June 19, 2022
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General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most successful conceptual breakthroughs of modern physics, but Einstein’s description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Recent work that tries to bring those theories together is revealing some mind-bending truths. In this episode, the physicist and author Sean Carroll talks with host Steven Strogatz about how space and time might be emergent properties of quantum reality, not fundamental parts of it.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.
Transcript
Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in science and math today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mysteries of space and time, and gravity, too. What’s so mysterious about them?
Well, it turns out they get really weird when we look at them at their deepest levels, at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in and become crucial. Of course, none of us have any direct experience with space and time and gravity at this unbelievably small scale. Up here, at the scale of everyday life, space and time seem perfectly smooth and continuous. And gravity is very well described by Isaac Newton’s classic theory, a theory that’s been around for over 300 years now.
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Michael Driver for Quanta Magazine
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June 18, 2022
Mohenjo
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Loch is the Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Irish word for a lake or sea inlet. It is cognate with the Manx lough, Cornish logh, and one of the Welsh words for lake, llwch.
In English English and Hiberno-English, the anglicized spelling lough is commonly found in place-names; in Lowland Scots and Scottish English, the spelling “loch” is always used. Many loughs are connected to stories of lake bursts, signifying their mythical origin.
Sea-inlet lochs are often called sea lochs or sea loughs. Some such bodies of water could also be called firths, fjords, estuaries, straits or bays.
This name for a body of water is Insular Celtic in origin and is applied to most lakes in Scotland and to many sea inlets in the west and north of Scotland. The word comes from Proto-Indo-European *lókus (“lake, pool”) and is related to Latin lacus (“lake, pond”) and English lay (“lake”).
Lowland Scots orthography, like Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Irish, represents /x/ with ch, so the word was borrowed with identical spelling.
English borrowed the word separately from a number of loughs in the previous Cumbric language areas of Northumbria and Cumbria. Earlier forms of English included the sound /x/ as gh (compare Scots bricht with English bright). However, by the time Scotland and England joined under a single parliament, English had lost the /x/ sound. This form was therefore used when the English settled Ireland. The Scots convention of using ch remained, hence the modern Scottish English loch.
In Welsh, what corresponds to lo is lu in Old Welsh and llw in Middle Welsh such as in today’s Welsh placenames Llanllwchaiarn, Llwchwr, Llyn Cwm Llwch, Amlwch, Maesllwch, the Goidelic lo being taken into Scottish Gaelic by the gradual replacement of much Brittonic orthography with Goidelic orthography in Scotland.
Many of the loughs in Northern England have also previously been called “meres” (a Northern English dialect word for “lake” and an archaic Standard English word meaning “a lake that is broad in relation to its depth”) such as the Black Lough in Northumberland.[2] However, reference to the latter as loughs (lower case initial), rather than as lakes, inlets, and so on, is unusual.
Some lochs in Southern Scotland have a Brythonic rather than Goidelic etymology, such as Loch Ryan where the Gaelic loch has replaced a Cumbric equivalent of Welsh llwch. The same is perhaps the case for water bodies in Northern England named with ‘Low’ or ‘Lough’ or otherwise, it represents a borrowing of the Brythonic word into the Northumbrian dialect of Old English.
Although there is no strict size definition, a small loch is often known as a lochan (so spelled also in Scottish Gaelic; in Irish it is spelled lochán).
Perhaps the most famous Scottish loch is Loch Ness, although there are other large examples such as Loch Awe, Loch Lomond, and Loch Tay.
Examples of sea lochs in Scotland include Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Linnhe, and Loch Eriboll. Elsewhere in Britain, places like the Afon Dyfi can be considered sea lochs. Wikipedia
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An image from Loch Images
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June 18, 2022
Mohenjo
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Classical physics did not need any disclaimers. The kind of physics that was born with Isaac Newton and ruled until the early 1900s seemed pretty straightforward: Matter was like little billiard balls. It accelerated or decelerated when exposed to forces. None of this needed any special interpretations attached. The details could get messy, but there was nothing weird about it.
Then came quantum mechanics, and everything got weird really fast.
Quantum mechanics is the physics of atomic-scale phenomena, and it is the most successful theory we have ever developed. So why are there a thousand competing interpretations of the theory? Why does quantum mechanics need an interpretation at all?
What, fundamentally, is it trying to tell us?
Affairs of state
There are many weirdnesses in quantum physics — many ways it differs from the classical worldview of perfectly knowable particles with perfectly describable properties. The weirdness you focus on will tend to be the one that shapes your favorite interpretation.
But the weirdness that has stood out most, the one that has shaped the most interpretations, is the nature of “superpositions” and of measurement in quantum mechanics.
