1938 Morgan F-Trike

Unit circle.

I wish I could have been there.

Daytona beach 1957

If you put that ball on that machine while it wasn’t spinning, it would just roll straight down the lower sides. 

The raised edges would keep it in the middle line, but it’s only controlled in one direction. By spinning it, you constantly alternate the position of the tall sides, meaning that the ball is held in the middle, never able to fall off.

Particle accelerators control particles in the same way. Magnetic or electric fields can only direct particles in one plane at a time, so to keep a beam of particles rushing down a particle accelerator in one focused stream, the current gradient must constantly oscillate. This means the particles are constantly held in place, never able to shoot off in one direction.

Here’s the same principle in action: these are tiny pollen grains being held in place by an oscillating field. Rods in the four corners of the beam establish a field that oscillates many times a second to keep the pollen trapped. If it didn’t constantly switch, the pollen would all fly off in one direction.

Watch the full film with Dr Suzie Sheehy for more.

According to NASA, a neighboring star has 7 Earth-like planets in its orbit

Seven Earth-like planets have been found orbiting a sun not too far — in space terms, at least — from our own.

NASA announced Wednesday that the planets resemble Earth in composition and spacing from their star, which means their conditions might be favorable to liquid water and life, Time reported.

“The planets form a very compact system,” Michaël Gillon of Belgium’s University of Liège, said in a teleconference, according to Time. “They are very close to their star and are reminiscent of the system of moons that orbit Jupiter. They could have liquid water and life.”

Astronomers studied the star, Trappist-1 — which, at 39 light years away from Earth, is considered a relative neighbor — for six years, using telescopes located all over the world, plus the Spitzer Space Telescope. Read more (2/22/17 2:04 PM)

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Dudeney dissection from a square to an equilateral triangle. Only 4 pieces!

Dark Energy

Dark energy is in physical cosmology and astrology as an unknown form of energy that permeates through space making up for 68.3% of the observable universe (dark matter takes up 26.8%, only 4.9% is ordinary matter). Dark energy is currently the most accepted hypothesis to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate (if the observable universe comprised of only the ordinary matter we see, the universe would be expanding at a much slower rate than it currently is thus meaning dark matter and dark energy make up the mass for the accelerated rate of expansion). On a mass–energy equivalence basis, the density of dark energy (6.91 × 10^−27 kg/m3) is very low, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies.

Dark energy is not known to react with any of the fundamental forces other than gravity. It clearly has a large impact on the universe making up for 68.3% of universal density, only because it fills an otherwise empty space. The two current leading models are a cosmological constant and quintessence. Both models conclude that dark energy must have a negative pressure.

The effect of dark energy: a small constant negative pressure of vacuum

End to the universe ends your ideas of infinite

If the big rip or vacuum decay takes place then numbers can’t be infinite, infinity to finite