There are many types of fractals, both in two and three dimensions, but the most famous is the 2D Mandelbrot set, shown here. Past attempts to extend it to the third dimension have met with difficulty.There are many types of fractals, both in two and three dimensions, but the most... more
Quick restart of Big Bang machine stuns scientists
---ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 25 mins ago
GENEVA – Scientists moved Saturday to prepare the world's largest atom smasher for exploring the depths of matter after successfully restarting the $10 billion machine following more than a year of repairs.
The nuclear physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider were surprised that they could so quickly get beams of protons whizzing near the speed of light during the restart late Friday, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The machine was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault in September last year.
Some scientists had gone home early Friday and had to be called back as the project jumped ahead, Gillies said.
At a meeting early Saturday "they basically had to tear up the first few pages of their PowerPoint presentation which had outlined the procedures that they were planning to follow," he said. "That was all wrapped up by midnight. They are going through the paces really very fast."
The European Organization for Nuclear Research has taken the restart of the collider step by step to avoid further setbacks as it moves toward new scientific experiments — probably starting in January — regarding the makeup of matter and the universe.
CERN, as it is known, had hoped by 7 a.m. (0600 GMT) Saturday to get the beams to travel the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border, but things went so well Friday evening that they had achieved the operation seven hours earlier.
Praise from scientists around the world was quick. "First beam through the Atlas!" whooped an Internet message from Adam Yurkewicz, an American scientist working on the massive Atlas detector on the machine.
"I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running," said Dennis Kovar of the U.S. Department of Energy, which participates in the project.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has been re-started after a hiatus of 14 months.
Engineers working on the machine achieved a stable, circulating proton beam just after 2100 GMT on Friday.
The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel about 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.
The experiment is designed to smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.
The LHC has been shut down for repairs since an accident in September 2008.
Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will create similar conditions to those which were present moments after the Big Bang.
"It's great to see beam circulating in the LHC again," said Cern's director-general Rolf Heuer.
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”
(This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”
It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?
What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.
The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.
Scientists have ruled out various mundane explanations like atmospheric drag or the effect of deviations in Earth's shape. This has led some to propose that exotic new physics is involved, such as modifications of Einstein's general relativity, the currently accepted theory of gravity.
Comet-chaser clue
All eyes are now on Rosetta, which is set to swing by Earth again at 0745 GMT on 13 November. It is en route to a comet, and will travel around 2500 kilometres above our planet's surface at over 13 kilometres per second. If it gains an extra 1.1 millimetres per second relative to Earth, it would vindicate a formula that reproduces the anomalies seen so far.
The formula, published in 2008 by ex-NASA scientist John Anderson and his team, hints that Earth's rotation may be distorting space-time more than expected and thus influencing nearby spacecraft, though no one can explain how. General relativity predicts that spinning bodies distort the fabric of surrounding space, but the expected amount is far too small to explain the observed anomalies.
"I am definitely looking forward to this one," says Anderson, who is working with members of the Rosetta team to watch for an anomaly.
However, any anomaly will not be immediately obvious because the expected change is tiny. "I anticipate a few days or weeks before we know if an anomaly occurred," he says.
Curiously, Rosetta's 2007 flyby of Earth produced no anomaly. That might be because of its much higher altitude, about 5300 kilometres above Earth's surface, Anderson says. He suggests the effect may get weaker with distance from Earth: "There is most likely some dependence on distance – we just do not know what it is."
"Before you read this, realize that the truth isn’t always true and the false isn’t always false, that you must open your minds eye and follow your own soul’s judgment on actuality. This is my actuality that I am sharing with you…"
Did God create us, or did we create him? And if he created us then who him?
What happens when we die, and what of reincarnation and heaven or hell? Or nirvana and the seven Chakras? What of multiple and parallel universes?
To answer these questions and more, because I'm a very curious guy, I have been working on a philosophy paper full of my idea's and really want to know what current.com has to think.
It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time. But scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat.
Cern, the European particle physics laboratory, launched the LHC with much fanfare on 10 September last year. Physicists hope to use the collider to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.
But the collider, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9% of the speed of light, has been out of action for over a year after a helium leak caused it to be shut down on 19 September 2008, nine days after its start-up.
The particle accelerator, which is buried 100m underground near Geneva, is currently undergoing tests ahead of its proposed restart date later this month, but the testing process was stopped on Monday after the power supply to the collider was cut.
