As a child, astronomer Jill Tarter would walk along the beaches of western Florida with her father and look up at the stars.

“I assumed, at that time, that along some beach on some planet, there would be a small creature walking with its dad and they would see our sun in their sky, and they might wonder whether anyone was there,” she tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. “But I never thought about it professionally until graduate school.”

[ read on ]

Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what’s known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a “moving mirror” cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. It’s horribly technical, but the end result is that Mustafa’s use of shaped silicon plates similar to those used in solar power cells results in a net force being delivered. A force, of course, means a push or a pull and in space this equates to a drive or engine.

[ read on @ gizmodo ]

The “dark universe” — the sum of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — is pretty much THE universe. Observations put the dark universe at about 95 percent of the total. That means our kind of matter and energy — the stuff you see, touch and experience every day — is a mere 1/20th of the cosmos.

If this were an election, we would have no say in the congress of creation. Remember that next time you see an image of a beautiful spiral galaxy. What you see is not the galaxy at all. what you see is some luminous chaff floating at the center of a vast, dark ocean. So it is not that the universe is big and we are small that robs us of significance. We are barely part of the universe at all. That is why we don’t matter.

[ link ]