At UC Berkeley, researchers in Sergey Levine’s Robotic AI and Learning Lab eyed a table where a tower of 39 Jenga blocks stood perfectly stacked. Then a white-and-black robot, its single limb doubled over like a hunched-over giraffe, zoomed toward the tower, brandishing a black leather whip.
Through what might have seemed to a casual viewer like a miracle of physics, the whip struck in precisely the right spot to send a single block flying out from the stack while the rest of the tower remained structurally sound.
This task, known as “Jenga whipping,” is a hobby pursued by people with the dexterity and reflexes to pull it off. Now, it’s been mastered by robots, thanks to a novel, AI-powered training method.
#brain #brainhealth #discoveryourself #educationalyoutube #education #educationalvideo #health #healthtips. #PhysicsOfTheImpossible. #MichioKaku. #TimeTravel. #Teleportation. #Invisibility. #SciFiTech. #ScientificImpossibilities. #FutureTech. #Physics Can the impossible be achieved scientifically? In this video, we explore the fascinating ideas from Physics of the Impossible by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. We’ll discuss concepts like time travel, invisibility, and teleportation—could they become reality in the future?
If you’re a fan of science fiction and physics, this video is for you! Don’t forget to subscribe and turn on notifications for more exciting content.
📌 Topics Covered: ✔️ What is Physics of the Impossible? ✔️ The three categories of scientific impossibilities. ✔️ Is time travel possible? ✔️ Sci-fi technologies that may become real.
Go to: https://brilliant.org/arvinash — you can sign up for free! And the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual membership. Enjoy!
Two new recently published, peer-reviewed scientific papers show that real warp drive designs based on real physics may be possible. They are realistic and physical, which had not been the case in the past. In a paper published in 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre showed theoretically that an FTL warp drive could work within the laws of physics. But it would require huge amounts of negative mass or energy. Such a thing is not known to exist. 0:00 Problem with C 2:21 General Relativity. 3:15 Alcubierre warp. 4:40 Bobrick & Martire solution. 7:15 Types of warp drives. 8:42 Spherical Warp drive. 11:32 FTL using Positive Energy. 13:14 Next steps. 14:08 Further education Brilliant.
In a recent paper published by Applied Physics, authors Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire, outline how a physically feasible warp drive could in principle, work, without the need for negative energy. I spoke to them. They had technical input on this video.
What Alcubierre did in his paper is figure out a shape that he believed spacetime needed to have in order for a ship to travel faster than light. Then he solved Einstein’s equation for general relativity to determine the matter and energy he would need to generate the desired curvature. It could only work with negative energy. This is mathematically consistent, but meaningless because negative mass is not known to exist. Negative mass is not the same as anti-matter. Antimatter has positive energy and mass.
Even if you could create the Alcubierre curvature, you still need to accelerate the ship to speed of light and beyond. But to go beyond C, you have to have superluminal matter, or infinite energy. This is not possible.
What Bobrick and Martire figured out is that there is more than one type of warp drive. We can get to Proxima Centauri in 10 months without going faster than light, by dilating time inside the ship. If a spaceship is constructed of a massive super dense material, close to the mass density of a neutron star, then any individuals inside this ship would experience significant time dilation. Passengers on such a ship could go to Proxima Centauri in about 9 earth years traveling at half the speed of light, but only about 10 months would have passed from their perspective. But a huge amount of mass would still be needed, on the order of about the mass of Jupiter or larger.
When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.
We also use light to communicate, mostly radio waves. Could we use gravitational waves to communicate?
The idea is intriguing, though beyond our capabilities right now. Still, there’s value in exploring the hypothetical, as the future has a way of arriving sooner than we sometimes think.
When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the Universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.
We also use light to communicate, mostly radio waves. Could we use gravitational waves to communicate?
The idea is intriguing, though beyond our capabilities right now. Still, there’s value in exploring the hypothetical, as the future has a way of arriving sooner than we sometimes think.
A study by cognitive neuroscientists at SISSA investigated how the human brain processes space and time, uncovering that these two types of information are only partially connected.
Imagine a swarm of fireflies flickering in the night. How does the human brain process and integrate information about both their duration and spatial position to form a coherent visual experience? This question was the focus of research by Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti from SISSA’s Cognitive Neuroscience group, published in Nature Communications
<em> Nature Communications </em> is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, Earth sciences, and biology. The journal is part of the Nature Publishing Group and was launched in 2010. “Nature Communications” aims to facilitate the rapid dissemination of important research findings and to foster multidisciplinary collaboration and communication among scientists.
Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, astronomers have detected more than 7,000 of them in our galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered. At the same time, exoplanetologists have begun to take an interest in their characteristics, with the aim of finding life elsewhere in the universe. This is the background to the discovery of super-Earth HD 20,794D by an international team including the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the NCCR PlanetS.
The new planet lies in an eccentric orbit, so that it oscillates in and out of its star’s habitable zone. This discovery is the fruit of 20 years of observations using the best telescopes in the world. The results are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Mathematics and physics have long been regarded as the ultimate languages of the universe, but what if their structure resembles something much closer to home: our spoken and written languages? A recent study suggests that the mathematical equations used to describe physical laws follow a surprising pattern—a pattern that aligns with Zipf’s law, a principle from linguistics.
This discovery could reshape our understanding of how we conceptualize the universe and even how our brains work. Let’s explore the intriguing connection between the language of mathematics and the physical world.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the greater mysteries facing astronomers today, rivaled only by gravitational waves (GWs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Originally discovered in 2007 by American astronomer Duncan Lorimer (for whom the “Lorimer Burst” is named), these short, intense blasts of radio energy produce more power in a millisecond than the sun generates in a month.
In most cases, FRBs are one-off events that brightly flash and are never heard from again. But in some cases, astronomers have detected FRBs that were repeating in nature, raising more questions about what causes them.
Prior to the discovery of FRBs, the most powerful bursts observed in the Milky Way were produced by neutron stars, which are visible from up to 100,000 light-years away. However, according to new research led by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), a newly detected FRB was a billion times more radiant than anything produced by a neutron star.
The OS axiom posits that reality operates like a computational construct. Think of it as an evolving cosmic master algorithm—a fractal code that is both our origin and our ultimate destiny. This axiom doesn’t diminish the beauty or mystery of existence; on the contrary, it elevates it. When we think of the universe as a computation, we realize that the laws of physics, the flow of time, and even the emergence of consciousness are not random accidents but inevitable outcomes of this higher-order system.
This concept naturally leads us to the Omega Singularity, a term I use to describe the ultimate point of universal complexity and consciousness. Inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, this cosmological singularity is where all timelines of evolution, computation, and consciousness converge into a state of absolute unity—a state where the boundaries between the observer and the observed dissolve entirely. In The Omega Singularity, I elaborate on how this transcendent endpoint represents not just the culmination of physical reality but the quintessence of the “Universal Mind” capable of creating infinite simulations, much like we create virtual worlds today.
But let’s take a step back. How does this all relate to the OS axiom? If the universe is computational, it means that all processes—be they physical, biological, or cognitive—are governed by fundamental rules, much like a computer program. From the fractal geometry of snowflakes to the self-organizing principles of life and intelligence, we see the OS postulate at work everywhere. The question then becomes: Who or what wrote the code? Here, we enter the realm of metaphysics and theology, as explored in Theogenesis and The Syntellect Hypothesis. Could it be that we, as conscious agents, are co-authors of this universal script, operating within the nested layers of the Omega-God itself?
