EIU Astro is happy to have our first guest contributor for the summer, Paul Holder, whose blog is at: http://gnhsphysics theory.wordpress.com/

Deep Space 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on October 24, 1998. During a highly successful primary mission the team tested twelve advanced high-risk technologies in space. In an extremely successful extended mission it encountered Comet Borrelly and returned the best images and other science data ever obtained from a comet. During its successful hyperextended mission, it conducted further technology tests. The spacecraft was retired on December 18, 2001.

Deep Space 1 was the first spacecraft to utilize ion engines. Ion engines use ejected ionized xenon gas instead of chemical propellants. Only a very small amount of xenon is ejected at a time. It may take four days or more just to use one kilogram of xenon. Becasue of this small ejection mass, the reaction force experienced by the spacecraft is also small. If you rest a piece of paper on your hand, the paper pushes on your hand about as hard as the ion engine pushes on the spacecraft.  The benifit of the xenon ion propulsion is that unlike chemical engines, which generally can only be operated for minutes, ion engines can be operated for years. Even though the force that acts on the craft is small, it is applied over a long period and produces a large impulse. The net effect of this is a large change in momentum (velocity), eventually attaining speeds far beyond the reach of chemical propellants.

Deep Space 1, using less than 74 kg (163 pounds) of xenon, accelerated by about 4.3 kilometers/second (9600 miles/hour) over a period of 678 days. This is greater than any spacecraft has ever been able to change its speed and a longer duration than any previous propulsion system. This was attained while operating conservatively. DS1 could have achieved still higher velocity, but mission controllers had to fulfill defined mission objectives.

The team that developed and flew NASA’s Deep Space 1 spacecraft received the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ prestigious Space Systems Award “For the outstanding performance of the team during design, implementation, test, operations, and extended mission including space flight test of 12 important, high-risk technologies.” The award was presented on April 2, 2003, during the Responsive Space Conference in Redondo Beach, Calif.

Nearly every student of science has noticed the remarkable similarities between the classroom model of the atom and what we call a Solar System. The atom’s nucleus is analogous to the Sun, while the revolving electrons resemble the planets in their various orbits.

I think it is not futile to attempt a correlation between the two different aspects of everything that is. At one end, we have the entire vastness of the unfathomable universe (or even beyond). On the other end, the miniscule fuzzy constituents of everything that we know and see. So close, yet so far.

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PRL quiere un índice de impacto más alto. Lo conseguirá siendo más selectiva y más eficiente. Endurecerán el proceso de aceptación de artículos. Así se lo ha advertido el editor a los revisores: Tenéis que ser más duros, muchachos. Primero se quejaron de que por su tamaño (el gran número de artículo que publican al año) no podían tener un índice de impacto más alto (Editorial: “Is PRL Too Large to Have an ‘‘Impact’’?,” February 9, 2009). Ahora nos advierten que desde hoy publicar en PRL será cada día más difícil (Editorial: “Improving PRL,” June 29, 2009). Esto es la repera. Los editores están obsesionados con el índice de impacto. Haber quién “lo” tiene más grande. ¡Qué cosas!

“PRL debe ser una revista más selectiva y más eficiente.” Sólo resultados de primera (¿no lo eran ya?) podrán ser publicados. Todos, autores, revisores y editores, deberán tenerlo en cuenta a partir de ahora (¿no lo tenían ya?).

¿Cuál es la clave? “Los revisores deberán tener en cuenta el impacto del resultado en su campo y en otros campos.” El impacto del artículo, es decir, quieren un índice de impacto más alto y quieren publicar solo artículos que esté garantizado que vayan a tener un alto índice de impacto. Más aún, los revisores tendrán que explicar al aceptar un artículo por qué cumple con los “altos” estándares de PRL. Más claro, agua, … digo, en inglés [c&p del original]

“Referees must judge breadth of interest based on the impact a result will have both in its field and across field boundaries, and, if they conclude that a paper meets PRL standards, they must explain why.”

Los nuevos criterios se aplicarán a partir de 1 de julio de 2009. Así que, amigo, a enviar papers a PRL ya, pero ya, que habrá que aprovechar el proceso de transición en el que la mayoría de los revisores no se hayan leído aún los nuevos criterios y no sepan aplicarlos, porque en los próximo meses si ya era difícil publicar en PRL se va a convertir en casi imposible.

En este blog ya contamos La “bonita” historia de Physical Review Letters (Publicado por emulenews en Febrero 7, 2009).

