Physicist Michio Kaku explores the realm beyond current knowledge - the border of science fiction and science fact.
Amazingly, 95% of the make-up of the universe is stuff we can't see, according to cosmologists. Find out more about dark energy and dark matter, which far surpasses the amount of visible mass in the universe.
With the conclusion of season 5 of The Big Bang Theory, we've got our reviews of the last couple of episodes up on the site now, along with links to the science-related subjects that get mentioned in the course of the geek-related comedy.
You can access all of our The Big Bang Theory season 5 reviews.
One of the weirdest facts about quantum physics is that particles are constantly springing into and out of existence all around us. Even within "empty space," which seems like it should contain no energy at all, there are virtual particle pairs that manifest for a moment before annihilating each other.
This means that energy is contained even in the empty vacuum of space itself, a fact which yields all sort of strange behavior. This vacuum energy may explain the dark energy that cosmologists observe, but the problem is that the theoretical calculations and experimental observations are off by quite a lot. If the theoretical calculations were correct, there'd be a lot more vacuum energy (sometimes called vacuum pressure) and the universe's acceleration would be a lot faster ... so fast that, in fact, the universe probably wouldn't have been able to form galaxies, stars, and planets.
It's precisely this sort of behavior that physicist Brian Greene refers to as quantum jitters in his popular science books. In fact, there's a very high likelihood that this sort of "energy from nothing" aspect of quantum physics provides the physical basis for the formation of the universe. The Big Bang theory describes how the universe proceeded from the moment of its creation, but doesn't actually dictate how that creation occurred. Actually, once you have the laws of quantum physics in place, the idea of manifesting something from nothing becomes relatively commonplace, as described in Lawrence Krauss' A Universe From Nothing and Hawking & Mlodinow's The Grand Design. Of course, general relativity is also needed, for that universe to begin expanding ... at least until we figure out a theory of quantum gravity.
Virtual particles are important in astrophysics for at least one other reason: they provide the basis for the Hawking radiation, the radiation that should be emitted by black holes.
When a major blockbuster film comes out, there's no shortage of attempts among scientists to make it a "teachable moment." The new comic-based film The Avengers, however, may have more than its fair share of this ... and rightfully so. As I mentioned a while back, even I got on this bandwagon with my recent article about time travel and how it is utilized in some of the Avengers comic book plotlines.
The Avengers film doesn't have time travel, but it has been steadily building its storyline and fictional universe over a serious of previous films and that effort has had scientific elements to it. As I discussed when Thor came out, the creators were making specific efforts to ensure that the universe made sense and held together in a realistic way. The comic books rarely deal with the conflict between the science that fuels Iron Man's armor and the magic that fuels Thor's hammer, but since the films were reaching beyond your average comic reader, it needed to find a way to bridge that gap.
In Thor they did so by establishing the premise that the Asgardian race of "gods" were actually trans-dimensional beings who, though they resembled humans, were able to harness far more advanced scientific knowledge and became increasingly powerful as a result. In this latest film, the entire conflict centers around this advanced science.
Specifically, the film focuses on a real scientific problem: trying to find sustainable energy. The conflict is about control of a nearly-infinite energy source. (I'm not giving much away, because this is revealed in about the first 5 minutes of The Avengers and was previously hinted at in both the Captain America film and in the post-credits teaser at the end of Thor.) The energy source is called the Tesseract, or a doorway in space.
A tesseract is a mathematical concept. The simplest explanation is that the tesseract is a four-dimensional cube (in the same way that a cube is a 3-dimensional square). More on the comic book (and film) version of the Tesseract is covered here.
Though the physics of the tesseract isn't really laid out, what is clear from the film is that it has something to do with dark energy, the mysterious substance that physicists believe is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. The discovery of this acceleration earned the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, so it's kind of a big deal these days. The thing about dark energy is that it isn't particularly strong ... but there's a lot of it. The overall impact is quite a lot of power, enough to push the universe apart more quickly than we would expect it to be expanding.
In the film, the Tesseract has the capacity to somehow draw power from the dark energy to become a nearly-unlimited energy source. I won't spoil any part of the plot about how this energy is utilized, but there's the basic science behind it.
Of course, that isn't all the science that made its way into the film. Below are some additional links to some interesting articles on how science shows up in the Avengers film (and its predecessors).
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In Physics of the Future, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku brings the knowledge he's gleaned from interviewing over 300 scientific experts in a diverse range of disciplines to explore the ways that new scientific discoveries will affect the next century of human civilization. The book is broken up in a very clear manner, exploring the near future, midcentury, and far future discoveries that will shape our world in the century to come.
Of course, Kaku himself makes it clear that these are only predictions, and he goes to great lengths to explain that those who have tried to make such predictions in the past are wrong more often than not.
Still, this is a great book from a master at presenting science to the general public, so should be of interest to any readers who want an idea about what to expect from science in the next century.
Read more in our full review of the book or, if you've already read the book, let us know what you thought about it in the Comments!
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