magnus-pedersen.dk » Physics

This is NOT news!

Magnus — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 19:01:49 +0000

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

- Douglas Adams

And the above quote is from ’79 how’s this news?

Besides, the entropy bit is wrong, that is not Penroses argument. Black holes does not dissolve entropy…

I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Magnus — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:48:43 +0000

65 years…

Surreal!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)
http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Thermodynamics and girlfriends

Magnus — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:25:54 +0000

I came across an article recently, it was about Drakes equation an the number of potential girlfriends in London. That lead me to a similarly paper that states:

Since it is much more likely to have a girlfriend, we can suppose that in a random system (one without social standards, fear or psychological complexes) nearly everybody would have a girlfriend. Since this is not the case and we don’t want to violate the second law of thermodynamics we can suppose that people without girlfriends do more work in order to go to a state of lower entropy.

This is one of the weirdest conclusions I have ever heard and I love it! It also contradicts the Drake-Backus equation in the most humorous way. Thermodynamics rock!

You can read all of it here.

My first tricorder

Magnus — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:49:24 +0000

I just stumbled on this, my very own tricorder! Android rules!

Light just falls in to it…

Magnus — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:38:45 +0000

Remember the ship Zaphod and the gang steals from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? It was made of this:

“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”

Homework

Magnus — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:42:57 +0000

“Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.”

From the Sundayafternoonstuff department…

More of that stuff

Magnus — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:45:18 +0000

Did You, by the way, know that most children have been put here, in this world, to increase the entropy of our universe?

Physics 101

Magnus — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:01:34 +0000

Perception of time is an illusion caused by the continuous alteration of the
universe, a measure of increasing entropy.

Dimensions #10

Magnus — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:40:00 +0000

10. The Tenth Dimension – A Point?
Before we discussed the first dimension, we could say that we first started out with dimension zero, which is the geometrical concept of the “point”. A point indicates a location in a system, and each point is of indeterminate size. The first dimension then, takes two of these “points” and joins them with a line.
When we imagined the fourth dimension, it was as if we were treating the entirety of three-dimensional space in a particular state as a single point, and drawing a fourth-dimensional line to another point representing space as it is in a different state. We often refer to the line we have just drawn as “time”.
Then in the seventh dimension, we treated all of the possible timelines which could be generated from our big bang as if this were a single point, and imagined drawing a line to a point representing all of the possible timelines for a completely different universe.
Now, as we enter the tenth dimension, we have to imagine all of the possible branches for all the possible timelines of all the possible universes and treat that as a single point in the tenth dimension. Whew! So far, so good. But this is where we hit a roadblock: if we’re going to imagine the tenth dimension as continuing the cycle, and being a line, then we’re going to have to imagine a different point that we can draw that line to.
But there’s no place left to go! By the time we have imagined all possible timelines for all possible universes as being a single point in the tenth dimension, it appears that our journey is done.
In String theory, physicists tell us that Superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension are what create the subatomic particles which make up our universe, and all of the other possible universes as well. In other words, all possibilities are contained within the tenth dimension, which would appear to be the concept we have just built for ourselves as we imagined the ten dimensions, built one upon another.

Dimensions #9

Magnus — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:19:00 +0000

9. The Ninth Dimension – A Fold
As we’ve explored already, we can jump from one point in any dimension to another simply by folding it through the dimension above. If our ant on the newspaper were a two-dimensional Flatlander, then folding his two-dimensional world through the third dimension would allow him to magically disappear from one location and appear in a different one. As we’re now imagining the ninth dimension, the same rules would apply – if we were to be able to instantaneously jump from one eighth dimensional line to another, it would be because we were able to fold through the ninth dimension.