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3 scientists school flat Earthers on the evidence
Can this end flat-Earth theory once and for all?
28 June, 2020
- Despite centuries of evidence proving otherwise, there are an alarming number of people around the world who genuinely believe that the earth is flat. Bill Nye The Science Guy, NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller, and Neil deGrasse Tyson strongly disagree.
- From simple experiments like standing at a seashore or looking through a telescope at other planets, to reading about navigation or viewing photos of Earth taken from space, the scientists share several ways that flat Earthers can see the truth for themselves.
- Tyson explains why this trend doesn't qualify as a scientific debate and why it is actually dangerous for people to believe and, even worse, pass on these objectively false ideas.
Experiment proves old theory of how aliens might use black holes for energy
Researchers create a device to test a 50-year-old physics theory from the famed Roger Penrose.
23 June, 2020
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
- Scientists prove a 50-year-old physics theory by Roger Penrose.
- The theory explains how energy could be harvested from black holes by advanced aliens.
- Researchers from the University of Glasgow twisted sound waves to show that the effect Penrose described is real.
<p>A theory proposed 50 years ago to explain how energy might be harvested from a black hole was verified by an experiment. Scientists from the University of Glasgow were able to provide first proof for an idea from 1969 by the famed British physicist <strong>Roger Penrose</strong>, who predicted that only an advanced alien civilization would be able to get energy in the black hole's <em>ergosphere</em> – the outer layer of its event horizon.</p><p>Why would it take aliens to do this? Penrose thought that if you lower an object into the ergosphere, you could produce negative energy. But for this to work, the object would have to be moving faster than the speed of light. Penrose envisioned a mechanism that would split an object dropped into the black hole in two, with one part going into the hole while the other would be recovered. As explains the <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_727690_en.html" target="_blank">press release</a> from the University of Glasgow, the recoil generated by this process would result in the saved half gaining energy from the black hole's rotation.</p>
<p>Of course if this sounds complicated, it really is and only a very high-tech futuristic civilization would be up for the challenge, concluded Penrose.</p><p>What the scientists were able to do now was to test this idea by an experiment based on the proposal from another physicist, <strong>Yakov Zel'dovich.</strong> He suggested in 1971 that Penrose's theory could be proven by using "twisted" light waves, which would create energy by hitting a rotating metal cylinder and utilizing the rotational Doppler effect. </p><p>While Zel'dovich's approach also proved impractical, the scientists from the Glasgow University's School of Physics and Astronomy devised a setup of a small ring of speakers that twisted sound waves in a way similar to how he wanted to twist light. The advantage is that sound waves need a significantly slower rotating surface compared to light.</p>
Check out how the researchers explain their work
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="18cab22ba8605e6eaba8784df05eeb1d"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ES2VxhRAkUM?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>The team sent twisted sound waves towards a rotating sound absorber from a foam disk. Microphones positioned in the back of the disk captured the sound that passed from the speakers through the disc, which spun faster and faster.</p><p>What the scientists found was that this process produced clear changes in the frequency and amplitude of the sound waves, courtesy of the unusual behavior of the Doppler effect, which normally describes how for example, the pitch of a siren from an emergency vehicle seems to rise as it heads towards you but drops when it moves away. This happens because sound waves come at you with more frequency when the ambulance closes in, but less so after it goes past.</p><p>The paper's lead author, <strong>Marion Cromb,</strong> a Ph.D. student in the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, explained that rotation transforms this linear effect and pulls in energy. "The rotational doppler effect is similar, but the effect is confined to a circular space," he pointed out. "The twisted sound waves change their pitch when measured from the point of view of the rotating surface. If the surface rotates fast enough then the sound frequency can do something very strange—it can go from a positive frequency to a negative one, and in doing so steal some energy from the rotation of the surface."</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQxMjg1Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxOTQzNjE5Mn0.lDKFjoSEDlLXN7sELrRZNLwDMpehSyu1C6qyOVlC5xE/img.jpg?width=980" id="c4186" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="82eabec61876f5bac9daa0da06a80b05" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
The set-up of the experiment.
