Showing all posts tagged: science

Albert Einstein, special relativity, and an afterlife: this is heavy

22 July 2023

planet and galaxy, image/montage by Lumina Obscura

Image courtesy of Lumina Obscura.

Is your dead grandmother… still alive? The answer is…

… yes…

… in a sense.

That’s if information in the cosmos is never destroyed, but rather… rearranged. In this case the information I refer to are the atoms, sub-atomic particles, and who knows what else, that make up everything in the universe, including us, and our predeceased family members.

Interaction with this information, which over eons diffuses into the cosmos after our deaths, may then be possible if cosmic consciousnesses, being ours — somehow — come into being one day, and are able to envelope the universe, and eventually encounter your late grandmother’s information.

This is the understanding I took away from this Big Think video featuring German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, which I saw on Open Culture. Best you watch for yourself though, and see what you make of it, as matters of maths and physics are not my thing. Otherwise, some fodder for a little contemplative thinking this weekend, perhaps?

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Kurzgesagt: the next pandemic could be made at home, scary hey?

4 July 2023

Advances in biotechnology are being made in leaps and bounds. On one hand what is being learnt is making the world safer, but on the other, there is a downside. While cures for deadly diseases are being developed, even nastier pathogens are being created at the same time. Or could be, as Kurzgesagt explains:

We are adding knowledge at unprecedented rates, while things get ever faster and cheaper to do. This speed means we can expect even more wonderful things for humanity. Lifesaving treatments, miracle crops and solutions to problems we can’t even imagine right now. But unfortunately progress cuts both ways. What can be used for good, can also be used for bad, by accident or on purpose. For all the good biotech will do for us, in the near future it also could easily kill many millions of people, in the worst case hundreds of millions. Worse than any nuclear bomb.

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Space-time being rippled by waves from supermassive black holes

29 June 2023

Scientists think low-frequency gravitational waves generated by super-massive black holes found at the centres of some galaxies may be sending ripples through the fabric of space-time. While astronomers still aren’t one-hundred percent sure these waves exist, they would help in the study of super-massive black holes, if they did.

The super-massive black hole, Sagittarius A — also known as Sag A — at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, may not be a generator of these gravitational waves though. At a mere four point three million times the mass of the Sun, it’s considered to be a relatively small, er, super-massive black hole.

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Quasars, the black holes that kill galaxies

13 June 2023

Quasars, are the single most powerful objects in existence, and are the subject of the latest video from Kurzgesagt. Thankfully, the nearest known such object is about six-hundred million light years away from Earth.

As small as a grain of sand compared to the Amazon River, they reside in the centres of some galaxies, shining with the power of a trillion stars, blasting out huge jets of matter, completely reshaping the cosmos around them.

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Is an alien invasion of Earth imminent asks Kurzgesagt

12 April 2023

The latest feature from Kurzgesagt, those veritable video virtuosos of educational storytelling, explores the possibility of Earth being invaded by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilisation. While Kurzgesagt stresses much of what they present here is speculative, some of the points they raise are nonetheless fascinating.

While this video is based on scientific papers, we are presenting interesting ideas based on little data and lots of extrapolation, so take them with a grain of salt.

Kurzgesagt make the seemingly incredible suggestion that our galaxy, the Milky Way, may one day not be big enough to accommodate all the space faring civilisations that could potentially arise. The notion seems astonishing given the amount of space we’re talking about.

It would take one hundred thousand years to travel from end of the galaxy to the other, assuming we could do so at the speed of light — or who knows, less — if we could travel faster than the speed of light. Still, we’re talking about great volumes of space.

It is also possible humanity is the first technological civilisation to emerge in the Milky Way. This call is made on the basis that there is next to no evidence of the existence of other intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy. This thought is backed up by the Fermi paradox, which asks, if the galaxy is teeming with habitable planets, were are all the extra-terrestrials?

Sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrials would be relatively easy to detect, with the technologies we possess. Their Dyson swarms, their presence in numerous neighbouring star systems, would create blips on the radar, so to speak. That’s not to say there are no other technological civilisations in the galaxy, but if there were, they’re possibly at a similar level of development to ours at the moment.

But intelligent civilisations need significant amounts of time to evolve. The process has taken billions of years on Earth. So while the galaxy seems devoid of space faring civilisations at present, that may change in the next billion or so years, as currently in utero lifeforms grow. Intelligent civilisations also need a stable environment in which to germinate, which Earth, and the Sun, has given us, but some good fortune has been involved in our case.

Kurzgesagt suggests suitably located planets orbiting red dwarf, or M-type stars, which are abundant, provide an ideal environment for intelligent life to develop.

Most stars are red dwarfs that can sustain habitable planets for tens of trillions of years! Life on these planets has an incredibly long time window to appear and pass the hard steps.

Red dwarf stars live for trillions of years, as opposed to billions, for G-type stars such as the Sun. Intelligent life would therefore have more chance of taking hold, as it has plenty of time to do so. On Earth, intelligent life took five billion years to emerge, being half way through the Sun’s approximately ten-billion year lifespan.

But if the process had started any later, it may well have been too late. As the Sun ages, it is becoming warmer, and eventually Earth will be too hot to support life. Humanity, it seems, came along at the right moment. Seen in that context, planets hosted by red dwarfs appear to be the perfect incubator for intelligent life. But things are not that simple: red dwarfs pose their own problems for the emergence of life.

