Lifeboat Foundation

The so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer was once described as “a genius of the nuclear age and also the walking, talking conscience of science and civilization”. Born at the outset of the 20th century, his early interests in chemistry and physics would in the 1920s bring him to Göttingen University, where he worked alongside his doctoral supervisor Max Born (1882−1970), close lifelong friend Paul Dirac (1902−84) and eventual adversary Werner Heisenberg (1901−76). This despite the fact that even as early as in his youth, Oppenheimer was singled out as both gifted and odd, at times even unstable. As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and thin chainsmoker” who once stated that he “needed physics more than friends” who at Cambridge University was nearly charged with attempted murder after leaving a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his tutors. Notoriously abrupt and impatient, at Göttingen his classmates once gave their professor Born an ultimatum: “either the ‘child prodigy’ is reigned in, or his fellow students will boycott the class”. Following the successful defense of his doctoral dissertation, the professor administering the examination, Nobel Laureate James Franck (1882−1964) reportedly left the room stating.

“I’m glad that’s over. He was at the point of questioning me”

From his time as student at Harvard, to becoming a postgraduate researcher in Cambridge and Göttingen, a professor at UC Berkeley, the scientific head of the Manhattan project and after the war, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, wherever Oppenheimer went he could hold his own with the greatest minds of his age. Max Born, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Richard Feynman, they all admired “Oppie”. When he died in 1967, his published articles in physics totaled 73, ranging from topics in quantum field theory, particle physics, the theory of cosmic radiations to nuclear physics and cosmology. His funeral was attended by over 600 people, and included numerous associates from academia and research as well as government officials, heads of military, even the director of the New York City Ballet.

Although dark matter is a central part of the standard cosmological model, it’s not without its issues. There continue to be nagging mysteries about the stuff, not the least of which is the fact that scientists have found no direct particle evidence of it. Despite numerous searches, we have yet to detect dark matter particles. So some astronomers favor an alternative, such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model. And a new study of galactic rotation seems to support them.

The idea of MoND was inspired by galactic rotation. Most of the visible matter in a galaxy is clustered in the middle, so you’d expect that stars closer to the center would have faster orbital speeds than stars farther away, similar to the planets of our solar system. We observe that stars in a galaxy all rotate at about the same speed. The rotation curve is essentially flat rather than dropping off. The dark matter solution is that galaxies are surrounded by a halo of invisible matter, but in 1983 Mordehai Milgrom argued that our gravitational model must be wrong.

I’ve looked at quite a few of the Planck base units, and I’ve even worked them out mathematically, but today I’m going to look at one of the derived units and I’ll compare it to some other things to see how big or small this is. Today then I’m going to be looking at the Planck Density. Let’s find out more.
Before we start, we need to know what density is. Density is a measure of how tightly packed a material is. In other words, how much stuff is packed into a certain volume of space.

To work out density then we need a formula, and units. To work out density we use the following formula, density and that is denoted by the greek letter rho equals mass divided by volume. The SI unit of density is kilograms per metre cubed. So now that we know what density is and we have our units, time to see how dense different materials are and then compare that to the Planck density, which is very dense indeed. At the end I’ll show you where the numbers come from. We’ll start off by looking at some very un dense things and work our way up.

Continue reading “The Planck Density: The Density of the Early Universe” »

Boltzmann brains are perhaps one of the spookiest ideas in physics. A Boltzmann brain is a single, isolated human brain complete with false memories that spontaneously fluctuates into existence from the void. They’re the kind of thing you’d find in a campfire horror story. The big problem, however, is that a range of plausible cosmological models (including our current cosmology) predict that Boltzmann brains will exist. Even worse, these brains should massively outnumber “ordinary” conscious observers like ourselves. At every moment of your existence, it is more likely that you are an isolated Boltzmann brain, falsely remembering your past, than a human being on a rocky planet in a low-entropy universe.

In this video I explain where the idea of Boltzmann brains originated, and why they haunt modern cosmology.

Continue reading “Boltzmann Brains: A Cosmological Horror Story” »

Complementing data with NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory provided additional insights.

An international collaboration of researchers used observations from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to find out more about a supermassive black hole that mysteriously gives out bubbles of radiation, a press release said.

Supermassive black holes are often seen at the heart of galaxy clusters in the centers of enormous galaxies. The atmospheres of these galaxy clusters are filled with hot plasma that can exceed temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius. Over long periods of time, these temperatures cool down relatively, which allows the formation of new stars.

Read more about A 107-year-old Einstein theory on the origin of the universe is absolutely Right.

A simulation of a probe sent to the other side of a wormhole shows it could send speedy messages back before the hole closes and the probe is lost.

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

Since the discovery of black holes, they have inspired images of the universe’s extremities in both scientists and storytellers. Their immense gravity — sucking in any matter and light unfortunate enough to come within grabbing distance — conjures images of crushing death and infinite possibility.

That same gravity, however, creates a well which consumes indiscriminately and from whence nothing can ever emerge. The only trouble is that isn’t the case. Among Stephen Hawking’s many accomplishments was the discovery that black holes actually radiate very slowly and will eventually evaporate. This discovery, while enough to make Hawking famous, threw a wrench in contemporary astrophysics by creating a paradox.

Continue reading “If you could see a black hole, it might look like a cosmic koosh ball” »

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

“This [study] shows us the evolution of the QGP and eventually [could] suggest how the early universe evolved in the first microsecond after the Big Bang,” said co-author You Zhou, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen in Denmark in an official statement.

“First the plasma that consisted of quarks and gluons was separated by the hot expansion of the universe. Then the pieces of quark reformed into so-called hadrons. A hadron with three quarks makes a proton, which is part of atomic cores. These cores are the building blocks that constitutes earth, ourselves and the universe that surrounds us.”

Continue reading “Primordial plasma from the Big Bang recreated in particle accelerator experiments” »