Thought Experiment Helps Explain Why Time Always Flows Forward From The Past. (Inside Science) -- Almost nothing is more obvious than the fact that time flows from the past, which we remember, toward the future, which we don’t.
Scientists and philosophers call this the psychological arrow of time. Hot coffee left on your desk cools down, and never heats up on its own, which reflects the thermodynamic arrow of time. In a paper scheduled to appear this week in the journal Physical Review E, two physicists make the case that these two long-separate notions of time — one based on psychology and one based on thermodynamics — must always align. The principles of thermodynamics show that large collections of particles, like the trillions upon trillions of liquid molecules in a coffee cup, always move toward more disorganized arrangements. For instance, hot water molecules clumped together in a cold room need a lot of organization, so warm drinks eventually cool to the surrounding temperature. The Universe May Be A Hologram. Big Bang's 'Primordial Soup' May Be Created At Brookhaven National Lab.
Editor's Note: This article was updated at 4:00 p.m.
E.T. Alien Life May Have Evolved Just After Big Bang, New Research Suggests. What is the Fibonacci Sequence? The shapes of spiral galaxies, such as Messier 74, and hurricanes, such as Hurricane Irene, follow the Fibonacci sequence.
Credit: Left: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team. Right: NASA | NOAA | GOES Project. Physicists Create Magnetic 'Monopole,' Confirming Prediction Made In 1931. Physicists have created and photographed an isolated north pole — a monopole — in a simulated magnetic field, bringing to life a thought experiment that first predicted the existence of actual magnetic monopoles more than 80 years ago.
In nature, north and south magnetic poles always go hand in hand. Cutting a bar magnet in half just creates two magnets, each of which still has two poles, rather than creating separate north and south poles on each half. Yet their electrostatic cousins, positive and negative charges, exist independently. Innovations That Will Change Your Life: A Conversation With Elon Musk. Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and founder of Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity.
WORLDPOST: What are the key innovations that will change our lives in the decades ahead? ELON MUSK: There are four apart from the Internet, an astonishing invention by which people can access knowledge from anywhere. There will be the transition to the sustainable production and consumption of energy. Hopefully, the extension of human life to other planets, depending on how rapidly we progress in developing space transport and how we live - if we manage to survive -- by then. Reading and writing genetic code. Halley's Comet Played Role In Ancient Global Famine, Ice Core Study Suggests. SAN FRANCISCO — The ancients had ample reason to view comets as harbingers of doom, it would appear.
A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536, blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably, a new study suggests. This dramatic climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world, which may have made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D. 541-542 — the first recorded emergence of the Black Death in Europe. The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth. [Photos of Halley's Comet Through History] "I have all this extraterrestrial stuff in my ice core," study leader Dallas Abbott, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told LiveScience here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
9 Recklessly Optimistic Tech Predictions For 2014. It seems a fairly safe conclusion to draw that 2014 will deliver technology news, in some form or other.
Every year since the dawn of time has, pretty much -- whether it was the introduction of Fire Pro, the higher-specced version of Fire, released in 999,998 BC, or the spangly new consoles of the last few weeks: human technology evolves, inventions are reinvented, phones get thinner. So it goes. Aluminum speeds up the hydrothermal alteration of olivine. © 2013 Mineralogical Society of America + Author Affiliations ↵* E-mail: muriel.andreani@univ-lyon1.fr Manuscript handled by Haozhe Liu.
Hydrogen squeezed from stone could be new energy source. 12 December 2013Last updated at 20:10 ET By Simon Redfern Reporter, BBC News Olivine is sometimes found in nature as the semi-precious stone peridot Scientists from the University of Lyon have discovered a new way to split hydrogen gas from water, using rocks.
The method promises a new green energy source, providing copious hydrogen from a simple mixture of rock and water. It speeds up a chemical reaction that takes geological timescales in nature. In the reaction, the mineral olivine strips one oxygen and hydrogen atom from an H2O molecule to form a mineral called serpentine, releasing the spare hydrogen atom. The results were discussed at this week's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, and have been published in the journal American Mineralogist.