For one, any planets in a red dwarf’s habitable zone, a place where the environment is neither too hot nor too cold, would be tidally locked. This means one side of a planet would permanently face the star, and be exceedingly warm as a result. The other side, meanwhile, would always be shrouded in darkness, and likely too cold for life to thrive.

It has been suggested life could flourish on the day-night terminators of such planets, but this would make for an all too narrow habitable corridor. In addition, red dwarfs also emit radiation flares, which can have the effect of “sterilising” planets in their vicinity, rendering them uninhabitable. That’s not too good. Nor is it conducive for the prevalence of intelligent life.

Given life only spawns in what seems like an extremely slender set of circumstances, an extra-terrestrial invasion may be the one thing we don’t have to worry about. There’s simply no one else out there. Given humanity appears to ascendant then, we have the opportunity, as Kurzgesagt suggests, to carve out our own niche in the galaxy.

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Ten years of Kurzgesagt and freely available quality content

29 March 2023

It’s been ten years since Philipp Dettmer founded educational science portal Kurzgesagt. To mark the milestone, their latest video looks at Kurzgesagt’s inner workings, and explores how the operation is financed. There may not be too much for science enthusiasts to take away, but this is invaluable learning for content producers.

Kurzgesagt charges nothing for people to access their content. Rather than imposing a paywall, they have developed other revenue streams, including a shop and sponsorships. Readers/viewers are not assailed with ads, or thoroughly annoying popup prompts to subscribe to newsletters, instead leaving the content to be enjoyed at leisure. This is the way to do it.

Thank you Kurzgesagt for the first ten years, and here’s to the next decade.

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Poetry by American poet laureate Ada Limon headed for Jupiter

3 February 2023

Now if Australia had a poet laureate, which it will by 2025, perhaps their work would be winging its way through interplanetary space towards Jupiter. Instead, verse composed by American poet laureate Ada Limón, will be engraved on Europa Clipper, a NASA space probe scheduled for launch in October 2024, to study Europa, one of the giant planet’s largest moons.

The spacecraft is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in October 2024 and by 2030, it will be in orbit around the gas giant. It will conduct multiple flybys of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, to gather detailed measurements and determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life. Europa is thought to contain a massive internal ocean and is considered one of the most promising habitable environments in our solar system, beyond Earth.

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ChatGPT cannot take author credit for academic papers published by Springer Nature

28 January 2023

The United States Copyright Office (USCO) recently declared it only wants to grant copyright protection to artworks created by people, not AI technologies.

Now Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, says hot AI technology of the moment, ChatGPT, along with other large language models (LLM) tools, cannot be credited as the author of any academic papers they publish. The OpenAI engineered chatbot can however assist with research writing, but their use must be disclosed:

First, no LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research paper. That is because any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility. Second, researchers using LLM tools should document this use in the methods or acknowledgements sections. If a paper does not include these sections, the introduction or another appropriate section can be used to document the use of the LLM.

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Black hole stars, a weird cosmic entity and Soundgarden song

18 December 2022

Black hole stars, sometimes called quasi-stars, were a hypothetical star that may have existed in the earliest days of the universe, up to about half a billion years after the Big Bang.

They were larger — far larger — than any star known to be present in the universe today, and were capable of outshining entire galaxies. And, as the name suggests, they were part black hole. We know some stars become black holes at the end of their lives, but for the two to somehow co-exist, star and black hole, without one destroying the other? How can such a thing even happen?

In 1927, British-Indian scientist J. B. S. Haldane, in an essay titled Possible Worlds wrote the oft quoted sentence: “now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” It was Haldane’s way of saying we’re unlikely to ever make sense of the universe, no matter how much we learn about it. Black hole stars, in their bizarre weirdness, only add to the wonder.

And, as a bonus, American rock/grunge act Soundgarden’s 1994 track, Black Hole Sun, written by the late Chris Cornell, takes on a whole (er, no pun intended) new meaning in this context.

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Can an algorithm assess the quality of a novel manuscript?

18 December 2022

It pays to follow Australian scientist and writer Dr Karl Kruszelnicki (aka Dr Karl) on Twitter (as long as Twitter continues to permit such behaviour), especially if you are writing a novel.

The other day he posted a link to an article published in 2014, about a literary algorithm that is apparently capable of quickly assessing the quality of an unpublished novel manuscript. The article expounds upon research conducted (PDF) by Stony Brook University into the matter:

Regarding lexical choices, less successful books rely on verbs that are explicitly descriptive of actions and emotions (e.g., “wanted”, “took”, “promised”, “cried”, “cheered”, etc.), while more successful books favor verbs that describe thought-processing (e.g., “recognized”, “remembered”), and verbs that serve the purpose of quotes and reports (e.g,. “say”). Also, more successful books use discourse connectives and prepositions more frequently, while less successful books rely more on topical words that could be almost cliche, e.g., “love”, typical locations, and involve more extreme (e.g., “breathless”) and negative words (e.g., “risk”).

Fascinating, no? Remember though, don’t let the algorithm write the book, let it guide you in writing the book. But if you wish to avoid algorithms all together, look at the way Irish author Sally Rooney — for one — does things.

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