Lifeboat Foundation

On this day in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was correct in believing that the earth went around the sun.

2. In the first place, I wish to congratulate the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having chosen to deal, in its plenary session, with a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ‘the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology’

The emergence of the subject of complexity probably marks in the history of the natural sciences a stage as important as the stage which bears relation to the name of Galileo, when a univocal model of order seemed to be obvious. Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

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In this episode of Cosmology 101, we learn how the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) validated the Big Bang Theory and led to the development of the concept of cosmic inflation.

Explore the challenges and ongoing debates in cosmology as scientists seek to uncover the true nature of the early universe and the origins of cosmic structure.

Continue reading “Cosmic Inflation Explained | Cosmology 101 Episode 6” »

Physicists in Germany have used visible light to measure intramolecular distances smaller than 10 nm thanks to an advanced version of an optical fluorescence microscopy technique called MINFLUX. The technique, which has a precision of just 1 angstrom (0.1 nm), could be used to study biological processes such as interactions between proteins and other biomolecules inside cells.

In conventional microscopy, when two features of an object are separated by less than half the wavelength of the light used to image them, they will appear blurry and indistinguishable due to diffraction. Super-resolution microscopy techniques can, however, overcome this so-called Rayleigh limit by exciting individual fluorescent groups (fluorophores) on molecules while leaving neighbouring fluorophores alone, meaning they remain dark.

One such technique, known as nanoscopy with minimal photon fluxes, or MINFLUX, was invented by the physicist Stefan Hell. First reported in 2016 by Hell’s team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, MINFLUX first “switches on” individual molecules, then determines their position by scanning a beam of light with a doughnut-shaped intensity profile across them.

Joscha Bach is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist who works on on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. We got connected over the hard problem of consciousness — namely, why do people seem to think it’s so hard? During our conversation we deal with the foundational questions of the technological future being built in Silicon Valley, the fever dream of machine intelligence, and try to understand why people seem to think that there’s even such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

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Continue reading “Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? — Joscha Bach, Artificial Intelligence Researcher” »

A team of engineers and physicists affiliated with a host of institutions across Japan, working at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, has demonstrated acceleration of positive muons from thermal energy to 100 keV—the first time muons have been accelerated in a stable way. The group has published a paper describing their work on the arXiv preprint server.

The search for new elements comes from the dream of finding a variant that is sufficiently stable to be long-lived and not prone to immediate decay. There is a theory in nuclear physics about an island of stability of superheavy elements. This is a potential zone in the upper part of the periodic table of as-yet-undiscovered elements that could remain stable for longer than just a few seconds. The aim is to explore the limits of stability of atomic nuclei.

High-temperature superconductivity is one of the great mysteries of modern physics: Some materials conduct electrical current without any resistance—but only at very low temperatures. Finding a material that remains superconducting even at room temperature would spark a technological revolution. People all over the world are therefore working on a better, more comprehensive understanding of such materials.

With no conclusive laboratory results, researchers are turning to other methods to find the elusive substance.

Brush up on your physics knowledge with Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine.

Mathematician and Computer Scientist Stephen Wolfram wants to do no less than revolutionising physics. He wants to do it with computer code that gives rise to all the fundamental laws of nature that we know and like — and maybe more. Unfortunately, Einstein’s theories of general relativity inherently clash with how computers work. And yet, he and his team might have found a clever way around this problem.

Continue reading “This Theory of Everything Could Actually Work: Wolfram’s Hypergraphs” »