11 mind-boggling facts about time
By BBC Future Staff
11th November 2023
This week, we're launching a special series called "Time: The Ultimate Guide". To kick things off, here are some of the most fascinating facts we've learnt to date…
To mark the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we'll be spending the next week tackling the big questions about time, including the science of time travel, how clocks have shaped humanity, and even the mind-bending temporal consequences of flying into a black hole.
We're starting our ultimate guide with 11 mind-bending facts about the physics, psychology and history of time, plucked from the BBC Future archive. Read on to learn why there's more to time than meets the eye.
1. YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECTS YOUR PERCEPTION OF TIME
Think of time as a line. Which direction does it flow? Is it horizontal or vertical? Or perhaps it is not a line at all for you. The answers to these questions may very well depend on what language you speak.
Much of the way we perceive the time is influenced by the language we use. For example, English speakers describe time as being in front or behind them, or as a horizontal line moving left to right. Mandarin speakers envision time as a vertical line where down represents the future, while Greek people tend to view time as a three dimensional entity that is "big" or "much" rather than "long". In Pormpuraww, a remote Indigenous Australian community, time is arranged according to east and west.
2. WHEN THE UNIVERSE EVENTUALLY DIES THERE WILL BE NO MORE FUTURE AND NO PAST
Much like us, the way time passes changes will change as the Universe ages. The "arrow of time", which points from the past towards the future, is thought to have its origins in the Big Bang. The infant Universe is thought to have had very low entropy – a measure of disorder or randomness. Since then, entropy has been increasing – this change is what gives the arrow of time its directionality. It's the same reason it's easy to crack a fresh egg, but extremely hard to take a mess of shards and yolk and create a whole fresh egg.
No one knows what will happen at the end of the Universe, but a strong contender is "heat death", where entropy will have reached a maximum and the arrow of time will lose its direction. Think of it as all the eggs in the Universe being already smashed, and after that nothing interesting ever happens again.
3. IT MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE TO HAVE CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE WITHOUT TIME
We count, therefore we are. The ticking of time is the invisible heartbeat of our lives, and affects every moment of our consciousness. Time and self are in perpetual handshake – even a human trapped in a completely dark cave would still be governed by the circadian rhythms of our internal clocks.
Holly Andersen, who studies the philosophy of science and metaphysics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, warns about what losing our sense of time could do to our sense of self. She believes it's not possible to have conscious experience without time and the passage of time. Think about how your personal identity is built over time, filed away as memories.
"These memories constitute you over time," says Andersen. "If you lose a bunch of time you are now a different person."
4. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A CLOCK WITH 100% ACCURACY
Metrologists work very hard to keep time, using ever-finer technology to measure the passing of minutes, seconds and hours. However, while their atomic clocks are incredibly accurate, they're not perfect. In fact, there is no clock on Earth that is entirely "correct".
The actual process of defining what time it is – right now – is based on lots of clocks, all keeping time around the world. National laboratories all send their time-keeping to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, which then creates a weighted average. The time, therefore, is a human construct.
5. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME IS ACTIVELY CREATED BY OUR MINDS
Various factors are crucial to our construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow located in space. Our time perception roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.
The upside is that this gives us some measure of control over how we experience it. For example, if you want to feel like your life is not rushing past you, the key is novelty: research shows that a life of repetitive and routine activities will feel, as you reflect on it, that time is moving faster.
6. THERE ARE CITIZENS OF THE 22ND CENTURY ALREADY AMONG US – BUT THEY'RE NOT TIME TRAVELLERS
The next century can often feel very far away: a distant land, where hypothetical unborn generations live. However, there are millions of people on Earth right now who will be there when the fireworks go off on New Year's Eve 2099. A child born in 2023 will be their 70s. We're far more connected across long spans of time than we might realise. Through our family ties, we're all just a hop, skip and a jump away from past and future centuries.
7. WE CAN ALL EXPERIENCE A TIME WARP
Time does not always flow at the same rate for everyone. Is time all in the mind?
A car skids for what feels like an age, spraying gravel into the air where it hangs motionless. Time slows almost to a standstill and, in that moment, you react and dive for safety. In situations like this, stress can prompt the brain to speed up its internal processing – to help you handle a life-or-death situation.
Brain disorders such as epilepsy or stroke, too, can cause temporal tricks of the mind – speeding time up or stopping it dead. Some people, like athletes, can even train their brain to create a time warp on demand; a surfer catching a wave at the perfect moment, an unstoppable footballer.
Time, it seems, is a fragile illusion. In a moment we could find ourselves in an altered reality.
8. WHEN THE CLOCKS CHANGE FOR DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, WE HAVE ONE BUILDER TO THANK (OR BLAME)
Changing the clocks for summer – to make the most of long daylight hours at higher latitudes – is not universally embraced by everyone. But love it or hate it, there's a stubborn British campaigner you can thank. Without a builder called William Willett, a quarter of the world – including the US – might never have adopted daylight saving time.
After Willett managed to persuade political leaders, Britain made the change during World War One. The move came about because of a coal shortage – and longer daylight hours meant less need for coal-powered electricity to keep the lights on. It was such an effective idea that in World War Two, Britain took it a step further and temporarily ran on Double Summer Time, a full two hours ahead of GMT, to save on industrial costs.
9. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT
As you read these words, it's easy to assume that it's "now". However, it's not.
Take the simple act of looking at a person speaking to you across a table. The confirmation of them moving their lips reaches our eyes before the sound of their voice (because light travels faster than sound) but our brain syncs them up to make them match.
10. OUR DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER DUE TO THE MOON'S GRAVITY
It might surprise you to know that the Moon – our planet's constant orbital companion in the astro-ballet we perform around the Sun – is inching away from us. Every year the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases by 1.5in (3.8cm). And as it does so, it is making our days ever so slightly longer in the process.
This is down to the tug of the Moon's gravity on our planet. The gravitational pull of the Moon creates tides, which are a "bulge" of water that extends in an elliptical shape both towards and away from the gravity of the Moon. But the Earth spins on its axis much faster than the Moon orbits above, meaning friction from the ocean basins drag the water along with them. This causes the bulge to move slightly ahead of the Moon in its orbit, which in turn attempts to pull it backwards. This gradually saps our planet's rotational energy, slowing its spin while the Moon gains energy, causing it to move into a higher orbit and away from the Earth.
The incremental braking of our planet's spin has caused the length of an average Earth day to increase by about 1.09 milliseconds per century since the late 1600s. Other estimates put the figure a little higher, at 1.78ms per century by drawing on more ancient observations of eclipses. While none of this sounds like much, over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, it adds up.
