Thursday, 25 February 2016

Stephen Hawking: We must Colonize Other Planets, Or We're Finished

Stephen Hawking: We must Colonize Other Planets, Or We’re Finished

Renowned scientist Professor Stephen Hawking has claimed that the survival of the human race depends on colonizing other planets. He also stated that aggression is the trait that could lead to the demise of humanity. He added, space represents the long term future of the human race and can act as “life insurance” for the species.
“Space could prevent the disappearance of humanity by the colonisation of other planets.” Professor Hawking made the comments while escorting an American visitor around the museum as part of a guest of honour prize.
Adaeze Uyanwah, 24, from Palmdale, California, won the tour after producing a blog and video describing a ‘perfect day’ in the UK capital. She asked Professor Hawking what human shortcomings he would alter, and which virtues he would enhance if this was possible.
Stephen Hawking said human aggression 'threatens to destroy us all' Credit: Reuters
Stephen Hawking said human aggression ‘threatens to destroy us all’ Credit: Reuters
He replied:”The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression,” he responded. “It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.
“A major nuclear war would be the end of civilization, and maybe the end of the human race. The quality I would most like to magnify is empathy. It brings us together in a peaceful, loving state. So, space travel is our best bet for survival”.
“Sending humans to the moon changed the future of the human race in ways that we don’t yet understand. It hasn’t solved any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it has given us new perspectives on them and caused us to look both outward and inward.
Expressing her feeling on meeting with Hawking, Uyanwah said that “It’s something I’ll never forget ..” and added that decades from now when her grandchildren will be learning Hawking’s theories in science class, “I’ll be able to tell them I had a personal meeting with him and heard his views first hand.”

Stephen Hawking Solved Black Holes' Paradox?

Stephen Hawking Solved Black Holes’ Paradox?

One of the most vexing questions in physics is what would really happen if you fell into a black hole? Now, a new radical theory, proposed by famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking, may finally solve this challenging puzzle.
Black holes really not engulf and destroy the ‘physical information’. Instead, the information is stored in alternative universes.
This is the new idea proposed by professor Stephen Hawking in a meeting organized by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, there’s a way out,
Hawking said.
Quantum mechanics states that everything in our world is encoded with information about its constituent particles’ quantum states. And according to this law, the information is eternal, it cannot disappear forever, no matter what happens, not even if it gets sucked into a black hole. This is known as the ‘information paradox.’
The ‘information paradox’ has puzzled scientists for decades. While quantum mechanics says that nothing can ever be destroyed, general relativity says it must be.
However, Hawking’s new theory may solve this puzzle. In the so-called Hawking Radiation Conference, organized by UNC physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton, Hawking presented his latest idea.
I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect but on its boundary, the event horizon
The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole — so, in other words, whatever is falling into a black hole can escape because it doesn’t actually make it inside

The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,
Stephen Hawking
he said.
Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.
So, while the information is not technically lost, it is preserved in a “chaotic, useless form,
Hawking added.
For all practical purposes, the information is lost.
At the conference, Hawking also offered compelling ideas about what happens to the stuff that does fall into the black hole?
They travel down a one-way path, eventually winding up in a different universe.
The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that,
Hawking said.
The message of this lecture is that black holes … are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.
Bootome line: As we understand them, black holes are regions of space-time that are born after stars collapse into themselves, creating a ‘point of no return’ that swallows anything that comes too close. Not even light can escape, because their gravitational pull is so infinitely powerful.

Earth May Have Black Holes

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Earth May Have Black Holes

They are impossible to notice, but scientists are convinced that they exist. Black holes are kind of breaks in the textile of space and time that they attract everything that is close at hand. So, nothing escapes, not even light. Scientists believe they have found the specific features of these holes here on Earth, in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Some of the largest vortex in the region are equivalent with the mysterious black holes in space from a mathematical perspective, say researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Miami. These huge vortex are so well surrounded by circular water ways that anything caught in them does not escape. Additionally, in recent times, it seems that their number is growing.
Scientists believe that these oceanic’s formations might moderate the negative impact of melting sea ice. But until now, scientists could not quantify the impact since the limits of these vortex remain a mystery.
Now, George Haller (a professor at ETH Zurich) and Francisco Beron-Vera (University of Miami) they think that they have succeeded to unravel the mystery. Using mathematical models, they isolated these eddy currents from a series of satellite observations. They have accomplished this by detecting the edges that revolve and have discovered that, in fact, they were indicators that demonstrate the existence of whirlwind inside.
Unexpectedly, these eddy currents have been shown to be mathematically equivalent to black holes. At a critical distance, a light beam is no longer spirals inside the black hole that bends and returns to its original position, forming a circular orbit.
Mathematicians have been trying to understand such peculiarly coherent vortices in turbulent flows for a very long time explained Haller.
Their results are expected to help in resolving a number of oceanic puzzles, ranging from climate-related questions to the spread of environmental pollution patterns.

