Physics, Quanta, String Theory and more

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/is...hecrucible.asp

be well, be love.

david

the crucible

philip ball uncovers a pleasing symmetry surrounding the mysterious casimir force

few concepts in physical science have been made as mysterious as the casimir force. the force, identified in 1948 by the dutch physicist hendrik casimir, is the result of the quantum nature of a vacuum, which is not empty at all but is filled with spontaneously fluctuating electromagnetic fields. these can be regarded as composed of photons created when pairs of particles and antiparticles pop unheralded into existence before annihilating each other in a burst of radiation, suggesting an image of the vacuum as a seething mass of ephemeral activity.

because the wavelengths of the photons are constrained in the space between two surfaces to be no wider than this gap, the radiation pressure is smaller in this space than in the region outside, creating the (casimir) force that pushes the surfaces together.

now, this does represent a valid way of looking at the situation, and does indeed make the casimir force seem rather remarkable. but there's another, more mundane way to understand it. all surfaces contain electron clouds that are more or less 'floppy' or polarisable, deformable by nearby electric fields. these clouds undergo spontaneous quantum fluctuations, and when two such surfaces are very close together, each 'feels' the fluctuating polarisation of the other. the result is that the two may become correlated, creating an electromagnetically induced attraction between them. this is nothing more than the familiar 'dispersion' or van der waals force, which decays as the inverse-cubed power of the distance from a flat surface.

but for one surface to feel the other, a photon has to pass between them. and as the surfaces get further apart, the time taken for the photon to travel across the gap becomes non-negligible, affecting the ability of each surface to respond to the other. this changes the character of the force, specifically by making it decay instead as the inverse-fourth power of the separation. this too is then the casimir force: a kind of 'retarded' form of the dispersion force.

[SaraJane]

i don't know if this is the correct place to post this, but i'm sure a mod will let me know!
i recently read in discover magazine (jan 09) about quantum entanglement. is this what david is referring to with his experiment with the man where they hooked up his saliva swab to a battery/lie detector and the man continued to the airport and recorded his ups and downs of the day and they coincided with the saliva's recordings?

per magazine:

"using two villages on opposite sides of geneva as their lab, swiss physicists have taken one of the strangest phenomena of quantum mechanics to a new level. from geneva they sent a pair of photons along fiber-optic cables, one to each village. when they measured one photon upon its arrival, the other changed instantaneously- though it was 11 miles away. this weird linkage, called quantum entanglement, raises exotic possibilities like teleportation. when two particles are entangled, the measurement of one immediately affects the other, no matter how distant. it's so counterintuitive that albert einstein dismissed it as "spooky action at a distance." such entanglement had been observed before but never over such a great distance.
"one might assume that one particle sent an ultrafast signal to its partner, says physicist nicolas gisin, a member of the university of geneva team. if that were true, the quantum communique would have traveled at more than 10,000 times the speed of light, something difficult to reconcile with the known laws of physics. "nature does not function that way," gisin says. in relativity theory, communicating faster than light speed is not possible. but the correlations observed in entangled photons cannot be use to communicate any kind of signal, so they do not violate the theory. still, gisin says, "we have to admit this is a really big conceptual change.""

silly scientists... continuing to downplay the truth just so their comfy theories continue to keep them warm and fuzzy at night.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=naked-singularities

be well, be love.

david

do naked singularities break the rules of physics?
the black hole has a troublesome sibling, the naked singularity. physicists have long thought--hoped--it could never exist. but could it?
by pankaj s. joshi

* conventional wisdom has it that a large star eventually collapses to a black hole, but some theoretical models suggest it might instead become a so-called naked singularity. sorting out what happens is one of the most important unresolved problems in astrophysics.
* the discovery of naked singularities would transform the search for a unified theory of physics, not least by providing direct observational tests of such a theory.

modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size. whereas if a star is massive enough, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might halt the collapse. from a size of millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to a pinprick smaller than the dot on an "i."

most physicists and astronomers think the result is a black hole, a body with such intense gravity that nothing can escape from its immediate vicinity. a black hole has two parts. at its core is a singularity, the infinitesimal point into which all the matter of the star gets crushed. surrounding the singularity is the region of space from which escape is impossible, the perimeter of which is called the event horizon. once something enters the event horizon, it loses all hope of exiting. whatever light the falling body gives off is trapped, too, so an outside observer never sees it again. it ultimately crashes into the singularity.

