Quantum Physics

Blame Discovery channel   I like popular science and those wild haired geeks who go on about aliens building the pyramids. one of them was saying the Oracle of Delphi, Nostradamus and Einstein were tapping into the knowledge of the Universe, by meditation and stuff. They were calling this knowledge the Unified Field Theory. I think they have neatly used it to make their theories sound pseudo scientific, but I wondered what the theory entailed.

'A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object.
They were able to levitate and spin a microscopic sphere at speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute.
The work by the University of St Andrews scientists is published in Nature Communications.
Although there is much international research exploring what happens at the boundary between classical physics and quantum physics, most of this experimental work uses atoms or molecules.
The St Andrews team aimed to understand what happened for larger objects containing a million million atoms or more.

To do this they manufactured a microscopic sphere of calcium carbonate only four millionths of a metre in diameter.
The team then used the miniscule forces of laser light to hold the sphere with the radiation pressure of light.
They exploited the property of polarisation of the laser light that changed as the light passed through the levitating sphere, exerting a small twist or torque.
Placing the sphere in vacuum largely removed the drag due to any gas environment, allowing the team to achieve the very high rotation rates.
In addition to the rotation, the team observed a "compression" of the excursions or "wobble" of the particle in all three dimensions, which can be understood as a "cooling" of the motion.
Essentially the particle behaved like the world's smallest gyroscope, stabilising its motion around the axis of rotation.
Dr Michael Mazilu, a newly appointed lecturer in the school, added: "This system poses fascinating questions with regard to thermodynamics and is a challenging system to model theoretically.
"The rotation rate is so fast that the angular acceleration at the sphere surface is one billion times that of gravity on the Earth surface. It's amazing that the centrifugal forces do not cause the sphere to disintegrate."- BBC Scotland

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-23861397

See, this is the sort of thing you only come up with if you are very crabbit about not knowing stuff and its 3am and you've finished your 4th barrel of buckie.  

the Scottish scientists will find the worlds tightest sporan soon, only an object as small as a molecule can pass through its opening.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute.

I wonder how many MPH that would work out to if it was in a car.

'Miniature "human brains" have been grown in a lab in a feat scientists hope will transform the understanding of neurological disorders.
The pea-sized structures reached the same level of development as in a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought.'

 

'Scientists at Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now reproduced some of the earliest stages of the organ's development in the laboratory.
They used either embryonic stem cells or adult skin cells to produce the part of an embryo that develops into the brain and spinal cord - the neuroectoderm.
This was placed in tiny droplets of gel to give a scaffold for the tissue to grow and was placed into a spinning bioreactor, a nutrient bath that supplies nutrients and oxygen.
The cells were able to grow and organise themselves into separate regions of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, the retina, and, rarely, an early hippocampus, which would be heavily involved in memory in a fully developed adult brain.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23863544

  

How interesting and not at all creepy or anything.

it must be tempting for them to keep pushing the time limits and size of the brain, what happens if they find the creature can feel?   

Stare at the dot in the middle and you'll experience temporary motion blindness of the static yellow dots.

Thanks a lot Chris, I'm blind now.

Eldorion wrote:

Pettytyrant101 wrote:speeds of up to 600 million revolutions per minute.

I wonder how many MPH that would work out to if it was in a car.

About 250 mph. But it's a sphere about the size of a large cell. If it was baseball size the outer atoms would be going about 1% the speed of light.

halfwise wrote:
 If it was baseball size the outer atoms would be going about 1% the speed of light.

I bet that pitch would have a wicked curve to it! 
Imagine what would happen if the batter ever connected though...  

If this baseball had a mass of 145 g , would you care to calculate kinetic energy?

something on the order of a billion Joules, which is only about a kg of TNT; several sticks of dynamite.

I say again.....  

Congratulations Voyager! (Soon to be V'Ger  )

The Voyager-1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to leave the Solar System.
Scientists say the probe's instruments indicate it has moved beyond the bubble of hot gas from our Sun and is now moving in the space between the stars.
Launched in 1977, Voyager was sent initially to study the outer planets, but then just kept on going.
Today, the veteran Nasa mission is almost 19 billion km (12 billion miles) from home.
This distance is so vast that it takes 17 hours now for a radio signal sent from Voyager to reach receivers here on Earth.
"This is big; it's really impressive - the first human-made object to make it out into interstellar space," said Prof Don Gurnett from the University of Iowa and the principal investigator on the PWS.
On 25 August, 2012, Voyager-1 was some 121 Astronomical Units away. That is, 121 times the separation between the Earth and the Sun.
Breaching the boundary, known technically as the heliopause, was, said the English Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees, a remarkable achievement: "It's utterly astonishing that this fragile artefact, based on 1970s technology, can signal its presence from this immense distance."
Voyager-1 will not get near another star for another 40,000 years, even though it is moving at 45km/s (100,000mph).
"Voyager-1 will be in orbit around the centre of our galaxy with all its stars for billions of years," said Prof Stone. - BBC

It's really quite mindblowing. I wonder if anything or anyone will ever surpass it for the record of farthest distance traveled from Earth. Quite possibly not, unless faster-than-light travel is proven to be possible.

Hey, when Bugs Bunny takes that left turn at Albuquerque he could end up anywhere.

"Voyager-1 will be in orbit around the centre of our galaxy with all its stars for billions of years"

It occured to me it may be joining bilions of other bits of space junk from billions of other civilizations over time who all had a similar idea.  

That's actually a wild thought.  It reminds me of a part of Gurren Lagann too.

Devo-..........Space Junk

Havn't heard that song in years, still pretty good.

An excellent interview from the BBC with Stephen Hawking-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24120574

i do fisics 4 gcse so i no wut it is

great interview

There is a European satellite about the size of a camper van heading back to earth- track it here in case its going to land on your barrel (or house if youre sloppy about where you will live)-

http://www.n2yo.com/