Science and the Origins of Life ...

Is there another version of you somewhere out there in a parallel Universe?

What we find is that the Universe is most consistent with being spatially flat, with being uniform over a volume that’s much greater than the volume of the piece of the Universe observable to us, and therefore probably containing more Universe that’s very similar to our own for hundreds of billions of light years in all directions, beyond what we can see.

But theoretically, what we learn is even more tantalizing. You see, we can extrapolate the Big Bang backwards to an arbitrarily hot, dense, expanding state, and what we find is that it didn’t get infinitely hot and dense early on, but rather that — above some energy and before some very early time — there was a phase that preceded the Big Bang, and set it up.

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CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hits 1-PeV milestone with heavy ions (and re-ignites doomsday talk)

“This energy is that of a bumblebee hitting us on the cheek on a summer day. But the energy is concentrated in a volume that is approximately 10 -27 (a billion-billion-billion) times smaller.”

At first blush, a quadrillion electron-volts sounds like a huge ramp-up from 13 trillion to 14 trillion electron-volts, or 13 to 14 TeV, the traditionally quoted figures for the high end of the LHC’s collision energy. That’s what set off the doomsayers. In the weeks leading up to the ALICE collisions, there was a drumbeat of postings claiming that “CERN LIED” and warning that 1-PeV smashups would have catastrophic consequences.

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Hypersonic rocket engine could revolutionize space flight

"It's a synthesis of rocket and jet engine technologies. It's a device that would power a vehicle to more than five times the speed of sound; so more than 4,000 miles-per-hour, and up to 20 times the speed of sound if it's going into orbit," he added.

Previous attempts to build single stage to orbit propulsion systems have been hampered by the weight of an on-board oxidizer, such as liquid oxygen, that is needed by conventional rocket engines. Reaction Engines' idea was to design a device that could use the oxygen already present in the atmosphere through combustion like an ordinary jet engine.

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"The biggest issue that the guys have had to wrestle with is how you cope with extremely high temperatures that come into the engine when you're doing hypersonic speeds; so more than five times the speed of sound, 4,000 miles-per-hour. The temperature coming in at the front of the engine is a thousand degrees centigrade. And you have to be able to cool that air very rapidly to be able to do anything useful with it," said Thomas.

Head of Advanced Manufacturing, Simon Hanks, said SABRE is the first engine in the world to successfully build an on-board oxidizer that uses the oxygen in the atmosphere via its pre-cooler technology. This rapidly cools the incoming airstream in the blink of an eye.

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Destroying Death Star Would Trigger Economic Crisis

Feinstein worked on the assumption that at the time of its defeat the Empire would still have owed the banking sector 50 percent of the costs of building the first Death Star — and the entire costs of constructing the second.

This would leave the banks with a shortfall of more than $500 quintillion (if that sounds a lot, it is: the figure has 20 zeros). With the Empire gone, so the theory goes, there would be no one to pay the banks back on these universe-sized loans.

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Computing with time travel

Around ten years ago researcher Dave Bacon, now at Google, showed that a time-travelling quantum computer could quickly solve a group of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard.

The problem was, Bacon's quantum computer was travelling around 'closed timelike curves'. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity allows such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime known as wormholes.

Physicists argue something must stop such opportunities arising because it would threaten 'causality' - in the classic example, someone could travel back in time and kill their grandfather, negating their own existence.

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Zuma said:

The Multiverse and you

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Could molecular oxygen be common on comets?

"Our investigation indicates that a production rate of O2 with respect to water is, indeed, compatible with the obtained Halley data, and therefore that O2 might be a rather common and abundant parent species," the scientist wrote in the paper.

The first comet on which molecular oxygen was detected is 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, representing Jupiter family comets originating from the Kuiper belt. The Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) found this molecule in October 2015, and since then, the scientists have wondered whether the O2 abundance is peculiar to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko or Jupiter family comets in general. The new results hint that the existence of molecular oxygen could also be characteristic for the Oort cloud family of comets that includes Halley.

"We now have an indication for abundant O2 in the comas of two comets, one from the Oort cloud and the other from the Kuiper belt or possibly the scattered disk. This is particularly interesting, as both families of comets are believed to have formed at different locations in our early solar system," the paper reads.

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Physicists May Have Found New Fundamental Particle Of Nature

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research – may have found a new fundamental particle of nature. The scientists say that it’s still too soon to know for sure, but that isn’t stopping the excitement and intrigue.

Kyle Cranmer, a physicist on one of the teams at CERN that’s doing this research, speaks with Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson about what the scientists have seen that has led them to believe they may have found a new particle, and what the discovery could mean, if it’s real.

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Zuma said:

Physicists May Have Found New Fundamental Particle Of Nature

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Detecting Parallel Universes Hidden Inside Back Holes — The First Proof of the Multiverse?

According to Garriga, Vilenkin and Zhang, black holes could also have been formed by little bubbles of vacuum in our early universe. These would have expanded during our universe's inflationary phase (as the cosmos they were embedded in was also growing around them). When inflation ended in our cosmos, these bubbles would — depending on their mass — have either collapsed down to a singularity (an infinitely dense point that we think lies at the core of a black hole) — or, if they were heavier than some critical mass, the bubble interior would continue to inflate into an entirely new baby universe. This universe would look to us, from the outside, like a black hole, and would be connected to our universe by a wormhole.

