Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine you’re in a car, pedal to the metal, racing down the highway, but no matter how hard you push, you can’t surpass the speed of the car next to you, which is effortlessly cruising at the same pace. Now, replace the car with light, and you have a real cosmic conundrum: why can’t anything go faster than light?

Back in 1905, Albert Einstein turned the world of physics upside down with his theory of relativity. This wasn’t just about E=mc² or the bending of space-time; it was about something that touches everything we do: the speed of light, which is roughly 299,792 kilometers per second. According to relativity, no matter how fast you’re moving towards or away from a light source, you will always measure the speed of light at the same constant velocity.

Continue reading “Why Can’t We Go Faster Than Light?” »

The team claims to have generated 1G of thrust without any propellant. If true, it would be revolutionary.

The promise of photonics ICs is spurring innovation, but complex processes and a lack of open foundries are keeping it from reaching its full potential.

Circuit scaling is starting to hit a wall as the laws of physics clash with exponential increases in the volume of data, forcing chipmakers to take a much closer look at silicon photonics as a way of moving data from where it is collected to where it is processed and stored.

The laws of physics are immutable. Put simply, there are limits to how fast an electron can travel through copper. The speed of an electron, while fast on a macroscopic scale, encounters significant resistance as pathways shrink, leading to heat generation and power inefficiencies. In contrast, silicon photonics circumvents these electrical limitations by harnessing the swiftness of photons, which travel at the speed of light and are not bound by the resistive properties of materials like copper. Unlike electrons, photons do not generate significant heat, can carry more data due to their higher frequency, and suffer from less signal degradation.

I believe that utopian societies need to help all people.

Hakeem Oluseyi was born as James Plummer Jr. The book opens the night his parents split up (a bright, proud and decidedly urban mother and handsome, capable and “country” father). For the next few years, Oluseyi’s mom moves him and his sister to different cities and different Black neighborhoods. As Oluseyi grows older, he simultaneously becomes aware of the inherent racism of the social world around him and his own inherent, interior focus on the natural world. The first section of the book details the challenges he faces in communities that are both rich in relationship and struggling with inequality. At the same time, he faces his own struggle as his mother deals with mental illness and his father takes him into the entirely new universe of rural life in Piney Woods Mississippi.

All through these changes, Oluseyi becomes progressively aware of his own questions about the universe and his strange (to everyone else) capacities as a questioner. As a shy kid trying to steer clear of bullies, he counts things relentlessly and, in his counting, begins to find order and pattern in the world. He begins a life of experimentation, much to his mother’s chagrin, pressing burning incense cones into the shower curtain to see how long they take to make a hole. And, on a glorious night out in the country, he catches a glimpse of the dark night sky awash in stars. By his teen years, the fire of inquiry was burning hard in the young man.

Continue reading “From Poverty To Stanford, Memoir Tells A Physicist’s Remarkable Tale” »

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) have helped to detect a remarkable gravitational-wave signal, which could hold the key to solving a cosmic mystery.

The discovery is from the latest set of results announced by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which comprises more than 1,600 scientists from around the world, including members of the ICG, that seeks to detect gravitational waves and use them for exploration of fundamentals of science.

In May 2023, shortly after the start of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run, the LIGO Livingston detector in Louisiana, U.S., observed a gravitational-wave signal from the collision of what is most likely a neutron star with a compact object that is 2.5 to 4.5 times the mass of our sun.

Theoretical physicists at Utrecht University, together with experimental physicists at Sogang University in South Korea, have succeeded in building an artificial synapse. This synapse works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information.

The results appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the pursuit of enhancing the energy efficiency of conventional computers, scientists have long turned to the human brain for inspiration. They aim to emulate its extraordinary capacity in various ways.

Sir Roger Penrose proposes that the universe undergoes repeated cycles of expansion, decay, and rebirth, challenging the traditional notion of a singular Big Bang origin.

Renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose, hailing from the University of Oxford and a co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, posits a fascinating theory regarding the universe’s cyclical nature. Contrary to prevailing notions, Penrose suggests that our universe has undergone numerous Big Bang events, with another impending in the future.

Penrose’s Nobel-winning contributions revolve around advancing mathematical frameworks that not only validate but also extend Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Moreover, his investigations into black holes elucidated the phenomenon of gravitational collapse, wherein excessively dense entities converge into singularities, infinitely massive points.

Continue reading “The universe’s repeated rebirth and dying, controversial claim by Nobel Prize Winner” »

A scientist at the University of Portsmouth claims to have ‘evidence’ that humanity exists with a simulation. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the plot centers around the fact that we live in a digital simulation, and scientist Melvin Vopson claims that fact may match the fiction of the popular blockbuster.

Vopson has written extensively on the topic of the possibility that the known universe is a digital facsimile. He has provided articles for The Conversation and authored a book, Reality Reloaded, on the theme.

But while many of the theories posited about the universe being a simulation are in the realm of the abstract, Vopson now claims to have evidence that support his theory. “In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics,” the scientist said in 2022, reports Popular Mechanics.

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Most astrophysicists believe that 95% of the universe is dark stuff — dark matter and dark energy. We can’t see, feel, or hear it, but it’s supposedly all around us. NASA scientists recently proposed a new experiment to test what is going on with the dark stuff in our vicinity. The want to use four small spacecraft flying around the solar system in a tetrahedron formation to look for variations from Einstein’s theory of gravity. Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “Are we surrounded by dark energy? A spacecraft tetrad will look for it” »