Credit: University of Glasgow
<p>The researchers were able to show that as they increased the speed of the spinning disc, the pitch of the sound kept dropping until it disappeared, then it came back up to <strong>30 percent louder</strong> than before.<br></p><p>Marion called what they heard during the experiment "extraordinary," adding that the "negative-frequency waves are capable of taking some of the energy from the spinning foam disc, becoming louder in the process—just as Zel'dovich proposed in 1971."</p><p>Whether aliens are using this approach to get energy from black holes is certainly hard to ascertain, but the researchers are planning to investigate whether this effect extends to other sources like electromagnetic waves.</p><p>Check out their new paper "Amplification of waves from a rotating body" in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0944-3" target="_blank">Nature Physics.</a></p>
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Why we can stop worrying and love the particle accelerator
By delving into the mysteries of the Universe, colliders have entered the Zeitgeist and tapped the wonders and fears of our age.
23 June, 2020
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator?
<p> The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic, but it happens to shed light on our intuitions about radiation, the vulnerability of the human body, and the very nature of matter. Particle accelerators allow physicists to study subatomic particles by speeding them up in powerful magnetic fields and then tracing the interactions that result from collisions. By delving into the mysteries of the Universe, colliders have entered the Zeitgeist and tapped the wonders and fears of our age.</p><p>As far back as 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was charged with creating <a href="https://home.cern/about/physics/extra-dimensions-gravitons-and-tiny-black-holes" target="_blank">microscopic black holes</a> that would allow physicists to detect extra dimensions. To many, this sounds like the plot of a disastrous science-fiction movie. It came as no surprise when two people filed a lawsuit to stop the LHC from operating, lest it produce a black hole powerful enough to destroy the world. But physicists argued that the idea was absurd and the lawsuit was rejected.</p><p>Then, in 2012, the LHC detected the long-sought Higgs boson, a particle needed to explain how particles acquire mass. With that major accomplishment, the LHC entered popular culture; it was featured on the album cover of <em>Super Collider</em> (2013) by the heavy metal band Megadeth, and was a plot point in the US television series <em>The Flash</em> (2014-).</p><p>Yet, despite its accomplishments and glamour, the world of particle physics is so abstract that few understand its implications, meaning or use. Unlike a NASA probe sent to Mars, CERN's research doesn't produce stunning, tangible images. Instead, the study of particle physics is best described by chalkboard equations and squiggly lines called Feynman diagrams. Aage Bohr, the Nobel laureate whose father Niels invented the Bohr model of the atom, and his colleague Ole Ulfbeck have even gone as far as to deny the physical existence of subatomic particles as anything more than mathematical models.</p>
<p>Which returns us to our original question: what happens when a beam of subatomic particles travelling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body? Perhaps because the realms of particle physics and biology are conceptually so far removed, it's not only laypeople who lack the intuition to answer this question, but also some professional physicists. In a <a href="https://youtu.be/_NMqPT6oKJ8" target="_blank">2010 YouTube interview</a> with members of the physics and astronomy faculty at the University of Nottingham, several academic experts admitted that they had little idea what would happen if one were to stick a hand inside the proton beam at the LHC. Professor Michael Merrifield put it succinctly: 'That's a good question<em>. I don't know</em> is the answer. Probably be very bad for you.' Professor Laurence Eaves was also cautious about drawing conclusions. '[B]y the scales of energy we notice, it wouldn't be that noticeable,' he said, likely with a bit of British understatement. 'Would I put my hand in the beam? I'm not sure about that.'</p><p>Such thought experiments can be useful tools for exploring situations that can't be studied in the laboratory. Occasionally, however, unfortunate accidents yield case studies: opportunities for researchers to study scenarios that can't be experimentally induced for ethical reasons. Case studies have a sample size of one and no control group. But, as the neuroscientist V S Ramachandran has pointed out in <em>Phantoms in the Brain</em> (1998), it takes only one talking pig to prove that pigs can talk. On 13 September 1848, for example, an iron rod pierced through the head of the US railway worker Phineas Gage and profoundly changed his personality, offering early evidence of a biological basis for personality.</p><p>And on 13 July 1978, a Soviet scientist named Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head in a particle accelerator. On that fateful day, Bugorski was checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron – the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union – when a safety mechanism failed and a beam of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light passed straight through his head, Phineas Gage-style. It's possible that, at that point in history, no other human being had ever experienced a focused beam of radiation at such high energy. Although proton therapy – a cancer treatment that uses proton beams to destroy tumours – was pioneered before Bugorski's accident, the energy of these beams is generally not above 250 million electron volts (a unit of energy used for small particles). Bugorski might have experienced the full wrath of a beam with more than 300 times this much energy, 76 <em>billion</em> electron volts.</p>
