MPJ

Up there, within our own Solar system (and beyond) everything is in motion. There is no space object that is standing still. Ever since the big bang. Even the black holes that are capturing things into singularity point are moving across the universe along with their own neighborhood. The same is with Earth and its first neighbor Mars. They are both orbiting the Sun in their own time schedule - Earth needs full year to complete the cycle, while Mars in its own distant orbit needs 322 more days to do it. While both, Earth and Mars travel around the Sun, sometimes they got closer to each other by the approximate 55 million kilometers (while the farthest distance between the two is about 400 million kilometers).

Rarely I've got a chance and real opportunity to revive an old article from the past and to update it to fit better in the present day. Actually, the quantum weirdness is still where it was four years ago - science is not something that changes over night especially with quantum mechanics, so I am not going to update the post with any new physics or breakthroughs. Instead, what 's new and what pushed me to repost today is one extraordinary novel in the field. The book that kept me from sleeping last weekend was "Quantum Space" by Douglas Phillips and in short it is by far, one of the best titles I read this year. It is one of those true sci-fi stories that follows the real science and in this case the weirdness of the quantum world I wrote about in this post and I would add one of those articles I enjoyed the most writing in the history of the blog. But, before couple of my glimpses to the book itself, followed by my warm recommendation and especially if you want to r...

"It is unwise from some interstellar species to give us technology to leave the Earth - chances that we would use it for star wars are bigger than we would go the next level and use it for peaceful exploration of solar system and beyond." - What is Intelligent Life? As promised in my last post story about one grim political view of the last forgettable year , please behold another glimpse to the humanity from another angle. Let's move today from raw reality to the reality-inspired fiction and make a little peek into three science-fiction masterpieces. Two of them, product of current almost expired year, that if you ask me, are making this forgettable year, well, little less forgettable. But before Daniel Abraham's and Ty Franck's "Babylon's Ashes", sixth book of The Expanse and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", Star Wars sequel, I think this is a perfect moment for me to start the review with another classic, in the most genuine meaning of ...

It's a well known fact that our universe is, as far as we know today, four dimensional space-time continuum with three spacial coordinates and the time playing a role of the fourth one. We are perfectly capable of traveling backwards and forwards within first three spatial coordinates, but is it possible to do the same on the fourth one? I am sure you would agree that it is not too exciting going up or down or left or right but traveling through time could be something special. But, is it possible? Let's explore all the theories, share some stories and read about one connected hoax.

Until recently I had a toy-model of Russian space station Mir hanged in our living room settled nicely between two more common house decorations. It was small in size, no bigger than five cubic inches with two teeny tiny Soyuz spacecrafts docked at their designated locks and numerous solar panels all over the place. The plastic toy is long gone now but still from time to time it raises some nice memories, especially those moments when couple of our guests after close inspection from all directions asked questions like "What the heck is this?" or "Is this art?". Not many of them recognized the most challenging technological endeavor of the last two decades of previous century at first glance. On March 23, 2001, all the biggest Mir's fragments after surviving hellish re-entry through the atmosphere hit the Pacific ocean and ended 15 years of various scientific experiments performed by 28 long duration multinational crews with total of 104 people from 12 ...

There will come one day in the future. Relatively and astronomically speaking, it might come sooner than we think. It could happen way before we realize that there is no turning back. The day when mother Earth will simply say - sorry guys, I have no more energy to sustain this kind of life anymore and when most of biodiversity cocoons on Earth will reach the ultimate hazard and start imploding back into themselves. Air and water pollution will help a lot and not even planet's regular motions will be able to take us into another interglacial cycle. It is as much inevitable as what we are going to do next. We will take a long look toward the stars and say: "Well, we have to do this sooner or later. It's time to leave the Earth. Time to jump into Christopher Columbus's shoes again. And find the new home." But we will not get far. There will be no warp drives, "phasers on stun", robots, AIs or artificial gravity like in Sci-Fi blockbusters and there will b...

Did you know that if you were standing on the near side of the Moon, and for your mass of 80kg and weight of 785N on Earth, due to Moon's lower gravity, you would not feel being heavier than 13kg (130N)? You knew? Ok, did you know that Earth's and Moon's gravities combined gave you different weight on near and far side of the Moon? Slightly yes, but true. Earth and Moon are relatively small celestial bodies but this difference goes even higher if you move from the Moon to the Io or Europe for example as they are also tidally locked by Jupiter just like our Moon is locked by Earth. This would most definitely not help mountains on Avatar's Pandora to float but still, within right conditions and with presence of large mass(es) nearby, considering appropriate composition of the ground I am sure there are solar systems out there with strange conditions to live with, to say the least. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” - Isaac Ne...

In the last post of the Beth's Q&A we tried to understand four basic forces and their corresponding particle carriers or bosons. With almost certain discovery of the Higgs boson physicist completed the search for this last mystery of the standard model and we now know how larger particles get their mass and how interact with each other. Now is the time to bring this story up one level and write about chemical elements representing basic 'lego' blocks of almost everything in the universe we currently comprehend. Hmm, everything but mysterious dark matter that we still don't have a clue what it's made of. Every now and again in media (mostly internet) we can read about how we all are made out of stars and other violent events in the universe dating back in time even so far in the past to the Big Bang itself. Following some of this articles Beth posted another idea for the thread and I am paraphrasing her thoughts: "I keep reading we are made from the ...

I am not sure where to start this post or to better say, which point in history of time I'd choose when something extraordinary happened for the first time and started the domination of humans over all other species competing on Earth. Was it the discovery of fire and learning how to start it? Maybe it was rather the discovery of tools to make everyday life easier and made us the ultimate predator? Even though these two can definitively be classified as breakthrough discoveries, if you ask me, what was more important back in that period of prehistoric era was the point in evolution of human brain when we started to dream. The time when brain cells evolved to the point when we started to use imagination and to think outside the boundaries of simple survival. That point in history of mankind is maybe the most important of them all. It was the time when first images appeared on the cave walls, first simple houses and camps started to exist. We started to bury and mourn the dead and t...

Hello folks, or should I say random web reader! Or perhaps you are here on purpose. Or maybe you are a humanized or automatized bot or crawler, doing your scheduled intelligence from whatever reason you do that every now and again. Either way, now when you are here, this probably means you read at least one of my posts and now wondering who I am? Well, even though I believe in privacy on the net I guess when you are having a blog this is not really possible to maintain. Therefore, I created this page so I can introduce myself a little and say something about the blog itself. My name is Milan and basically, this would be just a stream of my texts, thoughts or whatever I think it's worthwhile publishing. Actually, I don't think of myself as a writer, especially in written English which is not my native language and the fact is that this is not what I do best. What I do best is programming and I am doing that for several decades professionally. I like to think that I am one of th...