How Quantum Suicide Works A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. But, wait. This thought experiment is called quantum suicide.
Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace Where there's water, life is possible. True, it may be very difficult and very hard to live, depending, but anyone who's driven, hiked, or camped in the American South West will have noticed that cities and ranches crop up where there's surface water or where there's been a well dug. Within the state of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, there are deserts, mesas, mountains, and forests where normally people never or rarely visit; not-so-secret places where there's water, access to a road within a day's hike, and where a fairly rugged individual may hide while remaining basically healthy, marginally well fed, and reasonably sane. In this section I'll look at two such environments, neither of which I would recommend, but one of which I'd suggest is a reasonable way to live in basic health while either on the run, hiding out from the law, old girl friends, the draft for an illegal war, putative wives and such. Where exactly? How I Would Do It Some Other Areas
16 Most Bizarre & Fascinating Google Earth Images | Rarely Known Coordinates: This strange square and line appears in the middle of the desert near Ouargla in Southern Algeria. Mysterious isn’t it? Any ideas? Coordinates: Weird desert circles are farm patches? Coordinates: -14.01336,-48.357697 Look closely, can you see it, the profile a man. {*style:<b>4. </b>*}Coordinates: 69.495564 A ufo? Coordinates: 39.623119,-107.635353 Coordinates: 37.563936,-116.85123 Coordinates: – 38°13’36.05″N 112°17’56.56″W Coordinates: -43.241201,-76.404419 Is this a google prank? Coordinates: -37.324407,143.608861 Coordinates: 35.277378,-112.022611 Coordinates: 33.747252,-112.633853 Coordinates: 27.379351,33.632433 Coordinates: 37.629562,-116.849556 {*style:<b>14.
Scientists Find a Pair of Supermassive Black Holes They're huge. They're voracious. They're blacker than a panther on a moonless night. They're black holes, the mind-bending, space-warping cosmic objects with gravity so insanely powerful that even a beam of light that wanders too close will be sucked in, never to emerge. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted they might exist, but the great physicist himself doubted it would really happen. Einstein was wrong. But that's positively puny compared with the two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, just announced in the journal Nature. Loeb is referring to quasars — beacons of light so intensely bright they can be seen halfway across the universe. Back when the universe was young, there was plenty of gas floating around to feed these monsters. Such observations are technically difficult, so in one sense the latest black-hole discoveries are extraordinary. For the rest of us — well, they're just kind of awesome.
FOLLOW-UP: What exactly is a 'wormhole'? Have wormholes been proven to exist or are they still theoretical? Richard F. Holman is a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He offers this response: Wormholes are solutions to the Einstein field equations for gravity that act as "tunnels," connecting points in space-time in such a way that the trip between the points through the wormhole could take much less time than the trip through normal space. The first wormhole-like solutions were found by studying the mathematical solution for black holes. Theorists have since found other wormhole solutions; these solutions connect various types of geometry on either mouth of the wormhole. Needless to say, this possibility is a disturbing one; time travel would allow for a variety of paradoxical situations, such as going back into the past and killing your grandfather before your father was born (the grandfather paradox). Wormhole geometries are inherently unstable. Wormholes are great theoretical fun, and are seemingly valid solutions of the Einstein equations. William A.
SIMBAD Astronomical Database What is SIMBAD, and what is it not ? % The purpose of Simbad is to provide information on astronomical objects of interest which have been studied in scientific articles. Simbad is a dynamic database, updated every working day. It provides the bibliography, as well as available basic information such as the nature of the object, its coordinates, magnitudes, proper motions and parallax, velocity/redshift, size, spectral or morphological type, and the multitude of names (identifiers) given in the literature. Simbad is a meta-compilation built from what is published in the literature, and from our expertise on cross-identifications. Simbad is not a catalogue, and should not be used as a catalogue.
Blog : Doing Spy Stuff with Mathematica I was reading about the IT problems of the recently arrested, alleged Russian spies, and I wondered if they could have managed secret communications better with Mathematica. One of the claims was that they were using digital steganography tools that kept crashing. I wanted to see how quickly I could implement digital image steganography in Mathematica using a method known as “least significant bit insertion”. The idea of steganography is to hide messages within other information so that no one notices your communications. The word itself comes from a Latin-Greek combination meaning “covered writing”, from earlier physical methods that apparently included tattooing a message on a messenger’s head before letting him grow his hair back to hide it. In the case of digital steganography, it is all done in the math. The first thing that we have to do is to pick an innocent-looking image to transmit to our spy masters, perhaps via some public online forum. Here is all of that put together…
Still life: Bent objects UPDATE: The Return of Bent Objects Wires transform these objects from inanimate to hilarious works of art. Little polish girl McDonalds as Sculpture Materials Yeah, this is where those come from Dancing Queens English breakfast Sylvia Muffin put her head in the oven. The introvert Bananas in bed – let’s slip into bed together You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto. Fruit with life experience Zombies are nuts about brains Modest pear Literary interpretations Paper training our little dog, Frank A little cat doodle Photo Credits: Terry Border at Bent Objects View more In Pictures sets on Owni.eu
Hubble Captures Violent Birth Pangs of Enormous Star | Wired Science NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a young star undergoing violent birth. The star, named S106 IR, has a mass of about 15 times that of our sun and lies approximately 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Formed from a cloud of gas and dust with more than 25,000 times the sun’s mass, the star is just about to mature and settle down to what astronomers call the main sequence portion of its life, where it will glow steadily like our sun. But before it grows up, the star is releasing a fierce torrent of ultraviolet radiation, heating up the surrounding cloud to temperatures greater than 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Most young stars blast tons of energy and dust, creating gigantic butterfly-wing lobes on their sides like the ones seen here. While its birth has clearly been fierce, the end of its life will be marked by an even more violent explosion: a supernova that will outshine galaxies. Image: NASA and ESA Video: NASA
Time travel Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, generally using a theoretical invention, namely a time machine. It has a commonly recognized place in philosophy and fiction, but has a very limited application in real world physics, such as in quantum mechanics or wormholes. Although the 1895 novel The Time Machine by H. G. Forward time travel[edit] There is no widespread agreement as to which written work should be recognized as the earliest example of a time travel story, since a number of early works feature elements ambiguously suggestive of time travel. The Buddhist Pāli Canons also mention time moving at different pace, in the Payasi Sutta, one of Buddha's chief disciples Kumara Kassapa explains to the skeptic Payasi that "In the Heaven of the Thirty Three Devas, time passes at a different pace, and people live much longer. In Islam, there is some reference to time travel. Theory[edit]
Voyager - The Interstellar Mission Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. The definitive work about the Voyager record is "Murmurs of Earth" by Executive Director, Carl Sagan, Technical Director, Frank Drake, Creative Director, Ann Druyan, Producer, Timothy Ferris, Designer, Jon Lomberg, and Greetings Organizer, Linda Salzman.