Showing posts with label Richard Feynman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Feynman. Show all posts
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Microsoft is hosting the videos of a famous lecture series given by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman back in 1964. The lectures, which will be hosted by Microsoft Research under the name Project Tuva, are lectures that the physicist gave just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics - along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga - for cracking some pesky problems in quantum electrodynamics.

This lecture has been credited by some (and discredited by others) as being the stimulus that started people thinking about nanotechnology. You can read a transcript of that lecture here. There is apparently a video of a follow-on lecture that Feynman gave, called Infinitesimal Machinery.

Check the videos out here!
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The brilliantly hilarious theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, had a very interesting notion of the universe, which eventually lead to his theory on quantum electrodynamics of which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. The notion I speak of is best stated in a passage from another wonderful theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, in his book, "The Physics of the Impossible":

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)
With his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron's journey, in which we see trillions of electron and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it explains a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. ...Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of thesame electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.

Maybe it's just me, but every road traveled in science tends to lead toward the notion of a singularity.