Blaze Tech Education

1.Bob Ebeling Bob Ebeling, one of the main engineers behind NASA's Challenger rocket, which exploded in 1986, revealed that after NASA would not heed his warnings against launching in the cold weather, he told his wife the night before the launch, "It's going to blow up. 2.  NASA has 2 satellites chasing each other around the Earth tracking the distance between themselves to measure gravitational anomalies. Their nicknames are Tom and Jerry. 3.  Not only did a private US company pay for the research for the inexpensive "space pen" NASA uses, but the pen worked so well that the Soviets bought it, too. 4.  The Minnesota Vikings' new stadium cost more than a NASA mission to Pluto. 5.  A NASA astronaut (Don L. Lind) waited 19 years to fly in space. He was selected in 1966 but was chosen for canceled missions, or as a backup for missions. He said, "I was backing up two of the most depressingly healthy people you can imagine." He finally f...

With Quantum Suicide, You'd Go On Living Forever The laws of the quantum world are so bizarre that if you follow them to their logical conclusions, you get some very strange results. That's why quantum physics is so full of thought experiments. You may have heard of Schrödinger's cat, for example: if you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison that has a 50/50 chance of killing the cat, the cat is both alive and dead—in a superposition of states, you might say—until you open the box. Well, try the quantum suicide thought experiment on for size: in that scenario, you're the cat—except you never die. Quantum Suicide, Explained The quantum suicide thought experiment was first posed by Max Tegmark in 1997, and it goes something like this: Imagine a gun is hooked up to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle every time the trigger is pulled. If the particle is measured as spinning clockwise, the gun will fire; if it's spinning counter-clo...

The Digital Universe Atlas is the world’s most complete 3D map of the universe, maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the Hayden Planetarium. When I watched this video, it was like all my problems just dissolved and seemed so trivial… “There are more stars in our Universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth.” There are 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and more than 100 billion galaxies in the Universe – maybe as many as 500 billion. If you multiply stars by galaxies, at the low end, you get 10 billion billion stars, or 10 sextillion stars in the Universe – a 1 followed by 22 zeros. At the high end, it’s 200 sextillion. These are mind bogglingly huge numbers. How do they compare to the number of grains of sand on the collective beaches of an entire planet? This type of sand measures about a half millimeter across. You could put 20 grains of sand packed in side-by-side to make a centimeter. 8000 grains in one cubic centimeter. I...