but is this picture really true? the known laws of physics are clear that a singularity forms, but they are hazy about the event horizon. most physicists operate under the assumption that a horizon must indeed form, if only because the horizon is very appealing as a scientific fig leaf. physicists have yet to figure out what exactly happens at a singularity: matter is crushed, but what becomes of it then? the event horizon, by hiding the singularity, isolates this gap in our knowledge. all kinds of processes unknown to science may occur at the singularity, yet they have no effect on the outside world. astronomers plotting the orbits of planets and stars can safely ignore the uncertainties introduced by singularities and apply the standard laws of physics with confidence. whatever happens in a black hole stays in a black hole.

[tuesday]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090123/sc_livescience/teleportationmilestoneachieved

teleportation milestone achieved
livescience.com fri jan 23, 12:05 pm et

scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "star trek" feat of teleportation. no one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter - about a yard.

this is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said christopher monroe of the joint quantum institute at the university of maryland, who led the effort.

teleportation is one of nature's most mysterious forms of transport: quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. it has previously been achieved between photons (a unit, or quantum, of electromagnetic radiation, such as light) over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third.

none of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

now the jqi team, along with colleagues at the university of michigan, has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a meter. that capability is necessary for workable quantum information systems because they will require memory storage at both the sending and receiving ends of the transmission.

in the jan. 23 issue of the journal science, the scientists report that, by using their protocol, atom-to-atom teleported information can be recovered with perfect accuracy about 90 percent of the time - and that figure can be improved.
"our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale 'quantum repeater' that can network quantum memories over vast distances," monroe said. "moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation."

<<<snip

article continues...

copyright © 2009 yahoo! inc. all rights reserved.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.naturalnews.com/025486.html

be well, be love.

david

the higgs boson particle isn't a particle - why the search for subatomic particles is an illusion
friday, january 30, 2009 by: mike adams, naturalnews editor

naturalnews) physicists are a great bunch of folks. they're bright and imaginative, but just like professionals in any other field of science, when educated under the same organized system of beliefs they have the ability to cluster together and share some rather remarkable delusions.

the latest delusion is the search for the so-called higgs boson particle. it's a multi-billion dollar effort that has taken decades to pursue in the u.s. using the fermilab particle accelerator. soon, the search for the "higgs," as it's known, will be largely taken over by the new large hadron collider powering up in switzerland in the summer of 2009.

sounds cool, huh? but there's a problem with all this: higgs boson isn't a particle!


outdated newtonian thinking still dominates modern physics
far too many western physicists remain steadfastly dedicated to the newtonian idea that the world is made of ever-smaller spheres of matter that bounce off each other like balls in a pinball machine. the atom, in fact, was once thought to be the smallest unit of matter (that's what "atomic" means, of course). but before long, physicists began wondering "what are atoms made of?" so they invented a comical model of particle physics that they use to explain how atoms are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons.

here's a typical explanation of this model of matter from the world of conventional physics:

matter is made of molecules; molecules of atoms; atoms of a cloud of electrons about one-hundred-millionth of a centimeter and a nucleus about one-hundred-thousandth the size of the electron cloud. the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. each proton (or neutron) has about two thousand times the mass of an electron.

that's a handy explanation for kindergarteners and the scientifically illiterate, but it has a fatal flaw: there are no such things as physical electron particles, either!

huh? did i just say there's no such "thing" as an electron? yep, i did. what i mean by that remark is that there's no such thing as a single, isolated, self-contained electron spinning around the nucleus like a tiny marble. as is well noted in the field of quantum physics a so-called "electron" is really just a cloud of probabilities in which the illusory appearance of an electron-like particle might be teased out of the fabric of reality under the right experimental circumstances, but no such discrete object can be said to truly "exist" in the physical world.

still, many western scientists cling to the particle theory on practically everything: subatomic physics, biochemistry and even water. in the world of water, for example, while we're told by scientists that water molecules are self-contained units of h2o, the truth is that water molecules are constantly transforming, releasing and creating new bonds in a sort of wet molecular square dancing jamboree. thus, if you look at a cup of water, you're not simply observing a very large number of discrete water molecules that keep to their own business; you're watching the constant exchange and reconfiguration of molecules that openly share not just elemental particles but also information at many levels.

the self-contained h2o molecule explanation is simpler for everybody to grasp, though, which is why it's still taught everywhere today. the universe is simpler if you think it's entirely made up of tiny particles rather than intertwined fields of possibility that span multiple dimensions and propagate information encoded in mysterious energy fields.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=...out-relativity

be well, be love.

david

was einstein wrong?: a quantum threat to special relativity

entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. it may also undermine einstein's special theory of relativity
by david z albert and rivka galchen

key concepts

in the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.

quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal.

this nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to einstein's special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.

our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. this intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. if a affects b without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from a to b. every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a bbc radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

we term this intuition "locality."

