Lifeboat Foundation

Do all scientific theories require evidence? Some disciplines, like physics, might be outgrowing the scientific method.

According to a straightforward interpretation of general relativity, the Big Bang wasn’t the start of ‘everything’.

Taking Einstein’s famous equations at face value and making as few assumptions as possible, a team of researchers has rewound the clock on our Universe to find it wouldn’t lead to a stopping point at all, but would take us through a different kind of beginning into a flipped space.

To understand what all the fuss over the Big Bang is, we need to rewind a bit to understand why physicists think it may not have been the start of everything.

Continue reading “Mind-Bending Study Suggests Time Did Actually Exist Before The Big Bang” »

Nope. Too late already. It’s been molten long ago already ha…

Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing his last theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven.

The paper, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics in May, puts forward that the Universe is far less complex than current multiverse theories suggest.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory About Our Universe Will Melt Your Brain” »

Black holes are great at sucking up matter. So great, in fact, that not even light can escape their grasp (hence the name).

But given their talent for consumption, why don’t black holes just keep expanding and expanding and simply swallow the Universe? Now, one of the world’s top physicists has come up with a new explanation.

Conveniently, the idea could also unite the two biggest theories in all of physics.

Continue reading “Why Don’t Black Holes Swallow All of Space? This Explanation Is Blowing Our Minds” »

When we die, our energy is redistributed throughout the universe according to the law of conservation of energy. While this should not be confused with our consciousness living forever, our energy continuing after we’re gone could make death a less scary prospect.

And how to build a time machine.

The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We’re doing it right now, aren’t we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time.

But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much further into the future? Absolutely.

Continue reading “Doctoral Student Just Published a Paper Describing How Time Travel Would Be Possible” »

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics carried out a combined experimental and theoretical investigation of the H+HD to H2+D reaction. They got first look at geometric phase effect in a chemical reaction.

An international team of physicists and materials scientists from NUST MISIS, Bayerisches Geoinstitut (Germany), Linkoping University (Sweden), and the California Institute of Technology (U.S.) has discovered an “impossible” modification of silica-coesite-IV and coasite-V materials, which seems to defy the generally accepted rules for the formation of chemical bonds in inorganic materials formulated by Linus Pauling, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that discovery. The research results were published in Nature Communications on November 15th, 2018.

According to Pauling’s rules, the fragments of the atomic lattice in inorganic materials are connected by vertices, because bonding by faces is the most energy-intensive way to form a chemical connection. Therefore, it does not exist in nature. However, scientists have proved, both experimentally and theoretically, using NUST MISIS’ supercomputer, that it is possible to form such a connections if the materials are at ultra-high pressure conditions. The obtained results show that fundamentally new classes of materials exist at extreme conditions.

“In our work, we have synthesized and described metastable phases of high-pressure silica: coesite-IV and coesite-V. Their crystal structures are drastically different from any of the earlier described models,” says Igor Abrikosov, leader of the theoretical research team. “Two newly discovered coesites contain octahedrons SiO₆, that, contrary to Pauling’s rule, are connected through common face, which is the most energy-intensive chemical connection. Our results show that the possible silicate magmas in the lower mantle of the Earth can have complex structures, which makes these magmas more compressible than predicted before.”

Continue reading “Silica paradox: Scientists discover seemingly ‘impossible’ material” »

The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics. A year before the conclusion of their 10-year study, they will present an amalgamation of findings to date before the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting opens this week.

Global team of scientists find ecosystem below earth that is twice the size of world’s oceans.