NASA’s main projected aimed for this year included ” Launching Americans from U.S. soil, sending a new rover to Mars and continuing to prepare for human missions to the Moon are just a few of the things NASA has planned for 2020.“
We hardly think of Extraterrestrial life in terms other than life forms based on Earth, that is, we have a hard and non-flexible definition of life that is based on carbon-based organisms that we seldom look out for other forms of “life”. Extraterrestrial life could be of the form that we have never seen on Earth, made of elements that are not even available on Earth. Or in some cases, as the Labeled release experiment from 1970 showed, we could have Earth-like microbial life. It is always, I believe, wrong to generalize life only based on the only experiences we have had so far.
Look at what happens around us. A child who smiles, a nightingale that sings, an ily that opens: all move. Every shadow, even an immobile one, is due to moving light.
Every mountain is kept in place by moving electrons. Every star owes its formation and its shine to motion of matter and radiation. Also, the darkness of the night sky* is due to motion: it results from the expansion of space.
A few years ago, while testing a superconducting ceramic disc by rotating it above powerful electromagnets, Podkletnov noticed something extremely strange. Small objects above the disc seemed to lose weight, as if they were being shielded from the pull of Planet Earth. The weight reduction was small – around 2 percent – but nothing like this had ever been observed before. If the shielding effect could be refined and intensified, the implications would be immense. In fact, practical, affordable gravity nullification could change our lives more radically than the invention of the internal combustion engine.
You don’t have to be a scientist to get excited about breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Discoveries such as gravitational waves and the Higgs boson can inspire wonder at the complex beauty of the universe no matter how little you really understand them.
Do supermassive black holes have friends? The nature of galaxy formation suggests that the answer is yes, and in fact, pairs of supermassive black holes should be common in the universe.
