Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect

December 6th, 2019

Chaos theory means deterministic systems can be unpredictable. Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this video. Click here to start using LastPass: https://ve42.co/VeLP
Animations by Prof. Robert Ghrist: https://ve42.co/Ghrist

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Butterfly footage courtesy of Phil Torres and The Jungle Diaries: https://ve42.co/monarch
Solar system, 3-body and printout animations by Jonny Hyman
Some animations made with Universe Sandbox: https://universesandbox.com/
Special thanks to Prof. Mason Porter at UCLA who I interviewed for this video.

I have long wanted to make a video about chaos, ever since reading James Gleick’s fantastic book, Chaos. I hope this video gives an idea of phase space – a picture of dynamical systems in which each point completely represents the state of the system. For a pendulum, phase space is only 2-dimensional and you can get orbits (in the case of an undamped pendulum) or an inward spiral (in the case of a pendulum with friction). For the Lorenz equations we need three dimensions to show the phase space. The attractor you find for these equations is said to be strange and chaotic because there is no loop, only infinite curves that never intersect. This explains why the motion is so unpredictable – two different initial conditions that are very close together can end up arbitrarily far apart.

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Is The Universe Finite?

December 2nd, 2019

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The universe is big, really, really big. Although according to a new paper, it may literally be infinitely smaller than we previously thought.

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Every time you walk out the door, light from the Big Bang strikes your face, enters your eyes. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation – the left-over heat-glow from the very early universe. We can’t see this microwave light with our eyes, but we can catch it with even a simple radio antenna. As soon as we became aware of its existence we’ve been feverishly building better and better devices to collect it. Why? Because it encodes so many secrets. And within this light, a group of scientists have just found evidence of the limits of space. A clue that our universe may be actually be finite in size. Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll delve into the Nature Astronomy paper that just reported this: Planck evidence for a closed Universe and a possible crisis for cosmology by Eleonora Di Valentino, Alessandro Melchiorri, and Joe Silk.

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3 Perplexing Physics Problems

November 20th, 2019

Why does shaken soda explode? Does ice melt first in fresh or salt water?
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This video features experiments that have been shown to me by science teachers over the years. Does ice melt fast in salt water or fresh water was an experiment introduced to me at the Utah Science Teachers’ conference. The ring of metal over a chain demo came from a teachers event in Florida. The idea shaking a carbonated drink increases pressure came from an email.

Special thanks to Petr Lebedev for building the pressure gauge.

Links to literature are below:
Victims of the pop bottle, by Ted Willhoft. New Scientist, 21 August 1986 p.28

Carbonation speculation
The Physics Teacher 30, 173 (1992); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.2343501

Agitation solution
The Physics Teacher 30, 325 (1992); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.2343556

Filmed by Cristian Carretero, Jordan Schnabel, Jonny Hyman, and Raquel Nuno

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Can You Observe a Typical Universe?

November 18th, 2019

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The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly controversial idea can be extremely powerful. So, how do you correctly use the anthropic principle?

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General Relativity: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlWMHnDwyliMevB36wgRbjXhJkoN_RUQ

According to the original definitions by Brandon Carter, the weak anthropic principle states that we must live in a place and time in the universe capable of supporting observers – in our case, a habitable biosphere, and the strong anthropic principle, which states that the universe itself must have the conditions necessary for producing environments that, in turn, produce observers. That means the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe must be just right to allow nice habitable planets to one day form. Let’s just call it the anthropic principle: we necessarily observe from an environment capable of producing observers; be that environment a planet within a universe or a universe within a multiverse.

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Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?

November 11th, 2019

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Life exists in our universe. There we go – one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless universes. Hmmm. Did I break my streak?

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Our universe seems to operate according to a set of fundamental rules that we try to understand and model with the equations of our laws of physics. Those equations always include one or more fundamental constants – simple numbers that set the scale for the equation. We can’t determine the values of these constants from pure theory – we have to measure them in the real universe. These are things like the speed of light, the Planck constant, the masses of the elementary particles, and the constants defining the relative strengths of the fundamental forces – the so-called coupling constants.