Stunning New Theory: Black Holes Don't Erase




Stunning New Theory: Black Holes Don’t Erase Information
For years, scientists have believed that black holes are a portal to no-return. Astronauts in movies fear the mouths of black holes because the nothingness extends into an unknown forever. Black holes have been known as Bermuda Triangles of space – what goes in is lost forever. Or so we thought.
Over time, physicists have argued that black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained. But new research shows that this perspective may not be correct.
According to this new study, black holes don’t erase information, which may suggest that “information loss paradox” in black holes does not exist.
Stephen Hawking was the first who proposed that black holes were capable of radiating particles, and that the energy lost through this process would cause the black holes to shrink and eventually disappear. He further concluded that the particles emitted by a black hole would provide no clues about what lay inside, meaning that any information held within a black hole would be completely lost once the entity evaporated. Though Hawking later said he was wrong and that information could escape from black holes.
“According to our work, information isn’t lost once it enters a black hole. It doesn’t just disappear,” said co-author Dr Dejan Stojkovic of the University at Buffalo.
In their study, Dr. Dejan Stojkovic and doctoral student Anshul Saini explain interactions that take place between the particles given off by a black hole can be used to reveal information about the phenomenon, such as the traits of the object that first formed it and the characteristics of the matter and energy it draws in. The new study presents explicit calculations demonstrating how information is preserved, Stojkovic said.
Further, Stojkovic explain: “an observer standing outside a black hole can recover information about the matter at the heart of the black hole by analyzing particle interactions such as gravitational attraction. Apparently, the scientific community has knows of such correlating information for a while, but this is the first paper flesh out the connection mathematically.”
Originally, many scientists deemed these correlations as ineffective because they were so minute, but Stojovic calculated that these interactions grow over time, and become large enough to significantly affect calculations.
“These correlations were often ignored in related calculations since they were thought to be small and not capable of making a significant difference,” Stojkovic said “Our explicit calculations show that though the correlations start off very small, they grow in time and become large enough to change the outcome.”
The research paper titled “Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary” was published in Physical Review Letters.

Top 5 Largest Stars In The Universe

5
Pistol Star
25,000 light-years from the Earth

Among the most radiant stars in the whole Milky Way galaxy, the Pistol Star measures between 80 to 150 solar masses, which means that its mass is roughly 80 to 150 times greater than that of our Sun.
First discovered in 1991 with the aid of the Hubble Space Telescope, this blue hypergiant was the most massive known star before the discovery of R136a1. The energy that it radiates in a matter of only 20 seconds is equal to what our sun does in a year.
It is, furthermore, believed to be 10 million times more luminous than the Sun. The Pistol Star is 25,000 light-years from the Earth and has a diameter that is significantly larger than the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

4
Mu Cephei
6,000 light-years from the Earth

Another star found in the constellation Cepheus that is among the largest and most luminous stars in the Milky Way is Mu Cephei. It is a so-called red supergiant star and may be the largest star visible to the naked eye, and possibly, in the whole galaxy.
Visually, Mu Cephei emits about 100,000 times more light than the Sun does. It takes a billion suns to match the size of Mu Cephei.
It is also known as Herschel’s Garnet Star, as its deep red color was noted by William Herschel (1738-1822), a German-born British astronomer. This star is currently unstable in terms of light output, temperature, and size. It is, moreover, believed to be nearing death.

3
VV Cephei A
5,000 light-years from the Earth

The VV Cephei A is one of the biggest stars found in the constellation Cepheus.
It is about 5,000 light years away.
This star is recognized as a red supergiant primary as its luminosity and magnitude do not qualify it as a hypergiant.
The VV Cephei A has a solar radius between 1,050 to 1,900.
This star belongs to an eclipsing binary star system called VV Cephei which is not entirely spherical, and hence, has unstable luminosity.
It is also difficult to measure in terms of size.