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How Smart Do You Need To Be To Collapse A Wave Function?

At a fundamental level, everything in the universe behaves like a little probability wave. Particles are literally in many places at once, each with some probability. Take an electron and fire it at a screen with two slits cut through it, and astonishingly, the electron will go through both slits simultaneously. But suppose you set up a pair of cameras to monitor which slit the electron goes through and suddenly – poof – the "wave function collapses" and it really goes through only one of the two. Somehow observing the system directly affects it.

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The First Image Ever of a Hydrogen Atom's Orbital Structure

What you’re looking at is the first direct observation of an atom’s electron orbital — an atom's actual wave function! To capture the image, researchers utilized a new quantum microscope — an incredible new device that literally allows scientists to gaze into the quantum realm.

An orbital structure is the space in an atom that’s occupied by an electron. But when describing these super-microscopic properties of matter, scientists have had to rely on wave functions — a mathematical way of describing the fuzzy quantum states of particles, namely how they behave in both space and time. Typically, quantum physicists use formulas like the Schrödinger equation to describe these states, often coming up with complex numbers and fancy graphs.

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From MACHOs to WIMPs—meet the top five candidates for 'dark matter'

When we look out at the universe – even with the most powerful of telescopes – we can only see a fraction of the matter we know must be there. In fact, for every gram's worth of atoms in the universe, there is at least five times more invisible material called "dark matter". So far scientists have failed to detect it, despite spending decades searching.

The reason we know it exists is because of the gravitational pull of galaxy clusters and other phenomena we observe. The matter we can see in a cluster isn't enough to hold it together by gravity alone, meaning some additional invisible or obscure matter must be present. But we have no idea what it is – it could be made up of new, yet undiscovered particles.

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Universe Not (Yet) Found to be a Hologram, Bummer

One of the wilder ideas to come from string theory is that space and time might exist in jumpy packets itself—in essence, the universe might be pixelated. An experiment based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has tested one theory of how this “hologram universe” might work. The appropriately named Holometer uses a pair of laser interferometers to test for any slight jittering. After a year of taking data, the Holometer did not, alas, find any evidence that we’re living in a jumpy reality of two-dimensional bits. The Holometer is just getting started though, say researchers. They’ve also investigated high-frequency gravitational waves and have other space-time models to fire their lasers at.

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Our quantum problem

When the deepest theory we have seems to undermine science itself, some kind of collapse looks inevitable
by Adrian Kent

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Physicists continue to investigate why the universe did not collapse

(Phys.org)—According to the best current physics models, the universe should have collapsed shortly after inflation—the period that lasted for a fraction of a second immediately after the Big Bang.

The problem lies in part with Higgs bosons, which were produced during inflation and which explain why other particles have the masses that they do. Previous research has shown that, in the early universe, the Higgs field may have acquired large enough fluctuations to overcome an energy barrier that caused the universe to transition from its standard vacuum state to a negative energy vacuum state, which would have caused the universe to quickly collapse in on itself.

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An Impossible Experiment Shows How Black Holes Might Burp Back Information

Now, the Caltech group has figured out how to snag some information from an electron dropped into a black hole using these virtual photon pairs and a totally unrealistic measurement of a black hole's combined angular momentum, or spin.

By taking this measurement along with a measurement of the surviving photon's own spin, the black hole itself becomes entangled with the photon. Next, the electron is dropped into the black hole and the black hole's angular momentum is measured again, this time with the electron. Since measurement has an irreversible effect on a quantum state, this action is reflected in the surviving photon from the virtual pair. In this way information from the "lost" electron is transmitted back out of the black hole.

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New way to measure stars’ gravitational pull

In work that should make it easier to determine which planets are capable of supporting life and which are not, an international team of researchers has come up with a new way to measure the pull of gravity from the surface of the stars orbited by exoplanets.

Their findings, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, will help determine how much a person or other biological lifeform would weigh on that star if it had a solid surface. Using this new method could measure stars too far away for current techniques.

In their paper, Thomas Kallinger from the University of Vienna and his colleagues explained that a person would weigh 20 times more on the sun than they do on Earth, and 50 times less on a red giant star. Since surface gravity depends on the radius and mass of a star, it can be used to discern the sizes and masses of distant stars, they explained.

“The size of an exoplanet is measured relative to the size of its parent star,” Jaymie Matthews, a professor at the University of British Columbia and study co-author, said in a statement. “If you find a planet around a star that you think is Sun-like but is actually a giant, you may have fooled yourself into thinking you've found a habitable Earth-sized world.”

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Lunar Leap: Europe Is Reaching for a Moon Base by the 2030's

There is growing interest in Europe to prioritize the moon as humanity's next deep-space destination.

The moon, supporters say, can serve as a springboard to push the human exploration of the solar system, with Mars as the horizon goal. So Europe is ratcheting up what it sees as the strategic significance of the moon by pushing forward on lunar-exploration missions that would involve both humans and robots.

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The Black Hole Information Paradox (just a pic...but a good one!)

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