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On Superluminal neutrinos
Four days ago a rumour started circulating in the comments at Resonaances that some �6.1 sigma� signal of new physics had been seen at CERN. I reported it in an update on the Seminar Watch post. There had been a seminar titled �Seminar DG� which was listed on indico and removed the day before it was due. The rumour confirmed that this meeting was rescheduled to Friday but as an update on OPERA, the neutrino experiment which a couple of years ago saw its first tau neutrino. The claim now is that they have measured the speed of muon neutrinos and got a result faster than the speed of light!
This is of course a crazy idea because if true it would violate everything we think we know about causality. Even if neutrinos are hard to detect it should be possible to use them to send information into the past if this result holds up. That does not sound very likely (but I am now setting up a neutrino beam to send the news back in time so that it was actually me who leaked the story) .
Hypothetical superluminal particles are known as tachyons and they always move faster than light because they have imaginary valued mass, but quantum field theories for tachyons have terrible problems. Aside from the causality issues, the vacuum becomes unstable because you can create neutrino pairs with negative energy out of nothing. You would need a very unconventional variation of relativistic quantum field theory to stop the universe degenerating into an instant burst of neutrinos, and we don�t have that.
However this is not the first time that superluminal neutrinos have been reported. Some people claimed that observations of neutrinos arriving before gamma rays from supernovae implied that they are superluminal see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9712265 . Other people just say that the neutrinos were created before the gamma rays. In fact some �crazy� people believed in superluminal neutrinos well before that. Early attempts to measure the squared mass of the neutrino in the 1990s always seemed to give negative results I have not had time to look back at that old ideas but it may be time to do that.
Experiments at CERN Confirmed a six sigma result that prove superluminosity. Back in 2011.
Source: http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/ca...e-superluminal/
Fast forward to 2015--
The souped-up LHC will smash together protons with combined energies of 13 teraelectronvolts � versus the 8 teraelectronvolts of the previous run: the extra energy will be capable of creating particles that were not possible to make before. Also, this summer, a WIMP detector called the XENON1T experiment, based under Gran Sasso in central Italy is scheduled to go live. It will have a sensitivity 50 times greater than LUX�s, says XENON1T spokesperson Rafael Lang, a particle physicist at Columbia University in New York.
One possibility is neutrinos, particles that interact weakly with other types of matter, a requirement for dark matter. The properties of the three known types of neutrino are not quite right for dark matter. But a hypothetical fourth type � called the �sterile� neutrino, because it would interact even more weakly than its cousins � could be a suitable candidate.
In December 2014, the European Space Agency�s Planck observatory released a map of ancient radiation from the early Universe that all but ruled out the existence of a sterile neutrino with a small mass like the other neutrinos, as did results from the Daya Bay neutrino experiment in China�s Guangdong province.
But back in February 2014, astrophysicist Esra B�lb�l of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her collaborators reported a mysterious photon signal coming from 73 galaxy clusters (E. Bulbul et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2301; 2014). The photons� wavelength was consistent with the decay of sterile neutrinos that weigh about 7 kiloelectronvolts � at least 30,000 times heavier than ordinary neutrinos.
Their results, posted on the arXiv repository, unleashed a flurry of proposed mechanisms by which dark matter could have produced the signal. Super-heavy neutrinos would still be light compared with WIMPs. According to conventional theories, this would make them �warm� and they would not be a good fit with models of the Universe�s evolution. But Abazajian says that the early Universe could have produced cold heavy neutrinos, and that these particles could fit with the current best models of galaxy formation, in some cases better than WIMPs (see, for example, K. N. Abazajian Phys. Rev. Lett.112,161303; 2014). �The WIMP miracle does have a theoretical nicety to it,� says Abazajian � but, he adds, a heavy neutrino solves many of the same problems as WIMPs do.
Evidence for a heavy neutrino �would be really revolutionary�, Dodelson says. So far, however, teams that have attempted to reproduce B�lb�l�s result have had mixed success.
Another WIMP alternative is the axion, a hypothetical particle proposed in the 1970s. Axions would spontaneously transmute into photons in a magnetic field, providing a means to detect them. Although a few experiments have failed, physicists led by Leslie Rosenberg of the University of Washington in Seattle is currently upgrading the sensitivity of its Axion Dark Matter Experiment. The team says that it will make or break the case for the axion.
