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  • 3 weeks later...

https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-saturn-moon-titan

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Titan is a strange world — a little bit Earthlike, if land were made of water ice, rivers and seas were filled with liquid methane and other hydrocarbons, and the atmosphere were thick and hazy, dotted with methane clouds. And now, the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) has observed two of those clouds during observations on Nov. 4 that have thrilled scientists, according to a NASA statement.

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10 hours ago, Tracker said:

 

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To put this into context, Sirius is 8.611 light years from Earth (just over 50 trillion miles away). At 9 miles per second, it will take 5.8 trillion years for that star to reach Earth. Since the Sun will consume Earth in 7.5 billion years, I’d say we have more pressing concerns. But to add more context to 8.6 lights years and distance, the Moon is 239,000 miles from Earth, which equates to 1.3 light seconds. 

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9 minutes ago, TrueBlue4ever said:

To put this into context, Sirius is 8.611 light years from Earth (just over 50 trillion miles away). At 9 miles per second, it will take 5.8 trillion years for that star to reach Earth. Since the Sun will consume Earth in 7.5 billion years, I’d say we have more pressing concerns. But to add more context to 8.6 lights years and distance, the Moon is 239,000 miles from Earth, which equates to 1.3 light seconds. 

It actually won't reach the consumed Earth.

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Sirius appears bright because of its intrinsic luminosity and its proximity to the Solar System. At a distance of 2.64 parsecs (8.6 ly), the Sirius system is one of Earth's nearest neighbours. Sirius is gradually moving closer to the Solar System, so it is expected to increase in brightness slightly over the next 60,000 years, reaching a peak magnitude of −1.68. After that time, its distance will begin to increase, and it will become fainter, but it will continue to be the brightest star in the Earth's night sky for approximately the next 210,000 years, before Vega, another A-type star and more luminous than Sirius, becomes the brightest star.[26]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius

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  • 3 weeks later...

Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are ‘Illusions’

This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?

Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

But why is entanglement related to space and time? And how can it be important for future physics breakthroughs? Properly understood, entanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics that its underlying reality is described in terms of waves, and a monistic universe would require a universal function. Already decades ago, researchers such as Hugh Everett and Dieter Zeh showed how our daily-life reality can emerge out of such a universal quantum-mechanical description. But only now are researchers such as Leonard Susskind or Sean Carroll developing ideas on how this hidden quantum reality might explain not only matter but also the fabric of space and time.

Entanglement is much more than just another weird quantum phenomenon. It is the acting principle behind both why quantum mechanics merges the world into one and why we experience this fundamental unity as many separate objects. At the same time, entanglement is the reason why we seem to live in a classical reality. It is—quite literally—the glue and creator of worlds. Entanglement applies to objects comprising two or more components and describes what happens when the quantum principle that “everything that can happen actually happens” is applied to such composed objects. Accordingly, an entangled state is the superposition of all possible combinations that the components of a composed object can be in to produce the same overall result. It is again the wavy nature of the quantum domain that can help to illustrate how entanglement actually works.

Picture a perfectly calm, glassy sea on a windless day. Now ask yourself, how can such a plane be produced by overlaying two individual wave patterns? One possibility is that superimposing two completely flat surfaces results again in a completely level outcome. But another possibility that might produce a flat surface is if two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle were to be superimposed on one another, so that the wave crests of one pattern annihilate the wave troughs of the other one and vice versa. If we just observed the glassy ocean, regarding it as the result of two swells combined, there would be no way for us to find out about the patterns of the individual swells. What sounds perfectly ordinary when we talk about waves has the most bizarre consequences when applied to competing realities. If your neighbor told you she had two cats, one live cat and a dead one, this would imply that either the first cat or the second one is dead and that the remaining cat, respectively, is alive—it would be a strange and morbid way of describing one’s pets, and you may not know which one of them is the lucky one, but you would get the neighbor’s drift. Not so in the quantum world. In quantum mechanics, the very same statement implies that the two cats are merged in a superposition of cases, including the first cat being alive and the second one dead and the first cat being dead while the second one lives, but also possibilities where both cats are half alive and half dead, or the first cat is one-third alive, while the second feline adds the missing two-thirds of life. In a quantum pair of cats, the fates and conditions of the individual animals get dissolved entirely in the state of the whole. Likewise, in a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-more-physicists-are-starting-to-think-space-and-time-are-illusions?ref=home

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On 2023-01-29 at 3:00 PM, Tracker said:

As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances

I think this writer has this wrong. pretty sure that einstein was a quantum skeptic.

I have tried to understand some of this stuff on a kindegarten level, and it is utterly beyond me. more like magic than what I think  of as science.

 

Edited by Mark F
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1 hour ago, Mark F said:

I think this writer has this wrong. pretty sure that Einstein was a quantum skeptic.

I have tried to understand some of this stuff on a kindergarten level, and it is utterly beyond me. more like magic than what I think  of as science.

 

You are correct in that Einstein saw quantum mechanics as " spooky action at a distance" and tried his best to ignore it. However it has persisted and has been repeatedly proven by such experiments as they have been able to design. Quantum mechanics are used to design all current electronics, so it is tangible and even has theological implications. For example, it is a tenet of quantum mechanics that nothing can exist without being aware of by an conscious being. It also supports the propositions of "The Holographic Universe"- a book that I have treasured for a long time.

Bohr famously said, " If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you are wrong. If you think you do not understand quantum mechanics, you are right".

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