University of Chicago physicist William Irvine and his colleagues are interested in how the interplay of geometry and light affect the structure of two-dimensionalcurved spaces, including those of a sphere (shown here), but also domes, waists and barrels. The team has developed methods for finely controlling pleats in these curved spaces, which may be useful in the design of nanoscale materials. (William Irvine
(PhysOrg.com) — A design feature well known in skirts and trousers has now been identified in curved, two-dimensional crystals. As University of Chicago physicist William Irvine and his colleagues report in this week’s Nature, crystalline arrays of microscopic particles grown on a negatively curved surface can develop linear defects analogous to fabric pleats. The results will facilitate a more general exploration of defects in curved spaces, including potential applications in engineered materials.
The problem of tiling a curved surface with hexagons is familiar from soccer balls and geodesic domes, in which pentagons are added to accommodate the spherical (positive) curvature. Interacting particles that form hexagonal patterns on a plane — known as ‘colloidal crystals’ — adopt these and other types of topological defects when grown on a sphere.
Irvine, an assistant professor in physics, and colleagues have developed an experimental system that allows them to investigate crystal order on surfaces with spatially varying curvature, both positive and negative. On negatively curved surfaces, they observed two types of defect that hadn’t been seen before: isolated heptagons (analogous to the pentagons on a sphere) and pleats.
The pleats allow a finer control of crystal order with curvature than is possible with isolated point defects, and may find application in curved structures such as waisted nanotubes (long, thin microscopic cylinders of material that display novel properties), or in materials created by techniques that permit control at the atomic and molecular levels, such as soft lithography or directed self-assembly.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person’s decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as “chronesthesia,” or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical “travel” occurs.
Although we can’t technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. “The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation,” explains Miles and colleagues.
Time travellers might only be able to travel back in time, within limits of some other law of physics we don’t know about yet – ufo’s could be ‘failed’ attempts to break through to the past – our present, we just don’t recognise them as such yet. USA, lost control of 50 of their nukes computer systems again recently – baring in mind some of their top ex staff blame that on ufo’s – it might be interesting to think we are trying to disarm them remotely from the future.
If we do find a way in the future to send back messages, atleast we know there IS a future for us and a possibilty of being ‘rescued’ for creepy flesh cloning experiments / art /pets by our future decendents.
According to Indian Philosophy, the period in question is 3.1 Billion years (appx) Time is Cyclic , not linear. “TIME- Calculation in Hindu Philosophy.
Story:
According to a team of United States and Japanese astrophysicists, they say there is a 50 percent chance that the end of everything as we know it will occur in approximately 3.7 billion years, reports Agence-France Presse.
The inevitable conclusion of our universe’s existence will transpire because of the expansion of the universe. Although scientists generally agree that the universe expanding can occur for an infinite period of time, the team of researchers say the rules of physics state that an eternal inflating universe is unlikely. “The point of this paper is to show that certain methods and assumptions that have been widely used by physicists for years — most prominently, the use of a time cutoff in order to compute probabilities in an eternally inflating universe — lead to the conclusion that time will end,” said Raphael Bousso of the University of California. “In other words, the time cutoff, which we may have thought was just a calculational tool, actually behaves like a physical event, whether we like it or not.”
GENEVA (Reuters) – Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts long dear to science-fiction writers such as hidden worlds and extra dimensions.
And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the “New Physics” on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.
“Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions… These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments.”
Matter and mind differ only in degree not in kind.
Greater the vibration it is Mind; lesser , matter.
Based on various levels of vibration,there are 14 Levels of existence9Vishnu Purana).References are also available in Buddhism.
All thee different levels co existed, co exist and shall co exist at the same in a cycle.
Please read my blog TIME.
Story:
String theory is a developing theory in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.[1] It is a candidate for the theory of everything (TOE), a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system. The theory has yet to make quantitative experimental predictions, which a theory must do in order to be confirmed or falsified.
String theory mainly posits that the electrons and quarks within an atom are not 0-dimensional objects, but rather 1-dimensional oscillating lines (“strings”). The earliest string model, the bosonic string, incorporated only bosons, although this view developed to the superstring theory, which posits that a connection (a “supersymmetry“) exists between bosons and fermions. String theories also require the existence of several extra, unobservable, dimensions to the universe, in addition to the usual four spacetime dimensions.
You must be logged in to post a comment.