Boltzmann brain is another bizarre consequence of laws of physics. It’s a configuration of matter, similar to our brains; a statistical fluctuation risen out of thermal equilibrium, a conscious observer created by a sudden decrease in entropy, having false memories of a grand structure exactly like our universe.
Given enough time, every single possibility allowed by the physical laws in our most likely closed universe must eventually occur, including one with a fluctuated brain, sitting in the middle of nowhere, having the exact same thoughts that you are having right now.
Boltzmann brains are speculative and inevitable at the same time. There is a serious chance that you might be indeed one of those brains, experiencing your false memories within a fake universe which is nothing but a delusion.
Sources: (Matthew Davenport, Ken D. Olum) Are there Boltzmann brains in the vacuum. https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.
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Creating novel materials by combining layers with unique, beneficial properties seems like a fairly intuitive process—stack up the materials and stack up the benefits. This isn’t always the case, however. Not every material will allow energy to travel through it the same way, making the benefits of one material come at the cost of another.
Using cutting-edge tools, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Warsaw have created a new layered structure with 2D materials that exhibits a unique transfer of energy and charge. Understanding its material properties may lead to advancements in technologies such as solar cells and other optoelectronic devices. The results were published in the journal Nano Letters.
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of materials structured like sandwiches with atomically thin layers. The meat of a TMD is a transition metal, which can form chemical bonds with electrons on their outermost orbit or shell, like most elements, as well as the next shell. That metal is sandwiched between two layers of chalcogens, a category of elements that contains oxygen, sulfur, and selenium.
Researchers have developed a novel material using tiny organic crystals that convert light into a substantial mechanical force able to lift 10,000 times its own mass. Without the need for heat or electricity, the photomechanical material could one day drive wireless, remote-controlled systems that power robots and vehicles.
Photomechanical materials are designed to transform light directly into mechanical force. They result from a complex interplay between photochemistry, polymer chemistry, physics, mechanics, optics, and engineering. Photomechanical actuators, the part of a machine that helps achieve physical movements, are gaining popularity because external control can be achieved simply by manipulating light conditions.
Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, have taken the next step in the development of photomechanical materials, creating a tiny organic crystal array that bends and lifts objects much heavier than itself.
The universe is not static or silent, as is commonly believed. It moves, expands and… vibrates. And this is where gravitational waves play an important role: tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time that occur when massive objects accelerate or collide.
Gravitational waves are generally very difficult to detect because they are usually very short and weak, and get lost in the background noise of the universe.
For this reason, until now only some of them have been captured with very sensitive instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which measures the distortions caused by the waves in two laser light beams separated by kilometers.
Those looking to make their academic departments more diverse, equitable, and inclusive can learn from previous wins and setbacks.
Achieving equity, diversity, and inclusion is a popular mantra—but is it important for the future of physics? A resounding yes to that question appeared several years ago in a public letter from more than 2000 physicists. The letter was a response to US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who, in a high-profile affirmative action case, questioned whether minority students would bring a unique perspective to physics. But what are the arguments for increasing diversity and inclusion? Some are practical: The change would make more talent available to our profession. Diverse teams of people also perform better than homogeneous ones. Another argument is moral: to have bias, discriminate, or exclude African Americans and other people of color, women, people with disabilities, or sexual and gender minorities is incompatible with basic human rights.
To improve access to large data sets, scientists are looking to cloud-based solutions for data management.
In the coming decade, big projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) are each expected to produce an exabyte of data yearly, which is about 20 times the digital content of all the written works throughout human history. This information overload requires new thinking about data management, which is why scientists have begun to look to the “cloud.” In such a scenario, data would be stored and analyzed remotely, with the advantage that information would become more accessible to a wider scientific community. Efforts are underway to create “science clouds,” but disagreements remain over their structure and implementation. To discuss these details, around 60 scientists came together for The Science Cloud meeting in Bad Honnef, Germany. The attendees shared lessons from past and ongoing projects in the hope of building the groundwork for a future scientific computing infrastructure.
How molecules change when they react to stimuli such as light is fundamental in biology, for example during photosynthesis. Scientists have been working to unravel the workings of these changes in several fields, and by combining two of these, researchers have paved the way for a new era in understanding the reactions of protein molecules fundamental for life.
The large international research team, led by Professor Jasper van Thor from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, report their results in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Crystallography is a powerful technique in structural biology for taking ‘snapshots’ of how molecules are arranged. Over several large-scale experiments and years of theory work, the team behind the new study integrated this with another technique that maps vibrations in the electronic and nuclear configuration of molecules, called spectroscopy.
Superconductivity promises to transform everything from power grids to personal electronics. Yet getting the low-waste form of power to operate at ambient temperatures and pressures is proving to be easier said than done.
A discovery by a team of researchers from Emory University and Stanford University in the US could inform theories that might help us get around the stumbling blocks.
The finding involves what’s known as oscillating superconductivity. Typical superconductor behaviors involve electron partnerships called Cooper pairs moving through materials without losing significant amounts of energy in the form of heat.
Conference presentation of “Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.” As presented at the Whitehead Psychology Nexus Workshop Conference held in Fontareches, France, March 27-30th, 2015 (with some minor adjustments). For full published paper, see: https://tinyurl.com/yc9r6kys (date of publication: October 18, 2017).
Abstract:
Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.
Author: Jeroen B. J. van Dijk, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Ever since Einstein’s arrival at the forefront of science, mainstream physics likes to think of nature as a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists all at once – in one timeless block universe. Accordingly, much to the dismay of more process-minded researchers, the experience of an ongoing present moment is typically branded as illusory. Mainstream physics is having a hard time, though, to provide a well-founded defense for this illusoriness of time. This is because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience to begin with. Moreover, if nature were indeed purely physical – as contemporary mainstream physics wants us to believe – it’s quite difficult to see how it could ever be able to give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of time’s illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extra-ordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an utterly convincing, but – physically speaking – pointless illusion. It’s because of problems like these that process thought has persistently objected against this ‘eternalism’ of mainstream physics. Just recently, physicist Lee Smolin even brought up some other major arguments against this timeless picture in his controversial 2013 book ‘Time Reborn’. And although he passionately argues that physics should take an entirely different direction, he admits that he has no readily available roadmap to success. Fortunately, however, over the last 15 years or so, a neo-Whiteheadian, ‘neurobiologically inspired’ way of doing foundational physics, namely Reg Cahill’s Process Physics, has been making its appearance on the scene. Process Physics aims to model the universe as an initially orderless and uniform process plenum by setting up a stochastic, self-referential modeling of nature. In Process Physics, all self-referential and initially noisy activity patterns are “mutually in-formative” as they are actively making a meaningful difference to (i.e. “in-forming”) each other. Due to this mutual in-formativeness, the stochastic activity patterns will act as “start-up seeds” that become engaged in self-renewing update iterations. In this way, the system starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then “branch out” to higher and higher levels of complexity – all this according to the same basic principles as a naturally evolving neural network. Because of this “neuromorphic” behaviour, the process system can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, threedimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, nonlocality, and classical behaviour are spontaneously emergent within the system. Also, the system’s constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time as the system’s ongoing change. As a final point, subjectivity – in the form of mutual informativeness – is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, later-arriving side-effect.
