Month: September 2022

QUANTUM COMPLEXITY. “The quantum-mechanical computation of one molecule of methane requires 10(42) grid points. Assuming that at each point we have to perform only 10 elementary operations, and that the computation is performed at the extremely low temperature T = 3 × 10(-3) K, we would still have to use all the energy produced on Earth during the last century.” R. P. Poplavskii (1975)[Pop75], as quoted by Manin https://lnkd.in/dif7Y_D View in LinkedIn

The first Irises of the year, glorious reminders that “life will find a way”. View in LinkedIn

A REMARKABLE PHYSICIST. “I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period . . . I was in the grip of the idea that Everything is Particles. . . . I call my second period Everything is Fields. . . . Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything is Information.” (John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam). https://lnkd.in/g-p9M-4 View in LinkedIn

THIS ENDS the very extensive and remarkably good review of space weather, which is a backdrop for the effects of Earth’s weather. We rarely have, in a single review, such a comprehensive and detailed summary of conditions in space, written in accessible language, describing a universe that is far from cold and empty. Rather, it is a hugely dynamic environment with immense scale, structure and distant impact, with intergalactic oceans of highly energetic particles and energy fields forming space conditions. This review should be kept bedside for a lifetime. View in LinkedIn

THE UPCOMING POSTS. Space weather is the prelude for the next series of posting sections, namely the range of extreme conditions found in space, and thus, what impact that might have on chemistry, physics and mathematics as we know it. Our sciences remain tethered in our blinkered view that the Earth is the end of the universe; to the contrary, it is not even a particularly relevant part of it, a tiny backwater in an obscure corner. View in LinkedIn