11. MANY PEOPLE LIVE OUTSIDE CONVENTIONAL TIME – FOR THEM, IT'S NOT 2023
For many Nepalis, this article was not published in 2023. In the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar, it's actually the year 2080. At least four calendars are used among different ethnic groups there, and Nepal is even 15 minutes out of sync with standard time zones.
It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years simultaneously. In Myanmar, it's also 1384, in Thailand it's 2566, and in Ethiopia it's 2016, where the year lasts 13 months. The Islamic calendar, meanwhile, marked the arrival of the year 1445 in July.
Link to original article with additional information and video about each item:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231110-11-mind-boggling-facts-about-time
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Monday, November 13, 2023
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
"Why does time go forwards, not backwards?" by Martha Henriques for BBC Future
I've been meaning to share this fascinating article from BBC Future for a little while now. I am a bit of armchair physicist so this is really interesting to me. And as we have seen, modern physics also incorporates philosophy and spirituality to varying degrees, areas that I am also interested in.
Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022
The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?
When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.
The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."
How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"
Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.
But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.
GATHERING STEAM
In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.
In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."
As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.
To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."
So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.
Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.
This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.
"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.
"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.
While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.
"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?
"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."
The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."
Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."
Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."
Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."
Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.
There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.
"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."
This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.
It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."
The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.
HUMAN TIME
The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".
"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."
This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."
There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".
The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.
"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."
These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.
"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."
That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.
To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.
"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.
"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.
"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"
Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards
Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022
The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?
When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.
The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."
How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"
Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.
But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.
GATHERING STEAM
In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.
In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."
As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.
To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."
So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.
Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.
This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.
"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.
"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.
While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.
"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?
"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."
The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."
Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."
Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."
Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."
Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.
There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.
"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."
This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.
It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."
The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.
HUMAN TIME
The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".
"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."
This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."
There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".
The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.
"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."
These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.
"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."
That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.
To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.
"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.
"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.
"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"
Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards
Monday, December 21, 2020
This Solstice, Solace for the Darkness by Dennis Overbye
This Solstice, Solace for the Darkness
A rare conjunction of planets serves as a reminder that there is more to the universe than just ourselves.
by Dennis Overbye for The New York Times
Dec. 18, 2020
We have now arrived at the longest, darkest night of the longest, darkest year. And yet rarely have the heavens so proclaimed their glory.
In blithe disregard for the activities of the Electoral College and everything else that humans were engaged in, the sun and the moon last week lined up in a perfect cue-ball shot to produce a total solar eclipse. The moon’s shadow slid across Argentina and Chile, and the majestic but shy mandala known as the solar corona revealed itself to crowds who had braved rain and fog in anticipation of the sight.
Meanwhile, the Geminid meteor shower graced the Northern Hemisphere with celestial brush strokes of fire. And as always there is the brilliance of the winter Milky Way, starring Orion.
Now comes one of the grandest events of the sky: a planetary conjunction.
For the past year, Jupiter and Saturn have been dancing ever closer in the night sky. On the evening of Dec. 21, the very nadir of winter, they will be so close — one-tenth of one angular degree — that if your eyes are as bad as mine, they will appear as one blurry, bright planet. With a little optical aid you should be able to discern them as separate orbs, almost kissing, although Jupiter will be 450 million miles in front of the ringed Saturn.
Go out and look southwest in the hour after sunset. According to astronomers, the two planets have not appeared this close to each other in the sky since 1623 — but the sun’s glare then would have rendered them invisible. To find a conjunction that humans could see, you must skip all the way back to 1226, or ahead to March 15, 2080. You might wonder who will be around to witness that event.
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn come into conjunction — appearing within a couple of degrees from each other, about the width of three full moons.
Such conjunctions of planets are fraught with psychic meaning to astrologers. And some astronomers have speculated that a conjunction involving Jupiter, Venus and the star Regulus in the years 2-3 B.C. might have inspired the stories of the star of Bethlehem
The universe is big enough that you can find almost any omen you want there. Yesterday more than 3,500 Americans died of Covid-19. As many may die today, and again tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Two of the titles on The New York Times Book Review’s list of notable books in 2020 concerned the long-term fate of life and the cosmos: “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” by Brian Greene, and “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking),” by Katie Mack. Both paint the same basic picture, which is either dreary or inspiring, depending on your point of view and psychology.
In the grand scheme of things, the universe is young. It was born in an eruption of energy 13.8 billion years ago. Its future, as far as we know, is endless, but everything interesting that will ever happen is happening now. This is the era of light, stars and galaxies; of creatures crawling around on dust motes, constructing telescopes and other intellectual pyramids, driven at least in part by wonder at the surroundings.
But in a few billion years the sun will engulf and destroy us. If the universe doesn’t collapse in a Big Crunch and disappear, dark energy could blow what remains permanently beyond the event horizon. The universe will become too cold and dead even for thought, let alone life. None of us will be remembered.
Should we curse our fate, or be grateful we were here for the party?
Lately a barred owl has come to live in my Manhattan neighborhood. Nicknamed Barnard after the college a block away, it has become a local celebrity. I saw it most recently in an old knotted elm on the edge of Riverside Park, surrounded by admiring humans with smartphones and telephoto lenses. A flock of crows kept trying to chase it away. For me, Barnard has become an omen, a harbinger of the essential generosity of nature in the low, slanting light of winter, a reminder that there is more going on in this world than just us. Even if the crows or the worsening weather causes Barnard to depart, I will feel blessed to have seen it.
On Dec. 3 astronomers from the European Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping and measuring more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, released a video showing the projected motions of some 40,000 stars over the next 400,000 years. They looked like bugs swimming in a petri dish, twigs circling in the eddy of a stream, dust motes in a sunbeam.
Wherever those cosmic dust motes are headed, they will go regardless of whether we are here to watch, measure, map or wonder about them. Jupiter and Saturn will continue their dance; the sun and moon will play tag with each other’s shadows.
Odds are, whoever or whatever lives out there will never know that we were here at all, nor will we know them. But we know who we are. We know that we are alive now. We know whom we loved and whom we lost. Maybe that’s enough to ask of any universe.
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/science/christmas-star-jupiter-saturn-conjunction.html
A rare conjunction of planets serves as a reminder that there is more to the universe than just ourselves.
by Dennis Overbye for The New York Times
Dec. 18, 2020
We have now arrived at the longest, darkest night of the longest, darkest year. And yet rarely have the heavens so proclaimed their glory.