A Cern spokeswoman, Christine Sutton, said scientists had headed above ground to investigate when they made their discovery.
"The problem related to the high voltage supply," Sutton said. "We get mains voltage from the grid, and there was an interruption in the power supply, just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread."
Sutton said the bird and its bread were discovered at a compensating capacitor – one of the points where the mains electricity supply enters the collider from above ground.
The incident cut power to one of the collider's cooling plants, causing temperatures to rise by more than 3C in part of the tunnel.
Superconducting magnets within the LHC require a temperature of 1.9C above absolute zero (-273.15C) to steer, and ultimately collide, particles around the 16.8 mile (27km) circuit.
This latest incident, although far less severe, appears to bear some similarities to the fault that caused the LHC to shut for more than a year after its launch. On that occasion faulty wiring led to an electrical failure, causing a rise in temperature which led to helium, cooled to minus 271C, being released into the machine.
The 2008 fault damaged a 400 meter stretch of the collider and cost Cern £23m. Scientists had to redesign safety systems to prevent a repeat, a process which has taken over a year.
However in this latest incident the magnets were only stopped for three days, while the LHC could be recooled, and Sutton said the power cut did not pose a risk to either life or the future of the project.
"The beams [of protons] would have been dumped, we have very safe mechanisms that come instantly into play," she said.
"They deposit beams into a huge block of graphite which is cooled to take up the energy of the beam. This is something Cern has a lot of experience of, perhaps power cuts will usually be caused by a more obvious kind of interruption than a bird eating a baguette – particularly by lightning, for example, but these incidents will happen."
In physical cosmology, the Big Bang is the scientific theory of how the universe emerged from a tremendously dense and hot state about 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory is based on the observed Hubble's law redshift of distant galaxies that when taken together with the cosmological principle indicate that space is expanding according to the Friedmann-Lemaitre model of general relativity. Extrapolated into the past, these observations show that the universe has expanded from a state in which all the matter and energy in the universe was at an immense temperature and density. Physicists do not widely agree on what happened before this, although general relativity predicts a gravitational singularity.
From this model, George Gamow in 1948 was able to predict, at least qualitatively, the existence of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The CMB was discovered in the 1960s and further validated the Big Bang theory over its chief rival, the steady state theory.
History
The Big Bang theory developed from observations and theoretical considerations. Observationally, it was determined that most spiral nebulae were receding from Earth, but those who made the observation weren't aware of the cosmological implications, nor that the supposed nebulae were actually galaxies outside our own Milky Way.
"For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial. The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries. Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer." Talk from the TED conference in Oxford, England filmed July 2009"For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and... more
A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the speed of light—now accepted as one of the unchanging foundations of modern physics—were not constant?
Magueijo, a 40-year old native of Portugal, puts forth the heretical idea that in the very early days of the universe light traveled faster—an idea that if proven could dethrone Einstein and forever change our understanding of the universe. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology -an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation- which proposes that the speed of light in the early universe was of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value.
Solving the most intractable problems of cosmology in one brilliant leap, Magueijo’s varying-speed-of-light theory (VSL) would have stunning implications for space travel, black holes, time dilation, and string theory—and could help uncover the grand unified theory that ultimately eluded Einstein.
Joao Magueijo's radical ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Marueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein’s most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/second) -is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light.
Magueijo -who received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London- says: not so. His VSL theory presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent.
In his fist book, Faster than the Speed of Light, Magueijo leads laymen readers into the abstract realm of theoretical physics, based on several well known, as well as obscure, thinkers. The VSL model was first proposed by John Moffat, a Canadian scientist, in 1992. Magueijo carefully builds the foundations for a discussion of Big Bang cosmology, and then segues into the second half of the book, which is devoted to VSL theory.
Like most radical, potentially seminal thinkers, Magueijo shakes the foundations of the physics community, while irritating off many of his fellow scientists. VSL purposes to solve the problems at which all cosmologists are forever scratching: those inscrutable conceptual puzzles that surround the Big Bang. Currently many of these problems have no widely accepted solutions.
Could Einstein be wrong and Magueijo right? Is he a gadfly or a true, seminal genius? Time will tell.A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the... more
In his famous lecture on Life in the Universe, Stephen Hawking asks: "What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life, as we explore the galaxy?"
If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?"
