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/

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(438)

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026

Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patr...

3 Aug 3h 57min

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities

People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relations...

27 Juli 1h 20min

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together

One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alt...

20 Juli 1h 15min

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026

Welcome to the July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

13 Juli 4h 3min

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass

Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking at screens, but we spend time indoors, or outdoors but in ur...

6 Juli 1h 29min

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy

The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, an...

29 Juni 1h 56min

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant

The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these...

22 Juni 1h 59min

357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics

Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is used t...

15 Juni 1h 19min

Populärt inom Vetenskap

p3-dystopia
dumma-manniskor
allt-du-velat-veta
hacka-livet
svd-nyhetsartiklar
ufo-sverige
rss-kriminologerna
rss-vetenskapsradion
bildningspodden
sexet
halsorevolutionen
det-morka-psyket
ufo-sverige-2
rss-vetenskapsradion-2
barnpsykologerna
vetenskapsradion
medicinvetarna
paranormalt-med-caroline-giertz
rss-ufobortom-rimligt-tvivel
parkinsonpodden