In blithe disregard for the activities of the Electoral College and everything else that humans were engaged in, the sun and the moon last week lined up in a perfect cue-ball shot to produce a total solar eclipse. The moon’s shadow slid across Argentina and Chile, and the majestic but shy mandala known as the solar corona revealed itself to crowds who had braved rain and fog in anticipation of the sight.
Meanwhile, the Geminid meteor shower graced the Northern Hemisphere with celestial brush strokes of fire. And as always there is the brilliance of the winter Milky Way, starring Orion.
Now comes one of the grandest events of the sky: a planetary conjunction.
For the past year, Jupiter and Saturn have been dancing ever closer in the night sky. On the evening of Dec. 21, the very nadir of winter, they will be so close — one-tenth of one angular degree — that if your eyes are as bad as mine, they will appear as one blurry, bright planet. With a little optical aid you should be able to discern them as separate orbs, almost kissing, although Jupiter will be 450 million miles in front of the ringed Saturn.
Go out and look southwest in the hour after sunset. According to astronomers, the two planets have not appeared this close to each other in the sky since 1623 — but the sun’s glare then would have rendered them invisible. To find a conjunction that humans could see, you must skip all the way back to 1226, or ahead to March 15, 2080. You might wonder who will be around to witness that event.
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn come into conjunction — appearing within a couple of degrees from each other, about the width of three full moons.
Such conjunctions of planets are fraught with psychic meaning to astrologers. And some astronomers have speculated that a conjunction involving Jupiter, Venus and the star Regulus in the years 2-3 B.C. might have inspired the stories of the star of Bethlehem
The universe is big enough that you can find almost any omen you want there. Yesterday more than 3,500 Americans died of Covid-19. As many may die today, and again tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Two of the titles on The New York Times Book Review’s list of notable books in 2020 concerned the long-term fate of life and the cosmos: “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” by Brian Greene, and “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking),” by Katie Mack. Both paint the same basic picture, which is either dreary or inspiring, depending on your point of view and psychology.
In the grand scheme of things, the universe is young. It was born in an eruption of energy 13.8 billion years ago. Its future, as far as we know, is endless, but everything interesting that will ever happen is happening now. This is the era of light, stars and galaxies; of creatures crawling around on dust motes, constructing telescopes and other intellectual pyramids, driven at least in part by wonder at the surroundings.
But in a few billion years the sun will engulf and destroy us. If the universe doesn’t collapse in a Big Crunch and disappear, dark energy could blow what remains permanently beyond the event horizon. The universe will become too cold and dead even for thought, let alone life. None of us will be remembered.
Should we curse our fate, or be grateful we were here for the party?
Lately a barred owl has come to live in my Manhattan neighborhood. Nicknamed Barnard after the college a block away, it has become a local celebrity. I saw it most recently in an old knotted elm on the edge of Riverside Park, surrounded by admiring humans with smartphones and telephoto lenses. A flock of crows kept trying to chase it away. For me, Barnard has become an omen, a harbinger of the essential generosity of nature in the low, slanting light of winter, a reminder that there is more going on in this world than just us. Even if the crows or the worsening weather causes Barnard to depart, I will feel blessed to have seen it.
On Dec. 3 astronomers from the European Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping and measuring more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, released a video showing the projected motions of some 40,000 stars over the next 400,000 years. They looked like bugs swimming in a petri dish, twigs circling in the eddy of a stream, dust motes in a sunbeam.
Wherever those cosmic dust motes are headed, they will go regardless of whether we are here to watch, measure, map or wonder about them. Jupiter and Saturn will continue their dance; the sun and moon will play tag with each other’s shadows.
Odds are, whoever or whatever lives out there will never know that we were here at all, nor will we know them. But we know who we are. We know that we are alive now. We know whom we loved and whom we lost. Maybe that’s enough to ask of any universe.
 |
| Saturn and Jupiter have been inching closer to each other all year and on December 21st, 2020, will be close enough to appear as one. Photo: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press |
Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/science/christmas-star-jupiter-saturn-conjunction.html
Friday, October 9, 2020
Time Crystals?
Oh, by the way, did you hear about this mind-boggling scientific discovery? It sounds like something form an episode of "Dr. Who."
For the first time, scientists have observed an interaction of a rare and baffling form of matter called time crystals. The crystals look at a glance like “regular” crystals, but they have a relationship to time that both intrigues and puzzles scientists because of its unpredictability. Now, experts say they could have applications in quantum computing.
Scientists only theorized the existence of time crystals starting in the 2010s, making this the state-of-matter equivalent of so-called ruby chocolate—is it really a new thing or just a special case of something else? (Sorry, ruby chocolate, we’re not convinced.)
By 2015, researchers were outlining ways time crystals could exist, generalized as a “non-equilibrium form of matter”:
In their experiments, they placed two time crystals in superfluid and mixed magnons between them. Magnons are a magnetic quasiparticle that, in this case, led to “opposite-phase oscillations,” while the crystals themselves stayed phase stable. What’s cool (and, literally, supercooled) is how the matter acts within predictable quantum mechanical ways despite the central quality of wild oscillation patterns over time.
“Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact,” lead author Samuli Autti, of Lancaster University, said in a statement. “Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing.”
Without this key finding, people could likely not entertain even the notion that a time crystal could be part of a designed system at all.
For the First Time Ever, Scientists Caught Time Crystals Interacting
That's huge news for the most mysterious phase of matter—and maybe physics as we know it.
BY CAROLINE DELBERT OCT 1, 2020
“The team was investigating what happens when certain isolated quantum systems, made of a potpourri of interacting particles, are frequently prodded by shining a laser on them. Counterintuitive to conventional physics, which maintained that mayhem would ensue once the systems would heat up, the Princeton team’s calculations showed that under certain conditions, the particles would glue together to form a phase of matter with properties previously unseen.”
Now, researchers say, they’ve collided two time crystals to see what happens next. “Our results demonstrate that time crystals obey the general dynamics of quantum mechanics and offer a basis to further investigate the fundamental properties of these phases, opening pathways for possible applications in developing fields, such as quantum information processing,” they explain in a new paper.
What is the odd oscillation that sets these crystals apart? There’s an interior motion that seems to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics, which is that the moving particles continue to move and seem never to lose any energy. Where is the initial energy coming from, and why doesn’t it ever dissipate?
In a way, studying how the crystals interact makes the question more puzzling, because it narrows down some parameters. The crystals act normal in these certain other ways, and that means whatever the energy source or phenomenon is remains at large.
