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Category: physics

James Fodor discusses what he is researching, mind uploading etc.

As of 2020, James Fodor, is a student at the Australian National University, in Canberra, Australia. James’ studies at university have been rather diverse, and have at different times included history, politics, economics, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology. Eventually he hopes to complete a PhD in the field of computational neuroscience.

James also have a deep interest in philosophy, history, and religion, which he periodically writes about on his blog, which is called The Godless Theist. In addition, James also has interests in and varying levels of involved in skeptical/atheist activism, effective altruism, and transhumanism/emerging technologies. James is a fan of most things sci-fi, including Star Trek, Dr Who, and authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

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Continue reading “James Fodor — Exploring the Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience” | >

“Hans A. Bethe, who discovered the violent reactions behind sunlight helped devise the atom bomb and eventually cried out against the military excesses of the cold war, died late Sunday. He was 98, among the last of the giants who inaugurated the nuclear age.” William J. Broad, New York Times, March 8, 2005.

Remembering Hans Bethe makes available a collection of more than five and one half hours of videos of one of the legendary figures of physics of the past century. He interprets the transcripts of secretly recorded conversations of interned German atomic scientists when they first heard of the use of the atomic bomb. Hans Bethe (pronounced BAY-tah) and Robert Wilson, a co-participant in the Manhattan Project discuss the development of the bomb. In 1993 he and friend, Victor Weisskopf, fondly reminisce about their early years as immigrants to upstate New York. Kurt Gottfried, Physics Department Chair, moderates these discussions. In 1994 Bethe describes the Manhattan Project for Cornell students, after being introduced by Carl Sagan, and entertains their questions.

This ‘…unpretentious man of uncommon gifts’, as the New York Times described him, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work explaining how stars shine. In 1995 his friends and colleagues celebrate his influence and the 60 years he had been at Cornell. He continued as an active and productive researcher and published original scholarship for many additional years beyond his ‘official’ retirement. A complete list of his publications is included.

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The mergers of massive black hole binaries could generate rich electromagnetic emissions, which allow us to probe the environments surrounding these massive black holes and gain deeper insights into the high energy astrophysics. However, due to the short timescale of binary mergers, it is crucial to predict the time of the merger in advance to devise detailed observational plans. The overwhelming noise and slow accumulation of the signal-to-noise ratio in the inspiral phase make this task particularly challenging. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep neural denoising network in this study, capable of denoising a 30-day inspiral phase signal. Following the denoising process, we perform the detection and merger time prediction based on the denoised signals.

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There are moments in the history of human thought when a simple realization transforms our understanding of reality. A moment when chaos reveals itself as structure, when disorder folds into meaning, and when what seemed like an arbitrary universe unveils itself as a system governed by hidden symmetries.

The Bekenstein bound was one such revelation—an idea that whispered to us that entropy, information and gravity are not separate but rather deeply intertwined aspects of the cosmos. Jacob Bekenstein, in one of the most profound insights of modern physics, proposed that the entropy of any physical system is not limitless; it is constrained by its energy and the smallest sphere that can enclose it.

This revelation was radical: Entropy—long regarded as an abstract measure of disorder—was, in fact, a quantity deeply bound to the fabric of space and time. His bound, expressed in its simplest form, suggested that the total information that could be stored in a region of space was proportional to its energy and its size.

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Astrophysicists have once again enriched our knowledge of the cosmos with a new discovery: two small planets orbiting TOI-1453. Located at around 250 light years from Earth in the Draco constellation, this star is part of a binary system (a pair of stars orbiting each other) and is slightly cooler and smaller than our sun. This discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, paves the way for future atmospheric studies to better understand these types of planets.

Around this star are two planets, a super-Earth and a sub-Neptune. These are types of planets that are absent from our own solar system, but paradoxically constitute the most common classes of planet in the Milky Way. This discovery sheds light on a planetary configuration that could provide valuable clues to the formation and evolution of planets.

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the HARPS-N high-resolution spectrograph, the researchers were able to identify TOI-1453 b and TOI-1453 c, the two exoplanets orbiting TOI-1453.

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BL Lacertae, an enigmatic blazar, has shattered long-held classification norms, leaving astronomers baffled. Originally mistaken for a variable star, this active galaxy emits high-energy jets that have suddenly defied expectations.

Observations from 2020–2023 revealed that BL Lacertae doesn’t neatly fit into any of the three known blazar categories, shifting unpredictably between classifications. This rapid transformation, particularly in X-ray emissions, has sparked intense debate about the underlying physics. Could it be an entirely new type of blazar? Or is an unknown mechanism at play, altering its radiation patterns at unprecedented speeds?

Mysterious Blazar Challenges Astronomers.

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A new technique in detector fabrication could change high-energy physics forever.

By using additive manufacturing, researchers have developed a novel way to construct plastic scintillator detectors, drastically cutting costs and build time. Their first prototype, the SuperCube, has proven capable of tracking cosmic particles, marking a milestone for 3D-printed particle physics technology.

Next-Generation Neutrino Detection

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Researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, have succeeded in producing sensors from single-wall carbon nanotubes that could enable major advances in health care, such as continuous health monitoring. Single-wall carbon nanotubes are nanomaterial consisting of a single atomic layer of graphene.

A long-standing challenge in developing the material has been that the nanotube manufacturing process produces a mix of conductive and semi-conductive nanotubes which differ in their chirality, i.e., in the way the graphene sheet is rolled to form the cylindrical structure of the nanotube. The electrical and chemical properties of nanotubes are largely dependent on their chirality.

Han Li, Collegium Researcher in materials engineering at the University of Turku, has developed methods to separate nanotubes with different chirality. In the current study, published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, the researchers succeeded in distinguishing between two carbon nanotubes with very similar chirality and identifying their typical electrochemical properties.

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Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/06/17/epis…formation/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.

Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are also even deeper questions, having to do with why there is a universe at all, and why the early universe had low entropy, that most working cosmologists don’t address. Today’s guest, Anthony Aguirre, is an exception. We talk about these deep issues, and how tackling them might lead to a very different way of thinking about our universe. At the end there’s an entertaining detour into AI and existential risk.

Anthony Aguirre received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. He is currently associate professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where his research involves cosmology, inflation, and fundamental questions in physics. His new book, Cosmological Koans, is an exploration of the principles of contemporary cosmology illustrated with short stories in the style of Zen Buddhism. He is the co-founder of the Foundational Questions Institute, the Future of Life Institute, and the prediction platform Metaculus.

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