Anyone announcing the successful sale of tourist trips around the moon would attract ridicule and laughter. Unless your name is Elon Musk. In that case the announcement amounts to nothing more than a logical and rather modest step towards Musk's promise of getting a million people to live on Mars.
Human thought has led to a variety of remarkable and profound insights. Many of these insights are well established and have been embraced by a significant portion of the global population. The earth being round, the atomistic nature of matter, our unremarkable place in the universe, and us being a product of evolution, all being examples of such insights. Other insights, although unanimously embraced by experts, have a long way to go for a larger population to accept them. More than for any other subject, this holds for quantum physics. No other product of human thought is as profoundly mysterious as quantum theory.
Winston Churchill liked his chocolate and he liked it rich and dark. At least that is what Hitler must have been convinced of as he decided to lure the British prime minister not with cigars but with dark chocolate. Churchill barely escaped his death by chocolate and went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
Coincidence?
Well, kind of. David Wineland and Serge Haroche have not endangered any living beings. That is to say: probably not in their physics experiments. Yet, although they stayed at a safe distance from bringing life form into quantum superposition, both physicists have thoroughly explored the schizophrenic world of the quantum, and opened the door to the direct observation and manipulation of quantum superpositions. By cleverly exploiting the fundamental interaction between light and matter, the two quantum optics experts have managed to pull off a range of experiments in which Schrödinger's cat states lead to bizarre results.
The deeper we look into the universe, the deeper we look back in time. When in the night sky you see planets like Jupiter and Saturn, you look about an hour back in time. Look at the stars, and you are looking back in time anywhere from years to several centuries. Bring a binocular to a dark site and you will be able to see galaxies millions of years back in time. Get a decent telescope to the same site and you look even further back.
In the previous blog post we discussed entropy. I provided you with a less well-known perspective on entropy and demonstrated that this generic perspective is fully compatible with the more traditional (and more narrow) thermodynamics view on entropy.I promised you a toy model to elucidate the information-theoretical entropy that was introduced. You have been waiting patiently, and you get your new toy today. But before we start playing, let's test your patience for a few more minutes, and first expand upon the results obtained in the previous blog post.Trivializing The Second law
Entropy. A subject that comes back again and again and again and again and again in this blog. And so does the question in my inbox: "what exactly is entropy?" On the internet you can find a plethora of answers to this question. The quality of the answers ranges from 'plain nonsense' to 'almost right'.
In my late teenage years I grew fond of Scientific American. Although language caused a barrier, and while I could digest and understand only some of the articles, the popscience presented opened my eyes to exciting developments and invited me to study further the subjects presented. These days, many years later, I still glance through the magazine, but generally with less enthusiasm. Today's editions seem packed with rather superficial information, and the articles tend to be less inviting towards further studies. Yet, once in a while, a hidden jewel attracts my attention. Such is the case this month with an article by Steve Carlip from UC Davis. Subject is quantum gravity. Quantum gravity in a pancake universe, that is.
Ridicule might delay truth but it can't replace it. In recent weeks astonishing rumors have been spreading fast in science circles, and soon the wider public will be in the know. According to these rumors, despite all the denial and ridicule, planet Nibiru is real. Yes, you read that correctly. Nibiru is a fact. Science leaders are ready to admit the observation of Nibiru. This rogue object was there all the time. Right under our eyes. Since the days of Galileo we are aware of its existence. Initially it was mistaken for a star, and later for a solar system planet. It's neither.
February 23rd 1987 is a day indelibly imprinted on the minds of everyone interested in astrophysics. At 7:36 GMT that day, now 25 years ago, the big one hit us. There was no escape. For 13 seconds a tsunami of neutrinos, emanating from a giant star eleven billion times more distant than the sun, flooded earth. This wave of neutrinos paled the steady stream of neutrinos reaching us from the sun by a factor of more than ten thousand.
Yet no one noticed.
We are all familiar with velocities. Velocities tell us how positions change with time. Velocities can not be assigned to individual objects, as they describe a relation between pairs of objects. We know this since Galileo Galilei. Yet, in common day language this profound fact is mostly ignored.
No, not a million of those... I am talking about page hits. And no, there is no reason for retiring: the next million is awaiting!
I didn't give much thought to page hits when I started blogging. And I probably still don't give it enough attention, but I do realize it is page hits that make the internet tick. And yes, it is stimulating for me to witness a piece that I have written attracting many thousands or even tens of thousands of hits. Yet somehow it feels unreal. Who are all these folks clicking on a link to this blog? A million hits for a nerdy and rather inaccessible physics blog is way more than I ever could have expected.
How do airplanes fly? The next time you find yourself in an airplane, look around at your fellow passengers. How many of them would be able to explain to you what force keeps the hundreds of tons of metal up in the air? How about yourself? Would you be able to explain this applied physics feat to the person sitting next to you?
Wings are simple and straightforward devices, yet misconceptions abound on how they work, and many people carry wrong perceptions on their lift-creating mechanism. The 'equal transit time' fallacy being the most prominent misconception in this area.
