String Theory

          Here's an  engrossing short video on String Theory by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. It's a new theory (not so new because it was first studied in the late 1960s) of everything, which challenges Einstein's vision of the Universe as a constantly widening bubble with some insects stuck to it. According to that approach we live in a macrocosm of floating bubbles. When they collide or split in half they can create different universes. It is said to be the origin of the Big Bang. Scientists wonder whether one day we will be able to escape our bubble and find ourselves between universes and penetrate to some parallel universe. Of course a huge amount of energy is necessary only to consider that option, it would be connected with time travelling as well. The professor claims that sooner or later the intelligent life will perish due to the cooling and spreading of this Universe. The only solution to that threat would be to find some other bubble. It all looks like science-fiction, but String Theory is very real and backed up by sets of equations and the greatest minds of our times.I encourage you to read Kaku's books, "Hyperspace" is the one that I enjoyed the most. 

Mind-boggling experiments that you probably have never heard of

         Here's an interesting short video on how the curiosity and some simple questions led to great scientific discoveries. The host Adam Savage started with an anecdote from the life of a great American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. When he was a young boy, we went on a walk with his father holding his wagon with a ball inside. When he pulled it, the ball  moved to the back of the wagon. He became intrigued by that and asked his father to explain that phenomenon to him. The reply wasn't satisfying: it was called “inertia” but nobody really knew what it really was. When he grew up, this scientific curiosity led to the development of diagrams describing movement of subatomic particles and his Nobel price.  

        In antiquity Aristotle discovered that the earth was round well before Christopher Columbus. He noticed gazing through his field glasses that the earth’s shadow on the moon surface was always round and because the fact that only sphere can cast  round shadow  he concluded with no doubt that earth is a sphere. The next great mind mentioned in this video was the third librarian  in Alexandria – called Eratosthenes. He was the first man ever to calculate an almost exact circumference of the earth two centuries B.C using a stick and knowing the distance between Alexandria and Swenet. He got encouraged to perform that experiment after he'd got a letter from a man who claimed that at noon, while we was watching down the well, he was able to see in the reflection his head covering the sun beams.

       Armand Fizeau was a French physicist living in XIX century. He revised Galileo’s experiment on the speed of light. Finally he came up with his own experiment using a tooth wheel and a mirror. Using relatively cheap tools he managed to  calculate the speed of light within the 2% of its actual speed. The conclusion of A. Savage is that those people weren’t superheroes, they were just a bit more curious and ingenious that other people, thus each of us can solve our world’s mysteries.