Recent content by Quotidian

That was not Avi Loeb's explanation for his rejection of Berger's paper. A précis of the reasons for his rejection is given here. By way of clarification, the expedition that is being mounted near New Guinea is the attempt to locate another object, that was also judged to have been from...

Developments in this case - a paper was published earlier this year suggesting that the irregular acceleration of 'Oumuamua might have been due to the ejection of gases heated by its proximity to the Sun, creating a kind of jet propulsion effect. Avi Loeb, however, disputes this, providing...

That becomes the main question (but I don't want to give too much away).

thanks, great tip. Hadn't heard of that one. 'Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements.' Bingo!

Interesting idea. It turns out to be interstellar, and the source seems to be related to a supernovae event, but, as I say, it turns out to be very difficult to analyse - which is a part of the story. That's also part of the story, and one of the reasons that it defies analysis. The story...

Care to share? I'm interested!

Hi all - I'm not a physics grad, my knowledge is limited to whatever I can glean from popular science publications. Anyway, I'm crafting a hard sci-fi story - 'hard' because it's written to seem kind of plausible, or at least not outrageously surreal - no shape-shifting or anti-gravity or...

that's one of the confusions inherent in the story. It might be intentionally confusing, to reflect the confusion that is inherent in various intepretations of physics, like that between the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds intepretation. Notice that the young female engineer was...

It's not a matter of irony. Determinism of the kind Forest is advocating is all or nothing. Everything is determined by prior causes. There's no wriggle room. In the 18th Century, LaPlace said 'We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its...

Well, the motivation behind that expression of his, 'God does not play dice', was the discovery of the stochastic nature of predictability in quantum mechanics. When I say, he said it many times, what I meant was it was a belief he maintained all his life, it was central to his objection to the...

Just binged it from a streaming service. Fantastic show, I thought. Edge of my seat. The graphics, music production, architecture, all fantastic. Worked as a crime thriller also. Also a great deal of interesting philosophical speculation on various interpretations of quantum physics. The Many...

No that’s OK. There are interesting methodological and philosophical considerations. I think the ‘principle of mediocrity’ is indeed the same as ‘the Copernican principle’ which is that the Universe is assumed to behave consistently from any point in it. I wasn’t aware of the ‘average energy...

I have often read that dark matter and dark energy are now thought to comprise 94% of the total mass of the Universe. Just now I was reading an article which says that dark energy comprises 74% of the total. So, I'm confused about how energy can comprise mass. Dark matter, I can understand -...

Jim explores what are the most popular interpretations of quantum mechanics and how we might need to be a little more specific when we talk about ‘reality’. Excellent layman's explanation of the Bell Inequality experiments.

A 'language difficulty' :rolleyes:. You can see how the whole idea started: "What if there is no 'collapse'...?" Then, formulaize that implications of that. Hey presto! It's a gestalt. And nobody really pushes back - well, apart from Bohr - because they didn't want to discourage a 'brilliant...