Why hasn't the Earth been visited, and even colonized? Hawking asks. "I discount suggestions that UFO's contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant."
Hawking continues: "What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence."
We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution, Hawking emphasized, but it is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.
Intelligence, Hawking believes contrary to our human-centric existece, may not have any long-term survival value. In comparison the microbial world, will live on, even if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Hawking's main insight is that intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution: "It took a very long time, two and a half billion years, to go from single cells to multi-cell beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available, before the Sun blows up. So it would be consistent with the hypothesis, that the probability for life to develop intelligence, is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life."
Another possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form, and to evolve to intelligent beings, but at some point in their technological development "the system becomes unstable, and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion. I very much hope it isn't true."
Hawkling prefers another possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations, Hawking warns,"we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved" a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,' Hawking says "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."In his famous lecture on Life in the Universe, Stephen Hawking asks: "What are the... more
Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic black hole, soaking up radiation in the microwave regime like the astrophysical version sucks up matter and light.
Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, detailed their creation in a paper posted to the online physics preprint Web site arXiv.org last week. Cheng and Cui report engineering a thin cylinder 21.6 centimeters in diameter comprising 60 concentric rings of so-called metamaterials—composite structures specifically crafted to possess unique light-bending capabilities.
Unlike ordinary magnifying glasses, lenses made from metamaterials can have a negative index of refraction, meaning that refracted light bends to the same side of the "normal," the imaginary line perpendicular to the surface of the lens, as does the incident light. In the past few years, research groups around the world have harnessed metamaterials to create "superlenses" as well as for so-called invisibility cloaking, in which light is bent around an object as if it were not there.
The laboratory black hole is based on a similar approach—establishing a graded index of refraction to bend electromagnetic radiation inward to the cylinder's core. The core, in turn, is an efficient absorber of electromagnetic radiation. In one possible application, the core would be replaced with a "payload" such as a solar cell, with the outer layers funneling light inward. But Cui cautions that such an implementation is a long way off, requiring both that the device be modified to work at visible wavelengths and that the two-dimensional ring be extended to three dimensions.
Cheng and Cui's work represents the preliminary realization of a theoretical proposal put forth just this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alex Kildishev of Purdue University for a metamaterial structure that could absorb incident light from all directions.
Narimanov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, says that in the wake of his work with Kildishev, as well as the many studies into extreme light manipulation with metamaterials, he is not surprised to see the theoretical made real. "It's impressive, though, how quickly they have done it," he says.
John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London who was among the first to harness the unusual properties of metamaterials, says the new research "constitutes an entirely novel way of constructing an absorber, but at the same time keeping control of the absorbed radiation."
Nevertheless, Pendry notes, the analogy to black holes is imperfect. "Black holes absorb incident radiation and other objects, but the key point about real black holes is the prediction of Hawking radiation emitted by the black hole," he says, referring to physicist Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that is rooted both in general relativity and quantum mechanics. Were it observed, Hawking radiation would provide critical insight into the complicated boundary of the two theories. "A real black hole powers the radiation through its gravitational energy," Pendry says, "but the device reported in this paper has no internal source of energy and therefore cannot emit Hawking radiation."
Besides, the metamaterial black hole is not as ruthlessly voracious as the gravitational kind. Cui estimates that the demonstration black hole only absorbs 80 percent of the microwaves that hit it but that increasing the frequency of the incident light—to visible wavelengths, for instance—will increase absorption. Such an artificial black hole for optical light is in the works and might even be developed by the end of the year, Cui says—a prediction that may raise a few eyebrows in the field. "I think that the authors are rather optimistic in projecting into the visible region," Pendry says. "But I would be very happy to be proved wrong."Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic... more
There are 10^10^16 of them (but #1,000,443,163,313,125,343,132 is the evil one)
For some time, physicists have theorized about the existence of alternate universes. In fact, some models of physics require multiple universes, to explain some rarely observed phenomena. But, other than obvious ones like The Man In The High Castle Universe where the Nazis won WWII, the Earth-295 Age of Apocalypse Universe, and the Terran Empire "Mirror Mirror" Universe, just how many alternate universes are there? Well, some Stanford University physicists have answered that question, and the magic number is: 10^10^16 other realities.