Link to original article:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33648414/scientists-catch-time-crystals-interacting/
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Saturday, May 23, 2020
"The Flow" by Markos Kay
Markos Kay is a digital artist who has created the generative short film "The Flow." This astonishing short film tracks the building blocks of our reality from M-branes to Quarks, Quarks to Hadrons, Hadrons to Nucleus, Atoms to Molecules, and finally Biomolecules to Organelles. Although the film tracks concepts in quantum physics and quantum mechanics, you don't necessarily have to understand the concepts in order to appreciate the unimaginable, staggeringly small nature of everything we are seeing. We currently do not possess any ways of seeing things this small and such ideas are based on mathematic models of reality.
"The evolutionary play of quarks and electrons resulted in nuclei and atoms. The computational outburst of atoms resulted into molecules and star systems. The intricate relationships between molecules created the fascinating entities of DNA, proteins and membranes. The interplay of which created the many species of cells, which through an inherent need to reduce their entropy and ensure their propagation would congregate into organs and advanced interacting organisms. These organisms would grow interfaces that would mirror their predecessors, and in a game of survival of the fittest would evolve complex processing capabilities creating virtual worlds, artifacts and cultural codes.
The Flow looks at the supervening layers of reality that we can observe, from quarks to nucleons to atoms and beyond. The deeper we go into the foundations of reality the more it loses its form, eventually becoming a pure mathematical conception. The Flow visually imagines physical processes that we are unable to directly observe with any imaginable medium, while referring to modern physical theories and scientific visualisation processes. It alludes to ideas of digital physics, complexity and information theories as well as the concepts of universal Darwinism, emergence and supervenience. The Flow is Bohm’s holomovement, the universal flux.
These visualisations are not based on actual scientific data, but are visual representations of scientific theory. The aim is to challenge current scientific iconography by presenting a more complete picture of physical processes, based on current theory. The form and movement of these visualisations is generated by 3D computer simulations of particle systems, fluid/soft body dynamics and spherical harmonics. These simulations create an unpredictable dynamic motion that is recorded by a virtual camera, that refers back to the stochastic processes that drive complexity theory.
Using biomorphism to evoke a sense of life, the microscopic-biological visual language portrays these invisible entities as active organisms, as embryonic processes of reality and life. They are presented as a seamless stream of interacting information, each layer building the next in a continuous everchanging state of flux. We ourselves are made out of these interweaving layers of reality, which makes us informational entity complexes.
The Flow proposes a paradigm shift, from a fragmented understanding of reality to a conceptually unified viewpoint of the inner workings of the universe. Through this new viewpoint one can discover patterns within the stream of reality but also raise the question of whether reality stems from a single unified field, like the implicate order or a holographic projection. This viewpoint also allows us to postulate how this flow unfolds into increasingly complex levels of interaction and how it gives rise not only to genetic information but also to entire cellular systems, consciousness and culture."
http://www.mrkism.com/flow/
"The evolutionary play of quarks and electrons resulted in nuclei and atoms. The computational outburst of atoms resulted into molecules and star systems. The intricate relationships between molecules created the fascinating entities of DNA, proteins and membranes. The interplay of which created the many species of cells, which through an inherent need to reduce their entropy and ensure their propagation would congregate into organs and advanced interacting organisms. These organisms would grow interfaces that would mirror their predecessors, and in a game of survival of the fittest would evolve complex processing capabilities creating virtual worlds, artifacts and cultural codes.
The Flow looks at the supervening layers of reality that we can observe, from quarks to nucleons to atoms and beyond. The deeper we go into the foundations of reality the more it loses its form, eventually becoming a pure mathematical conception. The Flow visually imagines physical processes that we are unable to directly observe with any imaginable medium, while referring to modern physical theories and scientific visualisation processes. It alludes to ideas of digital physics, complexity and information theories as well as the concepts of universal Darwinism, emergence and supervenience. The Flow is Bohm’s holomovement, the universal flux.
These visualisations are not based on actual scientific data, but are visual representations of scientific theory. The aim is to challenge current scientific iconography by presenting a more complete picture of physical processes, based on current theory. The form and movement of these visualisations is generated by 3D computer simulations of particle systems, fluid/soft body dynamics and spherical harmonics. These simulations create an unpredictable dynamic motion that is recorded by a virtual camera, that refers back to the stochastic processes that drive complexity theory.
Using biomorphism to evoke a sense of life, the microscopic-biological visual language portrays these invisible entities as active organisms, as embryonic processes of reality and life. They are presented as a seamless stream of interacting information, each layer building the next in a continuous everchanging state of flux. We ourselves are made out of these interweaving layers of reality, which makes us informational entity complexes.
The Flow proposes a paradigm shift, from a fragmented understanding of reality to a conceptually unified viewpoint of the inner workings of the universe. Through this new viewpoint one can discover patterns within the stream of reality but also raise the question of whether reality stems from a single unified field, like the implicate order or a holographic projection. This viewpoint also allows us to postulate how this flow unfolds into increasingly complex levels of interaction and how it gives rise not only to genetic information but also to entire cellular systems, consciousness and culture."
http://www.mrkism.com/flow/
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Just finished reading...
...HERE by illustrator Richard McGuire.
Well, "read" is a bit misleading as this is a graphic novel. Look? Watch? See? How does one absorb a graphic novel? No matter as this is unlike any graphic novel you may have encountered before. Absorb is a much more apt description.
In 1989, McGuire created "Here," a short, 6 page illustrated story which was published in RAW, a comics anthology edited by legendary graphic novelist and cartoonist Art Spiegelman along with Françoise Mouly. The narrative was simple enough: a meditation on a single home and all the people who have lived there and things that have transpired on that spot at different points in history and time. But the execution was something the comics world had never seen. McGuire effectively deconstructed the comic format, something that had not been done before. It proved so revolutionary that, in his book READING COMICS: HOW GRAPHIC NOVELS WORK AND WHAT THEY MEAN, author and critic Douglas Wolk wrote that its "influence has echoed through art comics for decades."
The idea was so profound, McGuire greatly expanded on it and published HERE, a 300+-page version of the story, in 2014 and I am so glad he did. This is a deeply moving, thought-provoking book which keeps the same basic premise but covers even more time.
Imagine a film camera set up on a single spot, filming everything that passes in front of it. Imagine that camera has been there for a long time. I mean a long, long time. And imagine that it will stay there for a long, long time to come. Now imagine you get to flip through moments this camera has captured over this time span...past, present, and future. After all, physics tells us all time is simultaneous. We begin in a house, camera pointed toward a corner...window on the left, fireplace and mantel on the right. People come and go, families live there and pass on. They may be related, they may not be. People celebrate holidays, people have parties and dance, people get angry with each other, people misplace keys and wallets, people have children, people lose loved ones. But before the house was there, the location was there...and so was our camera. The angle and placement of our view never changes. And never will.
