Lyman-alpha surveys miss 90% of all galaxies, so now we have 1.7t instead of 170B.
Tag: cosmology
Quantum Gravity
Differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximizes entropy: Gravity.
By playing with quantum entanglement, physicists hope to probe their ideas about quantum gravity for the first time
Math won’t solve quantum gravity. Experimentation will.
Astrophysics arxiv
too bad they don’t have a feed.
Quantum Black Holes
All particles may be varying forms of stabilized black holes
Pi Immortality
Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, all our thoughts, all our memories. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal.
Neutrino Communication
Jolting the star with neutrinos could advance the pulsation by causing it to heat up and expand. Information could thus be shuttled around our galaxy’s network of 500 or so Cepheids – and out as far as the Virgo cluster of galaxies.
does this mean we’ll finally have internet in the subway?
Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.
To make use of neutrinos an advanced civilization can use a gravitational lens as a focus and amplifier. The lens can be a neutron star or a black hole. Using wave optics one can calculate the advantage of gravitational lensing for amplification of a beam and along the optical axis it is exceptionally large. Even though the amplification is very large the diameter of the beam is quite small, less that 1 cm. This implies that a large constellation of neutrino transmitters would have to enclose the local neutron star or black hole to cover the sky. This means that such a beacon would have to be built by a Kardashev Type II civilization.
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
anthropic principle weakens as the chemistry of life may be more robust than we thought against changes in the fundamental laws of physics
Quantum physics and reality
they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.
Galaxy has billions of Earths
resulting in 2000 civilizations in the galaxy, as plugged into the drake equation.
LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. CERN is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September – and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C. Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over 7 stories tall), over the past several years.
big machine porn