What is the Universe expanding into..

Do you think there was anything before the big bang?

  • I don't think there was anything before the Big Bang

    Votes: 56 12.5%
  • I think something existed before the Big Bang

    Votes: 200 44.7%
  • I don't think the big bang happened

    Votes: 54 12.1%
  • I think the universe is part of a mutiverse

    Votes: 201 45.0%

  • Total voters
    447
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Yuri looks as glazed as I was in the Dentist Chair today. After three shots of Novocaine. That molar had to go! 🙁

Spent this evening reading dumb jokes at Mersenne Forum.

Dumb (Jokes) Thread - Page 26 - mersenneforum.org

"What is your date of birth?"
"July 15th."
"Which year?"
"The same every year!" 😀

Unix Jokes:

“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that this is a coincidence.” - Unknown 😀

“I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have to named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff)” - Unknown 😀


Main event is this Muon / Z' Boson thing is not proven. Some Boffins have redone the calculation of the precession of the Muon, and got exactly what the experimentalists have found.

Quanta Magazine

So it's all a bit iffy.
 
Quanta Magazine

So it's all a bit iffy.
Interesting! The theorists have suggested that the wobbliness of the muon which was measured by the experimentalists is actually exactly what the Standard Model predicts!

And, behind it all, is the fact that two teams of theorists can't agree on the value of a term which is used to calculate the muon’s magnetic moment. 🙁

I think this conflict may run and run!

Meanwhile, Steve, I'm sure you're up for another joke:

Why should you be nice to your dentist?

Because they have fillings too.
giphy.gif
 
Why do surgeons wear masks?

So if they make a mistake, you don't know who to blame. 😀

Dumb (Jokes) Thread - Page 57 - mersenneforum.org


I thought it might be interesting to talk about Mersenne Primes.

Quanta Magazine

These are of the form (2^ k) -1.

3, 7, 31, 127, 8191, 131071, 524287, 2147483647, ...

with exponent 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, ...

The largest known primes have been discovered by the GIMPS program, and those comedians at Mersenne Forum.

There is a one to one correspondence between Mersenne Primes and Perfect numbers. Which are equal to the sum of their divisors:

6, 28, 496, 8128, 33550336, 8589869056, 137438691328, ...

8128 was known to Euclid and the next one was known in Medieval times. So decent mathematicians in my opinion.

Father Pierre De Fermat got egg on his face with his series (2^2^n) +1.

Fermat number - Wikipedia

He conjectured it always generated primes: 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537, 4294967297, ...

Alas Leonard Euler calculated the last one in his head and noticed F5 was 641 x 6700417! Bang goes the theory. 😱
 
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I stay away from Doctors. Only sick people go to them... 😀

Galu, never underestimate the Primes.

Why Euler’s Formula for Primes could disrupt the World | by Frank Zielen | Towards Data Science

Have discovered much of interest to us Astrophysicists. 😎

Black Holes:

What Are Black Holes? | New Study May Reveal Their True Nature

Sounds RATHER GOOD to me. Dark matter might be extremely low energy photons. They still encode spin information if not much momentum.

Dark matter theory: Information has mass, says physicist - Big Think

Information has mass.
 
The second interesting piece of Space news this week is the amazing second attempt at refuelling ancient IntelSat space satellites. After 17 years they have run out of propellant, despite having functioning Solar Panels for electricity:

Commercial satellites dock high above Earth - BBC News

This was first achieved a year ago with a rocket:

Docking gives Intelsat telecoms satellite new lease of life - BBC News

A youtube video here:

MEV-1 Mission Profile - YouTube

Space is now in the hands of Billionaires like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos of Blue Horizon and Richard Branson of Virgin:

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: The Silicon Valley space race - BBC News

Results are generally impressive. Who'd have thought you could land a first-stage booster back on its tail. Well mostly. 🙂
 
Sounds RATHER GOOD to me. Dark matter might be extremely low energy photons.
First, we would have to accept that Igor Nikitin's type of "Dark Stars" actually exist, before we accept that galaxies are flooded with low-energy photons from them.

His hypothesis is that photons red shifted to a wavelength of ~ 10^14m (said to be ~16 times the distance from Pluto to the Sun) could be a composition of Dark Matter.

(The Pluto to Sun distance is ~ 6 billion kilometres, if a mathematician wants to check the comparison out! 😉)

[2102.07769] On dark stars, Planck cores and the nature of dark matter

It all obviously sounds "rather good" to Igor Nikitin and Steve, but I have my doubts! 😉
 
Information has mass.
"To measure the mass of digital information, you start with an empty data storage device. Next, you measure its total mass with a highly sensitive measuring apparatus. Then, you fill it and determine its mass."

The trouble is, the "ultra-accurate mass measurement" device the paper describes doesn't exist yet.

"Currently, I am in the process of applying for a small grant with the main objective of designing such an experiment."
I wish Dr. Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, good luck with his application.
 
The second interesting piece of Space news this week is the amazing second attempt at refuelling ancient IntelSat space satellites.
At least this news is not hypothetical! 😎

Intelsat 10-02 has now been returned to a proper geosynchronous orbit.

intelsat-10-02__1.jpg


No small change, given the extent of its communication coverage!
 

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Another nut job.

Reminds of the guy who was taken by aliens and then returned. When they asked him how UFO propulsion worked he said ‘it’s incredibly simple, and when we work it out, we will slap ourselves on the back of the head for not seeing it earlier’. Apparently it involves magnets

:O
 
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