What’s larger than Delaware and twice the size of Rhode Island? The first volcano discovered on the planet Mercury by the spacecraft Messenger during a flyby. The volcano is 60 miles in diameter and is capped by a 14 mile diameter crater.
Might be fun to climb, but I’d recommend taking water and sunscreen.
One of my favorite supergeniuses, Brian Cox, has a great piece today at The Guardian about the final months before the LHC activation. Money quote:
Without exploration there is no progress, and without progress our civilisation decays. It takes machines like the LHC to journey to the edge of our understanding because, quite simply, the easy stuff has all been done.
It’s part of The Guardian’s larger series of feature articles on Cern.
Steven Pinker, talking about language, social relationships, causality, and swearing:
And Steven? Might be time to ditch the ‘fro. Just sayin’.
(via New Scientist)
Joshua Roebke at Seed writes about Anton Zeilinger’s new experiments set up to test philosophical questions of locality vs. realism in quantum mechanics. In other words, do we create what we observe through the act of our observations?
The reason we see our world as we do is because of what we use to observe it. The human body is a just barely adequate measuring device. Quantum mechanics does not always wash itself out, but to observe its effects for larger and larger objects we would need more and more accurate measurement devices. We just do not have the sensitivity to observe the quantum effects around us. In essence we do create the classical world we perceive, and as Brukner said, “There could be other classical worlds completely
different from ours.”Zeilinger and his group have only just begun to consider the grand implications of all their work for reality and our world. Like others in their field, they had focused on entanglement and decoherence to construct our future information technology, such as quantum computers, and not for understanding reality. But the group’s work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics’ foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, “All information is physical.” How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.
It’s a great article, with a concise background history of quantum mechanics.
We are so fucked. Submitted without further comment:
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. . . . US courts have repeatedly decreed that creationism and intelligent design are religion, not science, and have no place in school science classrooms. . . . ”It seems a bit high, but I am not shocked by it,” says Linda Froschauer, past president of the National Science Teachers Association based in Arlington, Virginia. “We do know there’s a problem out there, and this gives more credibility to the issue.”
(via New Scientist [there's more on the original study at Pharyngula])
