Lifeboat Foundation

By David Lumb — Fast Company
Mars One, the Netherlands-based nonprofit that wants to send human colonists to Mars using private-industry rockets, has been widely criticized for its unrealistic goals and timeline. This week, in a U.S. House Committee hearing for NASA’s 2016 budget, NASA chief administrator Charles Bolden told the committee that “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars,” reports Engadget. Bolden’s statement, while not a direct reference to Mars One, certainly seems to support the skepticism surrounding the project. Read more

By Mark Jackson — SingularityHub

Ever wondered how the technology we use every day came into existence? Sure, an engineer designed it, a manufacturer produced it, and some savvy marketing helped sell you the product, but where did the ideas come from? Many famous inventions and household name technologies originated from research done by physicists, either as byproducts or direct application of their ideas. How does it all happen?

“So as a physicist, what do you actually do?”

Many people outside of academic physics departments often have this question, due to a lack of communication between general public and researchers. Read more

The retrieved global constancy of c in the equivalence principle implies that the vertical distance to the surface of the neutron star has increased compared to the traditional view: the indentation into the “cloth” of spacetime has become deeper.

The stronger the gravitational acceleration, the deeper the trough. The new globally constant-c result due to Noether implies that the spatial distance right down to the “horizon” (surface) of a black hole has become infinite. This novel spatial distance valid from the outside corresponds with the well-known infinite temporal distance valid from the outside for light sent down to, or coming up from, the horizon (Oppenheimer and Snyder, 1939).

So black holes are never finished in finite outer time. But I hear you ask: Is it not quite well known that one can fall-in onto a large black hole in finite astronaut time? Yes, this is correct.

How come? This is the last Noetherian point: The on-board clocks of the astronaut are infinitely slowed. Also our rotating wheel comes to a virtual standstill of its rotation on the horizon (the tangential velocity of the wheel staying invariant in reality while the wheel’s diameter invisibly approaches infinity).

Continue reading “Noether’s Theorem + Equivalence Principle = c-global (part IV, coda)” »

To see what happens, let your Noether wheel rotate about a horizontal axis (that is, rotate vertically). Then the doubled radius will still be optically masked in the horizontal direction, but not so in the vertical direction. Hence you get a 2:1 vertical ellipse.

The optical contraction in the horizontal directions, found to be valid downstairs using the Noether wheel, implies that light will be seen to “creep” downstairs at halved speed when watched from above. This is what Einstein already found in 1907. So everything is fine.

But: does light really creep down there? The answer is no. For the distance travelled is doubled compared to above.

The conserved angular momentum L obeys a simple formula for a constant vertical (or else horizontal) rotation axis of the wheel:

L = ω m r^2

Since this expression is hard to remember by heart, the word “L’hombre” can help even though it is not high-Spanish. ω is the rotation rate, m the mass and r the radius of Noether’s frictionlessly rotating bicycle wheel.

If ω is halved (as on the surface of a neutron star), what about m and r , the other two components of the conserved L ?

Continue reading “Noether’s Theorem + Equivalence Principle = c-global (part II)” »

This simple insight amounts to a revolution in physics. It resolves an inconsistency accepted by Einstein in the absence of Noether’s theorem in 1907: that c were reduced downstairs in a constantly accelerating long rocketship in outer space.

Noether allows you to see what happens. She discovered “global conservation of angular momentum in nature” as is well known in 1916.

Take a frictionless bicycle wheel that is suspended from its hub, and lower it and then pull it back up again. What happens if angular momentum is constant all the time as she showed?

Answer: The rotation rate of this “clock” must go down reversibly like that of any other clock. But since angular momentum is conserved (Noether), the other two components in angular momentum besides rotation rate (i.e. mass and radius) cannot both remain unchanged.

This is a wonderful new result enabled by Emmy Noether.

Lewis Dartnell | AEON
“Given the dwindling reserves of crude oil left in the world, it could be argued that the most wasteful use for this limited resource is to simply burn it. We should be carefully preserving what’s left for the vital repertoire of valuable organic compounds it offers.” Read more

Vicki Turk & Brian Anderson | Motherboard
“That’s another basic thing that the doom-and-gloom, death-is-preferable-to-the-future crowd seem to misunderstand. The world won’t just stay the same, with everyone trudging along in a state of boredom; it’ll keep changing. There’ll be new stuff to do because we’ll keep making new stuff. We’ll get those jetpacks we were promised, and that’s just the start.” Read more

Robert Szczerba | The Next Web
“The advancement of technology generally evokes a range of emotions in people from all walks of life. Some view technology as a great evil that slowly diminishes our humanity, while others view it as a way to bring the world closer together and to help solve some of our greatest challenges.” Read more