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tkdguy

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July Scientific American has a feature article on the discovery of Laniakea. As one may recall, Laniakea -- the super-duper-cluster that holds the Milky Way -- is currently the largest known gravitationally bound structure in the Universe.

 

The issue also has brief articles about Juno's arrival at Jupiter and a proposal to build a "sunshade" to assist space-based telescopes in imaging exoplanets.

 

Dean Shomshak.

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Schrodinger's Universe?

 

Maybe it's a hologram too, so we just keep rebooting the Matrix every trillion years or so...

Yep... :yes:  Perhaps intelligent life arises for that specific function, and the act of observing ultimately causes the reboot. The Universe is a Phoenix, and observation is the flame. :rockon:

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I call these sorts of speculations "theological physics." One of the common elements is someone saying that whatever they speculate about is a "holy grail" for physics.

 

Soooo tired of that particular figure of speech.

 

Dean Shomshak

A working Unified Field Theory (or similar terminology) would be just that. "Holy Grail" is the closest approximation they have.

It is like the P vs NP problem of mathematics (find one P solution for any NP-complete problem, you found a P solution for all NP-complete problems).

 

There is just no way to explain why either thing is important for those scientists, unless you are one of those scientists. They need to have something to explain "this is really important for us". And it will give us a imeasurable progress if we figure that out.

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Well, generally, figuring out how X causes Y advances not just scientific knowledge, but potentially technological knowledge as well(e.g., nuclear power).

"What has quantum physics ever done that affects my real life?"

Do you own a USB stick, SSD or any other Flash Memory like a Smartphone SD card? Quantum Tunnelling Effect!

 

Without Quantum Physics we would have had no small, shockproof, persistent memory to put into those smartphones. Meaning no smartphones as we understand them today.

 

Or, people figure out how to do stuff, and then scientists arrive to explain how it was done. . . 

Kinda like how Quantum Physics allows us to understand how Cold Fusion/LENR might be working.

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