Lifeboat Foundation

Data from the Parker Solar Probe confirms a long-suspected heat source for the Sun’s surprisingly hot corona, but there may be others.

The Sun’s surface temperature is around six thousand degrees kelvin, but the solar atmosphere—the corona and the solar wind—can reach a million degrees kelvin, a long-standing mystery in solar physics. Now, with data from the Parker Solar Probe, researchers have found evidence supporting a partial explanation for this mystery: magnetic waves driven by subsurface turbulence can impart energy to ions in these regions [1].

The exact mechanism of heating has been debated for decades, but the story appears to start with turbulent flow in the Sun’s convection zone, the outermost layer below the surface. In fluid dynamics, turbulence causes heating through a process known as turbulent energy cascade, where large eddies are converted into progressively smaller eddies. The energy in the smallest eddies is converted into heat through collisions between molecules.

On May 12, at nine simultaneous press conferences around the world, astrophysicists revealed the first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. At first, awesome though it was, the painstakingly produced image of the ring of light around our galaxy’s central pit of darkness seemed to merely prove what experts already expected: The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole exists, it is spinning, and it obeys Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

And yet, on closer inspection, things don’t quite stack up.

The speed of light is a universal physical constant that is important in many aspects of physics. Light travels at a continuous and finite speed of 186,000 miles per second. But did you have note that the speed of light can be manipulated?

In 1999, Lene Hau, a physicist from Denmark, was the first to slow light down to only 38 mph. Later, she could totally stop, control, and move it.

In this excerpt from “Cosmogenesis,” cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme explains how physics can approach questions about meaning in life.

Silicon, an element abundant in Earth’s crust, is currently the most widely used semiconductor material and is important in fields like engineering, geophysics and plasma physics. But despite decades of studies, how the material transforms when hit with powerful shockwaves has been a topic of longstanding debate.

“One might assume that because we have already studied silicon in so many ways there is nothing left to discover,” said Silvia Pandolfi, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “But there are still some important aspects of its behavior that are not clear.”

Now, researchers at SLAC have finally put this controversy to rest, providing the first direct, high-fidelity view of how a single silicon crystal deforms during shock compression on nanosecond timescales. To do so, they studied the crystal with X-rays from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser. The team published their results in Nature Communications on September 21st. What they learned could lead to more accurate models that better predict what will happen to certain materials in extreme conditions.

When astronomers around the world watched the epic collision between two neutron stars in 2017, the main event was just the beginning. The after-effects, both immediate and longer-term, of such a massive, never-before-seen merger were bound to be exciting, interesting, and deeply informative.

And now scientists have revealed a doozy. As the two neutron stars slammed together, they ejected a jet of material that, to our eyes, appeared to blast into space at seven times the speed of light.

This, of course, is impossible, according to our current understanding of physics. It’s a phenomenon known as superluminal speed, which in spite of its name is actually an illusion based on our viewing angle.

How likely is it that we live in a simulation? Are virtual worlds real?

In this first episode of the 2nd Series we delve into the fascinating topic of virtual reality simulations and the extraordinary possibility that our universe is itself a simulation. For thousands of years some mystical traditions have maintained that the physical world and our separated ‘selves’ are an illusion, and now, only with the development of our own computer simulations and virtual worlds have scientists and philosophers begun to assess the statistical probabilities that our shared reality could in fact be some kind of representation rather than a physical place.
As we become more open to these possibilities, other difficult questions start to come into focus. How can we create a common language to talk about matter and energy, that bridges the simulated and simulating worlds. Who could have created such a simulation? Could it be an artificial intelligence rather than a biological or conscious being? Do we have ethical obligations to the virtual beings we interact with in our virtual worlds and to what extent are those beings and worlds ‘real’? The list is long and mind bending.

Continue reading “#16 David Chalmers PHD — THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS AND VIRTUAL WORLDS” »

Francis Heylighen started his career as yet another physicist with a craving to understand the foundations of the universe – the physical and philosophical laws that make everything tick. But his quest for understanding has led him far beyond the traditional limits of the discipline of physics. Currently he leads the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels, a position involving fundamental cybernetics research cutting across almost every discipline. Among the many deep ideas he has pursued in the last few decades, one of the most tantalizing is that of the Global Brain – the notion that the social, computational and communicative matrix increasingly enveloping us as technology develops, may possess a kind of coherent intelligence in itself.

I first became aware of Francis and his work in the mid-1990s via the Principia Cybernetica project – an initiative to pursue the application of cybernetic theory to modern computer systems. Principia Cybernetica began in 1989, as a collaboration between Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and the late great Russian physicist, dissident and systems theorist Valentin Turchin. And then 1993, very shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the HTML/HTTP software framework and thus created the Web, the Principia Cybernetica website went online. For a while after its 1993 launch, Principia Cybernetica was among the largest and most popular sites on the Web. Today the Web is a different kind of place, but Principia Cybernetica remains a unique and popular resource for those seeking deep, radical thinking about the future of technology, mind and society.

Nebulae are interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Many nebulae are formed from the remnants of dying stars. Nebulae are often also regions where new stars…