Once Upon a Time, the Universe Was Really Weird : Discovery News

If they’re correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn’t how it’s always been — the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past.

The thinking goes like this: Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe possessed only one dimension of space and one dimension of time. It was basically a straight line. As the Universe began to cool, and expanded, this one dimension of space became “wrapped up” in such a way to create two dimensions of space and one of time — a plane, like a sheet of flat paper.

Samsung testing 5G wireless technology that can download entire movies in seconds

Samsung on Sunday announced that it had developed a core component of its 5G network by solving a problem that has stymied the wireless industry, Yonhap News reported. Using the 28GHz waveband, Samsung says [it] has achieved download and upload speeds of tens of gigabits per second (Gbps). Current 4G LTE networks top out at around 75 megabits (Mbps). In practice, that speed would allow wireless users to download a full HD movie in seconds.

HUGE achievement!

…Samsung used 64 antenna elements in order to accomplish the high-speed data transfer, and said the company expects that it can commercialize the technology by 2020.

Here’s to hoping that’s also a solvable problem. But a jump from ±20Mbps to 10+ Gbps in seven years is amazing. WIll wireless bandwidth follow Moore’s law as well?

To understand the universe at the deepest level, we have to understand why is there something rather than nothing,” Hawking said, speaking through a computer program that converts his eye and cheek movements into spoken speech. “Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws, and not some other? I believe the answers to all of these things is M-theory.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, speaking during a lecture in Los Angeles earlier today.

M-theory, by the way, remains a work-in-progress, but Hawking has hinted that it’s a unified theory about multiple dimensions, the nature of space-time and other concepts that leave our minds blown.

(via latimes)

More on M-Theory. One point worth noting is that at this moment M-Theory is almost entirely untestable. While it may not (and likely will not) remain that way forever, that currently remains a hindrance to any understanding beyond the purely theoretical and/or superficial.

Also, Hawking has NOT “hinted that it’s a unified theory” - the LA Times article linked by the LA Times Tumblr relates his feeling as:

The theory, he said, combines multiple ideas about math and physics. It suggests that there are multiple dimensions or universes, and offers solutions for the behavior of super-massive black holes and the properties of the fabric of space-time. M-theory is a work in progress, but Hawking said he believes that it’s the most promising lead to a unified theory.

This is important: he thinks it’s currently the best candidate, but he is not hinting or saying that we’ve discovered a unified theory. “This is the best we’ve found” is a lot different than “we think we’ve found it.”

(via evangotlib)

Source: Los Angeles Times

ladimcbeth: section9: inothernews: There’s a hexagon at Saturn’s north pole. THERE’S. A. HEXAGON. As it happens, that hexagon is roughly the same diameter as the Earth. You guys. The universe is AMAZING. And I think we forget that a lot when we get caught up in our (relatively) little lives. Reminders like this help me maintain my sense of awe. As a professor once told me, “the edges are where the simulation starts to break down…” Or as I put it when Beth walked in to show me this, “I’m sure they’ll scale up the resolution once they have enough processing power to increase the draw distance. I bet some QA guy is catching hell because we found one hell of a bug.” I like to fuck with people’s day-to-day existence.
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ladimcbeth:

section9:

inothernews:

There’s a hexagon at Saturn’s north pole.

THERE’S.

A.

HEXAGON.

As it happens, that hexagon is roughly the same diameter as the Earth.

You guys. The universe is AMAZING. And I think we forget that a lot when we get caught up in our (relatively) little lives. Reminders like this help me maintain my sense of awe.

As a professor once told me, “the edges are where the simulation starts to break down…”

Or as I put it when Beth walked in to show me this, “I’m sure they’ll scale up the resolution once they have enough processing power to increase the draw distance. I bet some QA guy is catching hell because we found one hell of a bug.”

I like to fuck with people’s day-to-day existence.

Source: universetoday.com

maxistentialist:

University of Washington:

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.

The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:

  • The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.
  • Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.
  • We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
[…]

In a paper they have posted on arXiv, an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.

“This is the first testable signature of such an idea,” Savage said.

If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

“Then the question is, ‘Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?’” she said.

To assume examination of the platform from inside the results of the executable seems a little rash. That being said, isn’t one of the goals of the Humanity+ and Transhuman movements the idea of avoiding death by uploading one’s consciousness to a computer? Also, this seems to differ from the traditional “Simulation Hypothesis” in that it’s specifying that descendants of Humanity are the ones running the simulation, as opposed to some unspecified other simulating the entirety of the universe.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I’d find it far more likely that the entire universe is a computer simulation (and therefore we’re the products of said simulation) than I would that within our universe Humanity+1 developed the ability to mimic and recreate an entire existing universe and then used it to recreate their ancestors.