This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.
Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.
Participate in observation of abandoned satellite that continues to transmit data although we've lost operational control as its orbital path brings it near us once again. [Reply]
Don't know if it was ever mentioned here, but last year's The Challenger Disaster tv docu-drama about the challenger investigation as told through the eyes of Richard Feynman was really good. [Reply]
Scientists Send Messages Directly From One Brain To Another
So a team of neuroscientists sent a message from the brain of one person in India, to the brains of three people in France, using brainwave-reading equipment and the Internet. Yes, really.
The process is slow and cumbersome. It also doesn’t make use of any bleeding-edge technology. Instead, it puts together neurorobotics software and hardware that have been developed by several labs in recent years. We’re not predicting that this will have practical applications, or society-changing implications, any time soon. Still, it’s pretty amusing that somebody did this, and we’re here to give you the step-by-step instructions on how.
To wit:
The emitter—we’re using the vocab and italics from the original paper because they are awesome—wears an EEG cap on her scalp that records the electrical activity in her brain. The cap communicates wirelessly with a laptop that shows, on its screen, a white circle on a black background.
The emitter translates the message she wants to send into an obscure five-bit binary system called Bacon’s cipher, which is more compact than the binary code that computers use.
Originally Posted by :
The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear. Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.
...
By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.
...
But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.
So her theory is there is never enough gravity to affect light. Well that's known bullshit. See gravitational lensing. Or is there some other aspect she believes cannot happen? [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
So her theory is there is never enough gravity to affect light. Well that's known bullshit. See gravitational lensing. Or is there some other aspect she believes cannot happen?
Apparently she has a mathematical proof. I don't claim to have the physics knowledge to say one way or the other. I just thought it was interesting. [Reply]
Not necessarily. It just means that we might be slightly wrong about the singularity aspect of a black hole, just as we were about the event horizon. Mainly that the center of a black hole might not be an actual singularity, but something that asymptotically approaches a singularity.
Media outlets did the same thing when Hawking made his now famous statement that event horizons don't actually exist the way we thought. Headlines all read "Black holes don't exist, says Hawking." Which completely misrepresents what Hawking meant. Similarly, the scientist here readily admits that something exists there and it gives off Hawking radiation.
The objects we currently call black holes absolutely exist. That's not really in question. This just means that we could have much more to learn about their formation. Particularly the idea that information is destroyed by a black hole and not eventually returned to the universe. If this is true, then it will definitely change the way we define black holes. But they're still there. [Reply]
