This weekend’s stories include Decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection of alien life to Does consciousness change the rules of quantum mechanics? There are many more.
Is consciousness able to change the rules of quantum mechanics in any way? Perhaps our knowledge of quantum entanglement may be incomplete or there might be something fundamentally different about consciousness, Elizabeth Fernandez reports for Big Think. This article will examine the limits and implications of quantum entanglement. It also explores how entanglement on a large scale could challenge our understanding of reality.
We can’t know if the universe had a beginning–An interview with cosmologist George Ellis, Templeton prize-winning cosmologist and co-author of ‘The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time’ with Stephen Hawking, in an interview about the limits of cosmology, and why we can never know whether the universe had a beginning or has existed forever. “The key issue for cosmology is that there is only one Universe. It is therefore different from all other sciences. We can’t rerun the Universe and see what happens; we can’t compare it with other universes.”
A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope–For Cornell’s Lisa Kaltenegger, perhaps the world’s leading computer modeler of potentially habitable worlds, and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection, reports Joshua Sokol for Quanta. “Most astronomers believe that our best near-term chance of encountering other life in the cosmos is to detect biosignature gases — gases that could only have come from life — floating in exoplanets’ atmospheres, now detectable by the Webb space telescope.
Hubble vs. Webb – A new NASA telescope has revealed never-before-seen details about the early universeBusiness Insider reports that it happened within 400 million years of the Big Bang. “With Hubble, it was just this pale, red dot. It was a small galaxy, and it was visible in the first 400,000,000 years of the universe. Now we look with Webb, and we’re able to resolve TWO objects,” Coe said in an October NASA release.”
The Higgs boson may reveal the fate and destiny of the universe.-It’s just over ten years ago that the Higgs boson was first discovered. Toyoko Orimoto, a Japanese physicist, wrote that the particle could be a catalyst for more discoveries. She also speculated on whether other spatial dimensions exist and what the fate of our universe might look like.
NASA Asteroid Threat Practice Drill Shows We’re Not Ready-Scientific American reports that gaps were found in plans for how NASA, government and local officials would handle a space rock heading toward Earth during a trial.
Astronomers find a black hole in our cosmic backyard –Just 1,600 light-years away, the black hole is the closest known to Earth. The good news: It’s dormant, at least for now. “It is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours,” reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times.
Some planets seem to have a strange ability to slow down their star ageScience Alert.
It is possible that a quark star has just been discovered.Advanced Science News’ Andrey Fieldman reports. “This would not only be an incredible new discovery in and of itself but would allow scientists a deeper insight into the very nature and behavior of quarks, of which we are only just beginning to understand.”
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