Jun 5, 2017 04:08 AM
String Theory’s Weirdest Ideas Finally Make Sense—Thanks to VR
https://www.wired.com/2017/06/string-the...thanks-vr/
EXCERPT: [...] Extra dimensions are a critical part of Greene’s field of study. String theory posits that the universe is built not just from three spatial dimensions (up/down, side/side, forward/backward) and the single dimension of time, but at least six other dimensions. These extra dimensions would be too small for humans to detect [...] But, according to the theory, the six, curled up dimensions play a major role in controlling how subatomic strings vibrate, and those vibrations determine how quarks, electrons, and other fundamental particles behave.
It’s also quite confusing. Those six extra dimensions some string theorists predict come wrapped together in what are known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. Greene is a great writer—bestselling, even—but even he can’t perfectly explain what these things look like. VR helps him make the shapes make sense. Sort of. Greene brings up a video of a wire in the virtual reality space. To a human, he says, this is a two dimensional object: a line. The video zooms in, and something new appears: an ant, walking in a circle around the wire’s girth. The lesson here is that extra dimensions are invisible unless you are the right size to see them. The analogy with the wire makes sense, but it doesn’t scratch all the strangeness away from trying to visualize six dimensional curling....
Senate panel explores the EMP threat
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10....602a/full/
EXCERPT: [...] A GMD is caused by a solar storm, such as a flare or coronal mass ejection; an EMP can be created by detonating a nuclear weapon miles above Earth’s surface. In 1989 a coronal mass ejection caused the blackout of Quebec’s grid for nine hours. A much bigger solar storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event, destroyed telegraph lines across the US and caused the aurora borealis to be visible as far south as Cuba. In 2012 NASA detected a solar storm that, had it occurred a week earlier, might have triggered a Carrington-like event.
In 2004 a congressional commission reported that a single EMP unleashed high above Omaha, Nebraska, would cripple half the nation’s economy. That commission, which was reinstated in 2008 and then again last year, wrote in its 2004 report that Russia, China, and North Korea were working to develop EMP weapons. Taking measures to defend the grid against a space weather event wouldn’t be sufficient to guard against an EMP attack. Only the human-made variety produces the short-wavelength, high-energy RF burst known as E1, which can destroy electronics, including the supervisory-control and data-acquisition systems that govern the grid, fossil-fuel pipelines, and other critical infrastructure....
https://www.wired.com/2017/06/string-the...thanks-vr/
EXCERPT: [...] Extra dimensions are a critical part of Greene’s field of study. String theory posits that the universe is built not just from three spatial dimensions (up/down, side/side, forward/backward) and the single dimension of time, but at least six other dimensions. These extra dimensions would be too small for humans to detect [...] But, according to the theory, the six, curled up dimensions play a major role in controlling how subatomic strings vibrate, and those vibrations determine how quarks, electrons, and other fundamental particles behave.
It’s also quite confusing. Those six extra dimensions some string theorists predict come wrapped together in what are known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. Greene is a great writer—bestselling, even—but even he can’t perfectly explain what these things look like. VR helps him make the shapes make sense. Sort of. Greene brings up a video of a wire in the virtual reality space. To a human, he says, this is a two dimensional object: a line. The video zooms in, and something new appears: an ant, walking in a circle around the wire’s girth. The lesson here is that extra dimensions are invisible unless you are the right size to see them. The analogy with the wire makes sense, but it doesn’t scratch all the strangeness away from trying to visualize six dimensional curling....
Senate panel explores the EMP threat
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10....602a/full/
EXCERPT: [...] A GMD is caused by a solar storm, such as a flare or coronal mass ejection; an EMP can be created by detonating a nuclear weapon miles above Earth’s surface. In 1989 a coronal mass ejection caused the blackout of Quebec’s grid for nine hours. A much bigger solar storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event, destroyed telegraph lines across the US and caused the aurora borealis to be visible as far south as Cuba. In 2012 NASA detected a solar storm that, had it occurred a week earlier, might have triggered a Carrington-like event.
In 2004 a congressional commission reported that a single EMP unleashed high above Omaha, Nebraska, would cripple half the nation’s economy. That commission, which was reinstated in 2008 and then again last year, wrote in its 2004 report that Russia, China, and North Korea were working to develop EMP weapons. Taking measures to defend the grid against a space weather event wouldn’t be sufficient to guard against an EMP attack. Only the human-made variety produces the short-wavelength, high-energy RF burst known as E1, which can destroy electronics, including the supervisory-control and data-acquisition systems that govern the grid, fossil-fuel pipelines, and other critical infrastructure....
