Tag: physics

Cat physics

Cat falling diagram

A diagram from the 1969 study, A Dynamical Explanation of the Falling Cat Phenomenon, by Kane and Scher of Stanford University. Apparently one of the very few scientific papers on cat physics.

Kane and Scher neither lifted nor dropped a single cat. Instead, they created a mathematical abstraction of a cat: two imaginary cylinder-like chunks, joined at a single point so the parts could (as with a feline spine) bend, but not twist. When they used a computer to plot the theoretical bendings of this theoretical falling chunky-cat, the motions resembled what they saw in old photographs of an actual falling cat. They conclude that their theory “explains the phenomenon under consideration”.

Our matryoshka universe

Every black hole contains another universe? It’s possible that our universe is actually sitting inside the black hole of another universe and the black holes in our universe may lead to alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

Living in a hologram

Our world may be a giant hologram.

Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole – not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.

Mind blown, check back later (via justin).

Space battle physics

The Physics of Space Battles. It won’t really be like the dogfights or naval style battles in our scifi books, movies and television shows.

In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, [they] are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics — not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.