2
VY Canis Majoris
5,000 light-years from the Earth

VY Canis Majoris is 30 to 40 times as heavy as the sun. A red hypergiant 2,000 times bigger than the Sun, VY Canis is the largest star in the universe in terms of size.
To put things into perspective, if we could take VY Canis Majoris and put it in our solar system in place of the sun, it would stick out of Saturn’s orbit.
The VY Canis Majoris emits roughly 500,000 times as much light as the Sun does.
Its temperature is estimated at around 3,200 degrees Celsius. The distance between this star and the Earth is 5,000 light years.

1
R136a1
165,000 light-years from the Earth

R136a1 is believed to be the most massive star in the universe. In 2010, British astronomers in the University of Sheffield discovered the giant star in the Tarantula Nebula through a small satellite galaxy that circles the Milky Way.
While R136a1 is reported to be 265 times more massive than the Sun, it could have been 320 times more once, the discoverers noted. This star is also the most luminous.
It is believed to be 10 million times brighter than our sun and has a temperature of 40,000 degrees Celsius on its surface.
The R136a1 gives off more energy than all stars belonging in the Orion Nebula.

Top 5 Facts About The Universe That Will Blow Your Mind

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All 6 Billion People On Earth Can Fit Inside An Orange

If I can just be allowed to explain, 99.9% of an atom is just empty space. “Well heck, everyone knows that!”, I hear you cry. As is the case with many facts we tend only to recognise this point in theory, because we cannot really envisage what an atom is like to look at. It is very small.
To put this point into perspective, if you removed all the empty space from the atoms that make up all the humans on the planet then you could fit all 6 billion of us inside a single orange. Come to think of it some unkind people have called me a waste of space and now it’s provable!
We can find atoms everywhere, since they are among the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The Sun contains 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System. The mass of the Sun is approximately 330,000 times greater than that of Earth. It is almost three quarters Hydrogen, whilst most of the remaining mass is Helium.
You see where I’m going with this? That means that the sun is responsible for most of the solar system and we account for no more than you could fit in the palm of your hand. Literally.
Atoms are on the very threshold of super-weirdness. They are stupidly small, yet account for just about everything in existence. One single strand of gossamer thread has about 1 million atoms across its diameter. Its mass, or the 0.1% of it that is actually material, is concentrated at its centre and is something like 1 trillionth of a centimetre across. Its electrons fly around the remainder of the space it occupies at impossible speeds. Even then we tend to rationalise what this means, but if we draw one of those perspective enhancing analogies that help soothe our brains let’s say the nucleus of an atom were the size of a football. At that scale the nearest electron would be half a mile (0.8km) away.
It’s no use. Atoms are just causing me a headache. What we need is another science to explain everything more rationally that doesn’t just cause more headaches.

4
Most Of The Universe Appears To Be Missing

So, let’s take stock of where we are here. We have ascertained that the universe is pretty astounding when considered at a vast scale. We have established that the universe consists of atoms. We have also worked out that atoms contain space mostly and a very tiny amount of matter. Leaving aside the worrying fact that we are made of atoms, how much matter is there in the universe?
According to the Planck mission team, and based on the standard model of cosmology, ordinary matter accounts for a staggeringly minuscule 4.9% of the total. The rest is 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy. I’m going to obstinately ignore the dark energy, because that’s clearly the equivalent of nothing – it’s not matter in any case. Can dark matter give a bit of substance to our existences?
Dark matter is at present no more than a very strong hypothesis among cosmologists and astronomers. It comes about for the very reason that we need to account for a large part of the mass that appears to be missing from the universe. Yes, I did write ‘missing’ there. The official view is that much of the universe’s matter, 26.8% of it, is simply… not there.
That is not the same as saying that nothing is there at all. There must be something, it is thought and this is clear since discrepancies exist between the mass of large astronomical objects determined from their gravitational effects and the mass calculated from the visible matter they contain. At best, dark matter can be thought of as matter that cannot be illuminated with light. It neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level. At worst, dark matter does not exist at all, but either way there is a significant amount of the universe unaccounted for.
Why are we so sure there is something there? It appears that we cannot just write the ‘matter discrepancy’ off like so much shop stock left unsold at the end of the financial year. The fact is that something as yet undetermined is having a very real effect upon the orbital velocities of stars in the Milky Way and is responsible for “missing mass” in the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters, (as calculated by astronomers Jan Oort and Fritz Zwicky).
Whichever way you look at it the behaviour of atoms and things unseen in the universe is a complete mystery.

