TTBrown

Mathemeticians at the Bar

You probably don't want to share a room in a motel with these guys, either:

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The fourth mathematician orders an eighth of a beer.

And so on, ad infinitum.

Finally, the bartender says "You're all idiots", and pours two beers

What If The "Multiverse" Is Real?

Don't ya just love when the guys with all the degrees start   we've been tossing around here for years now?

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

A "Quantum Theory of Gravity"

...and "fuzzy time."

Quantum theories of gravity have been tossed about for decades, in an attempt to do for quantum mechanics and gravity what General Relativity does with gravity, i.e. explain it.  Since General Relativity (the theory of the really, really big) and Quantum Mechanics (the theory of the really, really small) don't always see eye to eye, the Quantum types have always felt they needed to come up with their own variation on the theme.  Now they've got a machine:

In a classical view of the world, space and time are smooth. The minimum scales at which, according to quantum mechanics, the smoothness breaks down — the Planck length and time — can be derived from other quantities, but they have not been tested experimentally, nor would they be, given their impossibly small size.

Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big).

This is all being discussed in our forums, starting with this post from skyfish. Good luck following the thread...

Well Sure, Why Not??

Just something I found sifting through some un-opened e-mails from a few weeks ago:
Could a Warp Drive Engine Travel Faster Than Light?.

Two Baylor University physicists believe that if the 11th dimension could be shrunk behind a spaceship it would create a bubble of dark energy, the same dark energy that is causing the universe to speed up as time goes on. Expanding the 11th dimension in front of the ship would eventually cause it to decrease, although two separate steps are required. One slight problem though is exactly how the 11th dimension would be expanded and shrunk is still unknown.

John Hodgman Explains It All For You

I think this is the kind of intellect we need to lead us to the bottom of the rabbit hole: somebody who can ramble through a story about aliens, physics, time, space and the way all of these somehow contribute to a sweet, perfect memory of falling in love.

Another "Atomic Spy" Passes On

R. R. Furman, 93, Dies; Led Bomb-Project Spying

Robert R. Furman, a former Army major who as chief of foreign intelligence for the American atomic bomb project in World War II coordinated and often joined harrowing espionage missions to kidnap German scientists, seize uranium ore in Europe and determine the extent of Nazi efforts to build the bomb, died Oct. 14 at his home in Adamstown, Md. He was 93.

"Harrowing espionage missions", eh?  Enough to make you wonder who else's path he might have crossed... anybody we know?

TED Prize for SETI Researcher

The presitigious "TED" conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has awarded one of its three annual grants to a SETI researcher:

Astronomer Jill Tarter is Director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research, and also holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI. She has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere, and almost all aspects of this field have been affected by her work.

Jill led for Project Phoenix, a decade-long SETI scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, using telescopes in Australia, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. While no clearly extraterrestrial signal was found, this project was the most comprehensive targeted search for artificially generated cosmic signals ever undertaken.

So, umm, anybody wanna volunteer to tell her that she's looking in the wrong place?

Look! Up in The Sky!

No!  Down in the water!

Since the subject of (stealth?) submarines comes up from time to time in our explorations, I thought I'd pass on this story about Steve Fossett's Super Secret Flying, Diving, Space Bound Submersible that was recently sent to me:

Unbeknownst to most of the world, the late super rich adventurer Steve Fossett had started work on an amazing flying submersible that would one day theoretically touch the stars. More importantly, however, was that the design would have allowed adventurers and scientists alike (and most importantly Fossett himself, of course) to venture into the deadly depths of the Mariana Trench, some 36,000 feet below the ocean's surface. Sadly, the design was put on hold immediately after Fossett went missing about one year ago, but that hasn't stopped San Anselmo inventor Graham Hawkes from detailing the project that Fossett tapped him to create two years before his death.

Morgan always did say we'd be surprised to learn of some of the things that roam beneath the surface of the seas.  And like I told somebody over the weekend, submarines are easier to conceal than, say, aircraft.  Still you have to wonder what means of propulsion a craft like the one envisioned here would employ....??

There is another story about Fosset's "flying submersible in the Marin Independent Journal:

The Hawkes say they were four weeks away from launching the "Deep Flight Challenger" when news came of Fossett's disappearance. The submersible is now owned by the explorer's estate, and Hawkes is unsure whether it will ever get to make its historic dive. The couple would not disclose the cost of the vehicle.

"He would have felt as though he was traveling beyond the reach of his fellow man," Hawkes said. "The deep ocean is an incredibly beautiful, peaceful place. You're surrounded by strange life forms, and you're seeing a place on the planet that no one has seen before. If people understood what it was like, it would be crowded down there."

 

The subject is being discussed in our forums.

Elephants Master Math

Maybe this one can tell us what happened to those cowboys' missing dollar:

Add elephants to the growing menagerie of animals that can count.

An Asian elephant named Ashya beat this reporter at a devilishly simple addition problem. When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples. (In my defence, I watched the video in a noisy and crowded auditorium.)

The Universe Is Filled...

....with Magical Things.

It was a documentary called "Isaac Newton and Me" where I first heard the line "The universe is filled with magical things, patiently waiting for your wits to grow sharper." Unfortunately, the producers of that documentary did not see fit to track down Eden Philpotts as the source of the quotation. But most of the program was about the physicist Michio Kaku, who discusses some of the possibilities of just such a universe in this clip: