10 Mind-Bending Implications of the Many Worlds Theory Our World In quantum physics—the scientific study of the nature of physical reality—there is plenty of room for interpretation within the realm of what is known. The most popular mainstream interpretation, the Copenhagen interpretation, has as one of its central tenets the concept of wave function collapse. That is to say, every event exists as a “wave function” which contains every possible outcome of that event, which “collapses”—distilling into the actual outcome, once it is observed. For example, if a room is unobserved, anything and everything that could possibly be in that room exists in “quantum superposition”—an indeterminate state, full of every possibility, at least until someone enters the room and observes it, thereby collapsing the wave function and solidifying the reality. The role of the observer has long been a source of contention for those who disagree with the theory. There Is A Multiverse, An Infinite Number Of Parallel Physical Realities You Are Technically Immortal
There Is No Time. There Never Was and There Never Will Be By: Josh Richardson, Prevent Disease Everything exists in the present moment and it’s a fundamental principle of the Universe that many of our scientists are still trying to grasp. Time does not actually exist and Quantum Theory proves it. There are things that are closer to you in time, and things that are further away, just as there are things that are near or far away in space. But the idea that time flows past you is just as absurd as the suggestion that space does. The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, there is no way to specify events that everyone can agree happen simultaneously. The result is a picture known as the block universe: the universe seen from that impossible vantage point outside space and time. One might say that when we better understand consciousness we will better understand time.
Memories of Kurt Gödel [This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of a photo by Arnold Newman.] I didn’t know where his real office door was, so I went around to knock on the outside door instead. Suddenly he was there, floating up before the long glass door like some fantastic deep-sea fish in a pressurized aquarium. Kurt Gödel was unquestionably the greatest logician of the century. Like Einstein, Gödel was German-speaking and sought a haven from the events of the Second World War in Princeton. [Alley in Elko, Nevada, 2012] The Kafkaesque aspect of Gödel’s work and character is expressed in his famous Incompleteness Theorem of 1930. Scientists are thus left in a position somewhat like K. in The Castle. This seems terribly depressing. “Talk about what?”
A Black Hole Doesn't Die -- It Does Something A Lot Weirder And now you all understand why Stephen Hawking is widely acknowledged as a genius. Until his proposal of black hole evaporation by virtual particles, no one had then made such a strong link between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Much however still remains to be done. I'm interested in why the hole preferentially chooses to absorb antiparticles. No, no, no, you misunderstand. But that's not the issue at all so ignore that. Instead, by absorbing one or the other of any virtual particle/antiparticle pair near the event horizon, it looks to the outside universe as if the black hole generating mass from nothing. This would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics where it not for Hawking's clever realization that the mass had to be coming from the hole itself. Get it? I think so: I guess we'd see the black hole emitting particles and antiparticles?
How the Higgs Boson Might Spell Doom for the Universe Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable." The Higgs boson helps explain why particles have the mass they do. The Higgs particle that the LHC has found possesses a mass of approximately 126 giga-electron volts (GeV)—roughly the combined mass of 126 protons (hydrogen nuclei). And that very nature of being a Standard Model Higgs may be the reason our universe is ultimately unstable. Such a metastable universe is not a new idea.
The Possible Parallel Universe of Dark Matter I am a light-matter chauvinist. Don’t snicker; you’re probably one, too. Almost all of us are. We think of ourselves, and the world immediately around us, as something special. And by extension we regard our kind of matter — atoms, molecules, rocks, water, air, stars and all of the other things that interact with visible light — as the most important kind of matter in the universe. Science tells a starkly different story. Even the technical language used to describe the Planck result was humbling. But cosmologists have a hard time letting go of their prejudices. Two recent advances hint at just how much we have been missing about the dark side. The other shoe dropped earlier this year, when a group of Harvard University theorists, including Lisa Randall and JiJi Fan, formulated a new theory of dark matter. Acknowledging that dark matter might have some of the same kind of diversity as visible matter may seem a minor adjustment. “A Whole New World”
How Many Dimensions Does the Universe Really Have? - The Nature of Reality An engineer, a mathematician and a physicist walk into a universe. How many dimensions do they find? The engineer whips out a protractor and straightedge. That’s easy, she says. With her instruments she demonstrates the trio of directions at right angles to each other: length, width and height. The mathematician gets out his notepad and creates a list of regular, symmetric geometric shapes with perpendicular sides. Credit: Sven Geier/Flickr, under a Creative Commons license. Finally it is the physicist’s turn. Let’s see how she reached her conclusions. In 1917, Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest wrote a thought-provoking piece, “In what way does it become manifest in the fundamental laws of physics that space has three dimensions?” He noted, for example, that the stable orbits of planets in the solar system and the stationary states of electrons in atoms require inverse-squared force laws. Let’s think of what an inverse-squared law means. The universe is not just space, though.
