MachineMachine /stream - tagged with physics http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions? http://news.discovery.com/space/why-does-our-universe-have-three-dimensions-120119.html/why-does-our-universe-have-three-dimensions-discovery-news So you know, why the universe has three dimensions http://t.co/ak3XQF8E ]]> Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:35:56 -0700 http://news.discovery.com/space/why-does-our-universe-have-three-dimensions-120119.html/why-does-our-universe-have-three-dimensions-discovery-news What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://t.co/sRP1qCUf ]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:37:06 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american On Discovering Life http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_discovering_life/ There is an aspect of life sciences that has been largely absent: the confrontation of fundamental questions of biology much as particle accelerators grapple with fundamental questions of physics. The roll call of early pioneers and prospectors is notable, but short. Fortunately, increasing numbers of researchers are now re-entering this fertile frontier.

The open secret of this emerging frontier is that we do not have a fundamental definition or understanding of life. Similarly, we do not understand life’s origins, how life emerges from chemistry. We do know that the chemistry of life on Earth, or “Terran” biochemistry… ]]> Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:05:30 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_discovering_life/ Clinamen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus.
According to Lucretius, the unpredictable swerve occurs "at no fixed place or time":
When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no… ]]> Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:15:14 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation/the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation-scientific-american

Old Skool article @sciam : The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation #information #data

]]> Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:44:07 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-fundamental-physical-limits-of-computation We are as gods and have to get good at it http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate… ]]> Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:27:00 -0700 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand09/brand09_index.html Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:43:51 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Hawking contra Philosophy http://www.philosophynow.org/issue82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science. His lofty dismissal of that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifically irrelevant pseudo-discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (seventeenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of twentieth century developments such as quantum mechanics and relativity.

Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning… ]]> Sat, 19 Feb 2011 06:31:20 -0700 http://www.philosophynow.org/issue82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy The Danger of Cosmic Genius http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/ Freeman Dyson is one of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following his equations. His principal contribution has been to the theory of quantum electrodynamics, but he has done stellar work, too, in pure mathematics, particle physics, statistical mechanics, and matter in the solid state. He writes with a grace and clarity that is rare, even freakish, in a scientist, and his books, including Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope, Infinite in All Directions, and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, have made… ]]> Sat, 13 Nov 2010 06:07:00 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/ Cosmology, Cambridge Style: Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Hawking http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the universe that isn't astonishingly inferential. Alas, you'd hardly know that from listening to the retired Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and his media echo chamber.

The breaking news originated in the latest book by Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (Bantam), co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow. It excited front-page editors as few science tomes do. Britain's Mirror exclaimed, "Good Heavens! God Did Not Create… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 Stephen Hawking says there's no theory of everything http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/09/stephen-hawking-says-theres-no-theory-of-everything.html Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is 2010, and Hawking has given up. But it is not his fault, he says: there may not be a final theory to discover after all. No matter; he can explain the riddles of existence without it.

The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow, is Hawking's first popular book in almost a decade. It duly covers the growth of modern physics (quantum mechanics, general relativity, modern cosmology) sprinkled… ]]> Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:41:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/09/stephen-hawking-says-theres-no-theory-of-everything.html CERN Podcast | Chris Morris http://www.cernpodcast.com/?p=43 Chris Morris is considered to be one of the greatest satirists ever and has been responsible for some of the most controversial, and let’s face it funny, programmes on television. In the UK, comedy writers and performers ranked him number 11 out of the 50 greatest comedy acts ever, above people including Bill Hicks, Peter Sellars and Eddie Izzard.

Apart from being a comedy great, he’s an incredibly interesting guy. He’s performed with Peter Cook, Stereolab used his sketches as lyrics on one of their albums, he won a BAFTA for his first short film and, for… ]]> Sat, 28 Aug 2010 02:53:00 -0700 http://www.cernpodcast.com/?p=43 If the Earth Stood Still http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans. The line that delineates the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or the other ocean would follow the equator if the earth was a perfect ellipsoid. However, due to the significant relief of both the continents and the ocean floor, the hypothetical global divide between the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or another ocean deviates from the equator significantly. Analogous to the well-known… ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:51:00 -0700 http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.200-rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-spacetime.html Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple

IT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere… ]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:25:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.200-rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-spacetime.html Science historian cracks the 'Plato code' http://www.physorg.com/news196943667.html A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.

Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century… ]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:44:00 -0700 http://www.physorg.com/news196943667.html Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P7717-XOQ&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 03 May 2010 09:38:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P7717-XOQ&feature=youtube_gdata System of Enthalpy http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/system-of-enthalpy

Rooted in our language is a bias. It’s a bias that we can hardly be blamed for, based as it is in our conception of ourselves as distinct entities whose existence can be felt, from one moment to the next, through time. Nature appears to move ‘forwards’, the ice-cube melts if left unattended, the scream in the night dissipates into silence.

For very similar reasons we see society as a progressive entity. The 19th Century, Positivist appeal to a human reality that moves towards an ultimate goal still… ]]> Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:46:47 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/system-of-enthalpy Scientists supersize quantum mechanics http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:51:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html Black Hole Simulator http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/black-hole-simulation Get sucked in ]]> Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:03:00 -0700 http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/black-hole-simulation BBC - The Secret Life of Chaos (2010) (Part 1/6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEpZFEIDHdc&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:30:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEpZFEIDHdc&feature=youtube_gdata