Science and the Origins of Life ...

Building blocks of life found among organic compounds on Comet 67P – what Philae discoveries mean

Scientists analysing the latest data from Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko have discovered molecules that can form sugars and amino acids, which are the building blocks of life as we know it. While this is a long, long way from finding life itself, the data shows that the organic compounds that eventually translated into organisms here on Earth existed in the early solar system.

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Parallel Worlds Could Explain Wacky Quantum Physics

The idea that an infinite number of parallel worlds could exist alongside our own is hard to wrap the mind around, but a version of this so-called Many Worlds theory could provide an answer to the controversial idea of quantum mechanics and its many different interpretations.

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Is the universe a hologram?

The "holographic principle" asserts that a mathematical description of the universe actually requires one fewer dimension than it seems. What we perceive as three dimensional may just be the image of two dimensional processes on a huge cosmic horizon.

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Zuma said:

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-universe-hologram.html

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The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.

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"Was Time Faster in the Past?"

As the universe gets larger, cosmological objects, such as galaxies, move more rapidly away from each other in a process known as Hubble expansion. The Absolute Lorentz Transformation indicates that increased velocities induce directional time dilation. Applying this to the increased velocities associated with Hubble expansion in the present universe suggests a scenario in which the present experiences time dilation relative to the past. The passage of time would therefore be slower in the present and faster in the past.

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Dark Pion Particles May Explain Universe's Invisible Matter

Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that cosmologists think makes up some 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. A new theory says dark matter might resemble a known particle. If true, that would open up a window onto an invisible, dark matter version of physics.

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UCLA physicists offer a solution to the puzzle of the origin of matter in the universe

...asymmetry may have been produced as a result of the motion of the Higgs field, which is associated with the Higgs boson, and which could have made the masses of particles and antiparticles in the universe temporarily unequal, allowing for a small excess of matter particles over antiparticles.

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Is There a Parallel Universe That's Moving Backwards in Time?

...two-futures situation would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning that there would be essentially two universes, one on either side of this central state,”Barbour tells Scientific american. “Both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.”

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Journey through the universe beyond the speed of light...

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Solar system formation doesn’t mean a thing without that spin

New modeling shows that the supernova shock wave that helped form the Sun also could be responsible for the spin of our solar system

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Zuma said:

http://www.livescience.com/48806-pa...id=628007394056888320&adbpl=tw&adbpr=15428397

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The Brandon Five said:

Do you mean parallel universes?

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New data from Antarctic detector firms up cosmic neutrino sighting

The observations were reported today (Aug. 20, 2015) in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by the IceCube Collaboration, which called the data an "unequivocal signal" for astrophysical neutrinos, ultra high-energy particles that have traversed space unimpeded by stars, planets, galaxies..."

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Is Dark Energy hiding from us? Matter may be screening it from our view

If dark energy is hiding in our midst in the form of hypothetical particles called "chameleons," Holger Müller and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, plan to flush them out.

In the emptiness of space, chameleons would have a small mass and exert force over long distances, able to push space apart. In a laboratory, however, with matter all around, they would have a large mass and extremely small reach. In physics, a low mass implies a long-range force, while a high mass implies a short-range force.

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ITER: the world's largest Tokamak

ITER is based on the 'tokamak' concept of magnetic confinement, in which the plasma is contained in a doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel. The fuel—a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen—is heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million°C, forming a hot plasma.

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SPECIAL RELATIVITY - What does E=mc² mean?

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Knotty network could have powered universe’s early growth spurt

Arjun Berera of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues have come up with a new source for inflation that would also explain why the universe has three spatial dimensions. They say the early universe was flooded with particles resembling gluons – the force-carriers responsible for sticking quarks together to form protons and neutrons. As the universe cooled, stringy objects called flux tubes formed between these particles.

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5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse

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Infinite Universes
Scientists can't be sure what the shape of space-time is, but most likely, it's flat (as opposed to spherical or even donut-shape) and stretches out infinitely. But if space-time goes on forever, then it must start repeating at some point, because there are a finite number of ways particles can be arranged in space and time. So if you look far enough, you would encounter another version of you — in fact, infinite versions of you. Some of these twins will be doing exactly what you're doing right now, while others will have worn a different sweater this morning, and still others will have made vastly different career and life choices. Because the observable universe extends only as far as light has had a chance to get in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang (that would be 13.7 billion light-years), the space-time beyond that distance can be considered to be its own separate universe. In this way, a multitude of universes exists next to each other in a giant patchwork quilt of universes.

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Bubble Universes
Eternal inflation, first proposed by Tufts University cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, suggests that some pockets of space stop inflating, while other regions continue to inflate, thus giving rise to many isolated "bubble universes." Thus, our own universe, where inflation has ended, allowing stars and galaxies to form, is but a small bubble in a vast sea of space, some of which is still inflating, that contains many other bubbles like ours. And in some of these bubble universes, the laws of physics and fundamental constants might be different than in ours, making some universes strange places indeed.

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Parallel Universes
Another idea that arises from string theory is the notion of "braneworlds" — parallel universes that hover just out of reach of our own, proposed by Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. The idea comes from the possibility of many more dimensions to our world than the three of space and one of time that we know. In addition to our own three-dimensional "brane" of space, other three-dimensional branes may float in a higher-dimensional space. Columbia University physicist Brian Greene describes the idea as the notion that "our universe is one of potentially numerous 'slabs' floating in a higher-dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic loaf,".

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Daughter Universes
The theory of quantum mechanics, which reigns over the tiny world of subatomic particles, suggests another way multiple universes might arise. Quantum mechanics describes the world in terms of probabilities, rather than definite outcomes. And the mathematics of this theory might suggest that all possible outcomes of a situation do occur — in their own separate universes. For example, if you reach a crossroads where you can go right or left, the present universe gives rise to two daughter universes: one in which you go right, and one in which you go left.

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Mathematical Universes
Scientists have debated whether mathematics is simply a useful tool for describing the universe, or whether math itself is the fundamental reality, and our observations of the universe are just imperfect perceptions of its true mathematical nature. If the latter is the case, then perhaps the particular mathematical structure that makes up our universe isn't the only option, and in fact all possible mathematical structures exist as their own separate universes. "A mathematical structure is something that you can describe in a way that's completely independent of human baggage," said Max Tegmark of MIT, who proposed this brain-twisting idea. "I really believe that there is this universe out there that can exist independently of me that would continue to exist even if there were no humans."

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