05 Aug

Posted at 18:15h in Scoop.it

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, strong demand has grown for wearable and transparent displays that can be applied to various fields such as augmented reality (AR) and skin-like thin flexible devices. However, previous flexible transparent displays have posed real challenges to overcome, which are, among others, poor transparency and low electrical performance. To improve the transparency and performance, past research efforts have tried to use inorganic-based electronics, but the fundamental thermal instabilities of plastic substrates have hampered the high temperature process, an essential step necessary for the fabrication of high performance electronic devices.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.eurekalert.org

05 Aug

Posted at 18:12h in Scoop.it

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass.

 

Last month, about 60 physicists, along with a handful of philosophers and researchers from other branches of science, gathered at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, to debate this question at the Time in Cosmology conference. The conference was co-organized by the physicist Lee Smolin, an outspoken critic of the block-universe idea (among other topics). His position is spelled out for a lay audience in Time Reborn and in a more technical work, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, co-authored with the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who was also a co-organizer of the conference. In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is not now real and there can be no definite facts of the matter about the future.” What is real is “the process by which future events are generated out of present events,” he said at the conference.

 

Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, presents his work on the nature of time. Those in attendance wrestled with several questions: the distinction between past, present and future; why time appears to move in only one direction; and whether time is fundamental or emergent. Most of those issues, not surprisingly, remained unresolved. But for four days, participants listened attentively to the latest proposals for tackling these questions — and, especially, to the ways in which we might reconcile our perception of time’s passage with a static, seemingly timeless universe.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.quantamagazine.org