As you can see, the story unfolds simultaneously, in windows--sometimes small, sometimes large--that show us glimpses of what was, what is, and what will be, identified by the year in the top left corner. The windows move around in our frame, showing us something in this corner, that corner, by the fireplace, all around the space. It is a startling premise, one that proves to be truly transcendent. The cumulative effect is one of impermanence and permanence at the same time. When you step out of the subjective time stream, it all looks so fragile and beautiful: the grandeur and the daily minutiae is heartbreaking. Embedded in the change is a sense of eternity.
This story resonated with me deeply because I basically grew up in my grandmother's house in upstate New York. The house itself was built on the site of a previous home. My grandparents bought the plot of land and the shack that was on it for my grandfather to tear it down and build a new home for his bride. He dug the basement and poured cement and fitted rocks for the walls and foundation. This was during The Great Depression and materials and money were scarce so he had to be inventive. An indoor miniature golf attraction at the edge of town had recently closed and the raw pieces were being sold off so he sourced the wooden floor boards to be the floor boards in their new home. An occasional golf-ball-sized hole is still visible if one stands in the basement and looks up. My father and his siblings all grew up in that house, my grandfather died in the house he built with his own hands--so much love and resentment and laughter and joy and tears and new life and death all contained within a small structure of wood and glass and metal--and the home stands there to this day, with new occupants who have no idea how the house came to be, what has transpired in it, who lived there, or how much it means to certain people who are still alive, and who would love to step into it once more. I actually got to walk through it several years ago when it was between owners, and the smell of the kitchen was the exact same as when my grandmother lived there. Yet the backyard had changed. A small hill had been filled in and a flower garden and extensive vegetable garden had been eliminated. It was all just grass, no trace of the strawberries, sweet corn, and crunchy peas I used to nibble on as a child. The charming white fences had been destroyed. My aunt, who grew up in the house as well, had a chance to rent it recently but discovered that the house has not been cared for the way it should have. She moved away. Ever since I was young, I have tried to imagine the little shack that stood there before the home that I know and love so well, the home that occupies my dreams at night. I try to imagine what was there before the town existed, the First Nation people who lived there. And the ice sheets before that...all the way back to Pangea, to a molten ball of lava, to the formation of our solar system and galaxy. And there, the little house sits now. What will become of it? And what will become of us? We will all be eliminated and destroyed like the flower and vegetable gardens and fences. But your spot will remain.
Recommend? Absolutely. Buy it and absorb it. It is a quick "read"--about 20-30 minutes. But once you are done, wait a few days and then go back and ponder through it again. You will pick up more each time. It's just gorgeous.
http://www.richard-mcguire.com/
Well, "read" is a bit misleading as this is a graphic novel. Look? Watch? See? How does one absorb a graphic novel? No matter as this is unlike any graphic novel you may have encountered before. Absorb is a much more apt description.
In 1989, McGuire created "Here," a short, 6 page illustrated story which was published in RAW, a comics anthology edited by legendary graphic novelist and cartoonist Art Spiegelman along with Françoise Mouly. The narrative was simple enough: a meditation on a single home and all the people who have lived there and things that have transpired on that spot at different points in history and time. But the execution was something the comics world had never seen. McGuire effectively deconstructed the comic format, something that had not been done before. It proved so revolutionary that, in his book READING COMICS: HOW GRAPHIC NOVELS WORK AND WHAT THEY MEAN, author and critic Douglas Wolk wrote that its "influence has echoed through art comics for decades."
The idea was so profound, McGuire greatly expanded on it and published HERE, a 300+-page version of the story, in 2014 and I am so glad he did. This is a deeply moving, thought-provoking book which keeps the same basic premise but covers even more time.
Imagine a film camera set up on a single spot, filming everything that passes in front of it. Imagine that camera has been there for a long time. I mean a long, long time. And imagine that it will stay there for a long, long time to come. Now imagine you get to flip through moments this camera has captured over this time span...past, present, and future. After all, physics tells us all time is simultaneous. We begin in a house, camera pointed toward a corner...window on the left, fireplace and mantel on the right. People come and go, families live there and pass on. They may be related, they may not be. People celebrate holidays, people have parties and dance, people get angry with each other, people misplace keys and wallets, people have children, people lose loved ones. But before the house was there, the location was there...and so was our camera. The angle and placement of our view never changes. And never will.
As you can see, the story unfolds simultaneously, in windows--sometimes small, sometimes large--that show us glimpses of what was, what is, and what will be, identified by the year in the top left corner. The windows move around in our frame, showing us something in this corner, that corner, by the fireplace, all around the space. It is a startling premise, one that proves to be truly transcendent. The cumulative effect is one of impermanence and permanence at the same time. When you step out of the subjective time stream, it all looks so fragile and beautiful: the grandeur and the daily minutiae is heartbreaking. Embedded in the change is a sense of eternity.
This story resonated with me deeply because I basically grew up in my grandmother's house in upstate New York. The house itself was built on the site of a previous home. My grandparents bought the plot of land and the shack that was on it for my grandfather to tear it down and build a new home for his bride. He dug the basement and poured cement and fitted rocks for the walls and foundation. This was during The Great Depression and materials and money were scarce so he had to be inventive. An indoor miniature golf attraction at the edge of town had recently closed and the raw pieces were being sold off so he sourced the wooden floor boards to be the floor boards in their new home. An occasional golf-ball-sized hole is still visible if one stands in the basement and looks up. My father and his siblings all grew up in that house, my grandfather died in the house he built with his own hands--so much love and resentment and laughter and joy and tears and new life and death all contained within a small structure of wood and glass and metal--and the home stands there to this day, with new occupants who have no idea how the house came to be, what has transpired in it, who lived there, or how much it means to certain people who are still alive, and who would love to step into it once more. I actually got to walk through it several years ago when it was between owners, and the smell of the kitchen was the exact same as when my grandmother lived there. Yet the backyard had changed. A small hill had been filled in and a flower garden and extensive vegetable garden had been eliminated. It was all just grass, no trace of the strawberries, sweet corn, and crunchy peas I used to nibble on as a child. The charming white fences had been destroyed. My aunt, who grew up in the house as well, had a chance to rent it recently but discovered that the house has not been cared for the way it should have. She moved away. Ever since I was young, I have tried to imagine the little shack that stood there before the home that I know and love so well, the home that occupies my dreams at night. I try to imagine what was there before the town existed, the First Nation people who lived there. And the ice sheets before that...all the way back to Pangea, to a molten ball of lava, to the formation of our solar system and galaxy. And there, the little house sits now. What will become of it? And what will become of us? We will all be eliminated and destroyed like the flower and vegetable gardens and fences. But your spot will remain.
