MPJ

Perhaps it's a little weird for me to begin an article with a glimpse of a romantic movie, but I can't think of a cooler way to start today's topic. When I came up with the idea to write about "Camera Obscura", the first thought that came to my mind was a movie from 1997 called "Addicted to Love". Of all the movies in this genre, only a few are at the top of my mind, and this one, directed by Griffin Dunne with Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan in lead roles, is definitely the best one I remember. In short, Sam, an astronomer who, in an attempt to win back his girlfriend, turns his astronomical tools into specific spy equipment and, by using his dark-chambered pinhole camera, manages to observe what is happening in the building across the street in real time. What he used to achieve this is a principle behind Camera Obscura—a method to project the light through a small hole and create an image on the opposite wall inside a dark room, tent, or box. Something...

The knowledge and manufacture of lenses were known since the time of the old Greeks (the word optics came from the Greek word ὀπτικά, which means appearance) and later in the old ages with Egyptian scholar Alhazen, who made important contributions to the study of optics in general. In Europe, the lenses arrived around the 13th century and immediately triggered the invention of the first eyeglasses. However, one important discovery had to wait three centuries later in order to set off a wave of new discoveries in the field of astronomy. The invention was made by Hans Lippershey, the spectacle maker from the Dutch city of Middelburg in the Netherlands, who in October 1608 tried to apply for a patent for a tool he described as an aid capable of "seeing faraway things as though nearby" . It consisted of convex and concave lenses in a tube capable of magnifying objects three or four times. For strange reasons, the patent was rejected, but the new instrument immediately attracted a...

Up there, within our own solar system (and beyond), everything is in motion. There is no space object that is standing still. Ever since the big bang. Even the black holes that are capturing things into singularity points are moving across the universe along with their own neighborhood. The same is with Earth and its first neighbor, Mars. They are both orbiting the Sun in their own time schedules—Earth needs a full year to complete the cycle, while Mars, in its own distant orbit, needs 322 more days to do it. While both Earth and Mars travel around the Sun, sometimes they get closer to each other by the approximate 55 million kilometers (while the farthest distance between the two is about 400 million kilometers).

More and more I found myself troubled by following worldwide news on daily basis. It's not that I lack the free time to filter them all out. More, it is that recently I started feeling certain reluctance reading the headlines filled with conflicts, wars and civil fights, religious and cultural animosities, political and all the other disgusting affairs, political elections full of poorly casted actors, stories that you have to use superb power to read them between the lines, worldwide armed conflicts and warfare in foreign countries that I have not the slightest clue what initiated them all and why, mediocre journalism and sensationalism in the worst meaning of the word, etc... The list is endless and believe me, I'm not even referring to all those black chronicle stories with unappropriated articles where, i.e. somebody killed his parents with an ax or mass murder of cinema crowd by a lunatic in batman suit or worse. Or in today's case and what inspired me to revive this b...

Let me answer with what I think right away. To me, this is not one of those yes-or-no questions because it's impossible to tell. Simply put, the theory behind the question is most likely unprovable. Not from the inside anyway. 'Simulation Hypothesis' and the phrase 'non-playable characters' are concepts relatively new, born not that long ago, when digital computing came to be fast enough to produce graphically demanding multi-player games sophisticated enough to hint at this question and the probability that we might also be inside one of those simulations. And to dispute the question about the nature of reality is quite useless, because everything that surrounds us, no matter how strange we think it is, can also be real and not part of the code. Even if our reality were simulated, its origin would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove. By design, nothing inside the simulation could be able to see the lines of the code, only the outcome of its work. In...

I was no more than four years old when our car got stuck on a snowy hill decades ago. Everyone but me went outside to push to get us out of the frozen road. More people gathered from other cars to help each other, and soon everyone was engaged in a small rescue operation. That certainly didn't mean I didn't help—as well as others pushing the car from the outside, I did the same from the inside. From the back seat, I put my hands on the front and pushed hard. In my defense, deep down I knew that what I was doing was kind of weird and useless. At the time, I just didn't know why. I was just ashamed sitting alone and doing nothing. Well, like they say, with age comes wisdom, and now I know that what I did was physically impossible, just like in the case of Baron Münchhausen—when he got himself and his horse he was sitting on out of a swamp by pulling his own hair upwards. And just like in an old expression about an absurd and impossible thing one can do—if I were to pull the b...