http://www.nature.com/news/crunch-t...-matter-1.16757
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| Originally posted by Lagrangian The first realistic attempt to analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations from the point of view of the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics was by Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev. He based his ranking of possible civilizations on the basis of total energy output which could be quantified and used as a guide to explore the dynamics of advanced civilizations: Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet. Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and generates about 10 billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization. Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about 10 billion time the energy output of a Type II civilization. A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization. A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of solar flares. A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of billions of stars. http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-...stellar-travel/ |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Lagrangian On Superluminal neutrinos Four days ago a rumour started circulating in the comments at Resonaances that some �6.1 sigma� signal of new physics had been seen at CERN. I reported it in an update on the Seminar Watch post. There had been a seminar titled �Seminar DG� which was listed on indico and removed the day before it was due. The rumour confirmed that this meeting was rescheduled to Friday but as an update on OPERA, the neutrino experiment which a couple of years ago saw its first tau neutrino. The claim now is that they have measured the speed of muon neutrinos and got a result faster than the speed of light! This is of course a crazy idea because if true it would violate everything we think we know about causality. Even if neutrinos are hard to detect it should be possible to use them to send information into the past if this result holds up. That does not sound very likely (but I am now setting up a neutrino beam to send the news back in time so that it was actually me who leaked the story) . Hypothetical superluminal particles are known as tachyons and they always move faster than light because they have imaginary valued mass, but quantum field theories for tachyons have terrible problems. Aside from the causality issues, the vacuum becomes unstable because you can create neutrino pairs with negative energy out of nothing. You would need a very unconventional variation of relativistic quantum field theory to stop the universe degenerating into an instant burst of neutrinos, and we don�t have that. However this is not the first time that superluminal neutrinos have been reported. Some people claimed that observations of neutrinos arriving before gamma rays from supernovae implied that they are superluminal see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9712265 . Other people just say that the neutrinos were created before the gamma rays. In fact some �crazy� people believed in superluminal neutrinos well before that. Early attempts to measure the squared mass of the neutrino in the 1990s always seemed to give negative results I have not had time to look back at that old ideas but it may be time to do that. Experiments at CERN Confirmed a six sigma result that prove superluminosity. Back in 2011. Source: http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/ca...e-superluminal/ Fast forward to 2015-- The souped-up LHC will smash together protons with combined energies of 13 teraelectronvolts � versus the 8 teraelectronvolts of the previous run: the extra energy will be capable of creating particles that were not possible to make before. Also, this summer, a WIMP detector called the XENON1T experiment, based under Gran Sasso in central Italy is scheduled to go live. It will have a sensitivity 50 times greater than LUX�s, says XENON1T spokesperson Rafael Lang, a particle physicist at Columbia University in New York. One possibility is neutrinos, particles that interact weakly with other types of matter, a requirement for dark matter. The properties of the three known types of neutrino are not quite right for dark matter. But a hypothetical fourth type � called the �sterile� neutrino, because it would interact even more weakly than its cousins � could be a suitable candidate. In December 2014, the European Space Agency�s Planck observatory released a map of ancient radiation from the early Universe that all but ruled out the existence of a sterile neutrino with a small mass like the other neutrinos, as did results from the Daya Bay neutrino experiment in China�s Guangdong province. But back in February 2014, astrophysicist Esra B�lb�l of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her collaborators reported a mysterious photon signal coming from 73 galaxy clusters (E. Bulbul et al. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2301; 2014). The photons� wavelength was consistent with the decay of sterile neutrinos that weigh about 7 kiloelectronvolts � at least 30,000 times heavier than ordinary neutrinos. Their results, posted on the arXiv repository, unleashed a flurry of proposed mechanisms by which dark matter could have produced the signal. Super-heavy neutrinos would still be light compared with WIMPs. According to conventional theories, this would make them �warm� and they would not be a good fit with models of the Universe�s evolution. But Abazajian says that the early Universe could have produced cold heavy neutrinos, and that these particles could fit with the current best models of galaxy formation, in some cases better than WIMPs (see, for example, K. N. Abazajian Phys. Rev. Lett.112,161303; 2014). �The WIMP miracle does have a theoretical nicety to it,� says Abazajian � but, he adds, a heavy neutrino solves many of the same problems as WIMPs do. Evidence for a heavy neutrino �would be really revolutionary�, Dodelson says. So far, however, teams that have attempted to reproduce B�lb�l�s result have had mixed success. Another WIMP alternative is the axion, a hypothetical particle proposed in the 1970s. Axions would spontaneously transmute into photons in a magnetic field, providing a means to detect them. Although a few experiments have failed, physicists led by Leslie Rosenberg of the University of Washington in Seattle is currently upgrading the sensitivity of its Axion Dark Matter Experiment. The team says that it will make or break the case for the axion. http://www.nature.com/news/crunch-t...-matter-1.16757 |
A few years ago, the first lump of plutonium scientists ever made on Earth was removed from display in Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science and then forgotten about. Berkeley physicists think they've finally found it again�thankfully before it got thrown out as radioactive waste.
This precious lump of plutonium dates back to 1941. Plutonium doesn't exist naturally on Earth, except in trace amounts. So to study plutonium, scientists first had to make it. Berkeley physicist Glenn Seaborg got access to a newly built cyclotron, where he and his collaborators bombarded uranium with neutrons. The material then decays into the new element of plutonium.
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| It turns out that plutonium created in a cyclotron is very different from most plutonium, which is created inside nuclear reactors and then separated from spent nuclear fuel. That's because this stuff always contains another isotope, plutonium-241. This is a half-life of just over 14 years and decays into americium-241. So samples of plutonium from nuclear reactors, always contain americium-241 in amounts that grow over time. What's more, Am-241 in turn decays producing gamma rays with an energy of 59 kiloelectron volts. |
source: http://www.dw.de/zwergplanet-ceres-hat-nun-einen-begleiter/a-18217609
Google Translate: Prior to around 4.5 billion years ago our solar system looked very different than it is today. Instead of the eight planets initially a disk of gas and dust turned a cloud, and later to the sun just created. Under the influence of gravity, irregularly shaped lumps of matter clenched together, eventually reached a diameter of a few kilometers. By collisions these lumps grew into so-called protoplanetary.
Only in the environment of Jupiter is another development took place. Whose gravity prevented here the formation of planets. The newly born planetary system was changed by the influence of the sun and on. The heat and the bombardment of charged particles, flinging our central star into space, lost the inner planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars their volatile gas components. Back remained solid body. While the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and its moons were rich in water. The space probe DAWN to the researchers provide new insight into how this process between the planets in the inner and in the outer solar system once took place.
