Tag: physics

Living materials

These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells — which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales — with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

Principia Mathematica

newton’s masterpiece philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica which is available online in a translated edition with the original pictures. the principia is justly regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science.

Torus Earth

what a donut planet would be like.

Can toroid planets exist? It is not obvious that a toroid planet is stable.
For all practical purposes planets are liquid blobs with no surface tension: the strength of rock is nothing compared to the weight of a planet. Their surfaces will be equipotential surfaces of gravity plus centrifugal potential. If they were not, there would be some spots that could reduce their energy by flowing to a lower potential. Another obvious fact is that there exists an upper rotation rate beyond which the planet falls apart: the centrifugal force at the equator becomes larger than gravity and material starts to flow into space.

levitating frog

to celebrate the magnetic monopole breakthrough, here is a diamagnetic levitating frog

Magnetic monopoles

Magnetic monopoles would be miraculous technology if we can scale up production. Hovercars are one of the more pedestrian uses, to give you an idea.

It’s not every day that you get to poke and prod the analog of an elusive fundamental particle under highly controlled conditions in the lab.” He added that creation of synthetic electric and magnetic fields is a new and rapidly expanding branch of physics that may lead to the development and understanding of entirely new materials, such as higher-temperature superconductors for the lossless transmission of electricity. The team’s discovery of the synthetic monopole provides a stronger foundation for current searches for magnetic monopoles that have even involved the famous Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Shape-Memory Effect

The shape-memory effect is the metallic equivalent of elasticity, in which a solid material “remembers” and recovers its original shape after being deformed by an applied stress.

A much bigger LHC

building a 0.1k km ring would cost 10s of billions. given the timescale of 20 years into the future, it might be cheaper to build a ring in low orbit, 40k km around. i’m not sure how energies relate to circumference but they seem unlikely to be lower.

Polywater

spoiler: out of sweat actually. the story of Polywater (1969) mirrors the story of cold fusion (1989), or of FTL neutrinos (2011). these are pathological science, tiny sample sizes and a potentially revolutionary (and career-making) findings leading scientists astray.