Lifeboat Foundation

Within a year, Karl Schwarzschild, who was “a lieutenant in the German army, by conscription, but a theoretical astronomer by profession,” as Mann puts it, heard of Einstein’s theory. He was the first person to work out a solution to Einstein’s equations, which showed that a singularity could form–and nothing, once it got too close, could move fast enough to escape a singularity’s pull.

Then, in 1939, physicists Rober Oppenheimer (of Manhattan Project fame, or infamy) and Hartland Snyder tried to find out whether a star could create Schwarzschild’s impossible-sounding object. They reasoned that given a big enough sphere of dust, gravity would cause the mass to collapse and form a singularity, which they showed with their calculations. But once World War II broke out, progress in this field stalled until the late 1950s, when people started trying to test Einstein’s theories again.

Physicist John Wheeler, thinking about the implications of a black hole, asked one of his grad students, Jacob Bekenstein, a question that stumped scientists in the late 1950s. As Mann paraphrased it: “What happens if you pour hot tea into a black hole?”

Quantum objects make up classical objects. But the two behave very differently. The collapse of the wave-function prevents classical objects from doing the weird things quantum objects do; like quantum entanglement or quantum tunneling. Is the universe as a whole a quantum object or a classical one? Artyom Yurov and Valerian Yurov argue the universe is a quantum object, interacting with other quantum universes, with surprising consequences for our theories about dark matter and dark energy.

1. The Quantum Wonderland

If scientific theories were like human beings, the anthropomorphic quantum mechanics would be a miracle worker, a brilliant wizard of engineering, capable of fabricating almost anything, be it a laser or a complex integrated circuit. At the same token, this wizard of science would probably look and act crazier than a March Hair and Mad Hatter combined. The fact of the matter is, the principles of quantum mechanics are so bizarre and unintuitive, they seem to be utterly incompatible with our inherent common sense. For example, in the quantum realm, a particle does not journey from point A to point B along some predetermined path. Instead, it appears to traverse all possible trajectories between these points – every single one! In this strange realm the items might vanish right in front of an impenetrably high barrier – only to materialize on the other side (this is called quantum tunneling).

Most of the matter and energy in the Universe are in mysterious, invisible forms that cannot be explained by physics as we know it. But it is possible for us to uncover the dark side of the Universe, and CERN physicist John Ellis knows how.

John Ellis is a Maxwell prize-winning theoretical physicist, and is considered one of the world’s leading physicists. John is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London, and since 1978 has held an indefinite contract at CERN.

Physicists believe most of the matter in the Universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.

We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the Universe as we see it would make no sense.

But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.

How much of the multiverse is TRUE?? Join us… and find out!

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The question of what the Big Bang really represented still bamboozles cosmologists — and Hawking provided more than one answer.

The Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE) project team, jointly led by NASA and Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, envisions a way to make huge circular self-healing mirrors in-orbit to further the field of astronomy. Larger telescopes collect more light, and they allow astronomers to peer farther into space and see distant objects in greater detail.

These next-generation large space observatories would study the highest priority astrophysics targets, including first generation stars—the first to shine and flame out after the Big Bang—early galaxies, and Earth-like exoplanets. These observatories could help address one of humanity’s most important science questions: “Are we alone in the universe?”

Like a carry-on suitcase, payloads launching to space need to stay within allowable size and weight limits to fly. Already pushing size limits, the state-of-the-art 21 foot (6.5 meter) aperture James Webb Space Telescope needed to be folded up origami-style—including the mirror itself—to fit inside the rocket for its ride to space. The aperture of an optical space observatory refers to the size of the telescope’s primary mirror, the surface that collects and focuses incoming light.

Wormholes have been relegated to the realm of science fiction. But new research suggests that they might actually be real.

Wow. Spoiler, quasars are galaxies colliding and part of the gases reacting with black holes in the middle of the galaxies. Does that mean we’re all doomed though we could galaxy hop in the distant future I suppose. And the rest of the dispersed gases will take millions or was it billions of years to make new stars again. Kinda reminds me of human life. We are born only to return to the Earth.

Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars—the brightest, most powerful objects in the universe—by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding.

First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our solar system. In the decades since they were first observed, what could trigger such powerful activity has remained a mystery. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.

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