"Osmylated DNA, a novel concept for sequencing DNA Using Nanopores"
| quote: |
| Osmylation is the addition of osmium tetroxide bipyridine across the C5�C6 double bond of the pyrimidines. Osmylation adds almost 400% mass to the reactive base, creates a sterically and electronically notably different molecule, labeled 1, compared to the unreactive purines, labeled 0. If osmylated DNA were successfully sequenced, the result would be a sequence of osmylated pyrimidines (1), and purines (0), and not of the actual nucleobases. To solve this problem we studied the osmylation reaction with short oligos and with M13mp18, a long ssDNA, developed a UV�vis assay to measure extent of osmylation, and designed two protocols. Protocol A uses mild conditions and yields |
"...The dwarf, known as Reticulum 2, is about 98,000 light-years from Earth, making it one of the Milky Way�s closest discovered satellites. But that�s not its most exciting feature. The mini-galaxy seems to be emitting a strong gamma ray signal, a research team concludes in a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. That�s surprising for a dwarf, since they tend to be mostly devoid of the objects that typically produce gamma rays. While it�s too early to say for sure what the source of the gamma rays is, the authors have tentatively come to a very intriguing conclusion: dark matter annihilation."
"The study�s authors think that Reticulum 2�s gamma rays are likely produced by colliding dark matter particles. The strong gamma ray signal indicates that it�s unlikely to be the result of other known gamma ray-producing objects, like black holes and pulsars. �Something in the direction of this dwarf galaxy is emitting gamma rays,� said Alex Geringer-Sameth, a postdoctoral research associate in CMU�s Department of Physics and the paper�s lead author. �There�s no conventional reason this galaxy should be giving off gamma rays, so it�s potentially a signal for dark matter.�
"And there�s no doubt that such a gamma ray signal could imply dark matter. �If you see gamma rays in a dwarf galaxy, it would be a good way to make a case that you are seeing dark matter,� Neal Weiner, a particle physicist from New York University who studies dark matter, told the New York Times."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015...ome-from-wimps/
Engineers used the original material, called two-dimensional carbon phenolic, in the past on the space shuttle to protect it from the rocket flames during launch, on planetary exploration probes and on the 10-inch disc-shaped compression pads on NASA�s Orion spacecraft, which flew in space on its first flight test in December 2014.
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| NASA�s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, in collaboration with Bally Ribbon Mills in Bally, Pennsylvania, and San Diego Composites in San Diego, California, for NASA�s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). STMD funded the incremental maturation of the novel technology from investigation of the basic concept through proof-of-concept performance testing in the severe thermal environment expected for Orion's future missions. The pads are wedged between the crew module and the service module of Orion to support the extreme forces the crew module experiences on launch and ascent into space. Each pad supports approximately 55,000 pounds. That�s the equivalent of withstanding the force of 16 elephants jumping on Orion at the same time. |
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| Arc jets simulate the extreme heat and pressure spacecraft experience when entering a planet�s atmosphere at extreme speeds. The arc jets fire electricity at air particles so fast the particles turn into supersonic plasma. This gives engineers controlled test data on the ground before flight. In arc jet tests of 3D-MAT, the material withstood impressively high heat fluctuations, temperatures and pressures � consistently better than carbon phenolic, which cracked under the same conditions. After three years of STMD funding, the team is ready to hand over their research and development efforts to the Orion program for its next mission's development and flight hardware. "When we first started woven thermal protection systems technology, we felt it had the potential to significantly impact future NASA missions by changing heat shield development from a challenge to overcome into a mission-enabling component,� said Ames' Ethiraj Venkatapathy, chief technologist for the Entry Systems and Technologies Division. �In less than 36 months, we are celebrating this technological achievement and delivering a highly developed, multi-functional material with superior performance to meet Orion's needs as well as to address the critical needs of NASA�s journey to Mars.� |
Scientists know that dark matter exists because it has a gravitational effect on visible objects made of ordinary matter. And they know that there is a lot of it; dark matter is thought to be about five times as prevalent as other matter in the universe. Yet, dark matter has managed to evade detection so far.
Similar to normal matter, dark matter is commonly believed to be composed of particles. Scientists� current best guess is that these particles are WIMPs: weakly interacting massive particles. These particles would pass right through ordinary matter. That�s because they would interact only through the weak nuclear force�which works only over short distances�and gravity.
It could be that WIMPs are their own antimatter partners. That means that if one dark matter particle meets another dark matter particle, the two could annihilate, leaving behind a host of lighter particles and gamma rays.
It could also be that unstable dark matter particles produce gamma rays as they decay.
The trick will be distinguishing gamma rays produced by dark-matter annihilations from those generated by numerous other sources in the Universe. To differentiate between the two, researchers have established a set of four guidelines:
Supersymmetry predicts that WIMP annihilations will create gamma rays of particular wavelengths, distinct from those generated by other sources such as black holes or supernovae.
Dark-matter annihilations should produce gamma rays exclusively, ruling out interactions that involve other forms of radiation.
These signals should appear to GLAST not as point sources, but as large patches in the sky - some nearly twice as big as the full Moon.
These streams of gamma rays should be continuous, a marked difference from the fleeting explosions of gamma-ray bursts, which last only a few milliseconds to several minutes.
If scientists find a signal with all of these characteristics, chances are good that they have found a source of WIMP annihilation.
Dark matter annihilations could also produce almost massless particles called neutrinos. Experiments that search for signs of dark matter in neutrinos use the sun as a dark matter detector. WIMPs could get gravitationally trapped in the center of the massive star. Once the density of WIMPs there became large enough, they could annihilate and produce neutrinos.
