Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: physics – Page 209

The Universe Might Be Able to Bend the Laws of Physics All By Itself

At this point, the paper mingles cosmology, or the study of the universe and its origins, with biology. “We ask whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world, by means of which the universe could learn its laws,” the authors write. In other words, a universal law might transcend all scientific fields. That means that the laws of physics, as we know them, could be subject to higher-order laws of the universe that control them—and that we can’t even comprehend.

“Exploring links between fields is crucial because knowledge is not fundamentally compartmentalized,” says Bruce Bassett, professor at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Mathematics and head of the Cosmology Group at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in South Africa. We humans are simply narrow-minded. “We segment and compress knowledge into biology, and physics, and sociology because of our limited brains, and the cost of that segmentation and compression is that we easily miss the commonalities and hidden universality between branches of human knowledge.”

This 8-bit processor built in Minecraft can run its own games

The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted.

Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren’t just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine.

Minecraft builder “Sammyuri” spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn’t the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM.

Minecraft processors use the physics engine of the game to recreate the structure of real processors on a macro scale, with materials including redstone dust, torches, repeaters, pistons, levers, and other simple machines. For a little perspective, each “block” inside the game is one virtual meter on each side, so recreating this build in the real world would make it approximately the size of a skyscraper or cruise ship.

Artificial intelligence that can discover hidden physical laws in data

Researchers at Kobe University and Osaka University have successfully developed artificial intelligence technology that can extract hidden equations of motion from regular observational data and create a model that is faithful to the laws of physics.

This technology could enable researchers to discover the hidden equations of motion behind for which the laws were considered unexplainable. For example, it may be possible to use physics-based knowledge and simulations to examine ecosystem sustainability.

The research group consisted of Associate Professor YAGUCHI Takaharu and Ph.D. student CHEN Yuhan (Graduate School of System Informatics, Kobe University), and Associate Professor MATSUBARA Takashi (Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University).

From flashing fireflies to cheering crowds: Physicists unlock secret to synchronisation

Physicists from Trinity have unlocked the secret that explains how large groups of individual “oscillators”—from flashing fireflies to cheering crowds, and from ticking clocks to clicking metronomes—tend to synchronize when in each other’s company.

Their work, just published in the journal Physical Review Research, provides a mathematical basis for a phenomenon that has perplexed millions—their newly developed equations help explain how individual randomness seen in the and in electrical and computer systems can give rise to synchronization.

We have long known that when one clock runs slightly faster than another, physically connecting them can make them tick in time. But making a large assembly of clocks synchronize in this way was thought to be much more difficult—or even impossible, if there are too many of them.

Parker Solar Probe: A spacecraft has ‘touched’ the sun for the first time

On April 28, 2021, at 933 UT (3:33 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time), NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached the sun’s extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter the outer boundaries of our sun.

The results, published in Physical Review Letters, were announced in a press conference at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2021 on December 14. The manuscript is open-access and freely available to download.

“This marks the achievement of the primary objective of the Parker mission and a new era for understanding the physics of the corona,” said Justin C. Kasper, the first author, Deputy Chief Technology Officer at BWX Technologies, and a professor at the University of Michigan. The mission is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL).

Stiff Competition: Lab-Made Hexagonal Diamonds Stiffer Than Natural Cubic Diamonds

Nature’s strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

Challenging Einstein’s Greatest Theory in 16-Year Experiment — Theory of General Relativity Tested With Extreme Stars

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester have helped conduct a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

The international team looked to the stars — a pair of extreme stars called pulsars to be precise – through seven radio telescopes across the globe.

And they used them to challenge Einstein’s most famous theory with some of the most rigorous tests yet.

How our views on black holes have changed since Einstein

They’ve become an essential ingredient of astrophysics.

Black holes helped to explain new astronomical discoveries, becoming essential ingredients of astrophysics. Science regarded black holes as abstractions until the 1960s. The recent experimental discovery of gravitational waves has changed our understanding of what black holes are.

In 2016, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration detected gravitational waves generated by two merging black holes, opening a new era of astronomy celebrated by the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released an image of the supermassive black hole in the nearby galaxy M87. The following year, the Nobel Prize in physics recognized the trailblazing theoretical black hole studies of Roger Penrose and the observational ones by Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel.

Discovering Dark Matter: New Clue From Mysterious Clouds Circling Spinning Black Holes

Gravitational waves are cosmic ripples in the fabric of space and time that emanate from catastrophic events in space, like collisions of black holes and neutron stars — the collapsed cores of massive supergiant stars. Extremely sensitive gravitational-wave detectors on Earth, like the Advanced LIGO

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory supported by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT. It’s designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. It’s multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the minute ripples in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves. It consists of two widely separated interferometers within the United States—one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana.

Nuclear Fusion: Why the Race to Harness the Power of the Sun Just Sped Up

A nervous excitement hangs in the air. Half a dozen scientists sit behind computer screens, flicking between panels as they make last-minute checks. “Go and make the gun dangerous,” one of them tells a technician, who slips into an adjacent chamber. A low beep sounds. “Ready,” says the person running the test. The control room falls silent. Then, boom.

Next door, 3 kilograms of gunpowder has compressed 1,500 liters of hydrogen to 10,000 times atmospheric pressure, launching a projectile down the 9-meter barrel of a two-stage light gas gun at a speed of 6.5 kilometers per second, about 10 times faster than a bullet from a rifle.

On the monitors the scientists are checking the next stage, when the projectile slams into the target—a small transparent block carefully designed to amplify the force of the collision. The projectile needs to hit its mark perfectly flush. The slightest rotation risks derailing the carefully calibrated physics.