Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Friday, 29 October 2010

Could We Be Holograms?

A recent postulate believes we are in a universe that is just a hologram. This is coming from physicist Craig Hogan.

Hogan has done his math and thinks he can prove that the universe is just one big hologram. It’s in the math, so is it true? Well, at Fermilab’s largest laser laboratory, we can figure out whether this is true or not. The measuring device is being dubbed “holometer.”

It has often been postulated that we lived in a weird universe. Ideas of how unsmooth space-time can get has been considered by many scientists such as Stephen Hawking.  Think of the universe as a digital camera. As you zoom in, it becomes increasingly pixelated. The same concept can be applied to our universe. There seemed to be “pixilation” in a German experiment that tried to measure gravitational waves.

So what is the design? It’s a lot like a classical inferometer, an apparatus that measures interference of light sources. This inferometer will be scaled a lot bigger than a classical one. The arms of the holometer are going to be 40 metres long, to increase the uncertainties of the apparatus. If the values still return to what the mathematics predict, then we are holographic!

Wednesday, 21 July 2010

21st Century Lunatic

Hello Reader!

Today is a great day! It was beautiful out, the sky shined so bright. It was just an superb day.

Anyways, I have been given a challenge. Not quite me specifically, more of a broad thing. My brother posted on his wall "Write a letter to someone from the 19th century trying to explain an aspect of 21st century daily life. Guaranteed, you can't explain Facebook without making us all sound like lunatics." I am going to accept this challenge. 


Where to begin... I know! The fundamentals of Science. In this era, we had knowledge of (or on the way depending on the year) electricity, the battery, and electrical circuits. By the end of this century, we had a grasp of Alternating Current (Thank You Nikola Tesla). They were on the edge of everything big in the world of electricity and magnetism. Even in the last years of the century, Guglielmo Marconi created the first wireless communication device, the wireless telegraph.


So for those folks still stuck in the year 1897, here's what  Facebook is.


First we must introduce the computer. In a nutshell, a computer is an object that contain many electrical circuits that carry electrons (we know about electrons by now). These electrons carry numerical values of 1's and 0's. The 0's and 1's translate to information that can do math, which can determine output like colour, text, math equations and even sound. This is the basis of the computer. Many computers (or just one) can make something called a server.


In the 1960's the first unofficial model of the internet was used by the United States of America (Yes, the colonies survived and thrived!)  The internet is a network of computers, like that of neurons (you had the knowledge from Franz Nissl). Neuron are connected to send information back and forth from one neuron to the other. The internet uses the same concept. We are able to send information (via wireless electromagnetic waves or from electrons) from one computer to another. In recent years, the internet has been open to the public to use and abuse.


The internet runs on an IP address. An Internet Protocol address give the specific location of the computer/server. Sticking with the Neuron idea, it's like locating a specific neuron in the brain or anywhere in the nervous system. From there we have web pages.


A web page is like a brochure. Most of them are made with information that help you. Some websites are made to entertain. The difference is that a web page can be mutable. I mean it is able to have an interactive component, like playing a game. Word are able to be moved around. This brings us to Facebook.


Facebook is a web page in which people post what they like and what they don't. What is going on in their life and what they wish would. It's like writing a letter (in only a few words) to all your friends and they will understand whether you are happy, sad, angry or just plain crazy. You are able to talk with your friends from long distances (think wireless communication).


This is what Facebook is in a nutshell.

Friday, 16 April 2010

Problems with Time Travel (PT. 1)

I know I have broken my New Years promise, everyone does it though, so get over it. I know this is the first post in over a month and this one will be kept short, in order to study for my exams (I have one tomorrow -_-)

This topic has come from a quiz I was looking over to help study. Light was traveling faster than light. So I immediately thought about time travel because something that travels faster than light, is said to be able to travel in time.

So what happens if we build a machine that is capable of traveling in time but the actual machine doesn't move? I became quite curious and came up with this postulate. If the machine is stagnant and travels back in time, then it must exist at the same spot, at all times. That is, if it travels back in time to an era before the invention actual was constructed, then it must stay in that place for all time in between.

For example, this time machine is built in 2020 (this is highly unlikely) and I want to travel to my birth year. I will end up in the same place but on the date of my birthday. Where should this machine be built, because the past didn't have access to it? Also, think about this, if built in public, how would the population respond to you sitting in this machine traveling back in time? What if you got shot while on the machine right before the crowd disperses (or while just assembles by your point of view), when would it happen? Near your beginning of the travel or near the end?

As I said this is a short post and hopefully thought-provoking.

Saturday, 18 July 2009

The Most Precious

I know this sounds pretty bland, but this topic, dear Reader, is about time. Think about it for a moment, really think about it. As your reading this, subconsciously, you're either hoping this doesn't take long or this takes as long as you can imagine. Today's post will explaining how we have depended on time, how it's viewed in science and different views on time.

Time seems to be everything. We get paid per time, our life relies on every minute, every hour and even years. We celebrate an annual event that occurs when we are either conceived or born. For those married, you have an anniversary - returning every year - a yearly celebration of your marriage. But it seems much more important than this.

As Our Lady Peace said in R.K. On Death, "[Death] gives importance and value to time.
Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it." I find this to be absolutely true. If we never concieved an idea to measure amounts of different periods, we would never care about what we do as humans.

I'm sure you have heard of this: Space-time. Do you really understand it's meaning? Well, space-time is what are known as dimentions. You see in 3-D, three dimensions. You can see up and down, left and right, and because you have 2 eyes that are far enough apart, you can see depths. Well, time has been added to the well known dimensions, for scientific pruposes to understand things at the quantum level and on a grander scale alike. Einstien used it for his Theory of Reltivity. Using a 4th dimension helps to illustrate what would happen to us if the sun just vanished out of thin air (we would still move around the Sun's orbit until we about 8 minutes [speed of light from Earth to the Sun]. Then we would float away).

The reason why I have posted this topic is because a pseudo-suggeustion from a friend made me curious about a website, timecube, which should be bashed, in my opinion. But main concept is a bit weird, he claims we live on a 4 cornered planet in which we experince 4 days instead of 1. this is interesting because we have thought for the longest time, until explorers from Asia and Europe travelled to the Americas. We even have travelled to space and have taken many images of our own planet. The result: We are still spherical. He bashes the education system, because it teaches the 24-hour system. Needless to say, Time Cube is not a likely thing to be taught in any school in the near future. We have made a system that works out mathematically and seems suffcient enough.

I also recently completed a book by Canadian author, Robert J. Sawyer. The main plot revolves around a neanderthal being quantumly transported to our part of the multiverse universe. They have a metric time system. That is to say, a day is 10 hours long. Metric time probably could work, if we thought it out properly, but very unlikely to work. We already use the metric system for time, before a full second aka milliseconds and after a full year aka decade, century, millenium ect.

How could metric time work? Well, let's do a few calculations:
We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365.25 days in a year (every 4 years is a leap year). So we will multiply each value.
60 * 60 * 24 * 365.25 = 31557600
Because we don't have that many zeros ending this number, this is difficult to do. We just would have the same amount of daylight in a day as we do now.

Hope you enjoyed, and wasn't a waste of time. Sugguestions for new topics and comments are always welcome.