Scientists use observatories such as ANTARES under the Mediterranean Sea, the Lake Baikal Neutrino Telescope in Russia, Super-Kamiokande in Japan and IceCube at the South Pole to look for such an event.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/science/dark_matter.html
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/april-2015/seeing-dark-matter-without-seeing
From Wikipedia:
Functioning tractor beams based on solenoidal modes of light were demonstrated in 2010 by physicists at New York University. [34] The spiraling intensity distribution in these non-diffracting beams tends to trap illuminated objects and thus helps to overcome the radiation pressure that ordinarily would drive them down the optical axis. Orbital angular momentum transferred from the solenoid beam's helical wavefronts then drives the trapped objects upstream along the spiral. Both Bessel-beam and solenoidal tractor beams are being considered for applications in space exploration by NASA.[35]
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractor_beam
Laser physicists have built a tractor beam that can repel and attract objects, using a hollow laser beam that is bright around the edges and dark in its centre.
It is the first long-distance optical tractor beam and moved particles one fifth of a millimetre in diameter a distance of up to 20 centimetres, around 100 times further than previous experiments.
"Demonstration of a large scale laser beam like this is a kind of holy grail for laser physicists," said Professor Wieslaw Krolikowski, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering.
The new technique is versatile because it requires only a single laser beam. It could be used, for example, in controlling atmospheric pollution or for the retrieval of tiny, delicate or dangerous particles for sampling.
The researchers can also imagine the effect being scaled up.
Source:
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/physicists-build-reversible-tractor-beam
Continued.
Continued....
From wiki:
On 'Alien Abduction Phenomena'
Due to a paucity of objective physical evidence, most scientists and mental health professionals dismiss the phenomenon as "deception, suggestibility (fantasy-proneness, hypnotizability, false memory syndrome), personality, sleep paralysis, psychopathology, psychodynamics [and] environmental factors".
Again from wiki on Tractor Beams
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractor_beam
According to Peter Sturrock�s report of findings by the panel of scientists assembled to review the physical evidence of UFOs, one of the reports of apparent gravitational and/or inertial effects was the Mansfield, Ohio, Case of October 18, 1973.[41] Chapter 29 of Sturrock�s report included the entire investigative report by Jennie Zeidman, former Project Blue Book secretary for J. Allen Hynek. Zeidman�s reports had been prepared for the Center for UFO Studies.[42][43] Michael D. Swords presented the Mansfield, Ohio, Case to Sturrock�s panel of scientists. According to the testimony of the flight crew and independent ground witnesses, a green light beam from a cigar-shaped UFO had caused an U.S. Army Reserve helicopter to ascend 2,000 feet while its flight controls were in the descend position. Attempts to debunk the early reports of the incident were effectively refuted by researchers.[44] The Mansfield, Ohio, Case has been described as one of the most amazing UFO reports.[45]
Jenny Randles� summary of the Mansfield, Ohio, Case concluded a tractor beam had been used to cause the rapid ascension of the helicopter.[46] She compared that case with a February 12, 1979, incident that had been investigated by the Yorkshire UFO Society. According to that account, a British Rail worker was transported six feet into the air by a green light beam to avoid potential harm from a passing Harrogate to Leeds train.[citation needed]
Jemgum, GermanyEdit
The compilation of European cases by Illobrand von Ludwiger, Director, Mutual UFO Network � Central European Section, Incorporated (MUFON-CES), included the sightings of two cigar-shaped UFO�s emitting light beams, that seemed to guide the behavior of smaller UFOs.[47] Witnesses in Jemgum, a small village in the northeast corner of Germany, saw the objects through binoculars on March 7, 1977. MUFON-CES investigated the reports and assessed the case with a 99.99% reliability index (a definition of Olsen�s reliability index was given in Appendix A of Ludwiger�s book).
Ok so the physics is right but not the premise?
being "abducted" is a very personal experience, an amazing experience.
from wikipedia:
Water on Mars exists today almost exclusively as ice, with a small amount present in the atmosphere as vapour.[1] The only place where water ice is visible at the surface is at the north polar ice cap.[2] Abundant water ice is also present beneath the permanent carbon dioxide ice cap at the Martian south pole and in the shallow subsurface at more temperate latitudes.[3][4][5][6] More than five million cubic kilometers of ice have been identified at or near the surface of modern Mars, enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 35 meters.[7] Even more ice is likely to be locked away in the deep subsurface.[8]
This is the Bering Glacier in Alaska. I've seen this up close!
Some liquid water may occur transiently on the Martian surface today but only under certain conditions.[9][10][11] No large standing bodies of liquid water exist because the atmospheric pressure at the surface averages just 600 pascals (0.087 psi)�about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure�and because the global average temperature is far too low (210 K (−63 �C)), leading to either rapid evaporation (sublimation) or rapid freezing. Before about 3.8 billion years ago, Mars may have had a denser atmosphere and higher surface temperatures,[12][13] allowing vast amounts of liquid water on the surface,[14][15][16] [17][18] possibly including a large ocean[19][20][21][22] that may have covered one-third of the planet.[23][24][25] Water has also apparently flowed across the surface for short periods at various intervals more recently[when?] in Mars' history.[26][27][28] On December 9, 2013, NASA reported that, based on evidence from the Curiosity rover studying Aeolis Palus, Gale Crater contained an ancient freshwater lake which could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life.[29][30]
from wiki:
It is now widely believed that ice accumulated when Mars' orbital tilt was very different from the present (the axis the planet spins on has considerable "wobble," meaning its angle changes over time).[35][36][37] A few million years ago, the tilt of the axis of Mars was 45 degrees instead of its present 25 degrees. Its tilt, also called obliquity, varies greatly because its two tiny moons cannot stabilize it like our moon.
Many features on Mars, especially in the Ismenius Lacus quadrangle, are believed to contain large amounts of ice. The most popular model for the origin of the ice is climate change from large changes in the tilt of the planet's rotational axis. At times the tilt has even been greater than 80 degrees[38][39] Large changes in the tilt explains many ice-rich features on Mars.
