A surprising star collision is making scientists rethink what they know about the universe.
Category: physics
Is our Universe really the only one? A new theory that hopes to solve one of the biggest problems in physics, may have rewritten our perception of time, and found a way through the Big Bang. Video by Howard Timberlake.
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Cosmology draws on many branches of physics to study the universe’s history. And what it’s found has forever changed how we understand our position in the cosmos.
Moving ever closer to the Web v.5.0 – an immersive virtual playground of the Metaverse – would signify a paramount convergent moment that MIT’s Rizwan Virk calls ‘The Simulation Point’ and I prefer to call the ‘Simulation Singularity’. Those future virtual worlds could be wholly devised and “fine-tuned” with a possibility to encode different sets of “physical laws and constants” for our enjoyment and exploration.
We are in the “kindergarten of godlings” right now. One could easily envision that with exponential development of AI-powered multisensory immersive technologies, by the mid-2030s most of us could immerse in “real virtualities” akin to lifestyles of today’s billionaires. Give it another couple of decades, each of us might opt to create and run their own virtual universe with [simulated] physics indistinguishable from the physics of our world. Or, you can always “fine-tune” the rule set, or tweak historical scenarios at will.
How can we be so certain about the Simulation Singularity circa 2035? By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.
This illustrates the power of exponential growth and this is how the progress in information and communication technologies is now literally exploding – by double-improving price-to-performance ratio roughly once a year. This is why you can see memory cards jumping regularly from 32MB to 64MB, then to 128MB, 256MB and 512MB. This is why your smartphone is as capable as a supercomputer 25 years ago. This is why telecommunication carriers are actively deploying 5G wireless networks, as you read this article.
A research team led by professors from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy has announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter.
Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, a research associate professor are coauthors of the paper “Pascal conductance series in ballistic one-dimensional LaAIO3/SrTiO3 channels.” The research focuses on measurements in one-dimensional conducting systems where electrons are found to travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually.
The study was published in Science on Feb. 14. A video outlining the paper’s findings can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDjGiH8OnqU&feature=youtu.be
A research team led by professors from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy has announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter.
Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, a research associate professor are coauthors of the paper “Pascal conductance series in ballistic one-dimensional LaAIO3/SrTiO3 channels.” The research focuses on measurements in one-dimensional conducting systems where electrons are found to travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually.
The study was published in Science on Feb. 14.
Next week, the European Space Agency is going to jettison a cubesat called Qarman from the International Space Station and watch it burst into a fireball as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere—all on purpose.
What’s the mission: Qarman (short for “QubeSat for Aerothermodynamic Research and Measurements on Ablation”) is a shoebox-sized experiment meant to help researchers better understand the physics at play when objects plummet into the planet’s atmosphere and burn up. Qarman was brought up to the ISS in December during a cargo resupply mission. On February 17, it will be cast back out into space and begin slowly drifting toward Earth before entering the atmosphere and burning up in about six months.
Tell me more: Qarman has four solar-cell-covered panels that are designed to increase atmospheric drag and hasten reentry. Its nose is made from a special kind of cork that’s typically used in thermal protection systems on spacecraft. Ground testing shows that when the cork heats up, it chars and flakes away a bit at a time. The Qarman team is interested in learning how this process works during reentry.
In a universe that unthinkingly follows the rules, human agency is an anomaly. Can physics ever make sense of our power to change the physical world at will?
OmO.
Computer simulations show coupled oscillators behave as “activated time crystals”.
Circa 2017
The Middle Ages certainly were far from being science-friendly: Whoever looked for new findings off the beaten track faced the threat of being burned at the stake. Hence, the contribution of this era to technical progress is deemed to be rather small. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), however, were inspired by medieval mail armor when producing a new metamaterial with novel properties. They succeeded in reversing the Hall coefficient of a material.
The Hall effect is the occurrence of a transverse electric voltage across an electric conductor passed by current flow, if this conductor is located in a magnetic field. This effect is a basic phenomenon of physics and allows to measure the strength of magnetic fields. It is the basis of magnetic speed sensors in cars or compasses in smartphones. Apart from measuring magnetic fields, the Hall effect can also be used to characterize metals and semiconductors and in particular to determine charge carrier density of the material. The sign of the measured Hall voltage allows conclusions to be drawn as to whether charge carriers in the semiconductor element carry positive or negative charge.
Mathematicians already predicted theoretically that it is possible to reverse the Hall coefficient of a material (such as gold or silicon), i.e. to reverse its sign. This was expected to be achieved by a three-dimensional ring structure resembling medieval mail armor. How-ever, this was considered difficult, as the ring mesh of millionths of a meter in size would have to be composed of three different components.