Brain-twister with answer.

1	15	5	12
8	10	4	9
11	6	16	2
14	3	13	7

A brain-teasing question this time. A 13-year old boy challenged us to an apparently simple riddle. I suspect he just couldn’t find the answer. Much to my shame, I’ll have to rack my brain for quite some time — I’ve never been on good terms with numbers.
Anyway, can you beat us to it?

Here goes the puzzle:

Cut this square in four parts and rearrange it so that the sum of the numbers in each column, each row and each diagonal equals 34.

What are the dangers of nanotechnology?

"Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers"  — Arthur Eddington.

Most scientists will harangue us about the highly acclaimed newfangled panacea — “nanotech”, that is basically controlling matter or building machines which could re-order matter on a molecular and atomic scale. It usually deals with 1 to 100 nanometre structures. The concept was first used by Richard Feynman to describe the possibility of manipulating individual atoms and molecules using a set of precise tools, which in plain language means we could take the building blocks of matter and create literally anything. That of course after we had got around certain problems, such as gravity losing ground to surface tension and van der Waals attraction, etc.

Breaking down the Bible. Genesis, 3 The Fall.

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty." — Albert Einstein.

This is a crucial event in the book and history of mankind, because this is the point where all our misfortunes began...

Despite the fact that it should be taken as an allegory, something terrible must have happened. We became weak slavish mortals; lost all privileges and were ousted from the paradise.

The Fall.

(Capella Sistina. Michelangelo)

String Theory — The Music of The Spheres? M-theory (Superstring theory) and Brane cosmology.

String theory simplified and poeticised.

Wünschelrute
Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen
Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
(Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Magic wand
Sleeps a song inside all things
Dreaming in the spellbound world,
That will waken up to sing,
If you sound the magic word.

(Proverbs. Sentence poem by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff)

Please don't copy without permission. Copyright © 2010  Brainstorming Ideas.)

String theory — science or philosophy?
This theory especially appeals to me because it’s based on a very musical idea — strings, and ‘music’, as Nietzsche put it, ‘is the true Idea of the World’ or in other words ‘world is materialised music’ (Schopenhauer).

This is what string theory is all about: the electrons, quarks and other particles are 1-dimensional oscillating "strings", possessing only the dimension of length. Their vibration determines the particles' flavour (quantum number of an elementary particle, which describes values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of the quantum system), charge, mass and spin. In addition, the superstring theory claims that a "supersymmetry" exists between bosons and fermions — force carriers and matter. But probably its most mind-boggling peculiarity is that such theory requires the existence of several extra unobservable dimensions — M-theory, for instance, puts forward eleven-dimensional space-time.

Quantum Entanglement Questions. Quantum Weirdness.

'We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.' — N. Bohr.

What I most love of quantum mechanics is that it is nondeterministic, which means that it’s generally doesn’t predict the outcome of any measurement with certainty. Instead, it just provides the probabilities of the outcomes, so that ‘measurements of a certain property done on two apparently identical systems can give different answers’ — to put it simply, the Truth is unfathomable. That’s how I’ve always perceived the universe and therefore life: governed by the uncertain definition inherent in its very core.

Quantum entanglement, also called the quantum non-local connection, is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which their quantum states are linked together so that to describe one object you have to take into account its counterpart — even if they’re spatially separated.

Hawking Radiation and Black Hole Evaporation.

Bekenstein-Hawking radiation questions.

'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature...'  "The philosophy of Niels Bohr" by Aage Petersen.

How does Hawking Radiation work?



In 1974, Stephen Hawking set forth a theory that due to quantum effects black holes should emit a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum. Actually, he drew on two soviet scientists’ work who claimed that rotating black holes should create and emit particles according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle. That means that black holes can lose mass and, if they spew out more matter than they gain, they might shrink, evaporate and eventually vanish.

This analysis is allegedly the first serious shot at a possible theory of quantum gravity, but there’s a catch — the existence of Hawking radiation hasn’t been proved so far. NASA launched a satellite to search for the expected gamma-ray flashes from the evaporating primordial black holes, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is bent on creating micro black holes in order to observe their evaporation, or that’s the part they let us in on.

Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations and zero-point energy.

Or what I make of it.

'Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.' — Albert Einstein.

It turns out a great number of science lovers seek simple explanation of abstruse scientific topics rather than techno-babble and a pile of mind-bending equations. As one great physicist said, if you can’t break a complex scientific question down so that even your granddad understands it, you yourself don’t understand it.

First, to put it simply, classical mechanics deals with macroscopic objects, that is, things visible to the naked eye, while quantum mechanics deals with the wave-particle duality of atoms and molecules. That said, according to quantum field theory (quantum description of a physical field), the Casimir effect is a physical force produced by quantised field.