Studies have shown that when the tilt of Mars reaches 45 degrees from its current 25 degrees, ice is no longer stable at the poles.[40] Furthermore, at this high tilt, stores of solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) sublimate, thereby increasing the atmospheric pressure. This increased pressure allows more dust to be held in the atmosphere. Moisture in the atmosphere will fall as snow or as ice frozen onto dust grains. Calculations suggest this material will concentrate in the mid-latitudes.[41][42] General circulation models of the Martian atmosphere predict accumulations of ice-rich dust in the same areas where ice-rich features are found.[43] When the tilt begins to return to lower values, the ice sublimates (turns directly to a gas) and leaves behind a lag of dust.[44][44][45] The lag deposit caps the underlying material so with each cycle of high tilt levels, some ice-rich mantle remains behind.[46] Note, that the smooth surface mantle layer probably represents only relative recent material.
Scientists Abby Kavner and Thomas Duffy of Princeton University and Guoyin Shen from the University of Chicago have been using the nation's most brilliant X-ray beams to study iron sulfide (FeS) under the extreme pressures and temperatures thought to exist in the core of Mars. The experiments were the first direct density measurements of FeS at pressures and temperatures corresponding to conditions at the martian core. Along with observations made by spacecraft, the experiments have given scientists a better idea of the red planet's interior structure � and raise new questions about how the solar system's inner planets formed.
The Quantum Handshake
by John G. Cramer
Alternate View Column AV-16
Keywords: quantum, paradoxes,transactional, Copenhagen, interpretation
Published in the November-1986 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine;
This column was written and submitted 4/4/86 and is copyrighted � 1986, John G. Cramer. All rights reserved.
No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Quantum mechanics is weird. It has led respectable physicists to spin theories about cats that are half alive and half dead, about worlds which split into alternate universes with each quantum event, about a reality altered because an intelligent observer watches it, about mathematical equations describing "knowledge" rather than physical reality. This month's AV is about my own work, a new interpretation of quantum mechanics which seeks to dispell this weirdness by depicting each quantum event as a "transaction", a sort of handshake across space-time. A long description of this "Transactional Interpretation" has just been published in the July Reviews of Modern Physics (available at most university and major public libraries). It challenges the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg which has maintained a shaky dominance as the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics for over fifty years.
Quantum mechanics (QM) was invented in the late 1920's when an embarrassing body of new experimental facts from the microscopic world couldn't be explained by the accepted physics of the period. Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, and others used a remarkable combination of intuition and brilliance to devise clever ways of "getting the right answer" from a set of arcane mathematical procedures. They somehow accomplished this without understanding in any basic way what their mathematics really meant. The mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics is now trusted by all physicists, its use clear and unambiguous. But even now, five decades later, its meaning remains controversial. One hears the platitude that "mathematics is the language of science". Quantum mechanics reminds us that this "language" may lack a proper translation, that formulating a theory is not the same as understanding its meaning.
For orientation, let's start our discussion with some fairly simple questions and answers:
Q: What is quantum mechanics?
A: It's the theory which deals with the smallest scale of physical objects in the universe, objects (atoms, nuclei, photons, quarks) so small that the lumpiness or quantization of physical variables becomes important.
Q: What is quantization?
A: Its the idea that there are minimum size chunks for certain quantities like energy and angular momentum. The minimum energy chunk for light of frequency f is E=hf where h is Planck's constant. We call the particle of light carrying this minimum-size energy chunk hf a photon.
Q: What is meant by "the formalism of quantum mechanics"?
A: Basically, the formalism is mathematics consisting of (1) a differential equation like Schroedinger's wave equation which relates mass, energy, and momentum; (2) the mathematical solutions of that wave equation, called wave functions, which contain information about location, energy, momentum, etc. of some system; and (3) procedures for using wave functions to make predictions about physical measurements on the system.
Q: What's a "system"?
A: It is any collection of physical objects which is to be described by quantum mechanics. It could be a single electron, a group of quarks, an atom, a cat in a box, or the whole universe and all its contents.
Q: Why all the recent fuss about quantum mechanics?
A: Albert Einstein distrusted quantum mechanics because he perceived embedded in its formalism what he called "spooky actions at a distance". The characteristic which worried Einstein is called "nonlocality". The term locality means that separated system parts which are out of speed-of-light contact can only retain some definite relationship through memory of previous contact. Nonlocality means that some relationship is being enforced faster-than-light across space and time. The recent fuss has arisen because the nonlocality of quantum mechanics has been spotlighted by the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) experiments performed in the last decade. These measurements of the correlated optical polarizations for oppositely directed photons show that something very like faster-than-light hand-shaking must be going on within the formalism of quantum mechanics and in nature itself.
Q: Finally, just what is the Copenhagen interpretation?
A: The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is a set of ideas and principles devised by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Born in the 1930's to give meaning to the formalism of quantum mechanics and to avoid certain "paradoxes" which seemed implicit in the formalism.
My RMP article lists five independent interpretational ideas which comprise the Copenhagen interpretation:
(1) Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the idea that pairs of "conjugate" variables (like position and momentum or energy and time) cannot simultaneously be measured to "perfect" accuracy, nor can they have well-defined values at the same time;
(2) Born's Probability Law, the rule that the absolute square of the wave function gives the probability (P=|psi|2=psi�psi*) of finding the system in the state described by the wave function;
(3) Bohr's Complementarity Principle, the idea that the uncertainty principle is an intrinsic property of nature (not a just a measurement problem) and that the observer, his measuring apparatus, and the measured system form a "whole" which cannot be divided;
(4) Heisenberg's Knowledge Interpretation, the notion that the wave function is neither a physical wave travelling through space nor a direct description of a physical system, but rather is a mathematically encoded description of the knowledge of an observer who is making a measurement on the system; and
(5) Heisenberg's Positivism, the principle that it isn't proper to discuss any aspect of the reality which lies behind the formalism unless the quantities or entities discussed can be measured experimentally.
