Tag: time
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Closer. Less time…
A new study that reconstructs the deep history of our planet’s relationship to the moon shows that 1.4 billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted just over 18 hours. This is at least in part because the moon was closer and changed the way the Earth spun around its axis. (1) Closer to the […]
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Eternal recurrence… Cycles… Dasein into nothingness…
It is one of the most astonishing results of physics: when a complex system is left alone, it will return to its initial state with almost perfect precision. Gas particles, for example, chaotically swirling around in a container, will return almost exactly to their starting positions after some time. This “Poincaré Recurrence Theorem” is the […]
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Endless days… Time… Infinity… Zero…
A Duke University researcher has a new explanation for why those endless days of childhood seemed to last so much longer than they do now – physics. According to Adrian Bejan, the J.A. Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke, this apparent temporal discrepancy can be blamed on the ever-slowing speed at which images are […]
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From electrons to photons. From photons to electrons…
The quantum computer of the future will be able to carry out computations far beyond the capacity of today’s computers. Quantum superpositions and entanglement of quantum bits (qubits) make it possible to perform parallel computations. Making useful computations requires large numbers of qubits and it is this upscaling to large numbers that is providing a […]
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Butterflies. Before we had flowers…
Visiting a colleague in Germany in 2012, Boston College Research Professor Paul K. Strother was examining soil samples for pollen, spores, pieces of plants and insect legs – organic debris that might otherwise have been considered “pond scum” when it was trapped in sediment during cataclysmic earth events 200 million years ago. The slides of […]
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