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Credit: Lucid Pixel / Adobe Stock
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June 18, 2022
Mohenjo
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Hydrogen could be an important part of our future energy supply: It can be stored, transported, and burned as needed. However, most of the hydrogen available today is a by-product of natural gas production, and this has to change for climate protection reasons. The best strategy so far to produce environmentally friendly “green hydrogen” is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity that comes from renewable energy sources, for example, photovoltaic cells.
However, it would be much easier if sunlight could be used directly to split water. This is exactly what new catalysts are now making possible, in a process called “photocatalytic water splitting.” The concept is not yet used industrially. At TU Wien, important steps have now been taken in this direction: on an atomic scale, scientists have realized a new combination of molecular and solid-state catalysts that can do the job while using relatively inexpensive materials.
Interaction of atoms
“Actually, to be able to split water with light you have to solve two tasks at the same time,” says Alexey Cherevan from the Institute for Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “We have to think about oxygen and about hydrogen. The oxygen atoms of the water must be transformed into O2 molecules, and the remaining hydrogen ions—which are just protons—must be turned into H2 molecules.”
Solutions have now been found for both tasks. Tiny inorganic clusters consisting of only a small number of atoms are anchored on a surface of light-absorbing support structures such as titanium oxide. The combination of clusters and carefully chosen semiconductor supports lead to the desired behavior.
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Structural models of two clusters that enable water splitting into O2 and H2 by means of light energy. Credit: Vienna University of Technology
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June 17, 2022
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Shenzhen, also historically known as Sham Chun, is a major sub-provincial city and one of the special economic zones of China. The city is located on the east bank of the Pearl River estuary on the central coast of southern province of Guangdong, bordering Hong Kong to the south, Dongguan to the north, and Huizhou to the northeast. With a population of 17.56 million as of 2020, Shenzhen is the fourth most populous city proper in China. Shenzhen is a global center in technology, research, manufacturing, business and economics, finance, tourism, and transportation, and the Port of Shenzhen is the world’s fourth busiest container port.
Shenzhen roughly follows the administrative boundaries of Bao’an County, which was established since imperial times. The southern portion of Bao’an County was seized by the British after the Opium Wars and became Hong Kong, while the village of Shenzhen was situated on the border. Due to the completion of a train station that was the last stop on the Mainland Chinese section of the railway between Guangzhou and Kowloon, Shenzhen’s economy grew and became a market town and later a city by 1979, absorbing Bao’an County for the next decade.
In the early 1980s, economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping resulted in the city becoming the first special economic zone of China due to its close proximity to Hong Kong, attracting foreign direct investment and migrants searching for opportunities. In thirty years, the city’s economy and population boomed and has since emerged as a hub for technology, international trade, and finance. It is the home to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, one of the largest stock exchanges in the world by market capitalization, and the Guangdong Free-Trade Zone. Shenzhen is ranked as an Alpha- (global first-tier) city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Its nominal GDP has surpassed neighboring cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong and is now among the top ten cities with the largest economies in the world. Shenzhen also has the eighth-most competitive and largest financial center in the world, fifth-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, the second-largest number of skyscrapers of any city in the world, the 28th largest scientific research output of any city in the world, and several notable educational institutions, such as Shenzhen University, Southern University of Science and Technology, and Shenzhen Technology University.
Due to the city being a leading global technology hub, Shenzhen has been dubbed by media China’s Silicon Valley. The city’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and competitive-based culture has resulted in the city being home to numerous small-time manufacturers or software companies. Several of these firms became large technology corporations such as phone manufacturer Huawei, holding company Tencent, and drone-maker DJI. As an important international city, Shenzhen hosts numerous national and international events every year, such as the 2011 Summer Universiade and the China Hi-Tech Fair [zh]. Shenzhen’s rapid success has resulted in the Chinese government turning Shenzhen into a model city for other cities in China and the world to follow. Wikipedia
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An image from Shenzhen, China
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June 17, 2022
Mohenjo
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On a series of 70-year-old photographic plates containing images of the night sky, a few astronomers say they’ve found something weird: flashes of light that appear and then disappear, like ghosts.
“We found one image where nine stars were out there, and they vanished. And they are not there half an hour earlier, and they are not there six days later,” says Beatriz Villarroel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. “And you wonder, ‘Is this real?’”
There isn’t any readily available astronomical explanation for what these vanishing points of light, which the researchers call transients, might be. The dots might be defects in the photographic emulsions or image artifacts from when astronomers first scanned the plates. But in a series of recent papers, Villarroel and a small team of astronomers have been more seriously probing the possibility that the flashes might be something more exciting — extraterrestrial objects.
