Recent content by DrZforLife

Yes but if you disrupt the car completely, for example you vaporize it, energy in the form of entropy is released. If you were to instantly vaporize a human brain, considerably more energy should be liberated. In some sense, the human brain is the end result of billions of years of evolution...

I do not suggest an animating force. Let me put it this way, as far as we know, the human brain is the most complex object in this galaxy. As such, it has very very low entropy and therefore its construction required a great deal of energy. Completely disrupting a live human brain should...

As a pathologist, I have the notion that dead differs from alive in a fundamental sense. When a person dies, there is a period in which the muscles are flaccid, followed by a time when the breakdown of cell membranes releases calcium ions to expend the remaining ATP. This results in the...

A charged battery should have a mass a little greater than a depleted battery. Surely that is measurable. So does a live person have greater mass than his or her dead equivalent? Surely that is a 2nd law of thermodynamics that would be revealing. Or is the entropy of life so small that it is...

Would not such an encounter leave a trace that would fit with a mathematical model consistent with cosmological models? And could such an interaction not be seen in the CMBR? New observations are so sensitive it seems any predicted ripples or perterbations might be seen.

Could two Inflationary universes bumping up against one another result in the anisotropy seen in the Cosmic background radiation and thus ultimately lead to galaxy formation? And could the signature for such an event be measured? It seems two "big bang" universes arising near one another might...

One other interpretation is that what we perceive as reality is actually a computation. As such only the bit of the universe we are actually engaged with is fully computed at any given time. The rest of the universe exists in a pluripotent wave of possibilites which can collapse to anyone of an...

If you have not read it yet, Kurtzweil's The Approaching Singularity is a cool if somewhat drawn out prediction of the ramifications of blending machine and human intelligence. He thinks it will happen this century. I've already melded to my iPhone;)

Great forum by the way! I am really enjoying it. A feast for the mind.

Might the zoo of particles zipping around the surface of a black hole be related to supersymmetric heavy particles like the top quark?

I am brand new to this site. I did not read all the rules. Sorry, I'll read some more posts before I ask another question. DrZ

It's just a thought. But does the notion of black holes containing universes endlessly not strike anyone as rather elegant? On the one hand, a universe suffers a heat death over trillions of years and vanishes, on the other hand Galaxies collapse in on themselves to form black holes containing...

I am a physician not a physicist, but I read Einstein, Feinman, Schrodinger, Bohr, Wheeler, Brian Green, Susskind, Thorne, Gamow, etc. I recently learned of the Blue Brain project, lead by Henry Markram as well. It has occurred to me that the mysterious dark matter, detected as halos around all...

When a massive star orbits a supermassive black hole eccentrically, it can be accelerate to relartivistic speeds when it approaches the black hole. We have seen these dramatic u turns by stars in elegant work done over many years. Question, could these accelerating stars cross the threshold for...