“Futurology has always bounced around between common sense, nonsense and a healthy dose of wishful thinking […] For a thousand years people consulted the Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece in an attempt to know what the future held [see “Questioning the Delphic Oracle,” by John R. Hale Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Jeffrey P. Chanton and Henry A. Spiller; Scientific American, August 2003]. The Oracle was a priestess in a cave who became disoriented by volcanic fumes and babbled incoherently. These days we don’t believe any of that nonsense. Instead we can see the future because we consult thinkers and scientists and journalists and, well, all sorts of clever people. On second thoughts, perhaps the Oracle at Delphi was more reliable. […]”
—
The Future: A History of Prediction from the Archives of Scientific American
(via wildcat2030)
(Source: inthenoosphere)
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What would Han Solo really see from the Millennium Falcon?
Physics students calculate what travelling close to the speed of light would really look like and sadly, hyperspace looks nothing like what Star Wars depicts it as.
In the Star Wars films, every star in the sky is seen to stretch before the characters’ eyes as the hyperdrive is engaged.
A group of final year masters students at the University of Leicester have shown that the crew would actually see a central disc of bright light. There would be no sign of stars because of the Doppler effect - the same effect which causes the siren of an ambulance to become higher in pitch as it comes towards you.
Doppler blue shift is a phenomenon caused by a source of electromagnetic radiation – including visible light - moving towards an observer. The effect means that the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation will be shortened.
From the Millennium Falcon crew’s point of view, the wavelength of the light from stars will decrease and ‘shift’ out of the visible spectrum into the X-ray range.
They would simply see a central disc of bright light as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is shifted into the visible spectrum.
(via the-science-llama)
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Question: Does anyone know if there’s a system for an absolute-time scale? By that I mean, by comparison, 2pm Seattle-time is 5pm NY-time. But imagine a system where both use the same time to refer to the same instant. Of course, we could just convert the time by adding three hours, but I’m curious if there’s a system we could use on a universal level, so that people hanging out on jupiter or betelgeuse or wherever could be referring to the exact same instant (even if, bc of the speed of light, we couldn’t communicate simultaneously in that moment as we basically can here across time-zones).
Does something like this exist? What would be the frame of reference? (The big-bang?) Any info or ideas?
Time as we know it is always going to be relative to space, so I guess that we could use any kind of astronomical movement to measure it, we just need a reference (maybe the expansion of the universe). I do remember, however, that Newton used to believed in the concept of an absolute time that could be calculated mathematically, but I don’t think we could ever calculate that, ever.
2-D Rubik’s Cube
Imagine Green as the top, White as front, Blue as bottom, Yellow as back, Red as left, and Orange as right.
Image 1: rotation of top plane
Image 2: rotation of center plane (parallel to top)
Image 3: rotation of bottom plane
Image 4: rotation of center plane (parallel to sides)
Image 5: rotation of center plane (parallel to front)
Image 6: rotation of front plane
Image 7: rotation of left and right side planes [equivalent to rotation of center plane (parallel to sides)]
(Source: shaquilleonealslamdunksummercamp, via cellular-automaton)
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