Holiday Message 2020 | The Screwy Universe

Holiday Message 2020 | The Screwy Universe

Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned out this isn't all that different from a conventional solo episode. With the difference that what I'm talking about — a phenomenon called "cosmic birefringence" — has played a big part in my personal scientific career, so I get to be a bit autobiographical.

Every photon has a direction of polarization, which generally remains fixed as the photon travels through space. Birefringence is an effect by which the polarization rotates rather than staying fixed. It can happen in materials, but generally not in outer space. But there are exotic physics ideas that could cause such a rotation, including the dynamical dark energy candidate known as quintessence. People have put limits on such cosmic birefringence for a while now, but recently there was a claim that there might be a nonzero amount of birefringence visible in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background! Still very tentative, but if this hint turns into real evidence, it would big extremely big news for our understanding of physics and cosmology, possibly helping us pinpoint the nature of dark energy.

Show notes, links, transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/12/21/holiday-message-2020-the-screwy-universe/

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(427)

170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies

170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies

There is so much we don't know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn't blind us to the incredible progress we have made in cosmology over the last century. We know the univer...

25 Loka 20211h 27min

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, ...

18 Loka 20211h 24min

AMA | October 2021

AMA | October 2021

Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of que...

14 Loka 20212h 59min

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those law...

11 Loka 20211h 25min

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system thro...

4 Loka 20211h 35min

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. ...

27 Syys 20211h 14min

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children's physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their par...

20 Syys 20211h 25min

AMA | September 2021

AMA | September 2021

Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of q...

16 Syys 20213h 38min

Suosittua kategoriassa Tiede

rss-mita-tulisi-tietaa
rss-poliisin-mieli
tiedekulma-podcast
utelias-mieli
docemilia
rss-duodecim-lehti
rss-tiedetta-vai-tarinaa
rss-totuuden-liepeilla
university-of-eastern-finland
filocast-filosofian-perusteet
rss-duokkari-ekstra
rss-laakaripodi
rss-ylistys-elaimille
rss-lapsuuden-rakentajat-podcast