Lifeboat Foundation

Essentially from a disposal device to even warp drive hoverboards to even like gravity field control to even like hovering spaceships.

Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.

The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv¹.

Continue reading “Researchers create portable black hole” »

Physicists are using analog black holes to better understand gravity.

A spontaneous hole in the fabric of reality could theoretically end the universe, but don’t worry: physicists are studying the idea for what it can teach us about the cosmos.

A first-edition copy of Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking book laying out his three laws of motion, which became the foundation for modern physics, has been found at a library on the French island of Corsica.

Vannina Schirinsky-Schikhmatoff, director of conservation at the Fesch public heritage library in Ajaccio, said she discovered the copy of the 17th-century work while studying an index from the library’s founder Lucien Bonaparte—one of Napoleon’s brothers.

“I found the Holy Grail in the main room, hidden in the upper shelves,” she told AFP this week.

Hmmm dark matter perhaps or a still unknown type of exterrestial physics. Much like bootes which in my expert opinion is an alien dimension maybe there are still Easter eggs hidden in the fabric of our universe that can take several lifetimes to understand even with advanced technology understanding may still be like scratching at the ceiling of infinity of understanding but may not be as difficult.

It’s a mystery that’s been puzzling astronomers for years.

Omololu Akin-Ojo was always reluctant to go to the United States. “I felt I could do a lot of things in Africa,” he told me in his office at the new East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR) in Kigali, Rwanda. “Unfortunately, I was wrong.”

As a university student in his home country of Nigeria in the late 1990s, Akin-Ojo learned to write computer code by hand, without ever having the chance to put the code into a computer. Aware of these limitations, his father, a physicist, encouraged him to apply to doctoral programs abroad. While studying condensed matter physics at the University of Delaware, Akin-Ojo recognized the gulf in teaching and in research opportunities between Nigeria and the U.S.

He realized then that he wanted to stem the brain drain of Africa’s brightest minds. Although he spent the next 14 years working in the U.S. and Europe, he said, “I always knew I was coming back to Africa.” He chose to specialize in theoretical physics, so that the lack of experimental equipment in Nigeria wouldn’t hinder his research when he returned.

It’s hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device.

Push a button, press a petal, and that fancy drive system – whose workings no one can explain – will send us to another location in space-time.

However, in recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4TCg4vsz6Ac

Reeman Dyson, one of the 20th century’s greatest theoretical physicists, died this week aged 96. He is known for popularising the Dyson Sphere – a hypothetical megastructure that could surround an entire star, capturing all of its solar energy.

The locusts have no king, and yet they all go forth in ranks, noted King Solomon some three thousand years ago. That a multitude of simple creatures could display coherent collective behavior without any leader caused his surprise and amazement, and it has continued to do so for much of our thinking over the following millennia. Caesar’s legions conquered Europe, Napoleon’s armies reached Moscow: We always think of a great commander telling the thoughtless multitudes what to do.

Statistical physics pioneered an opposite view. When a piece of iron is cooled down to a certain temperature (the Curie temperature), the majority of the atoms align their spins, thereby making it magnetic. No atomic general gives any commands; each atom communicates only with its neighbors, and yet there is an overall alignment. It shows us that local microscopic interactions as such can lead to dramatic global behavior, and this realization brought about a revolution in the understanding of swarm behavior.

Some hundred years ago, serious biologists still thought that the coordination of birds in a flock was reached by telepathy, and the synchronized light emission by fireflies in the Asiatic jungle was attributed to faulty observation by the observer. The introduction of physics concepts in biology has to a large extent resolved these puzzles. Flocks of birds are much more like the atoms in iron than they are like the armies of Napoleon, and the fireflies act much like a laser. Collective behavior in the world of living beings is after all not so different from that in the inanimate world.

Continue reading “The Rules of the Flock” »