Month: January 2020

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Space-time is swirling around a dead star, proving Einstein right again

Space-time is indeed churned by massive rotating bodies, as scientists had thought
Article on Space.com

Artist’s illustration of Lense-Thirring frame-dragging resulting from a rotating white dwarf in the PSR J1141-6545 binary star system.
(Image: © Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav))

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a new study finds.
That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.

Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily small and, therefore, has been challenging to measure. Objects with greater masses and more powerful gravitational fields, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, offer better chances to see this phenomenon. ….

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Why take the time to be late?

France Culture Radio

Rehabilitate the backlog to regain time to live with the current injunctions on performance and profitability. Hélène L’Heuillet, psychoanalyst and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, talks about it in her “Eloge du retard” (Albin Michel, January 2020).

Hélène L’Heuillet, France Culture
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Exhibition: Made in Neuchâtel. Deux siècles d’indiennes

“Made in Neuchâtel. Deux siècles d’indiennes” 7 October 2018 – 19 May 2019.
Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel

By « Made in Neuchâtel. Deux siècles d’indiennes », the Art and History Museum of Neuchâtel offers the first large exhibition on “indiennes” (printed cotton cloths) made in Neuchâtel between the 18th and 19th century. From a rich series of more than 300 artefacts – “indiennes”, projects on paper, sample books, portraits and historical sources- the exhibition makes us discover one of the main printed canvas producer area from all over Europe.
This immersive and interactive installation closes the exhibition. It let the visitor choose between three patterns, which have been designed from ancient “indiennes”. The visitor can change the colour and the scale of the pattern and project it on walls by a control interface. The public take part to the creation and commercialisation process who has been and still is set up by the textile industry, by creating a unique fictitious tapestry.

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Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC (Available at www.eamesoffice.com)

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What if time doesn’t exist?

Carlo Rovelli, physicist

In a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, this interview with physicist and historian Carlo Rovelli also poses the fascinating question, “What if time didn’t exist?”

Our understanding of the universe rests on two pillars: the theory of general relativity and quantum physics. Two theoretical constructions whose accuracy is nowadays precisely verified, but which do not speak to each other, which ignore each other, so to speak. Some researchers, such as the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, are working to fill this gap. Among other research directors at the CNRS and a professor at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, Carlo Rovelli has developed, with the American Lee Smolin, the theory of quantum gravitation with loops aimed, as it were, at unifying general relativity and quantum physics.

Even if all this remains largely mysterious and incomprehensible to most of us, the sky lights up a little as we listen to Carlo Rovelli at the microphone of Stéphane Deligeorges in “Continent sciences”. In the course of a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, strings and networks of spins, a fascinating question arose which is also the title of a book by Carlo Rovelli: “What if time didn’t exist?”