Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, lasers have successfully excited the “thorium transition,” a process long pursued by researchers. This breakthrough sets the stage for groundbreaking advancements in high-precision technologies, such as nuclear clocks.

Physicists have eagerly anticipated this breakthrough: scientists globally have spent years searching for a specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that could lead to groundbreaking technological advancements.

It could be used, for example, to build an nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics – for example, the question of whether the constants of nature are actually constant or whether they change in space and time.

The work introduces a completely new way to create and study strange metals, whose electrons behave differently than those in a conventional metal like copper. “It is a potential new approach to designing these unusual materials,” says Joseph G. Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the research and Associate Professor of Physics.

Linda Ye, MIT Ph.D. ‘21, is first author of a paper on the work published earlier this year in Nature Physics. “A new way of making strange metals will help us develop a unifying theory behind their behavior. That has been quite challenging to date, and could lead to a better understanding of other materials, including high-temperature superconductors,” says Ye, now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology.

The Nature Physics paper is accompanied by a News & Views article titled, “A strange way to get a strange metal.”

Computer simulations by astronomers support the idea that dark matter—matter that no one has yet directly detected but which many physicists think must be there to explain several aspects of the observable universe—exists, according to the researchers, who include those at the University of California, Irvine.

From extreme cold to strong magnets and high pressures, the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF) provides conditions for researching these potential wonder materials.

This new propulsion system could rewrite the rules of spaceflight—not to mention completely defy conventional physics.

Russellian monism is a theory in the metaphysics of mind, on which a single set of properties underlies both consciousness and the most basic entities posited by physics. The theory is named for Bertrand Russell, whose views about consciousness and its place in nature were informed by a structuralist conception of theoretical physics. On such a structuralist conception, physics describes the world in terms of its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics (changes within that structure) and says nothing about what, if anything, underlies that structure and dynamics. For example, as it is sometimes put, physics describes what mass and charge do, e.g., how they dispose objects to move toward or away from each other, but not what mass and charge are. Thus, Russell writes the following about the events physics describes:

All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (Russell 1959: 18)

Continue reading “Russellian Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)” »

Get started on your science revolution with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine.

The universe seems to be ruled by equations and numbers. But why just these equations and why just those numbers? Is it just coincidence? In this video I have collected seven of the weirdest coincidences in physics.

Continue reading “The 7 Strangest Coincidences in the Laws of Nature” »

Neutral monism and it’s relation to information physics.

If information is “the relational glue that holds reality together,” the mind–body problem can be reframed in a more satisfactory way.

Continue reading “Can Informational Realism Help Sort Out the Mind–Body Problem?” »

Imagine you’re in a car, pedal to the metal, racing down the highway, but no matter how hard you push, you can’t surpass the speed of the car next to you, which is effortlessly cruising at the same pace. Now, replace the car with light, and you have a real cosmic conundrum: why can’t anything go faster than light?

Back in 1905, Albert Einstein turned the world of physics upside down with his theory of relativity. This wasn’t just about E=mc² or the bending of space-time; it was about something that touches everything we do: the speed of light, which is roughly 299,792 kilometers per second. According to relativity, no matter how fast you’re moving towards or away from a light source, you will always measure the speed of light at the same constant velocity.

Continue reading “Why Can’t We Go Faster Than Light?” »