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.
Will the $ 1,000,000 RandiChallenge Prize[http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html] soon beawarded? The prize, administered by the James RandiEducational Foundation (JREF), is offered to anyone who can provein scientifically controlled tests some form of paranormal power.So far, Randi's prize has not been claimed, but rumour has it thatunder supervision of the JREF an elaborate telepathy test is beingconducted with shocking results.
It is easy to marvel at Einstein's relativity theory. It is less easy to really understand relativity. At least so it seems. Understanding relativity requires abilities in predicting with confidence the outcomes of relativistic experiments. For that you need a PhD in physics. Right?
An article in this week's edition of Nature adds to the mysteries surrounding 'dark matter'. Should we abandon this enigmatic concept of invisible matter that exerts gravitational attraction but is otherwise undetectable? Could it be that we simply do not understand the long-range behavior of gravity?
Take a decently sized housecat. Let's say a cat that is well-fed and weights 7.5 kilograms. We can all comprehend such a mass. It's not too small, neither too big. A cat is something we can pick up and lift in earth's gravitational field. A cascade of powers of six-and-a-half billion
Can we bring life forms into pure quantum states? Will we ever manage to elevate Schrodinger's cat from thought experiment to real-life experiment? A recent publication suggests the answers to above questions are affirmative.
Was an almighty God required to boot up the universe, or would a blindfolded monkey have sufficed?What a silly question. Isn't it obvious that truly divine powers were needed to create our amazing universe capable of evolving systems of supreme complexity called 'life'? Maybe. Maybe not. It all boils down to the question: How special was the big boot, the mother of all boot-ups commonly referred to as the big bang?
Google “E=mc2 is wrong” and you get 1,060 hits. Google “E=mc2 is correct” and you get a mere 138 hits. There you have it. It took us a more than a century, but finally this crazy inconsistent theory of relativity got outvoted. Common sense cries victory! Fortunately, science does not work that way. Science is no democracy, and we do not render a theory invalid by popular vote. Einstein's theory of relativity has stood the test of time and its correctness is beyond any doubt. But... there is an issue with what is arguably the most famous equation in the history of natural sciences.
The Principle of Maximal Aging - Capturing the Essence of Relativity
Take a number. Take a second number. Add both together to produce a third. Again, add the last two numbers to produce the next. Repeat ad infinitum.What can be more boring?
Call it irreversibility, call it time's arrow, call it the second law of thermodynamics. Fact is that everything evolves in such a way that things get more messy. Disorder rises. Entropy increases. We do not observe the opposite happening. Heat flows from from hot to cold, not the other way around. Fluids mix but don't unmix. Shattered pieces of crystal don't reassemble into a vase.
An article in the latest (August 2009) edition of Scientific American describes an astronaut floating motionless with respect to his distant spaceship. He is not tethered to the spaceship and has no objects available that can be hurled away or can in some other way create a thrust.How is he ever going to make it back to his spaceship?
When Albert Einstein constructed his general theory of relativity he decided to resort to some reverse engineering and introduced a 'pressure' term in his equations. The value of this pressure was chosen such that it kept the general relativistic description of the universe stable against the gravitational attraction of the matter filling the universe.
