Category: Physics

Teleporting is Already Happening

Beam Me Up, Coxie
brian cox

Professor Brian Cox recently guested at a morning tv show called “This Morning” at ITV.   Brian Cox, the foppish scientist, was actually a member of a pop group sensation of the early to mid 90s, called D:REAM.  He was the key board player.  This was a part-time interest while he was being a particle physicist at the University of Manchester.

Today, Brian Cox has more or less left the music industry.  He is now well and truly a member of the academia.  He now works at CERN, Geneva.

The high brow Professor Cox has not completely left his pop star image; instead he is now the new face of popular science in Britain.  He is often found fronting documentaries about science particularly things that have something to do with Particle Physics.  I must say he’s got the knack of making high faluting subjects, brain numbing topics, to sound interesting and can be understood by viewers from all walks of life.

During his guest appearance at This Morning, Prof Cox revealed that teleportation is no longer a science fiction.  It is already happening and being applied at this very minute.

He further said that we will be able to teleport ourselves to work or anywhere in the universe just like in Startrek.

I am not sure whether professor Cox has really seen Startrek or knows the science of Startrek.

According to Startrek, teleporting is done by replication.   You go through a pattern buffer in the transporter.  Your original molecules and atoms are stored there but replicated and teleported to wherever you wanted to be.

What if during teleportation, the original does not completely separate from the replicant, you will be left thoeritically with twin entities!  Bizarre.

Apparconfused_facebook_emoticonently “real” teleportation does not do copies.  The real thing is teleported to appear somewhere else.  At the moment scientists are working on teleporting atoms and molecules and this has been a success and the mass being teleported is getting bigger and bigger all the time.

Interesting!

 

 

Steven Weinberg

weinbergSteven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of theweak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

– Wikipedia

What he said:

On cancelling engagements to UK universities when UK  directed a boycott towards Israel.

Given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than antisemitism.”

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Most physicists are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practising atheists.

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“‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

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Gravity Power

 

newtonThe genius of Isaac Newton, who in the 17th  century defined gravity and produced a universal law of gravitation laid down the foundations for scientists, theoretical physicists such as Einstein.

Gravity Power

Gravity is pervasive, it affects and influences us all on our planet, in our solar system  and in our universe.

einstein1Astronomy is a hobby/interest of mine I like to learn all about what happens in the cosmos and how our space probes/telescopes are unlocking secrets preciously hidden to us.   Below Ben Gilliland excellently explains how gravity helps  push back the frontiers of space

WE ARE USED TO THINKING OF SPACE FLIGHT as a struggle against gravity. After all, it takes vast, towering rockets filled with hundreds of tonnes of explosive liquids and gases just to give a light-aircraft-sized vehicle enough thrust to break free of the bonds of Earth’s gravity.

Even if you are lucky enough make it into space, there are still endless gravitational hurdles to overcome. Contrary to what Sir Isaac Newton believed, gravity isn’t caused by two massive objects pulling on one-another. Instead, gravity is a by-product of the dents and distortions made by massive objects in the fabric of the Universe. A truly massive object, like a planet, makes a pretty big dent and, when a less massive object, like a spacecraft, strays too close it finds itself ‘falling’ into that dent – it might look as if the spacecraft is being ‘pulled’ towards the planet, but really it is ‘falling’ towards it.

The Solar System is littered with these gravitational pitfalls – a satellite falls towards the Earth, the Earth falls towards the Sun and, in turn, the Sun falls towards the centre of the Milky Way. The only way to stop this fall from becoming a direct plunge is to move through space fast enough to ensure your momentum keeps you aloft.

You can think of the Sun’s gravity as being a little like a wine glass. If you drop an olive into the glass, it will fall straight to the bottom, but, if you spin the glass, you can give the olive enough momentum to roll around the sides without falling in (like a planet orbiting the Sun). Decrease the momentum and its orbit will fall closer; increase it and its orbit moves further away. If you continue to increase the speed, eventually the olive will move so fast that it will achieve ‘escape velocity’ and fly from the glass.