The first three elements of the Copenhagen interpretation are needed to connect the formalism with the results of physical measurements. The last two were devised by Heisenberg to deal with Einstein's "spooky actions at a distance" criticism and similar problems which lie in the general area of nonlocality. Let's consider an example of how the knowledge interpretation handles nonlocality.
A excited atom gives up energy by spitting out a photon. The QM formalism represents this event as a wave function which spreads out from the atom in an ever-widening spherical wave front resembling the ring of ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. The absolute square of this spreading wave function at a particular point in space-time gives the probability of finding the photon there. Finally the photon hits a silver atom in a photographic plate, giving up its energy and leaving a black spot on the plate. Instantaneously the photon's wave function undergoes a process called "collapse" which resembles the pricking of a soap bubble. The wave function completely disappears from all of space except in the immediate vicinity of the struck atom. The photon has now delivered its energy to the silver atom and has no probability of existing elsewhere. The wave function which had just been expanding through time and space has abruptly vanished.
This vanishment is part of Einstein's "spookiness" criticism. In 1929 at a physics conference he questioned how the remote parts of the wave function could possibly know that it was time to vanish when the photon was detected. Heisenberg's explanation was that the spreading wave function was not a real wave moving through space at the speed of light but rather a representation of the knowledge of an observer. When the observer had not yet detected the photon, it has an equal probability of being anywhere on the spreading spherical wave front. But as soon as the photon is detected it is know to have travelled to the silver atom and its probability of being elsewhere must become zero.
The problem with the knowledge interpretation comes when we try to stretch it to the EPR experiments, a system of two polarization-correlated photons travelling in opposite directions. Now there are two observers making measurements and gaining information about two photons which are out of speed-of-light contact, and yet the two measurements remain correlated in a "spooky" way. The nonlocality which enforces this correlation cannot be dismissed by attributing it to changes in knowledge. Something else must be going on, and the Copenhageners can only retreat behind the shield of Heisenberg's positivism in dealing with the problem.
The transactional interpretation meets the nonlocality problem head on, using a "transaction" model for quantum events which is itself nonlocal because it uses advanced waves which have negative energy and travel backwards in time. Advanced waves were the subject of a previous AV column ["Light in Reverse Gear II", August-1985 Analog]. This transaction model is based on the "absorber theory" originated by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler.
In the absorber theory description any emission process makes advanced waves on an equal basis with ordinary "retarded" waves. But when the retarded wave is absorbed (sometime in the future) a cancellation process takes place which erases all traces of advanced waves and their "advanced" effects. The absorber manages to absorb the retarded wave by making a second retarded wave identical to but exactly out of phase with the retarded wave from the emitter. Thus the two cancel and we say that the retarded wave from the emitter is absorbed. However, the absorber also must make an advanced wave. This advanced wave backtracks the retarded wave, travelling backwards in time along the path taken by the retarded wave and reaching the emitter at the instant of emission. It continues backward in time, but now it is accompanied by the advanced wave from the emitter. The two waves are exactly out of phase, so they also cancel, removing all "advanced" effects in the process.
An observer not privy to these inner mechanisms of nature would perceive only that a retarded wave had gone from the emitter to the absorber. The absorber theory description, unconventional though it is, leads to exactly the same observations as the conventional one. But it differs in that there has been a two-way exchange, a "handshake" across space-time which led to the transfer of energy from emitter to absorber.
This advanced-retarded handshake is the basis for the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is a two-way contract between the future and the past for the purpose of transferring energy, momentum, etc. It is nonlocal because the future is, in a limited way, affecting the past on the same basis that the past affects the future. When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction. In my RMP paper this model is used to explain the accumulation of curiosities and paradoxes (the EPR paradox, Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend, Wheeler's delayed choice, etc.) which have lain in the quantum mechanics Museum of Mysteries for decades. The need for half-and-half cats, schizophrenic universes, observer-dependent reality, or "knowledge" waves has been eliminated.
In this column we usually spotlight recent physics developments and then consider their science fiction implications. The transactional interpretation unfortunately pulls the rug from under a number of excellent SF works based on the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics. Examples are Pohl's "The Coming of the Quantum Cats" and Hogan's The Proteus Operation, both of which use the many-worlds or Everett-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics [See "The Alternate View: Other Universes II", November-1984 Analog]. The transactional interpretation addressed the same problems which prompted development the many-worlds interpretation and solves them in a more satisfactory way.
There are SF possibilities in the transactional interpretation. Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to "ansible-type" FTL communication favored by LeGuin and Card and to backwards in time signaling of the sort used in Benford's Timescape and Hogan's Thrice in Time. There is also the implication implicit in the transactional interpretation that Possibility does not become Reality along that sharp knife-edge that we call "the present". Rather, Reality crystallizes along a much fuzzier boundary which stitches into both future and past, advancing somehow in a way which defies sharp temporal definition. There must be a story in that.
A Nobel Prize winning biologist has ignited controversy after publishing details of an experiment in which a fragment of DNA appeared to �teleport� or imprint itself between test tubes.
According to a team headed by Luc Montagnier, previously known for his work on HIV and AIDS, two test tubes, one of which contained a tiny piece of bacterial DNA, the other pure water, were surrounded by a weak electromagnetic field of 7Hz.
