What remains unchanged over time?

What remains unchanged over time?

Things that are convenient are not changed or investigated! That's how they remain constant, timelessly...

Well, timelessly yes, but just think, how timeless does something sound that has been convenient and therefore has remained unchanged for 5000 years? We have a system of subdividing time, which if you think about it, if you go to investigate it, you might find it a bit odd... We divide the day into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, the minute into 60 seconds. "Why so?" One might say. And what's more, who told us to do it that way? Since when do we have this system?

So there was once a civilisation, the Sumerians, whose empire did not last long. The map shows their territory. They lived in Mesopotamia before the Babylonians. The Sumerians, first of all the Mesopotamian peoples, had a useful - as it turned out - habit of looking intently at the sky. They also had another useful habit; in their measurements they used the hexadecimal system (multiples of 6) and not the decimal system (multiples of 10).

The number 60 was, for the Sumerian astronomers, a magical number, as both the movements they observed in the sky and their everyday life were expressed by this number. On the one hand, the divisors of 60 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 and serve the times of the observed celestial movements; on the other hand, the Sumerian calendar year was an exact multiple, i.e. it had 360 days. As for the 24-hour day, this was due to the fact that sundials measured hours during the day but not at night. The system of measuring the hours of night - during which the sun does not exist, but stars do - was based on 36 star groups called 'decans'. These decans divided night-time into 12 hours which, combined with the 12 hours of day-time, gave the 24-hour day.

Since the above Sumerian calculations have proved to be quite accurate and convenient, for 5000 years, no one has any reason to make any changes! The Sumerian method has therefore proved to be constant over time!

What about Lateral Torsional Buckling (LTB) of our structures?

 

What about Lateral Torsional Buckling (LTB) of our structures?

Lateral Torsional Buckling (LTB) is the deformation experienced by a beam with generally unrenstrained ends.

Causes: The applied loads away from its longitudinal axis. It then undergoes both lateral displacement and bending.

Steel beams with "unrestrained" ends are beams whose compression flange is free to move (or shift) in the lateral direction and also to bend. If we are referring to a simply supported beam, then its compression flange is, of course, the upper flange. As this flange deforms laterally, the flange in tension tends to hold the beam in a straight configuration and thus generates "restoring" forces due to the lateral bending of the beam.

However, these forces alone are not sufficient to hold the beam in a straight configuration. The resistance of the beam to LTB is therefore determined by both the restoring forces and the lateral component of the tensile forces in the tensioned flange of the beam.

Design Provisions: The desired restraint can be fully achieved by the composite action of a concrete deck. Partial restraint can be achieved by the use of intermediate beams.  Sufficiently sized and appropriately placed bracing may also be used.

The links between philosophy, scientific freedom and democracy

 The links between philosophy, scientific freedom and democracy

The links between philosophy, scientific freedom and democracy.

Healthy democracies need critical minds. By extension, healthy human communities also need critical minds, that is, they need everyone's point of view and what will then be their goal to be a synthesis of views. And let us bear in mind that in any synthesis the components may not necessarily have equal weights. It is on the basis of this principle that the Socratic Principle (Socrates 470-399 BC, was one of the most important ancient Greek philosophers with a timeless global impact) on the weight of the opinion of the experts is introduced. 

If this is the case, let us consider in how many small or larger human communities (e.g., organized political or social groups at the local or supra-local level, etc.) that we know of, around us, there is acceptance and appreciation of critical minds. In other words, how many of the human communities we know are governed by freedom and democracy? 

Generating prime numbers

 Generating prime numbers

 
It is known that over the centuries, some people have been involved in discovering algorithms for generating prime numbers. One would not say that it is a difficult thing, as long as you evaluate such an algorithm mainly in terms of its usefulness.
 
An algorithm must be evaluated in terms of its application goals and also over time in terms of the applications for which it has proven itself suitable. Thus, the complexity of an algorithm cannot be a criterion for its evaluation.
 
For example, with regard to the generation of prime numbers, one could, first and foremost and rightly, refer to the Sieve of Eratosthenes or the model: y = 6 * x ± 1 where x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ... and possibly some other algorithms.
 
