Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: physics – Page 263

Unraveling turbulence: New insights into how fluids transform from order to disorder

Turbulence is everywhere—it rattles our planes and makes tiny whirlpools in our bathtubs—but it is one of the least understood phenomena in classical physics.

Turbulence occurs when an ordered fluid flow breaks into small vortices, which interact with each other and break into even smaller vortices, which interact with each other and so-on, becoming the chaotic maelstrom of disorder that makes white water rafting so much fun.

But the mechanics of that descent into chaos have puzzled scientists for centuries.

Physicists model the supernovae that result from pulsating supergiants like Betelgeuse

Betelgeuse has been the center of significant media attention lately. The red supergiant is nearing the end of its life, and when a star over 10 times the mass of the Sun dies, it goes out in spectacular fashion. With its brightness recently dipping to the lowest point in the last hundred years, many space enthusiasts are excited that Betelgeuse may soon go supernova, exploding in a dazzling display that could be visible even in daylight.

While the famous star in Orion’s shoulder will likely meet its demise within the next million years—practically couple days in cosmic time—scientists maintain that its dimming is due to the star pulsating. The phenomenon is relatively common among red supergiants, and Betelgeuse has been known for decades to be in this group.

Coincidentally, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have already made predictions about the brightness of the supernova that would result when a pulsating star like Betelgeuse explodes.

Black Holes Are Nothing But Holograms, New Study Finds

Black holes are one of the most mysterious objects astronomer have encountered so far. And a new study proposes that black are nothing but just a holographic projection, with a new calculation of the entropy — or also known as disorder. These calculations suggest that these giant enigmas of the Universe being nothing but an optical illusion. Holograph hypothesis was first proposed by physicist Leonard Susskind back in the 1990s, according to this theory, mathematically speaking, the Universe requires just two dimensions — not three — for the laws of physics and gravity to work as they really should.

Physicists may have accidentally discovered a new state of matter

Humans have been studying electric charge for thousands of years, and the results have shaped modern civilization. Our daily lives depend on electric lighting, smartphones, cars, and computers, in ways that the first individuals to take note of a static shock or a bolt of lightning could never have imagined.

Now, physicists at Northeastern have discovered a new way to manipulate . And the changes to the future of our technology could be monumental.

“When such phenomena are discovered, imagination is the limit,” says Swastik Kar, an associate professor of physics. “It could change the way we can detect and communicate signals. It could change the way we can sense things and the storage of information, and possibilities that we may not have even thought of yet.”

This is how ESA telescope Euclid is going to visualize dark matter

How can you see something that’s invisible? Well, with Euclid! This future ESA telescope will map the structure of the universe and teach us more about invisible dark matter and dark energy. Scientific coordinator of Euclid and Leiden astronomer Henk Hoekstra explains how this works.

Why do we assume that exists, if we have never seen it or even measured it? “We are orbiting the centre of our galaxy at 220 kilometres per second,” says Hoeksta. A bizarre speed, which fortunately we don’t notice. Still, something strange is going on. “Based on the number of stars in our Milky Way, the stars at the edge of the Milky Way should have a much lower speed, but they move as fast as the Sun. Yet these stars are not being slung into the . Something is holding them together.”

Basically, there can only be one explanation: there is matter that you cannot see, but that exerts extra gravity. In other words, dark matter. Hoekstra: “Or the theory of gravity is wrong. But everything indicates that dark matter exists, only we still don’t know what it is. What we do know is that it does not absorb light or interact with it. So that literally makes it invisible.” If this is not strange enough: since 1998 we know that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. To explain this an even more mysterious ingredient is needed: ‘dark energy,” a term that simply encompasses all ideas that astronomers and physicists are currently studying.

Design of the W7-X fusion device enables it to overcome obstacles, scientists find

A key hurdle facing fusion devices called stellarators—twisty facilities that seek to harness on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars—has been their limited ability to maintain the heat and performance of the plasma that fuels those reactions. Now collaborative research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany, have found that the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) facility in Greifswald, the largest and most advanced stellarator ever built, has demonstrated a key step in overcoming this problem.

Cutting-edge facility

The cutting-edge facility, built and housed at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics with PPPL as the leading U.S. collaborator, is designed to improve the performance and stability of the plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions, that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe. Fusion reactions fuse ions to release massive amounts of energy—the process that scientists are seeking to create and control on Earth to produce safe, clean and virtually limitless power to generate electricity for all humankind.

Nearing the Simulation Singularity: What Would Immersive Computing Mean to the Human Mentality?

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.