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POPSForget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”? Nobody is exactly sure how these explosions proceed which is a tad worrying for the following reason: some clever clogs has pointed out that superfluid helium is a BEC and that the LHC is swimming in 700,000 litres of the stuff. Not only that but the entire thing is bathed in some of the most powerful magnetic fields on the planet. If not for anything else, the LHC has become a modern doom spelling myth. The universe is about to punish us for prying on its privacy... These modern myths are truly fascinating. After Bose Nova? Bose Supernova! :-)
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POPSBuilding 'The Matrix' Feynman envisioned, a general purpose, programmable quantum computer could itself carry out quantum simulations. But such machines are still decades away, most researchers say, while machines designed only for quantum simulations may become available sooner.
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POPSSuperholographic Model of the Universe An extraordinary article. The idea seems to hark back to Leibniz's monads which always seemed very strange but has followers in the philosophy world. The discoveries of science seem to be getting more counter-intuitive as time goes by
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POPSThe Landscape of Possible Intelligences If we imagine the levels of intelligence as a ladder with unevenly spaced rungs, there may be jumps that some intelligences are not able to complete, or their derivatives are not able to jump. So a type 3 mind may be able to jump up four levels of bootstrapping intelligence, but not five. Since I don't believe intelligence is linear (that is I believe intelligence grows in many dimensions), a better illustration may be to view the problem of bootstrapping super intelligence as navigating across a rugged evolutionary landscape.
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POPS How A Catholic Priest Gave Us The Primeval Atom Theory
Returning to Belgium in 1925, where he worked at the Catholic University of Leuven as a part-time lecturer, his big break came two years later in 1927 when he proposed his theory of an expanding Universe to explain the movement of the galaxies, published in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels. Lemaitre was still pretty hazy about how the process of expansion could have begun. Like many scientists, he was still committed to the idea of a static Universe of unchanging size... Einstein, though interested, was largely dismissive, telling Lemaitre that, "Your calculations are good, but your physics is terrible". Einstein was also a little suspicious of the religious implications of these ideas. He declined to describe himself as an atheist (or a theist, or a pantheist) and liked to use the vocabulary of religion, most famously in his misguided rejection of much of quantum physics, "God does not play dice!" British physicist, Fred Hoyle coined the Big Bang term
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POPSThe Goldilocks Enigma and a self engineered universe This guy is something else. This paragraph sits in the middle of an erudite blog and the fact that it ends in an exclamation mark is out of character with the rest, he doesn't normally get excited. Don't ask me what panexperientialism means. I like Davies' book.
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POPSWhat Is Emotional Intelligence? can it measured? BBC Horizon program takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent?
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POPSFermilab Looks for Visitors from Another Dimension The prospect of extra dimensions is fascinating. ET might already be here in a neighbour dimension. :-) Estimated to cost about $15 million, the MicroBooNE tank would be located near the MiniBooNE detector at Fermilab so that it could observe the same beam of neutrinos. This past June the lab’s physics advisory committee approved the design phase for the project; if all goes well, the detector could begin operating as soon as 2011.
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POPSMark Morford on Elitism
Also, you read. 17. You are, for some godforsaken reason, absolutely convinced all the way down to your most profound sense of what is divine and truthful in this strangled world that violence and bloodshed are rarely the answer, that the irrefutable spiritual laws of the universe confirm that like attracts like and even at a quantum level there is a profound pull toward a divine, benevolent dynamic equilibrium, and therefore constructing a malicious national policy of torture and surveillance and pre-emptive aggression merely shames the better nature of the human animal and invites a particularly violent energy into the national bloodstream and poisons the human heart as it creates nothing but more turmoil and unrest and hate in the world. Man, only an elitist jerk would tolerate a ridiculous run-on sentence like that. 18. Your most treasured pieces of writing don't feature Muggles, Hobbits, glossy centerfolds of Dale Earnhardt Jr., dogs named Marley, or an angry and omnipotent
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POPSPhysicists investigate how time moves forward This provides an orientation, or arrow of time, and it is generally believed that all other time asymmetries, such as our sense that future and past are different, are a direct consequence of this thermodynamic arrow.” In their study, Feng and Crooks have developed a method to accurately measure “time asymmetry” (which refers to our intuitive concept of time, that the past differs from the future, in contrast with time symmetry, where there is no distinction between past and future). They began by investigating the increase in energy dissipation, or entropy, in various arrangements. While time blatantly moves forward in the macroscopic world, the direction of time becomes confusing on the scale of a single molecule
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POPSDo subatomic particles have free will? But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed. Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
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POPSTests clear way for mini 'Big Bang' The 'Higgs bosun' has so far been undetected, so it's theoretical, but it is thought to represent the quantum force that gives things their mass. So far they have found theorized quanta by their behavior, but they haven't been able to find one that makes things 'heavy' Higgs Bosun is supposed to fill the gap
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POPSPhysicists Seek Answers to Quantum Correlations The physicists ruled out several possible classical explanations for the instantaneous communication. For one thing, they showed that the photons did not share information before leaving Geneva, and so they didn´t travel knowing about each other´s properties. In another test, the scientists showed that no communication could have occurred through a different reference frame, as might happen because of the photons´ high speeds. According to Einstein´s theory of relativity, observers moving at high speeds can get different measurements of the same event because they have different reference frames. But, by performing tests over a complete rotation of the Earth, the researchers ruled out this possibility. "We think space and time are important because that´s the kind of monkeys we are,"
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POPS'Green' chemistry may get the midas touch I imagined 'green' chemistry would involve copper but...They think the size of the Gold particles may make them reactive due to quantum effects. I wonder how that theory extends to smaller particles or even mono-atomic (single non-metallic atoms powdered or in suspension) gold. I bet we'll find out.They regularly seem to be finding uses for gold, that are completely unlike any use it has had before. Still, all it can take for any element to be used in a revolutionary way is a new approach. Gold just happens to fascinate us so particularly.
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POPS"Worldshift" http://www.realitysandwich.com/worldshift_our_unsustainable_world_will_change
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