But let's look at a new proposal of mine for a prime number generation algorithm, which is obviously easy to program, but also seems to have potential in practical applications of quantum mechanics and quantum computing, where, as we know, what we actually perceive (via classical physics) that is, with bits being counted as "0" or "1," and only one of the four possible states can exist at any time in space, in a quantum superposition state, all four of the possible states can co-exist in time and space simultaneously.
 
So, there is an algorithm that can generate prime numbers, essentially as the integer part of decimals resulting from an iterative inversion process, starting with the irrational decimal 0.43233208718590286890... and then all the products of this inversion process. See in the picture what I mean...

The Bauhaus movement and its influence today

The Bauhaus movement and its influence today

The Bauhaus was essentially a cultural movement. It began as an expression of a German school of technology in Weimar and evolved into an approach that balanced design and function. Its ideal of 'form follows function', which is still popular today, was propagated by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Crucially, this approach was encouraged by mass production, not constrained by it.

The Bauhaus was driven by the creation of beauty through intentional utilitarian design, uncompromised by mass production. Mass production is perceived as a framework that can encompass art. It is characterised by a tendency towards simplicity and utility. In this sense, it always avoided the traps of decoration and considered that any media could be an interface for the Bauhaus approach.

These basic principles remain relevant today, at least for those involved in the design of elements of the anthropogenic environment, even in digital fields, i.e. with regard to the design of applications or services.

What may this year's Nobel Prizes in Physics mean?

 

What may this year's Nobel Prizes in Physics mean?

 

Who and why were they awarded?

Have you heard? The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger.

 

All three laureates received the prize because of their fundamental contributions to quantum mechanics, relating to experiments with entangled/coupled, photons. These experiments showed that information can be transmitted directly over infinite distances, known as quantum teleportation.

 

What is Bell's theorem?

The prize winners' experiments follow what is known as Bell's theorem. In simple terms, according to this theorem, what is attempted is to measure whether quantum mechanics approximates Newtonian mechanics, which is based on events that occur on a local scale (e.g. two balls colliding, after the collision they only affect each other) or whether, for example, the particles used in an experiment can be influenced by other particles that may be located at extremely large distances.

 

Bell's theorem argues that if certain predictions of quantum theory are correct, then our world is non-local. "Non-local" means that there are interactions between events that are far apart in space and very close together in time. What does this mean? Quite simply it means that if the quantum approximation is correct then events are connected even by signals moving at the speed of light. This theorem was proved in 1964 by John Stewart Bell and over the last few decades has been the subject of extensive analysis, debate and development by both experimental and theoretical physicists. The relevant predictions of quantum theory were first convincingly confirmed by the experiment of Aspect and his collaborators in 1982. Since then they have been confirmed many times. In the context of the predictions of Bell's theorem, the experiments prove that our world is non-local. This conclusion is very surprising, given that non-locality seems - without being 100% sure - not to be predicted by Einstein's theory ofrelativity.

 

Is quantum non-locality incompatible with Einstein's relativity?

Here is an important issue, then! Is non-locality incompatible with fundamental relativity? To attempt to answer this question one has to face a significant difficulty: What does it mean that a theory can be characterized as fundamentally relativistic? It may seem strange that such a difficulty exists for scientists today. For example, one might think that Maxwell's Einsteinian electromagnetism is a fundamentally relativistic theory, whereas Newtonian mechanics is not. Obviously, for many theories of physics it is indeed straightforward to label them as fundamentally relativistic or not. However, there is a way to show that it is not easy to precisely formulate the notion of a "fundamentally relativistic theory", and as far as theories of quantum phenomena are concerned things are not clear; no scientist today seems to know what a fundamentally relativistic theory should look like in the quantum world.

 

Conclusion

We may summarily say that it remains unclear exactly what "fundamental relativity" means or requires. Therefore, whether Bell's theorem and related experiments can be compatible with fundamental relativity remains largely an open question and no one, even after this year's Nobel Prizes in Physics, could say with certainty that non-locality is incompatible with Einsteinian relativity.