Cyclical Universe

Science defines our past, present, and future. My thoughts, philosophy, thesis's and ruminations on the Universe and the reality in which we all live, and ultimately perish in. This is the 循環宇宙 (Junkan uchū...)

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Demis is making good progress.

Google DeepMind is a British artificial intelligence company founded in 2010 as DeepMind Technologies. It was renamed when it was acquired by Google in 2014. The company has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a similar fashion to humans, as well as a neural network that may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that appears to possibly mimic the short-term memory of the human brain.

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‘Boston Dynamic’s’ new model of their ATLAS robot, now in an untethered version for the first time.

I for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

And progress towards the singularity continues...

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“The collision and wild oscillations constitute a "storm" in the fabric of space and time—an enormously powerful but brief storm. During the storm, the power output in gravitational waves is far greater than the luminosity of all the stars in our observable universe put together. In other words, this collision of two black holes, each the size of a large city on Earth, is the most powerful explosion that astronomers have ever seen, aside from our universe's birth in the Big Bang.“

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https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public

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January 28, 2016: The old adage "what goes up must come down" even applies to an immense cloud of hydrogen gas outside our Milky Way galaxy. First discovered in the 1960s, the comet-shaped cloud is 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years across. If the cloud could be seen in visible light, it would span the sky with an apparent diameter 30 times greater than the size of the full moon. The cloud, which is invisible at optical wavelengths, is plummeting toward our galaxy at nearly 700,000 miles per hour. Hubble was used to measure the chemical composition of the cloud as a means of assessing where it came from. Hubble astronomers were surprised to find that the cloud, which is largely composed of hydrogen, also has heavier elements that could only come from stars. This means the cloud came from the star-rich disk of our galaxy. The Smith Cloud is following a ballistic trajectory and will plow back into the Milky Way's disk in about 30 million years. When it does, astronomers believe it will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation, perhaps providing enough gas to make 2 million suns.

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“Major improvements to methods used to process observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have yielded an expanded, higher-quality set of data that allows astronomers to produce the most detailed census of the sky yet made at extreme energies. By carefully reexamining every gamma-ray and particle detection by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) since Fermi's 2008 launch, scientists have improved their knowledge of the detector's response to each event and to the background environment in which it was measured. This enabled the Fermi team to find many gamma rays that previously had been missed while simultaneously improving the LAT's ability to determine the directions of incoming gamma rays. The improved data, known as ‘Pass 8′, effectively sharpens the LAT's view while also significantly widening its useful energy range. For the first time, Fermi data now extend to energies previously seen only by ground-based detectors. Because ground-based telescopes have much smaller fields of view than the LAT, which scans the whole sky every three hours, they have detected only about a quarter of the objects in the new catalog.“

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http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/

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“North Korea's test

Seismic waves equivalent to a 5.1-magnitude earthquake were registered near the Punggye-ri nuclear site in a remote area in the east of the country, rattling Chinese border cities.Hours later, state media announced the first "successfully performed" underground test on a hydrogen bomb.Nuclear experts have expressed some scepticism, saying they would have expected a larger blast from an H-bomb, but it could be weeks before independent tests can verify or dismiss the claim.This is the fourth nuclear test carried out at Punggye-ri - the previous ones were carried out in 2006, 2009 and 2013.“

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[after playing out all possible outcomes for Global Thermonuclear War]

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.

Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.

Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

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Soyuz TMA-17M and the Progress 60 semi-automated cargo ship, both docked to the International Space Station, August 2015.

Typhoon Soudelor (below) made its first landfall in northeast Taiwan Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015 at 5:00 a.m. local time (5:00 p.m. EDT Friday, August 7, 2015) about 19 miles northwest of Hualien with estimated top sustained winds of 120 mph. This is equivalent to Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/20375745525/

[wavemotions]

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Starlight Pier.

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Everyone and everything is just a series of steps that naturally occur and fall into place as an emergent natural phenomena of selection. We exist to (try to) create a new variant of ourselves, and if we don't... Then the universe *doesn't care.* It's tragically indifferent to everything we have done, or will ever do in our lives. Every action, every word, will just be gone someday. Like it never happened. Nothing actually matters. We're all going to die. Will you come watch some TV with me, please? I just don't want to die alone, crying... cold and terrified. Please? ...

Everyone/Unknown.

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We observe a thermal distribution of Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole. This confirms Hawking's prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics. The thermal distribution is accompanied by correlations between the Hawking particles outside the black hole and the partner particles inside. We find that the high energy pairs of Hawking and partner particles are entangled, while the low energy pairs are not. This has implications for the problem of information loss in a black hole. The observation of Hawking radiation reported here verifies Hawking's semiclassical calculation, which is viewed as a milestone in the quest for quantum gravity.

“The evaporation of black holes is due to quantum effects of matter fields in the curved space-time close by the event horizon.“

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Atheism, versus religiously motivated conflicts.

“Your average atheist isn't going to be motivated to kill people in the name of his or her magical omnipresent sky-deity, or the promise of an afterlife. Most of us atheists realize that we only get one life to live, and so we try to make the most of it here and now. Yeah, some of us are assholes, but most of us just want to live our lives in peace and don’t wish to be persecuted in the name of any of the 100,000+ religions that are all vying for dominance on this tiny planet, quite often at the point of a sword, or a thumb on a gun or detonator.”

- Unknown author.

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It’s always shining, always ablaze with light and energy. In the ubiquity of solar output, Earth swims in an endless tide of particles. Every time half of the Earth faces the Sun, we experience the brightness of daytime, the Sun’s energy and light driving weather, biology and more. But in space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the Sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. In this video we experience images of the Sun in unprecedented detail captured by SDO. Presented in ultra-high definition video (4K) the video presents the nuclear fire of our life-giving star in intimate detail, offering new perspective into our own relationships with grand forces of the solar system.

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Milankovitch theory.

The Earth's axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. At the same time, the elliptical orbit rotates more slowly. The combined effect of the two precessions leads to a 21,000-year period between the astronomical seasons and the orbit. In addition, the angle between Earth's rotational axis and the normal to the plane of its orbit (obliquity) oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees on a 41,000-year cycle. It is currently at 23.44 degrees and decreasing.

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Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor.

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Solar Eclipse

Path of shadow, March 20th 2015.