I found this on NewsBreak: A new physics paper suggests that we may all be living in the ultimate 4X strategy game after all.
My money’s on the universe being like Civ 6, with its borked-n-bonkers AI.
An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has confirmed the first known observance of a tidally locked super-Earth exoplanet. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes the unique approach they took to confirm that the exoplanet LHS3844b is tidally locked and what the finding suggests about other planets in the galaxy.
Prior research has led astronomers to believe that some exoplanets are tidally locked, with one side that always faces the star they revolve around, but they have been unable until now to prove it. In this new effort, the research team picked a likely candidate and used a unique approach to study its attributes to ascertain its motion.
Prior research has shown that several moons in our solar system, including the one circling Earth, are tidally locked, always facing the planet they orbit. In this situation, their rotation period matches their orbital period—the result is a moon that always shows the same side to its planet. For this reason, the Earth’s moon has what has commonly been described as a “dark side”—the side we never see. Tidal locking is due to gravitational forces between a moon and its planet—or a planet and its star.
But not in the Einstein/Newtonian Lambda-cold-dark-matter model
This post is based on the research paper by Mazurenko, Banik, Kroupa & Haslbauer (2023, MNRAS). Sergij Mazurenko is an undergraduate physics student at the University of Bonn, and Indranil Banik was an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow with us until recently and is currently at the University of St. Andrews. Moritz Haslbauer is a finishing PhD student at the University of Bonn who has been contributing to The Dark Matter Crisis (DMC). The press release from the University of Bonn on this matter can be read here (and from Charles University in Prague here) and a description can also be found in The Conversation.
Three years after introducing its second-generation “neuromorphic” computer chip, Intel on Wednesday announced the company has assembled 1,152 of the parts into a single, parallel-processing system called Hala Point, in partnership with the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories.
The Hala Point system’s 1,152 Loihi 2 chips enable a total of 1.15 billion artificial neurons, Intel said, “and 128 billion synapses distributed over 140,544 neuromorphic processing cores.” That is an increase from the previous Intel multi-chip Loihi system, debuted in 2020, called Pohoiki Springs, which used just 768 Loihi 1 chips.
Sandia Labs intends to use the system for what it calls “brain-scale computing research,” to solve problems in areas of device physics, computer architecture, computer science, and informatics.
A veteran NASA scientist says his company has tested a propellantless propulsion drive technology that produced one Earth gravity of thrust.
Superconductivity continues to revolutionize technology in so many ways. While some technological advances rely on finding ways to encourage zero-resistance currents at warmer temperatures, engineers are also considering better ways of fine-controlling the super-efficient flow of electrons.
Unfortunately, many processes that would work just fine for run-of-the-mill electronics, such as the application of external magnetic fields, risk interfering with the properties that make superconductors so efficient.
An international team of scientists has succeeded in confining an exotic state of superconductivity that’s controlled by strong magnetism rather than disrupted by it.
For most stars, neutron stars and black holes are their final resting places. When a supergiant star runs out of fuel, it expands and then rapidly collapses on itself. This act creates a neutron star—an object denser than our sun crammed into a space 13 to 18 miles wide. In such a heavily condensed stellar environment, most electrons combine with protons to make neutrons, resulting in a dense ball of matter consisting mainly of neutrons. Researchers try to understand the forces that control this process by creating dense matter in the laboratory through colliding neutron-rich nuclei and taking detailed measurements.
Karl Friston, Joscha Bach, and Curt Jaimungal delve into death, neuroscientific models of Ai, God, and consciousness. SPONSOR: HelloFresh: Go to https://HelloFresh.com/theoriesofever… and use code theoriesofeverythingfree for FREE breakfast for life!
TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00:00 Introduction.
- 00:01:47 Karl and Joscha’s new paper.
- 00:09:13 Sentience vs. consciousness vs. The Self.
- 00:21:00 Self-organization, thingness, and self-evidencing.
- 00:29:02 Overlapping realities and physics as art.
- 00:41:05 Mortal computation and substrate-agnostic AI
- 00:56:38 Beyond Von Neumann architectures.
- 01:00:23 AI surpassing human researchers.
- 01:20:34 Exploring vs. Exploiting (the risk of curiosity in academia)
- 01:27:02 Incompleteness and interdependence.
- 01:32:25 Defining consciousness.
- 01:53:36 Multiple overlapping consciousnesses.
- 02:03:03 Unified experience and schizophrenia \.
Researchers at Aalto University have discovered a new force acting on water droplets moving over superhydrophobic surfaces like black silicon by adapting a novel force measurement technique to uncover the previously unidentified physics at play. This force, identified as air-shearing, challenges previous understandings and suggests modifications in the design of these surfaces to reduce drag, potentially improving their efficiency and application in various fields.
Microscopic chasms forming a sea of conical jagged peaks stipple the surface of a material called black silicon. While it’s commonly found in solar cell tech, black silicon also moonlights as a tool for studying the physics of how water droplets behave.
Black silicon is a superhydrophobic material, meaning it repels water. Due to water’s unique surface tension properties, droplets glide across textured materials like black silicon by riding on a thin air-film gap trapped beneath. This works great when the droplets move slowly—they slip and slide without a hitch.
Extremely short pulses of laser light with a peak power of 6 terawatts (6 trillion watts)—roughly equivalent to the power produced by 6,000 nuclear power plants—have been realized by two RIKEN physicists. This achievement will help further develop attosecond lasers, for which three researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023. The work is published in the journal Nature Photonics.
