The Engineers Crib

biography.com The late professor  Stephen Hawking's  final theory on the origin of the universe has been published today in the  Journal of High Energy Physics . Hawking collaborated with Professor Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven on the paper which was submitted for publishing before  Hawking's death  in March this year. The paper’s ideas are based on string theory, it predicts the universe is finite and that the universe's origin may, in fact, be far more simple than current theories relating to the Big Bang. Modern Big Bang theorists believe that the universe came into existence with a burst of inflation that started to occur just moments after the Big Bang itself. It is thought that once this inflation begins the quantum effects can keep it going indefinitely. The part of the universe that we can observe is just a hospitable pocket where inflation has ended. "The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like...

Mechanical engineering  is a very wide discipline that, effectively, covers anything that moves.  Its breadth is due, in part, from its need to cover the design and manufacture of anything and everything in a moving system. This ranges from a system's smallest components to the completed, sometimes enormous, machine as a whole. Throughout history some  innovations  have come to define mechanics as we know it today, the following are no exception. These engineering innovations range from the any one of the classical 'simple machine' to complex concepts such as  flight . This list is far from exhaustive and in no particular order. 1. The Aeolipile Was an Early Steam Reaction Turbine The  Aeolipile   was the world's first rotating steam engine or more technically correct, a steam reaction turbine. It was devised by the great Heron of Alexandria in the  1st Century AD  and described it in great detail in his book  Pneumatica . ...

Entanglement is of central importance for the new quantum technologies of the 21st century. A research team is now presenting the largest entangled quantum register of individually controllable systems to date, consisting of a total of 20 quantum bits. The physicists are pushing experimental and theoretical methods to the limits of what is currently possible Conceptual picture of the new exotic quantum states that have been generated in Innsbruck. The generation of quantum entanglement in a string of 20 single atoms is shown. Entanglement between neighboring atom pairs (blue), atom triplets (pink), atom quadruplets (red) and quintuplets (yellow) was observed, before the system became too complex to characterize with existing techniques. Credit: IQOQI Innsbruck/Harald Ritsch Some of the new quantum technologies ranging from extremely precise sensors to universal quantum computers require a large number of quantum bits in order to exploit the advantages of quantum physics. Ph...

It is commonly understood that the dinosaurs disappeared with a bang -- wiped out by a great meteorite impact on the Earth 66 million years ago. But their origins have been less understood. In a new study, scientists from MUSE -- Museum of Science, Trento, Italy, Universities of Ferrara and Padova, Italy and the University of Bristol show that the key expansion of dinosaurs was also triggered by a crisis -- a mass extinction that happened 232 million years ago. In the new paper, published today in  Nature Communications , evidence is provided to match the two events -- the mass extinction, called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and the initial diversification of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had originated much earlier, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, some 245 million years ago, but they remained very rare until the shock events in the Carnian 13 million years later. The new study shows just when dinosaurs took over by using detailed evidence from rock sequences in the Dolom...