flyby, magnetic fields, and remarkable comparisons between Jupiter and Earth’s oceans and atmospheres were discussed during a briefing today on NASA.
Optical Chip Promises 350x Speedup Over RTX 3080 in Some Algorithms
Lightelligence, a Boston-based photonics company, revealed the world’s first small form-factor, photonics-based computing device, meaning it uses light to perform compute operations. The company claims the unit is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080.” 350 times faster, to be exact, but that only applies to certain types of applications.
However, the PACE achieves that coveted specialization through an added field of computing — which not only makes the system faster, it makes it incredibly more efficient. While traditional semiconductor systems have the issue of excess heat that results from running current through nanometre-level features at sometimes ludicrous frequencies, the photonic system processes its workloads with zero Ohmic heating — there’s no heat produced from current resistance. Instead, it’s all about light.
Lightelligence is built around its CEO’s Ph.d. thesis — and the legitimacy it provides. This is so because when “Deep Learning with Coherent Nanophotonic Circuits” was published in Nature in 2017, Lightelligence’s CEO and founder Yichen Chen had already foreseen a path for optical circuits to be at the forefront of Machine Learning computing efforts. By 2020, the company had already received $100 million in funding and employed around 150 employees. A year later, Lightspeed has achieved a dem product that it says is “hundreds of times faster than a typical computing unit, such as NVIDIA RTX 3080”. 350 times faster, to be clear.
The PACE’s debut aims to charm enough capital to comfortably reach its goal of launching a pilot AI accelerator product to the market in 2022. That’s still only a stretch goal in the company’s vision, however, its goal is to develop and distribute a mass-market, photonics-based hardware solution as early as 2023, targeting the Cloud AI, Finance, and Retail markets. Considering how Lightelligence managed to improve the company’s 2019 COMET design performance by a factor of a million with PACE in a span of two years, it’ll be interesting to see where their efforts take them when it comes to launching.