Brief Answers to Cosmic Questions Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? Does the term "universe" refer to space, or to the matter in it, or to both? Evolution of the Universe Did the Universe expand from a point? More about the Big Bang When they say "the universe is expanding," what exactly is expanding? Structure of the Universe Does the Universe have an edge, beyond which there is nothing? Are the galaxies arranged on the surface of a sphere? Why can't we see the whole universe? If you could suddenly freeze time everywhere in the universe, and magically survey all of creation, you would find galaxies extending out far beyond what we can see today. Does the term "universe" refer to space, or to the matter in it, or to both? Today, the situation is reversed. Discovering the properties of space remains one of the deepest and most important problems in modern science.
Future proof » Tim’s laptop service manuals Have you come to this webpage looking for Toshiba laptop service manuals? Please read this. Introduction In the same vein as in my driver guide, I’ve started finding laptop service manuals and hosting them on my site. They generally detail the exact list of parts in each model of laptop – often down to individual screws, if you happen to have lost some and need to know the exact size for a replacement – and describe the procedure for disassembling and reassembling the entire machine, including panels, RAM, wireless cards, keyboards and touchpads and LCD screens, all the way down to the motherboard itself. They’re difficult to find – you have to know where to look in their support site, or come up with the right Google search string, or beg and steal from someone you know in the industry. This page, and indeed my whole site, has no ads. Practical stuff Firstly, I do not claim ownership, authority or copyright of anything here on this page. Organisation Some of these files are quite large.
News ::: Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is Strongest Material July 21, 2008 Columbia Engineers Prove Graphene is the Strongest Material Research scientists at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have achieved a breakthrough by proving that the carbon material graphene is the strongest material ever measured. Graphene holds great promise for the development of nano-scale devices and equipment. Until now, graphene’s estimated strength, elasticity and breaking point were based on complex computer modeling theories. “Our team sidestepped the size issue by creating samples small enough to be defect-free,” said Columbia Professor Jeffrey Kysar. The studies were conducted by postdoctoral researcher Changgu Lee and graduate student Xiaoding Wei, in the research groups of mechanical engineering professors Kysar and James Hone. “Our research establishes graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,” Hone said.
The Turing Test First published Wed Apr 9, 2003; substantive revision Wed Jan 26, 2011 The phrase “The Turing Test” is most properly used to refer to a proposal made by Turing (1950) as a way of dealing with the question whether machines can think. According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion (442). However, if we consider the more precise—and somehow related—question whether a digital computer can do well in a certain kind of game that Turing describes (“The Imitation Game”), then—at least in Turing's eyes—we do have a question that admits of precise discussion. Moreover, as we shall see, Turing himself thought that it would not be too long before we did have digital computers that could “do well” in the Imitation Game. The phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities. 1. 2.
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov by Isaac Asimov I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. In the first sentence, he told me he was majoring in English Literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, here and elsewhere, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the Universe straight. I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. "Wrong!"
BOINC: compute for science BOINC is a program that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. After installing BOINC on your computer, you can connect it to as many of these projects as you like. You may run this software on a computer only if you own the computer or have the permission of its owner. Tested on the current Ubuntu distribution; may work on others. After downloading BOINC you must install it: typically this means double-clicking on the file icon when the download is finished. System requirements · Release notes · Help · All versions · Version history · GPU computing
Schopenhauer's Stratagems Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer)
Black Hole Theory “Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” In a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, a physicist at Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born. Poplawski proposes that the universe in which the Earth exists may be located within the wormhole of a black hole which itself exists in an even larger universe. A universe could exist 'inside every black hole,' claims scientist Using an adaptation of Einstein's general theory of relativity, Poplawski analysed the theoretical motion of particles entering a black hole. He concluded that it was possible for a whole new universe to exist inside every black hole, which could mean that our own universe could be inside a black hole as well. Translated, this means that our universe inherited its arrow of time from its source. Other Sources:
The Oh-My-God Particle by John Walker January 4, 1994 Fly's Eye The University of Utah operates a cosmic ray detector called the Fly's Eye II, situated at the Dugway Proving Ground about an hour's drive from Salt Lake City. The Fly's Eye consists of an array of telescopes which stare into the night sky and record the blue flashes which result when very high energy cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. On the night of October 15, 1991, the Fly's Eye detected a proton with an energy of 3.2±0.9×1020 electron volts.[1,2] By comparison, the recently-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have accelerated protons to an energy of 20 TeV, or 2×1013 electron volts—ten million times less. All evidence points to these extremely high energy particles being protons—the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Microbial Mass First of all, noting that mass and energy are equivalent, we can calculate the rest mass equivalent of a 3×1020 eV particle to be about 5×10−13 grams. How Fast? How fast was it going? Quicktime But How?
10 Futuristic Materials Lifeboat Foundation Safeguarding Humanity Skip to content Switch to White Special Report 10 Futuristic Materials by Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Michael Anissimov. 1. Aerogel protecting crayons from a blowtorch. This tiny block of transparent aerogel is supporting a brick weighing 2.5 kg. Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Carbon nanotubes are long chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp2 bond, even stronger than the sp3 bonds that hold together diamond. “Metamaterial” refers to any material that gains its properties from structure rather than composition. We’re starting to lay down thick layers of diamond in CVD machines, hinting towards a future of bulk diamond machinery. Diamonds may be strong, but aggregated diamond nanorods (what I call amorphous fullerene) are stronger. Transparent alumina is three times stronger than steel and transparent. inShare28 Materials