Recommend? Absolutely. Buy it and absorb it. It is a quick "read"--about 20-30 minutes. But once you are done, wait a few days and then go back and ponder through it again. You will pick up more each time. It's just gorgeous.
http://www.richard-mcguire.com/
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
We Are Stardust
"The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust."
--Neil deGrasse Tyson
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."
--Carl Sagan
"Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes."
--Iris Schrijver, author of LIVING WITH THE STARS: HOW THE HUMAN BODY IS CONNECTED TO THE LIFE CYCLES OF THE EARTH, THE PLANETS, AND THE STARS
"We are stardust/ We are golden/ And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden"
--Joni Mitchell
Images produced by Lematworks
https://lematworks.myportfolio.com/
Saturday, October 10, 2015
If Time Isn't Real
“If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”
--Herman Hesse
Thursday, September 10, 2015
"All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence M. Kruss
From The New Yorker.
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
The Large Hadron Collider Discovered a NEW PARTICLE!
 |
| A diagram of one possible layout of the five quarks that compose the newly discovered pentaquark |
The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered yet another new particle! This one is called a pentaquark and has been postulated and searched for over the last 50 years. The discovery of this new form of matter further enables our understanding of how the universe is put together, and could eventually lead to our complete understanding of the workings of reality. This is quite exciting!
 |
| An alternate layout of a pentaquark showing it composed of a meson particle (one quark and one antiquark) and a baryon (three quarks). |
LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson commented: "The pentaquark is not just any new particle… It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we're all made, is constituted."
The original findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03414
Friday, March 27, 2015
Dark Matter: Now Even Stranger Than Before!
Fascinating, important science news from BBC:
Dark matter 'ghosts' through galactic smash-ups
By Jonathan Webb
Science reporter, BBC News
By observing multiple collisions between huge clusters of galaxies, scientists have witnessed dark matter coasting straight through the turmoil.
Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85% of the matter in the cosmos - and these results rule out several theoretical models put forward to explain it.
This is because it barely interacts with anything at all, including the dark matter in the oncoming galaxies.
The work appears in Science magazine.
To conduct their study, astrophysicists looked at 72 smash-ups between galactic clusters, using two space telescopes: visible light was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope, and X-rays by the Chandra Observatory.
Scouring multiple views of the collisions, the researchers tracked the movement of the three main components of galaxies: stars, clouds of gas, and dark matter.
The violently swirling clouds of gas are hot enough to glow with X-rays, which Chandra detects. And stars can be seen in regular, visible-light images from Hubble.
Dark matter is more difficult to "see" - but not impossible. Although it does not emit or absorb light, it does have gravity, and so it bends the path of light passing nearby. This warps our view of anything on the other side of it, in an effect called "gravitational lensing".
"Looking through dark matter is like looking through a bathroom window," said Dr Richard Massey from Durham University, one of the study's authors. "All the objects that you can see in the distance appear slightly distorted and warped."
Using this distortion allowed Dr Massey, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to "map" the dark matter in the clusters as they collided.
Galaxy clusters are vast and contain huge amounts of dark matter, so when they collide - over billions of years - it offers a unique glimpse of how the stuff behaves.
"We like these collisions because it's exactly what we'd do in the lab," Dr Massey told BBC News.
"If you want to figure out what something is made out of, you knock it, or you throw it across the room and see where the bits go."
In this case, the bits went straight through each other.
Unlike the gas clouds, which grind to a turbulent halt, and the stars, which mostly glide past each other, the ubiquitous dark matter passes through everything and emerges unscathed, like a ghost.
"It seems not to interact with anything at all," Dr Massey said.
Earlier observations of the "Bullet Cluster" - a bust-up between two particularly big groups of galaxies, now in its final stages - had already demonstrated dark matter's weird lack of interactions, including with itself.
But this new, major survey was able to deliver much more precision, concluding that there was even less interaction than the previous work allowed for.
"If you bang your head against the wall, the electrostatic force between the molecules in your head and the ones in the wall cause a collision. This is what dark matter doesn't seem to feel," Dr Massey explained.
Dark matter does "feel" gravity; those interactions are the reason we know it is there, and the reason it is bound up in the galactic collisions to begin with. But the lack of almost any other interaction makes it even more mysterious than before.
Link to the original BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32066013
The original article in Science Magazine:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6229/1462
Dark matter 'ghosts' through galactic smash-ups
By Jonathan Webb
Science reporter, BBC News
By observing multiple collisions between huge clusters of galaxies, scientists have witnessed dark matter coasting straight through the turmoil.
Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85% of the matter in the cosmos - and these results rule out several theoretical models put forward to explain it.
This is because it barely interacts with anything at all, including the dark matter in the oncoming galaxies.
The work appears in Science magazine.
To conduct their study, astrophysicists looked at 72 smash-ups between galactic clusters, using two space telescopes: visible light was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope, and X-rays by the Chandra Observatory.
Scouring multiple views of the collisions, the researchers tracked the movement of the three main components of galaxies: stars, clouds of gas, and dark matter.
The violently swirling clouds of gas are hot enough to glow with X-rays, which Chandra detects. And stars can be seen in regular, visible-light images from Hubble.
Dark matter is more difficult to "see" - but not impossible. Although it does not emit or absorb light, it does have gravity, and so it bends the path of light passing nearby. This warps our view of anything on the other side of it, in an effect called "gravitational lensing".
"Looking through dark matter is like looking through a bathroom window," said Dr Richard Massey from Durham University, one of the study's authors. "All the objects that you can see in the distance appear slightly distorted and warped."
Using this distortion allowed Dr Massey, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to "map" the dark matter in the clusters as they collided.
Galaxy clusters are vast and contain huge amounts of dark matter, so when they collide - over billions of years - it offers a unique glimpse of how the stuff behaves.
"We like these collisions because it's exactly what we'd do in the lab," Dr Massey told BBC News.
"If you want to figure out what something is made out of, you knock it, or you throw it across the room and see where the bits go."
In this case, the bits went straight through each other.
Unlike the gas clouds, which grind to a turbulent halt, and the stars, which mostly glide past each other, the ubiquitous dark matter passes through everything and emerges unscathed, like a ghost.
"It seems not to interact with anything at all," Dr Massey said.
Earlier observations of the "Bullet Cluster" - a bust-up between two particularly big groups of galaxies, now in its final stages - had already demonstrated dark matter's weird lack of interactions, including with itself.
But this new, major survey was able to deliver much more precision, concluding that there was even less interaction than the previous work allowed for.
