Lifeboat Foundation

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

Continue reading “Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of” »

This series is absolutely fantastic. Especially for Transhumanist non-astrophysicists like me!

Thank you to Wren for supporting PBS. To learn more, go to https://wren.co/start/spacetime.

Continue reading “How To Build The Universe in a Computer” »

How many black holes are out there in the Universe? This is one of the most relevant and pressing questions in modern astrophysics and cosmology. The intriguing issue has recently been addressed by the SISSA Ph.D. student Alex Sicilia, supervised by Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr. Lumen Boco, together with other collaborators from SISSA and from other national and international institutions. In a first paper of a series just published in The Astrophysical Journal, the authors have investigated the demographics of stellar mass black holes, which are black holes with masses between a few to some hundred solar masses, that originated at the end of the life of massive stars. According to the new research, a remarkable amount around 1% of the overall ordinary (baryonic) matter of the Universe is locked up in stellar mass black holes. Astonishingly, the researchers have found that the number of black holes within the observable Universe (a sphere of diameter around 90 billions light years) at present time is about 40 trillions, 40 billion billions (i.e., about 40 × 10¹⁸, i.e. 4 followed by 19 zeros!).

A new method to calculate the number of black holes

As the authors of the research explain: This important result has been obtained thanks to an original approach which combines the state-of-the-art stellar and binary evolution code SEVN developed by SISSA researcher Dr. Mario Spera to empirical prescriptions for relevant physical properties of galaxies, especially the rate of star formation, the amount of stellar mass and the metallicity of the interstellar medium (which are all important elements to define the number and the masses of stellar black holes). Exploiting these crucial ingredients in a self-consistent approach, thanks to their new computation approach, the researchers have then derived the number of stellar black holes and their mass distribution across the whole history of the Universe.

The first direct observation of light from behind a supermassive black hole confirms a prediction in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Sonifying science: from an amino acid scale to a spider silk symphony – Physics World.

Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo explain how they have been able to explore new avenues of research by translating living structures into sound.

A team of physicists, philosophers and biologists have come up with a list of organisms that could withstand the harsh conditions of interstellar space, and tardigrades take the top spot.

Light-matter interactions form the basis of many important technologies, including lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and atomic clocks. However, usual computational approaches for modeling such interactions have limited usefulness and capability. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a technique that overcomes these limitations.

In a study published this month in The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba describes a highly efficient method for simulating light-matter interactions at the atomic scale.

What makes these interactions so difficult to simulate? One reason is that phenomena associated with the interactions encompass many areas of physics, involving both the propagation of light waves and the dynamics of electrons and ions in matter. Another reason is that such phenomena can cover a wide range of length and time scales.

led by specialists from the University of Barcelona, ​​discovered a huge population of black holes, which seemed to “lurk” in the globular star cluster Palomar 5 in the Milky Way. In the distant future, this cluster will completely consist of black holes.

SciTechDaily.

Structure may reveal conditions needed for high-temperature superconductivity.

When two sheets of graphene are stacked atop each other at just the right angle, the layered structure morphs into an unconventional superconductor, allowing electric currents to pass through without resistance or wasted energy.

Continue reading “The Biggest Bang’ — Physicists Create Tunable Superconductivity in Twisted Graphene ‘Nanosandwich” »