<p>Proton radiation is a rare beast indeed. Protons from the solar wind and cosmic rays are stopped by Earth's atmosphere, and proton radiation is so rare in radioactive decay that it was not observed until 1970. More familiar threats, such as ultraviolet photons and alpha particles, do not penetrate the body past skin unless a radioactive source is ingested. Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, for instance, was killed by alpha particles that do not so much as penetrate paper when he unknowingly ingested radioactive polonium-210 delivered by an assassin. But when Apollo astronauts protected by spacesuits were exposed to cosmic rays containing protons and even more exotic forms of radiation, they <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/183/4128/957.full.pdf+html" target="_blank">reported</a> flashes of visual light, a harbinger of what would welcome Bugorski on the fateful day of his accident. According to an interview in <em>Wired</em> magazine in 1997, Bugorski immediately saw an intense flash of light but felt no pain. The young scientist was taken to a clinic in Moscow with half his face swollen, and doctors expected the worst.</p><p>Ionising radiation particles such as protons wreak havoc on the body by breaking chemical bonds in DNA. This assault on a cell's genetic programming can kill the cell, stop it from dividing, or induce a cancerous mutation. Cells that divide quickly, such as stem cells in bone marrow, suffer the most. Because blood cells are produced in bone marrow, for instance, many cases of radiation poisoning result in infection and anaemia from losses of white blood cells and red blood cells, respectively. But unique to Bugorski's case, radiation was concentrated along a narrow beam through the head, rather than being broadly distributed from nuclear fallout, as was the case for many victims of the Chernobyl disaster or the bombing of Hiroshima. For Bugorski, particularly vulnerable tissues, such as bone marrow and the gastrointestinal track, might have been largely spared. But where the beam shot through Bugorski's head, it deposited an obscene amount of radiation energy, hundreds of times greater than a lethal dose by some estimates.</p><p>And yet, Bugorski is still alive today. Half his face is paralysed, giving one hemisphere of his head a strangely young appearance. He is reported to be deaf in one ear. He suffered at least six generalised tonic-clonic seizures. Commonly known as <em>grand mal</em> seizures, these are the seizures most frequently depicted in film and television, involving convulsions and loss of consciousness. Bugorski's epilepsy is likely a result of brain tissue-scarring left by the proton beam. It has also left him with <em>petit mal</em> or absence seizures, far less dramatic staring spells during which consciousness is briefly interrupted. There are no reports that Bugorski has ever been diagnosed with cancer, though that is often a long-term consequence of radiation exposure.</p><p>Despite having nothing less than a particle accelerator beam pass through his brain, Bugorski's intellect remained intact, and he successfully completed his doctorate after the accident. Bugorski survived his accident. And as frightening and awesome as the inside of a particle accelerator might be, humanity has thus far survived the nuclear age.<img src="https://metrics.aeon.co/count/1c4148f5-b2bf-4c84-923a-acc6618b0363.gif" alt="Aeon counter – do not remove"></p><p>Joel Frohlich</p><p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co/?utm_campaign=republished-article" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons.</p>
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- We typically think of events as happening in space and in time. "In reality, space and time are strongly intertwined things and the union of them is called spacetime," explains Konstantin Batygin.
- The force that we understand as gravity, according to Batygin, is the result of the spacetime continuum being curved by Earth's gravitational field. Depending on how close you are to the source of gravity, time will pass at different rates.
- Traveling backward in time is not possible. Traveling forward through time without aging, however, would require going to the center of the planet where the effects of that gravitational field can't be experienced.
For more from Batygin, visit konstantinbatygin.com.
3 mind-blowing space facts with Neil deGrasse Tyson
Tyson dives into the search for alien life, dark matter, and the physics of football.
31 May, 2020
- Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson joins us to talk about one of our favorite subjects: space.
- In the three-chaptered video, Tyson speaks about the search for alien life inside and outside of the Goldilocks Zone, why the term "dark matter" should really be called "dark gravity," and how the rotation of the Earth may have been the deciding factor in a football game.
- These fascinating space facts, as well as others shared in Tyson's books, make it easier for everyone to grasp complex ideas that are literally out of this world.
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