A spacecraft leaving Earth has been given enough momentum to escape Earth’s gravity wine glass, but, if it wants to travel into deep space, it has to find enough momentum to escape the Sun’s gravitational dent. Using rockets isn’t practical because they’d need so much heavy fuel it would be prohibitively expensive to just leave the Earth –so scientists came up with a clever trick called a ‘gravity assist’ manoeuvre,

Also known as the ‘slingshot’ manoeuvre, the technique was first used successfully 40 years ago this week, by Nasa’s Mariner 10 Mercury probe. Instead of struggling against the gravitational pull of the planets, during a gravity assist, a spacecraft uses a planet’s gravity (or a series of planets) to give it a speed boost. By falling towards a planet that is falling towards the Sun, a spacecraft can ‘steal’ enough momentum to travel against the Sun’s gravitational pull.

So you could say that spaceflight isn’t flying at all: it’s just falling, with style.

 

 

A spacecraft leaving Earth has been given enough momentum to escape Earth’s gravity wine glass, but, if it wants to travel into deep space, it has to find enough momentum to escape the Sun’s gravitational dent. Using rockets isn’t practical because they’d need so much heavy fuel it would be prohibitively expensive to just leave the Earth –so scientists came up with a clever trick called a ‘gravity assist’ manoeuvre,

Also known as the ‘slingshot’ manoeuvre, the technique was first used successfully 40 years ago this week, by Nasa’s Mariner 10 Mercury probe. Instead of struggling against the gravitational pull of the planets, during a gravity assist, a spacecraft uses a planet’s gravity (or a series of planets) to give it a speed boost. By falling towards a planet that is falling towards the Sun, a spacecraft can ‘steal’ enough momentum to travel against the Sun’s gravitational pull.

So you could say that spaceflight isn’t flying at all: it’s just falling, with style.

Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN

Women Who Changed the World

 

Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN


Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN (Wikipedia)

BioData

  • Full Name: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper
  • Maiden Name: Murray
  • DoB: 9 December 1906
  • PoB: New York City, USA
  • Death: 1 January 1992 (85)
  • Civil Status:
  • Education: Vassar College, Yale University
  • Occupation: Military
  • Work Period: 1943–1966, 1967–1971, 1972–1986

Today’s Google Doodle is an animation of Grace Hopper sitting on her computer, using COBOL  to print out her age.  Google is celebrating the 107th birthday of Grace Hopper, the “mother” of the COBOL computer language.

Just toward the end of animation a moth was seen coming out of the computer; that was a reference to Grace popularising the term “debugging”.    Apparently whilst in the Navy and working on a Mark II computer, it was found that a moth was stuck in the relay, which was impending the system, quick as a flash Grace said they are debugging the system.

The remains of the moth can be seen at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Grace lived a full and hectic life.

At a very young age, she showed a very inquisitive mind.  At the age of seven, she tried to find out how clock works and managed to disassemble seven of them much to her mother’s consternation.  In the end she was only allowed to touch one clock.  LOL

Grace was a Vassar girl but at 16 she was declined entry to the College because she had a low score in Latin.  She got admitted the next year and went on to earn bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics.  She then went to Yale University and became a history maker for becoming  the first woman to graduate with a doctorate in Maths in Yale’s long history.

Grace Brewster Murray, as she was, married Vincent Foster Hopper, a New York professor in 1930.  The marriage ended in divorce in 1945.  Grace never married again thus retaining her ex-husband’s surname.  Grace Hopper has a memorable ring to it.

Grace Hopper, to me, was like a grasshopper.  She leaped from one success to another.  She leaped from one award to the next.

Even her retirement was one of the longest hopping in history.  She first retired at 60 but was recalled almost immediately and then retired again and then recalled and then retired and then recalled………

Grace ended up working until her death at 85.

Land of the Giants

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
— Isaac Newton
Thought of the Day
30 October 2013

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What a lovely quote from the genius of all geniuses. He was saying that he owed and was inspired by the intellectuals before him for his own achievements. What an unassuming fellow Newton was. 😉 What a guy!

newton5

Probably Newton was musing about this, thinking about Aristotle, Pythagoras, Galileo, Kepler, etc while sitting under an apple tree when he was boink by apple because of gravity. hmmmmmmmm