Recently, some interesting research out of the University of Arkansas, and as published in the journal Physical Review E, has been in the news. A team led by Professor Paul Thibado has harvested energy from freestanding graphene—a potentially revolutionary development of power generation from material that is just simply existing, essentially. These sheets of graphene […]
For anyone who missed it the first time, here is the entire manuscript of The Enlightening, for free download (PDF below).
28 Out in the parking lot, a snazzy little red two-door sports car was parked to the left of Merle’s nondescript vehicle. I could see Atropha behind the wheel, and Clotro in the front passenger seat. As we approached, Clotro opened the passenger door, leaned forward, and unhinged her seat, so that Latsis […]
14 I came to find that although Merle’s knowledge of science was light-years beyond that of present-day Earth, he was especially fond of Earth culture, especially music and art of just about any variety. Merle once explained to me that his planet’s history, like Earth’s history, included a man who discovered gravity. His planet’s history, […]
1 Prior to my Enlightening, I actually believed that scientists knew just about everything there is to know about the universe. It never even occurred to me that many great thinkers throughout history believed the same thing, quite mistakenly, in the context of their own times. From the brilliant scholars of the Enlightenment and Renaissance, […]
Physics, as everybody knows, is very equation intensive. When people argue physics in the laboratory, in a university setting, or even on the internet, it is all about the equations, usually. Yet much of our modern astrophysics is based on a famous theory that, counter-intuitively, relies very heavily on non-mathematical thinking. I am convinced that […]
Nikola Tesla detested relativity theory, and he derided Albert Einstein as a “white-haired crank.” Tesla supported the concept of the universal “ether,” and he raged about Einstein’s relativistic concept of “curved space.” Tesla also scoffed at the maximum possible velocity of “c” (light speed), which is a central tenet of Special Relativity. When viewed through […]
A Caltech researcher has recently pointed out that Schrodinger’s Equation, which describes the wavelike nature of particles, and is therefore the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, is also very useful in describing the long-term evolution of large-scale astronomical structure of space-time. Today, let’s conduct a little science thought experiment. A typical scientific process might entail […]