The physicists, Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin, calculated the number by first going all the way back to the Big Bang. Linde and Vanchurin posit that the stellar organization and physics of our universe resulted from small perturbations in the otherwise uniform mass of matter and energy that existed milliseconds after the Big Bang. So, the number of possible variations of those perturbations represents the upper limit of possible alternate universes, or about 10^10^10^7 possible alternate universes.
However, because of the physical limits of the human brain, no individual could perceive more than 10^10^16 realities different from our own. And since the perspective of the viewer factors into the calculations (like time dilation in relativity), that's the number of possible alternate universes.
Of course, that's the total number of POSSIBLE alternate universes. The number of ACTUAL alternative universes actually depends on depends on how many boxes the Professor made.There are 10^10^16 of them (but #1,000,443,163,313,125,343,132 is the evil one)
For... more
No, CERN hasn't started slamming protons into each other at the Large Hadron Collider early. And no, a top secret warp drive hasn't been test-driven in Earth orbit (not that we know of anyway). In reality, an electromagnetic black hole has been fabricated in the laboratory for the first time.
Before you start getting concerned that the planet will soon be swallowed up by a rampaging singularity, the black hole in question isn't the gravitational behemoth you might find after a supernova or in the center of the Milky Way. This particular table-top black hole mimics the curvature of space-time, creating a fabricated event horizon that swallows electromagnetic radiation at microwave wavelengths.
The best thing is that this experiment isn't just for curiosity-sake, it has a practical application that could revolutionize future solar panel design, making the production of solar energy a lot more efficient than it is currently.
According to previous theoretical studies, mimicking the curvature of space-time around an analog black hole should be possible, guiding electromagnetic radiation around a cylindrical structure "consisting of a central core surrounded by a shell of concentric rings" (as explained by the New Scientist article). The theory is that a material of increasing permittivity (a characteristic of the medium electromagnetic radiation travels through, influencing the electrical component of the photons) could be used between the outer and inner surface of the cylinder. If the transition is smooth enough, and the permittivity eventually matches that of the cylinder core, the photons should be absorbed by the core, rather than reflected.
Although the physics sounds complicated (and I think I'd have to see the apparatus up-close to fully appreciate what is going on), the result is astonishing. What's more, theory has just been turned into a working model by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China. This is the world's first working black hole.
By designing a printed circuit board with an intricate pattern of "meta-materials" (i.e. a man-made material that can alter the characteristics of the passage of electromagnetic radiation), a steady permittivity gradient was created, ensuring the photons' absorption by the core. The physicists used microwaves, not optical light, in this set-up as the wavelength of microwaves is easier to manage (the wavelength of microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum is longer than optical light, so larger scale meta-material patterns could be made).
"When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core," says Cui. "The wave will not come out from the black hole."
However, the microwave energy has to go somewhere (this black hole is still bound by physical laws), and in Cui and Cheng's black hole, microwave energy is converted into heat.
This sounds like fun, but how can this technique be used in solar panels? Although optical light can't be manipulated so easily, Cui is confident that by the end of this year that he will be able to manufacture an optical black hole. If this can be done, then it isn't such a stretch of the imagination to think that a meta-material surface could replace traditional photovoltaic cells to literally suck sunlight into an array of tiny black holes printed in a circuit board.
Image: The experimental results of the black hole when the microwave beam is pointed at different angles from the central core (or "event horizon"). Credit: Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui.
Publication: An electromagnetic black hole made of metamaterials, arXiv:0910.2159v1 [physics.optics], via New Scientist.No, CERN hasn't started slamming protons into each other at the Large Hadron Collider... more
What if all the Large Hadron Collider's recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.
The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.
(more at link)What if all the Large Hadron Collider's recent woes are more than bad luck and... more
ESP Psychic Channeling by T. Chase on Dark Matter in Physics.
I attempted to channel on August 5 2009, psychic information on Dark Matter, the matter that is unseen but scientists believe it holds the galaxies together through its mass. Many theorists think it may be an undiscovered type of nuclear particle, that cannot be seen but gives mass to the galaxies.
Through ESP psychic channeling I will ask the entity his opinion on Dark Matter and its nature.
From T. Chase who is the channeller, and Revelation13.net. Copyright 2009 by T. Chase. From the Revelation13.net web site, also see Revelation13.net (Revelation 13: Prophecies of the Future, Astrology, Nostradamus, Bible Prophecy, the King James version English Bible Code).ESP Psychic Channeling by T. Chase on Dark Matter in Physics.
I attempted to channel... more
