Category Archives: physics

I remember reading somewhere that one possibility in the early universe is that a tremendous amount of matter and antimatter both formed, most of it annihilated itself, and the small amount that remained became our present matter-dominated universe. From a few casual Google searches I have not been able to find this reference. It was probably some popular physics book written in the 1990s. Possibility one in the summary below would appear to correspond to this scenario, however.

The question is that of baryogenesis, which is not well understood. Here’s the background from Wikipedia:

The Dirac equation, formulated by Paul Dirac around 1928 as part of the development of relativistic quantum mechanics, predicts the existence of antiparticles along with the expected solutions for the corresponding particles. Since that time, it has been verified experimentally that every known kind of particle has a corresponding antiparticle. The CPT Theorem guarantees that a particle and its antiparticle have exactly the same mass and lifetime, and exactly opposite charge. Given this symmetry, it is puzzling that the universe does not have …

Wei Dai has an argument:

If it’s true that the only efficient way to cool material down to near absolute zero is with black holes, we should expect all sufficiently advanced civilizations to live near them.

This dovetails with an idea I’ve had for a while, which was independently discovered by John Smart — that an advanced civilization of uploads will have an incentive to turn some of the Earth’s matter into a black hole and huddle around it. It helps you compress your computers and cool them. It also provides a great energy source — you can use shear forces in the accretion disc to efficiently convert matter into energy. As John would put it, “MEST (matter-space-energy-time) compression” would culminate in the literal compression of the planet.

To put it in Tiplerian terms, we would create a local Omega Point “wannabe” (as much computation as possible in finite time instead of infinite computation) instead of a universal Omega Point, which would necessitate a closed universe. (Most cosmologists consider the universe open, due to the …

1. Superconductivity — conducts electricity perfectly, magnetic fields are excluded from the interior of the object (Meissner effect). The soon-to-open Large Hadron Collider will use superconducting magnets to accelerate subatomic particles to 99% the speed of light. In the near future, superconducting materials will decrease the necessary size of large engines, such as those on aircraft carriers, by a factor of 3-4. Some scientists believe that the future discovery of a room-temperature superconductor will launch a new industrial revolution.

2. Superfluidity — zero viscosity, zero entropy, infinite thermal conductivity, “creeps” up surfaces, shows quantum effects at the macroscopic level, such as behaving like a single “superatom”. 645 gallons of superfluid helium were used to cool Gravity Probe B, an orbiter designed to test Einstein’s theories about the curvature of spacetime. When rotated in a canister, a superfluid can only move at certain quantized, discrete speed levels.

3. Superlubricity — practically zero friction observed in eggshell-shaped configurations of crystal. Might be used to create frictionless gears for nanomachines. Has been measured using …

Below is a list containing various power values and the quantity of water they can boil. Click for the larger version. For the water, the initial temperature is approximately that of the ocean’s surface, 20 °C. The text version may be downloaded here.

Source: Wikipedia – Orders of magnitude (power).

A couple of videos demonstrating cymatic phenomena.

The last part of the final video is the most unusual of all.