3
Light Doesn’t Always Travel Very Fast

“Nothing travels faster than light.” That’s something we hear bandied about quite a lot. Another is, “Light is a constant. We can measure everything alongside it.” Sometimes we hear that light can have its direction of travel altered, e.g. when it passes close to a star. The truth is that light can end up going quite slowly and it is not quite the constant many believe it is.
What people mean to say, or should rather express, is that light travels at a constant speed in a vacuum. Without this essential qualification we soon see that light is anything but a constant. In a vacuum light travels at 186,000 miles per second, (300,000 km per second).
Am I just a pedant merely quibbling with tiny amounts of speed? It seems not, because when travelling through water photons will slow down to about three-quarters of their maximum pace. That’s a full 100,000 km per second. You can go a long way in one second if you’re a photon of light, so I don’t call that a quibble.
It gets weirder when we start observing light in specific spaces. Particles in some places acting alongside light photons actually go faster than light itself. Does this mean they’re travelling into the future, I wonder?
I wouldn’t like to get into that question, but in a nuclear reactor that is precisely what happens. In a reactor some particles are forced up to extremely high speeds indeed. If they happen to be passed through an insulating medium that slows light down at the same time they end up going quicker than the light around them. When that happens you get an effect called Cherenkov radiation, which manifests itself as a blue glow. Reactors glow in the dark, not because they are getting overheated, but because light is being overtaken.
Scientists have even slowed light down to a standstill and the slowest it has been recorded travelling was 38 miles per hour, (17 m per second).

2
Electrons Colliding At The Edge Of The Universe Affect Us On Earth Instantaneously
Sky map
Click to zoom
Another simplification of explanations about atoms concerns the ‘billiard ball’ analogy. In this description we are invited to think of all the atoms in the universe like a collection of billiard balls bouncing around against each other. It’s not a bad description, but it does rather ignore the effects of gravity. Gravity is rather more powerful than many suspect.
Take, for example, the World Snooker Championship, which is played out every year at The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, England. When the champion-elect gets to the final ball upon which the tournament rests, does he stop to consider the fact that every person’s gravitational field in the auditorium is going to affect his shot? No, he does not and neither should he, because the effect of the gravity involved is so very small when just two balls strike each other on the snooker table.
On the other hand if his shot involved a canon, or collision, with up to 50 balls in sequence then he had better alter his style of play, because under those circumstances everyone’s gravity would have a very real effect. Why? It can be shown that the gravitational attraction of a single electron, at the edge of the known universe, (10 billion light years away), is sufficient to deflect an oxygen molecule in the air on earth by enough to miss a predicted destination molecule within about 50 collisions. And it all takes place within around one hundred millionth of a second!
Before you object that this could never be shown to be true this has actually happened in an experiment, although it was across a laboratory rather than an entire universe. It does sort of lend weight to recent theories involving chaos where sensitive dependence upon the initial conditions of the state of a system are highly relevant to its eventual position after a period of time. Mind you, astrologers could equally argue that it gives credence to the stars having a genuine effect upon our lives down here too, I suppose!

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You Can Never Use The Past To Predict The Future
Past & Future
Click to zoom
At first sight this statement might look like nothing more than an observation about the bleeding obvious were it not for the fact that it hides a deep truth about the structure of the universe.
None of us can predict the future, but Chaos Theory implies that we never will be able to either. For centuries astronomers tried to compare the solar system to an enormous mechanism revolving around the sun – something like a gigantic clock.
Unhappily for them all they found out was that their equations never actually mirrored how real planets would travel across space.
The theoretical difficulty was summed up by the work of French mathematician Henri Poincaré around 1900. He demonstrated that while astronomers can easily predict how any two celestial bodies will travel around their common centre of gravity, by introducing a third gravitating body (such as another planet or the Sun) you prevent a definitive analytical solution to the equations of motion. This makes the long-term evolution of the system impossible, in principle, to predict.
Many suppose that the practical difficulty in predicting the trajectory of the system is a lack of computing power and that one day even this will be overcome. The problem with this approach is that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle rears its ugly head time and again, because the level of sensitivity to the system’s initial conditions involved could actually be relevant right down to a quantum level. We can be sure enough about big events on a grand scale to get us by at a practical level. This has to be so, otherwise no lunar mission would ever hit the moon every time with certainty. But if we want to get really detailed about many things interacting with each other in a system, then the universe may have a found a way to prevent us ever finding out how things will really turn out.
In short, the universe tells us what some philosophers have always guessed – that there is absolutely nothing one can be sure of save the existence of one’s own mind. And at that point I think I had better shut up before someone points out to me the problems with Solipsism.