[weboy78]

http://esciencenews.com/articles/200....ray.blast.yet

nasa's fermi telescope sees most extreme gamma-ray blast yet

the first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from nasa's fermi gamma-ray space telescope is one for the record books. the blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. "we were waiting for this one," said peter michelson, the principal investigator on fermi's large area telescope at stanford university. "burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and fermi is giving us the tools to understand them."..


coupled with the fermi measurements, the distance also helps astronomers determine the slowest speeds possible for material emitting the prompt gamma rays. within the jet of this burst, gas bullets must have moved at 99.9999 percent the speed of light. this burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date.

one curious aspect of the burst is a five-second delay separating the highest-energy emissions from the lowest. such a time lag has been seen clearly in only one earlier burst.

"it may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," michelson said.

[weboy78]

pier luigi ighina from italy
the law of rhythm
i think about being able to affirm,without shades of doubt, that all of that is alive and vital, is expressed with rhythmic functions. if there is no rhythm, life cannot exist.

but what is the rhythm in itself?

there are so many types of rhythms in nature: the diurnal and nighttime rhythm that alternates the passage of the night a day and vice versa; the monthly rhythm of the moon; the rhythm of the seasons,...

in the man there is the cardiac rhythm, the respiratory rhythm, that digestive, etc. etc.

it can be said that the presence of the rhythm not only characterizes the existence of the living beings, but also of all that appears in the created universe.

if we want to give the more possible synthetic definition of the rhythm, we should say that it consists in an external alternate motion, that can have the form of a cyclical motion, both parabolic and spiral shaped, that expresses an inside pulsation that expands and contracts continuously.

now if the pulsation is the inside aspect and therefore the hidden part of the rhythm,the rhythmical spatial exterior movement of varing aspect, that manifests itself in less or more rapid succession, is all that can be known in apparent way,from the senses of a human being.

from that,our senses gain only what derives from that is external, and therefore superficial of the rhythm, and this sets a notable limit between the man and the true knowledge than surrounds him.

ighina has brought on the earth the revelation of what it is the rhythm in its inside aspect, but as always it happens in these cases, anybody or almost everyone hasn't believed in his words, that implicated an unknown reality to the sensorial perceptions.

as a intimate friend and faithful collaborator of ighina, i try to bring forth his work of diffusion of these important truths, that if they were understood and approved, they would contribute to turn into evolutionary way the existence of the humanity,addressing it toward a spiritual future of salvation.

the simplest system to understand its revelations, would consist of believing in its words by faith, as i have done with few others at the time, because "we felt" internally that it was the truth that was proposed to us and only subseguently,we noticed that the reward to our trust, was also a logic and rational understanding of all the mysterious phenomenons that happen continuously in us and around us.
... http://www.rexresearch.com/ighina2/ighina2.htm


http://www.rexresearch.com/ighina/ighina.htm

[r0ni]

sound becomes light

new research confirms a theory: high-frequency acoustic waves can be converted to light

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...-becomes-light

peace

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...-particle.html

be well, be love.

david

strange particle created; may rewrite how matter's made
brian handwerk for national geographic news
march 20, 2009

an unexpected new subatomic particle has been discovered in illinois's fermilab atom smasher, scientists announced this week.

the new particle may break all known rules for creating matter, say the researchers who created the oddity.

y(4140)—as the new particle has been dubbed—couldn't have formed through either of the two known models for matter creation. researchers aren't even sure what y(4140) is made of.

it's long been accepted that six different "flavors" of particles called quarks combine to form larger subatomic particles.

in one method, a quark pairs with one of its opposites, an antiquark, to create a type of matter called a meson. in the second method, three quarks gather to form baryons, such as protons and neutrons.