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Category: physics – Page 21

A group of Brazilian researchers has presented an innovative proposal to resolve a decades-old debate among theoretical physicists: How many fundamental constants are needed to describe the observable universe? Here, the term “fundamental constants” refers to the basic standards needed to measure everything.

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The group argues that the number of fundamental constants depends on the type of in which the theories are formulated; and that in a relativistic space-time, this number can be reduced to a single constant, which is used to define the standard of time. The study is an original contribution to the controversy sparked in 2002 by a famous article by Michael Duff, Lev Okun and Gabriele Veneziano published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

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The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.

Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.

Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…

Continue reading “What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know” | >

The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.

Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.

Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…

Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video-generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while.

Continue reading “Google DeepMind Unveils Veo 2, A New AI Video Model To Rival OpenAI’s Sora” | >

When analyzing artworks, understanding the visual clarity of compositions is crucial. Inspired by digital artists, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) researchers from the Mechanics and Materials Unit have created a metric to quantify clarity in digital images. As a result, scientists can accurately capture changes in structure during artistic processes and physical transformations.

This new metric can improve analysis and decision-making across the scientific and creative domains, potentially transforming how we understand and evaluate the structure of images. It has been tested on digital artworks and physical systems. The research is published in the journal PNAS.

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In case dark matter didn’t seem mysterious enough, a new study proposes that it could have arisen before the Big Bang.

Conventional thinking goes that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything – matter, dark matter, space, energy, all of it. After the event itself, the Universe went through a period of cosmic inflation, which saw its size swell by a factor of 10 septillion within an unfathomable fraction of a second.

But some theories suggest that this inflation period actually occurred before what we call the Big Bang. And now, physicists at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin have proposed that dark matter was formed during this brief window.

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The reliable control of traveling waves emerging from the coupling of oscillations and diffusion in physical, chemical and biological systems is a long-standing challenge within the physics community. Effective approaches to control these waves help to improve the present understanding of reaction-diffusion systems and their underlying dynamics.

Researchers at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Université de Rennes recently demonstrated a promising approach to control chemical waves in a type of known as hyperbolic flow. Their experimental methods, outlined in Physical Review Letters recently, entail the control of chemical waves via the stretching and compression of fluids.

“At a summer school in Corsica, discussions between the Brussels and Rennes team triggered the curiosity to see how chemical waves studied at ULB in Brussels would behave in hyperbolic flows analyzed in Rennes,” Anne De Wit, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The primary objective was to see how a non-trivial flow would influence the dynamics of waves.”

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Will AI ever surpass human intelligence, discover new laws of physics, and solve the greatest mysteries of our universe?

This week on Into the Impossible, I explore the potential and dangers of artificial intelligence with none other than Max Tegmark!

Max Tegmark is a renowned physicist and machine learning expert who dedicated his career to uncovering the mathematical fabric of reality, proposing that our universe itself might be a vast mathematical structure and that we could be living in a multiverse of endless possibilities. His work goes beyond physics to tackle the transformative power and ethical challenges of artificial intelligence, an area where he believes humanity must tread carefully.

In the second part of our fascinating interview, we discuss the development of AI, the impact it will have on science, and our role in all of this.

Tune in to discover if AI will ever surpass human intelligence!

Continue reading “Max Tegmark: Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence?” | >

NASAs SPHEREx observatory will lend insight into what happened after the Big Bang, measure the glow of galaxies near and far, and search the Milky Way for building blocks of life.

NASA and SpaceX are planning to launch the SPHEREx astrophysics observatory in late February 2025. SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, will lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Roughly the size of a subcompact car, SPHEREx will enter a polar orbit around Earth. From there, it will map the entire sky in 3D by capturing images in every direction, similar to scanning the inside of a globe. The resulting map will feature hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies, displayed in 102 distinct colors, each representing a unique wavelength of light.

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The newly found ORC, designated ORC J0219–0505, was discovered in data from the MIGHTEE survey conducted by the MeerKAT radio telescope located in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The 371,600 light-year-wide ORC seems to be associated with the elliptical galaxy WISEA J021912.43–050501.8. It has features that seem to set it apart from other ORCs, including the fact that it appears fainter and that details of its structure reveal it leans to one side.

“Odd Radio Circles: Circles of radio emission found around distant galaxies that we still don’t understand,” lead researcher and Western Sydney University astronomer Ray Norris told Space.com. “It’s a completely unexpected discovery, not predicted by the physics we already know, and therefore revealing a gap in our knowledge.

So we hope these will tell us something new about how galaxies form and interact.

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