Eighteen hours later, after DNA amplification using a polymerase chain reaction, as if by magic the DNA was detectable in the test tube containing pure water.
Oddly, the original DNA sample had to be diluted many times over for the experiment to work, which might explain why the phenomenon has not been detected before, assuming that this is what has happened.
The phenomenon might be very loosely described as 'teleportation' except that the bases project or imprint themselves across space rather than simply moving from one place to another.
To be on the safe side, Montagnier then compared the results with controls in which the time limit was lowered, no electromagnetic field was present or was present but at lower frequencies, and in which both tubes contained pure water. On every one of these, he drew a blank.
The possible quantum effect � the apparent imprinting of the DNA on the water � is not in itself the most contentious element of the experiment, so much as the relatively long timescales over which it appears to manifest itself. Quantum phenomena are assumed to show their faces in imperceptible fractions of a second and not seconds minutes and hours, and usually at very low temperatures approaching absolute zero.
Revealing a process through which biology might display the underlying �quantumness� of nature at room temperature would be startling.
Montagnier�s experiment will have to be repeated by others to have any hope of being taken seriously. So far, some scientists have been publically incredulous.
"It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds," said the Ruhr University in Bochum�s Klaus Gerwert, quoted by New Scientist magazine, which broke the story (requires registration).
What does all of this mean? It could be that the propagation of life is able to make use of the quantum nature of reality to project itself in subtle ways, as has been hinted at in previous experiments. Alternatively, it could be that life itself is a complex projection of these quantum phenomena and utterly depends on them in ways not yet understood because they are incredibly hard to detect.
Speculatively, (and Montagnier doesn�t directly suggest anything so unsubstantiated), it could also be the little-understood quantum properties of the water molecule and not just its more obvious chemical bonding properties that gives it such a central role in the bio-engineering of life-forms. Water might be a good medium in which DNA can copy itself using processes that hint at quantum entanglement and �teleportation� (our term).
Montagnier's paper goes on to discuss the phenomenon he claims to have uncovered using 'quantum field theory' within the context of his personal interest, disease propagation.I'm
Stolen Goods.
1 Majorana�s paper was published a year before his disappearance from a transport ship between Palermo and Naples. The story behind his life and theories of his demise are interesting in their own right and are summarized by Holstein (Holstein, 2009) and references therein.
"In solid state physics the only fermionic particles that mat- ter for all practical purposes are electrons. Electrons are, of course, Dirac fermions. However, as it turns out, Majorana fermions can occur in certain solids as emergent quasiparti- cles which can be thought of as collective excitations of the quantum many-body state describing the interacting electron system."
"
Condensed matter physics is replete with examples of emer- gence (Anderson, 1972). Emergent particles in solids range from those very well established (phonons, magnons, plas- mons, polarons) through some that are more elusive (triplons, composite fermions) to truly exotic and speculative (spinons, holons, chargons, visons, etc.). At the conventional end, phonons for example represent quanta of the lattice vibra- tions, and form an essential ingredient in the description of the low-temperature thermodynamic and transport properties of all solids (Kittel, 1987). Magnons � quanta of spin fluctu- ations � are similarly essential in the description of magnetic solids, as are polarons for ionic insulators and semiconduc- tors. In this sense, emergent particles are as real as the el- ementary particles in nuclear and high-energy physics. Ob- servation of an emergent Majorana fermion in a solid state system would be as exciting, and perhaps even more so, as establishing that e.g. the neutrino is a Majorana fermion. As we shall see in Sections II and IV quasiparticle excitations in superconductors indeed behave in all respects as Majorana fermions."
"Majorana bound states (MBSs) [1] in solid-state systems is currently receiving a lot of attention from theorists and experimentalists alike [2�4]. Shortly after the prediction that MBSs can be realized in semi- conductor nanowires with strong Rashba spin-orbit cou- pling [5�7], various experiments have indeed reported sig- natures of Majorana fermions in such systems, which are currently being scrutinized [8�11]. MBSs appear at the phase boundaries between topologic"
http://www.urticator.net/maze/
A team of researchers at Princeton University (New Jersey) has developed a way to use a quantum cascade laser (QCL) to measure blood sugar noninvasively. With more work to shrink the laser system to a portable size, the technique could allow diabetics to check their condition without pricking themselves to draw blood.
Led by Claire Gmachl, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE) Center at Princeton, the researchers measured blood sugar by directing the QCL they developed at a person's palm. The laser passes through the skin cells without causing damage, and is partially absorbed by the sugar molecules in the patient's body.
"Because the quantum cascade laser can be designed to emit light across a very wide wavelength range, its usability is not just for glucose detection, but could conceivably be used for other medical sensing and monitoring applications," Gmachl says.
Besides Liakat and Gmachl, researchers included Kevin Bors ('13), Laura Xu ('15), and Callie Woods ('14), who worked on the project as undergraduate students majoring in electrical engineering; and Jessica Doyle, a teacher at Hunterdon Regional Central High School (Flemington, NJ).
http://www.bioopticsworld.com/artic...monitoring.html
The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A View on the Quantum Nature of our Universe, Compulsory or Impossible?
Gerard 't Hooft
(Submitted on 7 May 2014 (v1), last revised 10 Jun 2014 (this version, v2))
When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, "quantum logic" is taking over from "classical logic" in the minds of almost all researchers today. Dissatisfied, the author investigated how one can look at things differently. This report is an overview of older material, but also contains many new observations and calculations. Quantum mechanics is looked upon as a tool, not as a theory. Examples are displayed of models that are classical in essence, but can be analysed by the use of quantum techniques, and we argue that even the Standard Model, together with gravitational interactions, may be viewed as a quantum mechanical approach to analyse a system that could be classical at its core. We then explain how these apparently heretic thoughts can be reconciled with Bell's theorem and the usual objections voiced against the notion of 'super determinism'. Our proposal would eradicate the collapse problem and the measurement problem.
