Lifeboat Foundation

New research confronts the elephant in the room—the ‘trilemma’ of population growth, economic growth and environmental sustainability—and reveals the vast incompatibility of current models of economic development with environmental sustainability.

Using data collected from across the globe, national economies and natural resource use were closely examined by an international team of scientists using a mathematical model.

The results suggest that as long as our economic system retains its current structure, and if population growth continues, both high- and low-income countries will fail to achieve environmental sustainability.

Continue reading “Can sustainable development co-exist with current economic growth?” »

Researchers have solved a problem related to the quantum Hall effect. It’s the first on a wish list of open math problems to be solved.

Researchers make significant progress toward proving a critical mathematical test of the theory of general relativity.

• By Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine on August 27, 2018

Black women, especially, played a crucial role in the pool, providing mathematical data for NASA’s first successful space missions, including Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission and John Glenn’s pioneering orbital spaceflight.

Jason Padgett grew up struggling in school — until one night in 2002 when he was attacked in a bar and everything changed. Padgett said after the incident, he was using areas of the brain he didn’t previously have access to; he experienced choppy vision, was drawing intricate shapes and was seeing complex mathematical objects everywhere. Dr. Darold Treffert, a world renowned expert on savants, later diagnosed Padgett with acquired savant syndrome, which explained Padgett’s new skills. Padgett joins Megyn Kelly TODAY to share his story.

A trio of physicists with Columbia University is making waves with a new theory about phonons—they suggest they might have negative mass, and because of that, have negative gravity. Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis have written a paper to support their theory, including the math, and have uploaded it to the xrXiv preprint server.

Most theories depict sound waves as more of a collective event than as physical things. They are seen as the movement of molecules bumping against each other like balls on a pool table—the energy of one ball knocking the next, and so on—any motion in one direction is offset by motion in the opposite direction. In such a model, sound has no mass, and thus cannot be impacted by gravity. But there may be more to the story. In their paper, the researchers suggest that the current theory does not fully explain everything that has been observed.

In recent years, physicists have come up with a word to describe the behavior of sound waves at a very small scale—the phonon. It describes the way sound vibrations cause complicated interactions with molecules, which allows the sound to propagate. The term has been useful because it allows for applying principles to sound that have previously been applied to actual particles. But no one has suggested that they actually are particles, which means they should not have mass. In this new effort, the researchers suggest the phonon could have negative mass, and because of that, could also have negative gravity.

By Chelsea Whyte

Swirling patterns in the sky may be signs of black holes that survived the destruction of a universe before the big bang.

“What we claim we’re seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon,” says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford.

Continue reading “Weird circles in the sky may be signs of a universe before ours” »

This may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever seen and I love it.

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”