"If you bang your head against the wall, the electrostatic force between the molecules in your head and the ones in the wall cause a collision. This is what dark matter doesn't seem to feel," Dr Massey explained.
Dark matter does "feel" gravity; those interactions are the reason we know it is there, and the reason it is bound up in the galactic collisions to begin with. But the lack of almost any other interaction makes it even more mysterious than before.
Link to the original BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32066013
The original article in Science Magazine:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6229/1462
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Just watched...
...Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar."
My busy life usually only allows for films to be seen via Netflix or on cable (DVRs are a miracle invention, I tell ya), but every now and then, a film comes along that requires a trip to the theater. My husband had heard that the epic visuals in "Interstellar" should be seen on a big screen, so off we went last night to see this nearly three hour sci-fi adventure. And it was certainly worth it.
Director Nolan (who also wrote and directed "Inception," previously here, as well as the astounding films "Memento," "Insomnia," and the horrific, effective nightmare that was "The Dark Knight Rises") based the meat of this film starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, and Ellen Burstyn on the scientific theories of renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Without giving too much away, I will say that the film starts with a dying earth and an intergalactic space mission to find another suitable planet for human beings. When I first started reading press about "Interstellar" just before it was released, there were some snarky comments from reviewers and talking heads about how this is the first "cli-fi" film, meaning a film about "climate change" and a future dealing with its effects. Of course I wouldn't mind a bit if that is what the film turned out to be since climate change is--or should be--one of the top concerns of the entire globe right now, but I was pleased to discover that there was no heavy-handed commentary, à la the simplistic and clunky "Avatar." Instead, climate change was simply presented as a fait accompli. We see it, and we move forward with the plot.
I was also very impressed with how Nolan manages to make such an epic spectacle into such an intimate experience, psychologically speaking, both for the characters and us. It was also quite anxiety-laden which served the story line quite well. There is a long sequence about half way through that cuts back and forth between two very different scenes in a supremely effective manner. And every actor displays their respective talents at capturing and rendering raw emotion. There are some spectacular moments from McConaughey and Chastain in particular. But what is worth noting is that there was no back and forth between big sci-fi scenes and small emotional scenes: often the emotion was about the sci-fi plotlines we were witness to, which is a marvel of script writing. We see the bonds of love but also the type of disappointing behavior, born of fear, that threatens lives.
But the most delightful, incredibly engrossing part of "Interstellar" is the science fiction, which it turns out, is closer to science fact. Worm holes, time dilation, black holes, and relativity are addressed, based in the actuality of astrophysics. Neil de Grasse Tyson even commented on the veracity of the many scientific premises at work in the film.
The special effects were truly remarkable in that they are not noticeable. They blend in seamlessly with the story. And that must have something to do with the fact that Nolan did not use green screen effects but chose instead to use projection, and miniatures to achieve the perfect reality of the film. The unmistakable homages to past science fiction are also present, particularly Kubrick's masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Recommend? Yes, enthusiastically, with the caveat that you really should be familiar with some of these basic physics principles before you see the film, so you are not adrift.
https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/
My busy life usually only allows for films to be seen via Netflix or on cable (DVRs are a miracle invention, I tell ya), but every now and then, a film comes along that requires a trip to the theater. My husband had heard that the epic visuals in "Interstellar" should be seen on a big screen, so off we went last night to see this nearly three hour sci-fi adventure. And it was certainly worth it.
Director Nolan (who also wrote and directed "Inception," previously here, as well as the astounding films "Memento," "Insomnia," and the horrific, effective nightmare that was "The Dark Knight Rises") based the meat of this film starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, and Ellen Burstyn on the scientific theories of renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Without giving too much away, I will say that the film starts with a dying earth and an intergalactic space mission to find another suitable planet for human beings. When I first started reading press about "Interstellar" just before it was released, there were some snarky comments from reviewers and talking heads about how this is the first "cli-fi" film, meaning a film about "climate change" and a future dealing with its effects. Of course I wouldn't mind a bit if that is what the film turned out to be since climate change is--or should be--one of the top concerns of the entire globe right now, but I was pleased to discover that there was no heavy-handed commentary, à la the simplistic and clunky "Avatar." Instead, climate change was simply presented as a fait accompli. We see it, and we move forward with the plot.
I was also very impressed with how Nolan manages to make such an epic spectacle into such an intimate experience, psychologically speaking, both for the characters and us. It was also quite anxiety-laden which served the story line quite well. There is a long sequence about half way through that cuts back and forth between two very different scenes in a supremely effective manner. And every actor displays their respective talents at capturing and rendering raw emotion. There are some spectacular moments from McConaughey and Chastain in particular. But what is worth noting is that there was no back and forth between big sci-fi scenes and small emotional scenes: often the emotion was about the sci-fi plotlines we were witness to, which is a marvel of script writing. We see the bonds of love but also the type of disappointing behavior, born of fear, that threatens lives.
But the most delightful, incredibly engrossing part of "Interstellar" is the science fiction, which it turns out, is closer to science fact. Worm holes, time dilation, black holes, and relativity are addressed, based in the actuality of astrophysics. Neil de Grasse Tyson even commented on the veracity of the many scientific premises at work in the film.
The special effects were truly remarkable in that they are not noticeable. They blend in seamlessly with the story. And that must have something to do with the fact that Nolan did not use green screen effects but chose instead to use projection, and miniatures to achieve the perfect reality of the film. The unmistakable homages to past science fiction are also present, particularly Kubrick's masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Recommend? Yes, enthusiastically, with the caveat that you really should be familiar with some of these basic physics principles before you see the film, so you are not adrift.
https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Science and Life Beyond
A Physicist’s View of the Afterlife: Weird Quantum Physics
By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times | September 5, 2014
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot has spent decades contemplating the conundrums of physics, along with the enigma of human consciousness.
Hugenot holds a doctorate of science in mechanical engineering, and has had a successful career in marine engineering, serving on committees that write the ship-building standards for the United States.
“I did things using Newtonian physics to create ships,” he said, “but the whole time, I knew better. There’s this whole other world that our five senses don’t register.” He gave a talk on the science of the afterlife at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2014 Conference in Newport Beach, Calif., on Aug. 29.
Exploring the scientific theories related to this other world, Hugenot has wondered whether the consciousness of living human beings as well as the “souls” of the dead reside in dark matter or dark energy. He has pondered the implications of the power our consciousness seems to have over physical reality.
Hugenot told of a near-death experience in the 1970s during which he experienced part of this other world. He found it “more real than this place.”
These matters aren’t only intellectual curiosities for Hugenot; they bear on a profound experience that has changed his worldview.