It was commonly believed that ancient hunter-gatherers, both humans and Neanderthals, had a simple lifestyle in which most or all of their food was obtained by gathering from local sources or by hunting animals from their environment. We simply assumed that beside the meat they hunted, their diet consisted of only raw foods such as wild plants, edible insects, mushrooms, honey, or pretty much anything that was safe to eat. Well, according to the recent study performed by Ceren Kabukcu* and her team from the archaeobotanical department of the University of Liverpool, we couldn't be more wrong. Researchers analyzed charred food remains at two locations: the Shanidar Cave in Iraq and the Franchthi Cave in Greece. The food remains from the first cave originated from both Neanderthal hearths, 70,000 years old, and those from ancient humans thirty millennia later, and also those from Greece consumed some 12,000 years ago by our modern ancestors under microscopic examination reveal th...

It's amazing how different people react to the same thing. Consider the famous question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" What do you see inside such glass when you spot it on the table? The water or the air? This is, of course, not a school-grade sort of question. Actually, there is no right or wrong answer here. There's no definite reason to consider anyone thinking that the glass is half full to be overly optimistic or those who see the emptiness of the glass to be unreasonably realistic. It is just a point of view and nothing more. But it tells a bit about your character, or how Carl Jung, a well-known Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, defined it—your personality type. The point of inquiries like this one is simply in the fact that if we ask ourselves enough questions, they would have the potential to unveil our personality type fully, or to a high degree of accuracy. However, we would need to be careful in both selecting the questions and defining all ...

More than two hundred years have passed since Thomas Young performed the famous double-slit experiment as a demonstration of the wave behavior of visible light, and still its revelation has puzzled our sanity ever since. In short, if we shoot a beam of light at a panel with two small slits (less than a millimeter apart), the photons—elementary particles that light is made of—have to figure out how to get through the slits to radiate out the other side. If they are truly particles, like in the macro world, they would project a solid image of two piles on the background wall behind the slits. If they travel similar to the waves, like water does in the macro world, the image would resemble a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles leave a mark on the wall. Thanks to the outcome of the experiment, we know that light is capable of doing both. It always travels in a wavelike fashion, even if we shoot photons in a row towards slits, one aft...

It's hard to create a list of all the scientists in the history of mathematics and physics who better applied theoretical knowledge to the hardware that ultimately worked and moved the world to the next step of existence. But if we try to do it, John von Neumann would be among the top five in the list of scientific GOATS. ⁣ Probably the best of all of his contributions is in the history of computer science; along with Arthur Burks and Herman Goldstine, he published a paper* in 1946 that practically described the architecture of modern computers as we are familiar with today. However, what he will be most remembered for is not a machine in existence today but one that is still just a theoretical and basically only an idea. Not yet, anyway. In short, the design of a von Neumann probe or a self-replicating spacecraft is not that far-fetched from all that we know today, and if humanity sees its survival on Earth as difficult in the future (to say the least) and tries to become...

"Seeing me confused, Phil paused to give me more time to reflect. To be honest, I couldn't fathom how anybody would react to all this. Literally in just couple of minutes I have learned the origin of life and the entire structure of, well, everything. And yet, at that moment I felt like more is coming. Like the truth only started to unveil and I am about to understand the fate of what was undoubtedly beyond my comprehension.. The fate of the universe.. No less." Revelation of Life - part three Choosing Planets Revelation of Life - prequel To the loving memory of my father November 6, 2020 Revelation of Life part four Thea Seeing me confused, Phil paused to give me more time to reflect. To be honest, I couldn't fathom how anybody would react to all this. Literally in just a couple of minutes, I have learned the origin o...

"After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words. After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words." Revelation of Life - part two Is Life a Zero-Player Game? Revelation of Life - part four Revelation of Life part three Divulgence After the longest minute of my life, I finally regained my senses and rationality, and more importantly, my ability to speak. Well, sort of. At the moment, all I came up with were a few incoherent words. "I... I'm... also glad to... meet you. Phil?" The initial fear and tremble started to fade o...