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Why We Might Be Alone in the Universe

November 4th, 2019

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Why does it appear, that humanity is the lone intelligence in the universe? The answer might be that planet Earth is more unique than we’ve previously assumed. The rare earth hypothesis posits exactly this – that a range of factors made Earth exceptionally unusual and uniquely able to produce intelligent life.

In upcoming episodes we’ll be exploring the anthropic principle and its two main versions – the strong and the weak anthropic principles. The strong anthropic principle tells us that the observed universe must be able to produce observers – including the contentious idea that this predicts the existence of universes beyond our own. But in today’s episode we’re going to focus on the weak anthropic principle. It says that we must find ourselves in a part of the universe capable of supporting us. For example, in a planetary biosphere rather than floating in the void between the galaxies. This may seems tautological, but accounting for this observer selection bias is important to understanding why the universe looks the way it does from our perspective. And the weak anthropic principle is much more useful than that. When combined with the apparent absence of alien civilizations, it may tell us why intelligent life is incredibly rare in our universe.

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Is Time Travel Impossible?

October 21st, 2019

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Invitation to Time Travelers: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgzeIA0O00-bVioxU4t4AaABCQ

Time travel stories are cool because both the past and future are somehow more interesting that the present and because everyone wants a redo. But so far it appears we’re doomed to live consumed by regret in the eternal, boring present. Time marches on, inexorably and only forward. Or so we thought until Einstein came along. His special and general theories of relativity changed the way we think about time forever, and believe it or not, their raw equations permit time travel. They even tell us how to do it. So let’s review the possibilities, and decide how possible they really are.

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Loop Quantum Gravity Explained

October 15th, 2019

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It’s time we talked about loop quantum gravity. What exactly is it? What are the loops? And can it really defeat string theory in our quest for a Theory of Everything?

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The holy grail of physics is to connect our understanding of the tiny scales of atoms and subatomic particles with that of the vast scales of planets, galaxies, and the entire universe. To connect quantum physics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Our search for a theory of quantum gravity is a century old, and we’ve talked quite a bit about it already, including what’s probably the lead contender – string theory. But string theory isn’t the only game in town – or so some physicists believe. There may be another way to reconcile the physics of the tiny and the gigantic – another way to a theory of quantum gravity that avoids a lot of conceptual baggage like tiny wiggling strings made of coiled up extra dimensions. That other way would be loop quantum gravity, and today we’re going to learn exactly what it is.

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Black Hole Harmonics

October 7th, 2019

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Black holes are crazy enough on their own – but crash two together and you end up with a roiling blob of inescapable space that vibrates like a beaten drum. And the rich harmonics of those vibrations, seen through gravitational waves, could hold the secrets to the nature of the fabric of spacetime itself. Today on space time journal club we’ll explore the papers that claim to have detected black hole harmonics. We’ll also give you the latest updates on the most recent – in some cases quite bizarre – LIGO detections.

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When physicists talk about black holes they’re usually referring to highly theoretical objects – static, unchanging black holes viewed from “infinitely” far away. This makes everything clean and simple enough to attempt the already notoriously complex calculations of black hole physics. But real black holes are created in the violent deaths of massive stars, and there’s nothing clean about that. And we now know that black holes merge – and in the process produce gravitational radiation that we’ve only just managed to detect with the miraculous work of the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave observatories. In the instant after its merger, the new, joined black hole looks nothing like the idealized theoretical black hole.

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Engineering with Origami

October 4th, 2019

Origami is inspiring a plethora of new engineering designs. Try yourself: https://ve42.co/Origami
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Dr. Robert Lang https://langorigami.com
Prof. Larry Howell https://www.compliantmechanisms.byu.edu/

On first glance it’s surprising that origami — a centuries old art of folding paper to achieve particular aesthetics — is applicable to engineering. But upon closer consideration there are a lot of reasons methods developed for paper folding are also applicable to engineering: origami allows you to take a flat sheet of material and convert it to almost any shape only by folding. Plus for large flat structures, origami provides a way of shrinking dimensions while ensuring simply deployment – this is particularly useful for solar arrays in space applications. Furthermore, motions designed to take advantage of the flexibility of paper can also be used to form compliant mechanisms for engineering like the kaleidocycle. Since the principles of origami are scalable, mechanisms can also be dramatically miniaturized.

Some of the work shown is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant No. EFRI-ODISSEI-1240417. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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