A shiny, spinning object passing by Earth would leave a line of dots in a long-exposure image of the night sky. Asteroids or meteors aren’t likely to look like that — most asteroids are dark, and meteors are moving so fast they’d look like streaks. And, most intriguingly for the researchers, there weren’t any satellites in the night sky when the images were taken, as all the plates were before the launch of Sputnik.
Still, Villarroel and colleagues haven’t ruled out Earthly explanations for these tantalizing dots. And there’s a long history of events associated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) fizzling out under closer scrutiny.
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June 17, 2022
Mohenjo
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In about 5 billion years, the Sun will leave the main sequence and become a red giant. It’ll expand and transform into a glowering, malevolent ball and consume and destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars.
Can humanity survive the Sun’s red giant phase? Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETCs) may have already faced this existential threat.
Could they have survived it by migrating to another star system without the use of spaceships?
Universe Today readers are well-versed in the difficulties of interstellar travel. Our nearest neighboring solar system is the Alpha Centauri system.
If humanity had to flee an existential threat in our Solar System, and if we could identify a planetary home in Alpha Centauri, it would still take us over four years to get there – if we could travel at the speed of light!
It still takes us five years to get an orbiter to Jupiter at our technological stage. There’s lots of talk about generation starships, where humans could live for generations while en route to a distant habitable planet.
Those ships don’t need to reach anywhere near the speed of light; instead, entire generations of humans would live and die on a journey to another star that takes hundreds or thousands of years. It’s fun to think about but pure fantasy at this point.
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(Cavan Images/Getty Images)
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June 16, 2022
Mohenjo
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Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac, and Lurín Rivers, in the desert zone of the central coastal part of the country, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima Metropolitan Area. With a population of more than 9.7 million and more than 10.7 million in its metropolitan area, Lima is one of the largest cities in the Americas.
Lima was named by natives in the agricultural region known by native Peruvians as Limaq. It became the capital and most important city in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Following the Peruvian War of Independence, it became the capital of the Republic of Peru (República del Perú). Around one-third of the national population lives in the metropolitan area.
Lima is home to one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the New World. The National University of San Marcos, founded on 12 May 1551, during the Viceroyalty of Peru, is the first officially established and the oldest continuously functioning university in the Americas.
Nowadays, the city is considered to be the political, cultural, financial, and commercial center of the country. Internationally, it is one of the thirty most populated urban agglomerations in the world. Due to its geostrategic importance, the Globalization and World Cities Research Network has categorized it as a “beta” tier city.
Jurisdictionally, the metropolis extends mainly within the province of Lima and in a smaller portion, to the west, within the Constitutional Province of Callao, where the seaport and the Jorge Chávez Airport are located. Both provinces have regional autonomy since 2002.
In October 2013, Lima was chosen to host the 2019 Pan American Games; these games were held at venues in and around Lima and were the largest sporting event ever hosted by the country. It also hosted the APEC Meetings of 2008 and 2016, the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group in October 2015, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2014, and the Miss Universe 1982 contest. Wikipedia
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An image from Lima Peru
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June 16, 2022
Mohenjo
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Key Takeaways
- Here on Earth, our entire planet is a little under 13,000 kilometers in diameter, or about seven orders of magnitude greater than the size of a human.
- But as we go up, to larger and larger scales, we find that stars, stellar systems, star clusters, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and more show us how insignificant human, and even planetary, scales truly are.
- Even with all we know, the vast abyss of the unobservable Universe is larger than the cumulative suite of all we can see. These images show how big the cosmic scale truly is.
Within this Universe, we’re merely a drop in the cosmic ocean.
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From a pre-existing state, inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space. One of these “bubbles,” where inflation ended, gave birth to our Universe some 13.8 billion years ago, where our entire visible Universe is just a tiny portion of that bubble’s volume. Each individual bubble is disconnected from all of the others (Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller)
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June 16, 2022
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NASA’s new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft’s 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is “still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements.”
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is the agency’s incredibly powerful next-generation space telescope, designed to look into the farthest reaches of the Universe and see back in time to the stars and galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang. It cost NASA nearly $10 billion to build and more than two decades to complete. But, on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope finally launched to space, where it underwent an extremely complex unfolding process before reaching its final destination roughly 1 million miles from Earth.
Since its launch, JWST has already been hit by at least four different micrometeoroids, according to a NASA blog post, but all of those were small and about the size of what NASA expected the observatory to encounter. A micrometeoroid is typically a small fragment of an asteroid, usually smaller than a grain of sand. The one that hit JWST in May, however, was larger than what the agency had prepared for, “likely less than .1 millimeter,” a NASA spokesperson told The Verge in an email. NASA admits that the strike, which occurred between May 23rd and May 25th, caused a dimple in the mirror and a “marginally detectable effect in the data,” which engineers are continuing to analyze.
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What’s going on?
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