Einstein's Unfinished Dream: Marrying Relativity to the Quantum World Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, the U.S.' largest Large Hadron Collider research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent "The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your Mind" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). You can follow him on Facebook. Lincoln contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. This November marks the centennial of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Einstein's theory of general relativity describes a broad range of phenomena, from nearly the moment of creation to the end of time, and even a journey spiraling from the deepest space down into a ravenous black hole, passing through the point of no return of the event horizon, down, down, down, to nearly the center, where the singularity lurks. Deep into a quantum world Bridging the quantum world to relativity The water analogy
Geometry of the Universe Can the Universe be finite in size? If so, what is ``outside'' the Universe? The answer to both these questions involves a discussion of the intrinsic geometry of the Universe. At this point it is important to remember the distinction between the curvature of space (negative, positive or flat) and the toplogy of the Universe (what is its shape = how is it connected). There are basically three possible shapes to the Universe; a flat Universe (Euclidean or zero curvature), a spherical or closed Universe (positive curvature) or a hyperbolic or open Universe (negative curvature). All three geometries are classes of what is called Riemannian geometry, based on three possible states for parallel lines always divergent (hyperbolic) or one can think of triangles where for a flat Universe the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees, in a closed Universe the sum must be greater than 180, in an open Universe the sum must be less than 180.
The Absurdity of Infinity: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Explains Whether the Universe Is Infinite or Finite in Letters to Her Mother – Brain Pickings By Maria Popova In 1998, while on the cusp of becoming one of the most significant theoretical cosmologists of our time, mathematician-turned-astrophysicist Janna Levin left her post at Berkeley and moved across the Atlantic for a prestigious position at Cambridge University. During the year and a half there, she had the time and space to contemplate the question that would eventually become the epicenter of her career — whether the universe is infinite or finite. What began as a series of letters to her mother, Sandy, eventually became an unusual diary of Levin’s “social exile as a roaming scientist,” and was finally published as How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (public library) — a most unusual and absorbing account of the paradoxes of finitude. In an entry from September 3, 1998, Levin fleshes out her ideas on infinity and writes with exquisite Saganesque sensitivity to the poetics of science: No infinity has ever been observed in nature.
Un trou noir supermassif libère des explosions de gaz dans une galaxie voisine Deux émissions massives de gaz provenant d'un trou noir ont été enregistrées par le télescope spatial Chandra. Selon les astronomes, ce phénomène s’apparente à une sorte de "rot" après que le trou noir se soit nourri d’étoiles. Les astronomes ont identifié deux émissions massives de gaz provenant d'un trou noir supermassif situé dans le centre d'une galaxie voisine. Les images du phénomène semblable à deux arcs et assimilé à une "régurgitation", ont été reprises par le télescope spatial à rayons X Chandra de la NASA. "A titre de comparaison, les astronomes se réfèrent souvent aux trous noirs comme des "mangeurs" d’étoiles et de gaz. Apparemment, ces derniers peuvent également faire un rot après leur repas", a commenté Eric Schlegel, astronome à l'Université du Texas, à San Antonio et membre de l’équipe à la base de la découverte. Un trou noir relativement proche de la Terre Le trou noir dont il est question est l’un des plus proches de la Terre à être soumis une activité aussi violente.
The aliens are silent because they're dead Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, say astrobiologists from The Australian National University (ANU). In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets. "The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology. "Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive." "Most early planetary environments are unstable. About four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilise the rapidly changing environment, said co-author Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute.