Lifeboat Foundation

Breakthrough Prize winner Alan Guth developed the theory of inflation to answer to our cosmic origins. It’s one of the most studied and debated theories in cosmology, with research propelling Guth’s work to the forefront of scientific conversation.

In this Master Class, Professor Guth addresses what experiments could potentially rule out the BICEP2 results. Since recording this in 2017, the Planck spacecraft collected the data that Professor Guth anticipated, which shows that the initial observations were likely an artifact of interstellar dust, not primordial gravitational waves.

Continue reading “WSU Master Class: Inflationary Cosmology with Alan Guth” »

Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian credits mentorship with helping him establish a path through nuclear physics.

Mentorship has played a central role in the twists and turns of Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian’s life.

“Verification of nuclear disarmament is very important, because a treaty without verification is worse than no treaty at all,” Danagoulian says, citing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was proposed in the 1950s but not fully adopted until 1996, in part because scientists lacked the technology to reliably differentiate underground testing from seismic events. has played a central role in the twists and turns of Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian’s life.

Using hundreds of computer simulations, the researchers found that the gravitational wave signals from GW150521 are best explained by a high-eccentricity, according to the statement.

The study also sheds new light on how some of the black hole mergers detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart, Virgo, are so much heavier than previously thought possible. Their findings were published Jan. 20 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Associate Professor Jonathan Boreyko and graduate fellow Mojtaba Edalatpour have made a discovery about the properties of water that could provide an exciting addendum to a phenomenon established over two centuries ago. The discovery also holds interesting possibilities for cooling devices and processes in industrial applications using only the basic properties of water. Their work was published today (January 21, 2022) in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Water can exist in three phases: a frozen solid, a liquid, and a gas. When heat is applied to a frozen solid, it becomes a liquid. When applied to the liquid, it becomes vapor. This elementary principle is familiar to anyone who has observed a glass of iced tea on a hot day, or boiled a pot of water to make spaghetti.

When the heat source is hot enough, the water’s behavior changes dramatically. According to Boreyko, a water droplet deposited onto an aluminum plate heated to 150 degrees Celsius.

Professor Stephen Hawking’s final theory on the origin of the universe, which he worked on in collaboration with Professor Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven, was published in 2018 in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

A team of astrophysicists has created a simulated image that shows how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could conduct a mega-exposure similar to but far larger than Hubble’s celebrated Ultra Deep Field Image. This Hubble observation transformed our view of the early universe, revealing galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

“Roman has the unique ability to image very large areas of the sky, which allows us to see the environments around galaxies in the early universe,” said Nicole Drakos, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, who led the study. “Our study helps demonstrate what a Roman ultra-deep field could tell us about the universe, while providing a tool for the scientific community to extract the most value from such a program.”

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of β=0.30±0.11 (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data. The values of β decrease as we enlarge the Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized foreground emission. Two independent ways to model this effect are used to mitigate the systematic impact on β for differen… See more.

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic.

Microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data.
release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of $\beta=0.30\pm0.11$ (68%

Continue reading “Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4” »

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

Continue reading “Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of” »

This series is absolutely fantastic. Especially for Transhumanist non-astrophysicists like me!

Thank you to Wren for supporting PBS. To learn more, go to https://wren.co/start/spacetime.

Continue reading “How To Build The Universe in a Computer” »