Hugenot summarized some theories in physics, interpreting how they may point to the existence of a consciousness independent of the brain and to the existence of an afterlife on another plane. He noted that further investigation (reliant on further funding) would be needed to verify his postulates. He also noted challenges in trying to verify these ideas in a traditional scientific framework.
How Your Consciousness Could Exist in a ‘Cloud’
Hugenot said the human consciousness may function like the data we store in the cloud. That data can be accessed from multiple devices—your smartphone, your tablet, your desktop computer.
During a near-death experience, theorized Hugenot, the mind may be fleeing a dangerous situation. We can “flip the switch and go to the other computer,” he said.
“The nexus of my consciousness is in my head, but the locus of my consciousness—where is it really? It’s outside my body. Because inside and outside is an illusion.”
Space may not exist, or at least not in the way we commonly understand it, he said, citing Dr. John Bell’s non-locality theorem. “[It's a] hard one to get; we love our space,” he joked.
Non-locality refers to the ability of two objects to instantaneously know about each other’s states, even if they’re separated by vast distances. It is related to the phenomenon of entanglement: particle A and particle B interact, and thereafter remain mysteriously bonded. When particle A undergoes a change, particle B undergoes the same change; A and B have, in many ways, lost their individuality and behave as a single entity.
Bell’s theorem has been verified by many scientists over the years and is part of mainstream quantum physics. Hugenot’s ideas about the consciousness existing inside and outside of the human body at the same time build on this theorem, but remain outside the mainstream.
Is the Afterlife in Dark Matter, or Maybe in Another Dimension?
What scientists have observed accounts for an estimated 4 percent of our universe. Dark energy and dark matter comprise the other 96 percent. Scientists don’t really know what dark energy and matter are, and their existence is only perceived because of the effects they appear to have on observable matter.
Hugenot said: “This undiscerned 96 percent of the universe … gives us plenty of room for both consciousness and the afterlife to exist in.”
Perhaps the consciousness exists in another dimension, Hugenot said. String Theory, much-discussed in mainstream physics, holds that other dimensions exist beyond the four-dimensional concept of the universe. String Theory views the universe as a world of very thin, vibrating strings. The strings are thought to project from a lower-dimensional cosmos, one that is simpler, flatter, and without gravity.
Link to the original full article:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/936107-a-physicists-view-of-the-afterlife-weird-quantum-physics/
By Tara MacIsaac, Epoch Times | September 5, 2014
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot has spent decades contemplating the conundrums of physics, along with the enigma of human consciousness.
Hugenot holds a doctorate of science in mechanical engineering, and has had a successful career in marine engineering, serving on committees that write the ship-building standards for the United States.
“I did things using Newtonian physics to create ships,” he said, “but the whole time, I knew better. There’s this whole other world that our five senses don’t register.” He gave a talk on the science of the afterlife at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2014 Conference in Newport Beach, Calif., on Aug. 29.
Exploring the scientific theories related to this other world, Hugenot has wondered whether the consciousness of living human beings as well as the “souls” of the dead reside in dark matter or dark energy. He has pondered the implications of the power our consciousness seems to have over physical reality.
Hugenot told of a near-death experience in the 1970s during which he experienced part of this other world. He found it “more real than this place.”
These matters aren’t only intellectual curiosities for Hugenot; they bear on a profound experience that has changed his worldview.
Hugenot summarized some theories in physics, interpreting how they may point to the existence of a consciousness independent of the brain and to the existence of an afterlife on another plane. He noted that further investigation (reliant on further funding) would be needed to verify his postulates. He also noted challenges in trying to verify these ideas in a traditional scientific framework.
How Your Consciousness Could Exist in a ‘Cloud’
Hugenot said the human consciousness may function like the data we store in the cloud. That data can be accessed from multiple devices—your smartphone, your tablet, your desktop computer.
During a near-death experience, theorized Hugenot, the mind may be fleeing a dangerous situation. We can “flip the switch and go to the other computer,” he said.
“The nexus of my consciousness is in my head, but the locus of my consciousness—where is it really? It’s outside my body. Because inside and outside is an illusion.”
Space may not exist, or at least not in the way we commonly understand it, he said, citing Dr. John Bell’s non-locality theorem. “[It's a] hard one to get; we love our space,” he joked.
Non-locality refers to the ability of two objects to instantaneously know about each other’s states, even if they’re separated by vast distances. It is related to the phenomenon of entanglement: particle A and particle B interact, and thereafter remain mysteriously bonded. When particle A undergoes a change, particle B undergoes the same change; A and B have, in many ways, lost their individuality and behave as a single entity.
Bell’s theorem has been verified by many scientists over the years and is part of mainstream quantum physics. Hugenot’s ideas about the consciousness existing inside and outside of the human body at the same time build on this theorem, but remain outside the mainstream.
Is the Afterlife in Dark Matter, or Maybe in Another Dimension?
What scientists have observed accounts for an estimated 4 percent of our universe. Dark energy and dark matter comprise the other 96 percent. Scientists don’t really know what dark energy and matter are, and their existence is only perceived because of the effects they appear to have on observable matter.
Hugenot said: “This undiscerned 96 percent of the universe … gives us plenty of room for both consciousness and the afterlife to exist in.”
Perhaps the consciousness exists in another dimension, Hugenot said. String Theory, much-discussed in mainstream physics, holds that other dimensions exist beyond the four-dimensional concept of the universe. String Theory views the universe as a world of very thin, vibrating strings. The strings are thought to project from a lower-dimensional cosmos, one that is simpler, flatter, and without gravity.
Link to the original full article:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/936107-a-physicists-view-of-the-afterlife-weird-quantum-physics/
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Evolution Really Happened
I am currently watching the new "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson on the National Geographic Channel, a follow up to the original "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" with Carl Sagan. This new version is produced by Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan who is Sagan's widow.
Such a worthy show... both of them.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/
Such a worthy show... both of them.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Proof of The Big Bang
A huge scientific breakthrough was announced yesterday. The twisting gravity waves from the Big Bang have been detected and seen for the first time! This is being hailed as Nobel worthy and will certainly add to the knowledge base for a Unified Theory of Everything! VERY exciting!
Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News
Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.
Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.
It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.
The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.
"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.
"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.
The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.
This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.
The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
Complete article from BBC News here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974
and the BICEP2 findings here:
http://bicepkeck.org/index.html#papers
Cosmic inflation: 'Spectacular' discovery hailed
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News
Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.
Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.
It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.
The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.
"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.
"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.
The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.
This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.
The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
Complete article from BBC News here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26605974
and the BICEP2 findings here:
http://bicepkeck.org/index.html#papers
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