Cool science stuff

Um, that is really cool.
That is completely mind-blowing.

 

Not so fast, my friend!



http://space.io9.com/a-new-thruster-pushes-against-virtual-particles-or-1615361369/1615513781/+rtgonzalez

 

I suspect the Zephram Cochrane breakthrough will come when we figure out the interrelationships between dark matter, dark energy and 'conventional' physics.

 

We'll see what happens. I think the point the NASA team was trying make was they are not advancing a theoretical basis for the results of the experiment. Their approach appears to be an engineering approach. They built it to see if it would work, and it appears to work. And they've repeated the results.

But we still need a second, distinct research group to replicate the results.

It's way beyond my understanding, but still really cool.

 

Well, the key point in that link I put up is that the experiment seemed to work in that an extremely tiny amount of thrust was measured, but that thrust was also measured when the experimenters set things up in such a way that it was not supposed to generate thrust.

The question, therefore, is whether it really generated thrust or there was some problem with the measurements, which, that story contends, is far more likely.

 

Understood. I skimmed through the NASA report. They acknowledge that we are talking about a minute amount of thrust.
And they intentionally set the experiment up to fail on the next go-around and it still showed the same results.

Could be an error.

 

This is the one I found intriguing: Apparently, warp drive is really a possible thing, and there's a physicist experimenting with the first steps toward it.

http://www.space.com/22430-star-trek-warp-drive-quantum-thrusters.html

Here's Dr. White explaining some of the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M8yht_ofHc#t=2566

 

Back to the more-or-less real world, the Rosetta probe has rendezvoused with its target comet and sent back some awesome pictures:

http://earthsky.org/space/as-the-rosetta-spacecraft-approaches-its-target-comet?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=599150b352-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-599150b352-393727541

And the funny thing is, the comet DOES look at least vaguely like the bizarro-world comet/asteroid surfaces shown in "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon."

 

Maybe there's a new theory behind the big bang, or how we came to be.

http://scitechdaily.com/universe-may-emerged-black-hole-higher-dimensional-universe/

 

It's part of a universal budding theory that has been around for a while.

http://quibb.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-holes-and-universe-budding.html

 

universe budding is part of an even cooler theory - cosmological natural selection, which is really mind-blowing:

http://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_(fecund_universes)

 

Africa is splitting into two, courtesy of a "superplume" of molten rock. They've got about 10 million years before another ocean starts to form.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-superplume-is-the-reason-africa-is-splitting-apart/