Tag: physics

New Class of Dyson Sphere

Any civilization that evolves during its sun’s main sequence and then finds a way to survive the red giant and supernova stages, will also probably find a way to create a Dyson sphere around the surviving white dwarf. For that reason, these stars may be more likely to host such a structure.

What’s more, a white dwarf is a better host for a Dyson sphere. The habitable zone around a white dwarf is closer to the star, so such a sphere would be smaller. A 1-meter-thick sphere built in the habitable zone around a white dwarf would require some 10^23 kilograms of matter, just a little less than the mass of our moon.

Solid light

Researchers at Princeton University are transforming light into crystal. “It’s something that we have never seen before. This is a new behavior for light.” In the future, they hope to observe exotic phases of light such as superfluids and insulators.

Cryogenic Metallic Alloy

very unusual. it even gets tougher as it cools.

A new concept in metallic alloy design – called “high‐entropy alloys” – has yielded a multiple-element material that not only tests out as one of the toughest on record, but, unlike most materials, the toughness as well as the strength and ductility of this alloy actually improves at cryogenic temperatures.

Suffering in fundamental physics?

a really fun paper, mind expandingly strange:

This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations — atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc. — could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I’m personally doubtful about this, I suggest reasons to keep an open mind on the topic. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if numerically, simple physics-based suffering dominates. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what distribution of “experiences” it entails. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains.