Quantum Mechanics and Scientific Realism
What is the status of scientific theories? Should they be interpreted as literal descriptions of reality?
Category: Physics
Your Future Laptop Will Be Powered By A Black Hole
Dr. Seth lloyd examined the computational capacity of the ultimate physically possible laptop computer. There’s only one problem, this ultimate laptop is going to have to contain a small black hole.
Intergalactic Wormhole Highway Discovered?
Do most spiral galaxies harbor traversable wormholes connecting them in a sort of inter-galactic highway?
God is a byproduct of your hard-wired narcissism
“The spiritual things — the exotic phenomena people experience — in general violate the things we know to be correct on the basis of experiment, so they’re highly likely to be wrong,”
The Deistic Maximalism Principle
“When a hyper intelligent designer of universes uses mathematical entities of exceptional type (e.g. the exceptional Lie algebras, or the exceptional finite simple groups, etc) to help it in its design work, it will choose the largest example of the exceptional type it is using.”
Video Friday: Max Tegmark — Humanism in a Cosmic Perspective
We humans have again and again underestimated not only the size of the cosmos—a planet, a solar system, a galaxy, a universe, maybe a hierarchy of parallel universes—but we’ve also repeatedly underestimated the power of the human mind to understand our cosmos.
Video Friday: Solving the Measurement Problem of Quantum Mechanics
Physicists don’t all agree on the solution to the measurement problem. A penel of experts discuss the three most popular candidates and one neecomer to the scene, QBism.
X – teched creatures billions of years old
In earlier essays I conceived the idea of X-Techs, i.e. technologies at the “X scale”, where X could be femto, atto, zepto, etc. The next logical step is to speculate on what hyper intelligent synthetic creatures (artilects), which are x-tech based, might have done with themselves over billions of years, given that our sun, our star, is billions of years younger than most stars in the observable universe.
Further Musings on Warp Drives
NASA has toyed with the idea of the possibility of faster-than-light speed spaceships for a number of years.
Neutrino Science: The Post Nuclear Age, Extra-terrestrial Contact and The Perfect Wave (Part 1)
You might not have have heard that physicists want $1 billion US for a project to detect neutrinos that includes building an underground tunnel, 800 miles long, between Chicago and South Dakota. The recently released Depart of Energy plan includes funding for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) which includes an experiment to “send the world’s highest-intensity neutrino beam 800 miles through the Earth’s mantle”.