Indeed, this is one of the central questions that forced us to do the investigations described in this report; the hamiltonian of the quantum field theory considered here is
an extensive one, and also naturally bounded from below.
At first sight, the similarity between the automaton described by the equations (5.38) and (5.39), and the quantum field theory of Section (5.1.1) may seem to be superficial at
best. Quantum physicists will insist that the quantum theory is fundamentally different.
To construct theories containing fermions, it was proposed to plant fermionic degrees of freedom on the string world sheet. Again, anomalies were encountered, unless the bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom can be united to form super multiplets. Each bosonic coordinate degree of freedom X�(σ, τ ) would have to be associated with a fermionic degree of freedom ψ �(σ, τ ) . This should be done for the left-moving modes independently of the
right-moving ones. A further twist can be given to the theory by only adding fermionic modes to the left-movers, not to the right movers (or vice versa). This way, chirality can be introduced in string theory, not unlike the chirality that is clearly present in the Standard Model. Such a theory is called a heterotic string theory.
http://www.sci-news.com/space/scien...luto-02749.html
Self-organized complex systems are ubiquitous in nature, and the structural complexity of these natural systems can be used as a model to design new classes of functional nanotechnology based on highly interconnected networks of interacting units. Conventional fabrication methods for electronic computing devices are subject to known scaling limits, confining the diversity of possible architectures. This work explores methods of fabricating a self-organized complex device known as an atomic switch network and discusses its potential utility in computing. Through a merger of top-down and bottom-up techniques guided by mathematical and nanoarchitectonic design principles, we have produced functional devices comprising nanoscale elements whose intrinsic nonlinear dynamics and memorization capabilities produce robust patterns of distributed activity and a capacity for nonlinear transformation of input signals when configured in the appropriate network architecture. Their operational characteristics represent a unique potential for hardware implementation of natural computation, specifically in the area of reservoir computing�a burgeoning field that investigates the computational aptitude of complex biologically inspired systems.
http://m.iopscience.iop.org/0957-44.../204003/article
🇺🇸 AMERICAN PHYSICS
PART 1
WITH THE NIGHT-VISION IMAGE INTENSIFIER PROJECT UNDER way at Fort Belvoir and the Project Horizon team
trying to swim upstream against the tide of civilian management of the U.S. space program, I turned my attention to the next of the Roswell crash fragments that looked especially intriguing: the charred semiconductor wafers that had broken off some larger device. I hadn�t made these my priorities at first, not knowing what they really were, until General Trudeau asked me to take a closer look.
�Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at Alamogordo about these things, Phil, � he said. �I think they�ll know what we should do with them. �
I knew that in the days immediately following the crash, General Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel Command and had described some of the debris to them. But I didn�t know how detailed his descriptions were or whether they even knew about the wafers we had in our file.
�I want to talk to some of the scientists up here, too, � I said. �Especially, I want to see some of the engineers from the defense contractors. Maybe they can figure out what the engineering process is for these things. �
�Go over to Bell Labs, Phil, � General Trudeau also suggested. �The transistor came out of their shop and these things look a lot like transistorized circuits.�
I�d heard that General Twining had worked very closely with both Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research during the war, afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile launches, and after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any material from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a matter of pure speculation. I only know that the entire field of circuit miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of the transistor and the first solid state components.
By the late 1950s,transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had turned the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable plastic radio you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July Sunday. The electronics industry had taken a major technological jump in less than ten years, and I had to wonder privately whether any Roswell material had gotten out that I didn�t know about prior to my taking over Foreign Technology in 1961.
I didn�t realize it at first when I showed those silicon wafers to General Trudeau, but I was to become very quickly and intimately involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very small, completely invisible, cog in an assembly line process that fifteen years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and the personal computer revolution.
Over the course of the years since I joined the army in 1942, my career took me through the stages of vacuum tube based devices, like our radios and radars in World War II, to component chassis.
These were large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed in sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and transistorized electronic components. The first army computers I saw were room sized, clanking vacuum tube monsters that were always breaking down and, by today�s standards, took an eternity to calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil filled data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers work before.
At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting radars we used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers that were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the battalion. So when I opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte gray quarter sized, cracker shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a match book, I could make an educated guess about their function even though I�d never seen anything of the like before. I knew, however, that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would more than understand the primary function of these chips and figure out what we needed to do to make some of our own.
But first I called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic background on what, if any, development might have taken place after the Roswell crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and probably received second hand the substance of the conversations General Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of the debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he did, in those months when the ENIAC - the first working computer - was just cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in Maryland, what did the scientists make of those chips?
�They saw these at the Walker Field hangar, � Dr. Oberth told me. �All of them at Alamogordo flew over to Roswell with General Twining to oversee the shipment to Wright Field. �
Trip to Los Alamos soon? Don't Forget the Peyote.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Heaviside Trip to Los Alamos soon? Don't Forget the Peyote. |
Interesting. You got me thinking, and I did some RESEARCH!! Which consisted mostly of YouTube videos and the Bob Lazar story came up. So this Lazar guy worked at Area 51 with Alien Spacecraft. The U.S has been reverse engineering these things for a while it seems. What's crazy about the Lazar story is that all his claims seem real at first, except they lack credible evidence. He did mention Unumpentium 115 which at the time had not been synthesized until 2003.
Corso Is saying that we reverse engineered the microchip aswell? And this Corso guy held some high ranking military duty? So that makes him reliable, right?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NcBLrVv8wYQ
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