Lifeboat Foundation

The received view in physics is that the direction of time is provided by the second law of thermodynamics, according to which the passage of time is measured by ever-increasing disorder in the universe. This view, Julian Barbour argues, is wrong. If we reject Newton’s faulty assumptions about the existence of absolute space and time, Newtonian dynamics can be shown to provide a very different arrow of time. Its direction, according to this theory, is given by the increase in the complexity and order of a system of particles, exactly the opposite of what the received view about time suggests.

Two of the most established beliefs of contemporary cosmology are that the universe is expanding and that the direction of the arrow of time in the universe is defined by ever-increasing disorder (entropy), as described by the second law of thermodynamics. But both of these beliefs rest on shaky ground. In saying that the universe is expanding, physicists implicitly assume its size is measured by a rod that exists outside the universe, providing an absolute scale. It’s the last vestige of Newton’s absolute space and should have no place in modern cosmology. And in claiming that entropy is what gives time its arrow, physicists uncritically apply the laws of thermodynamics, originally discovered through the study of steam engines, to the universe as a whole. That too needs to be questioned.

Continue reading “Time is the increase of order, not disorder” »

Astronomers just discovered the sneaky asteroid on July 26.

NASA astronomers discovered that a large asteroid will zoom past Earth on Aug. 4, missing our planet by millions of miles.

Got a protein? This AI will tell you what it looks like.

AlphaFold was recognized by the journal Science as 2021’s Breakthrough of the Year, beating out candidates like Covid-19 antiviral pills and the application of CRISPR gene editing in the human body. One expert even wondered if AlphaFold would become the first AI to win a Nobel Prize.

The breakthroughs have kept coming.

Continue reading “Finally, an answer to the question: AI — what is it good for?” »

Artificial Intelligence has many potential applications and consequences for strategic risk. Here is NTI’s work on it so far.

Japanese studio Nendo has created an archive to house its products and furniture from precast concrete box culverts in central Japan.

Named Culvert Guesthouse, the archive and residence was constructed from four tunnel-like forms that were stacked on top of each other.

Designed by the studio as its own archive, the distinctive-shaped building is located in dense woodland on the edge of the town of Miyota in Nagano Prefecture.

In February 2020, four distinguished astrophysicists — Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf — suggested that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.

“It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so; maybe explorers visited us in the past, but we don’t remember, and they died out,” says Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his collaborators in a 2019 study that suggests it wouldn’t take as long as thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the orbits of stars can help distribute life, offering a new solution to the Fermi paradox. “The solar system may well be amid other settled systems; it’s just been unvisited for millions of years.”

Scientists at Nagoya University in Japan claim to have discovered dark matter that dates back 12 billion years ago, which would make it the earliest observation of the hypothetical substance to date.

Their findings — as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters — could potentially offer some tantalizing answers about the nature of the universe.

Until now, observations of dark matter only went as far back as ten billion years. Any further than that, and the light was too faint to observe.

On Monday, hackers exploited a basic vulnerability in the code of Nomad — a crypto “bridge” that allows customers to transfer cryptocurrencies between different blockchains — getting away with roughly $190 million in user investments, CNBC reports.

This hack is just the latest in a string of attacks on crypto bridges, platforms that, according to CNBC, have collectively lost more than $1 billion to hackers in 2022 alone.

Given that Nomad markets itself as a “secure” platform, the company definitely has a lot of explaining to do.

Physicists have been trying to determine the ground states of 2D electron systems at extremely low densities and temperatures for many decades now. The first theoretical predictions for these ground states were put forward by physicists Felix Bloch in 1929 and Eugene Wigner in 1934, both of whom suggested that interactions between electrons could lead to ground states that had never been observed before.

Researchers at Princeton University have been conducting studies in this area of physics for several years now. Their most recent work, featured in Physical Review Letters, gathered evidence of a new state that had been predicted by Wigner, known as a disordered Wigner solid (WS).

“The phase predicted by Wigner, an ordered array of electrons (the so-called Wigner crystal or WS), has fascinated scientists for decades,” Mansour Shayegan, principal investigator for the study, told Phys.org. “Its experimental realization is extremely challenging, as it requires samples with very low densities and with appropriate parameters (large effective mass and small dielectric constant) to enhance the role of interaction.”