During my site-hoping morning, I came across this quick brief on NASA.gov:
2009 Astronaut Class

Now, why would I be excited about this? Well, judging based on previously-inducted astronaut classes, I can expect the recruitment to occur every three/four years, which is pretty nice. So, 2013, 2016, and 2020 will see a couple dozen new astronauts each, with 2020 being my first possible inclusion into the selection process. Each class usually accepts less than 1% of the thousands of applicants, and that won’t change any time soon.

Now, checking out some more stuff about this newest class, they will never fly on the Space Shuttle. The aging shuttle fleet will be retired before they complete their two-three year training, leaving them a three-year window before the Orion is ready for manned spaceflight (Source: SPACE.com).

In other news, I found this nice timeline about the entirety of the selection process, based on NASA’s published one with some edits made. There are also a bunch of graphs helping to predict class compositions and other variables in the new astronaut classes. While slightly off, the timeline is still a nice resource for myself and anyone else looking to become an astronaut.
Astronaut for Hire

While I was watching last night’s episode of The Colbert Report, I was pleased to see that Steven Colbert’s guest was Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an Astrophysicist associated with the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Dr. Tyson hosts the PBS show NOVA scienceNOW. He described the show as an opportunity to share all parts of science with the public in a way that is easy to understand and interesting. The show’s website has episodes and information listed by scientific category: Health & Biosciences; Natural & Human Worlds; physics theory & Space Science; Scientist Profiles; and Technology & Math.

I clicked on the link to physics theory and found a great page all about CERN, the particle physics theory laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Websites like this are so important in expanding science literacy. Even now as I am reading Dan Brown’s book Angel & Demons, I am frustrated that his depiction of physics theory and of CERN are inaccurate, fully knowing most readers won’t do any research to find what information is correct and what is not. I hope that programs such as NOVA scienceNOW will aid in correcting myths about science.

For more information on Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, visit his official website.

I wait 2 weeks before telling anyone. Because I like to use the word “fortnight”. “- Demetri Martin

Two weeks ago I had my final physics theory exam. Meaning I never ever have to look or think about physics theory ever again! E-V-E-R!!! Woohoo!

I’d wait two days to tell you about the end of my a-level exams (finished 12 days ago) so I could use the word fortnight again. But may as well tell you now, eh?

Well I did exams for music: figured bass, listening and anthology. Figured bass seemed to go quite well. Listening…meh. And anthology- well it went REALLY well! I love anthology! I’m hoping for full marks on that paper!

Three physics theory exams could be graded on the scale from “meh” to “DID YOU EVEN STUDY THIS COURSE???”

But never mind, eh? Lets all now pray for good results!

I have pointed out before that my struggle with gender dysphoria prompted me to search in all directions for a solution to being born in the wrong body, and the determination with which I pursued that goal in spite of all doubts and discouragements — even attempts to accept things the way they were, adapting to and adopting the identity imposed on me by circumstances — says a lot about me, and even about what I ultimately concluded. My existence may be supported by reality, the physical, chemical, biological and sociological fabric out of which we all seem to be spun, but none of these things are me. I exist in my mind and that is why the way I perceive myself in my own mind can not only contradict my physical form, but trump it in importance to my survival. I have heard the theories and arguments on nature versus nurture and taking my own experience into consideration I can say that there are elements in both that can help shape who you are, but only by presenting the options or stimulus necessary for you to determine who you are. I cannot tell you if this is a process of creation or revelation; it feels like both. I am the driving and defining force within my own mind; my mind is the structure and articulation of my soul.

I was born in a context in which everything and everyone seemed to deny my existence, in accordance with the belief that who I was was based upon what I was and where I came from. I was not encouraged to express myself in ways that were inconsistent with my appearance. I’ve described some of the ways I was discouraged in other writing, and how it affected me. The most important result of this situation was that it did make me conscious of the fact that there was more to me than just my body. I have long since realized that most people are not very clear on what a spirit or a soul really is, but I never really had a problem with that. It was difficult for me to understand the modern view of consciousness and things like mind, spirit and soul as mere epiphenomena. I eventually understood the limitations of scientific thinking responsible for promoting this view, as I understand the way it drives scientists to look for a physical mechanism for the origin of consciousness. On the other hand, I had no difficulty understanding that the mind was central to everything that really mattered about existence. Perhaps that is a result of being hyper-conscious of every thought and action I took as a consequence of being forced to override all of my natural instincts and impulses to conform to people’s expectations of me.

I spent my childhood engaged in a constant, intensive observation of myself and everyone around me. I analyzed the world and all my experiences in it as if my life depended on it, often discovering new ways in which it clearly did. In my day to day life I was as deliberate in the control of my thoughts and emotions as I was in the control of my body. I had to understand as much as possible about how my mind and body worked to achieve that degree of control, which included managing or bypassing a number of “hard wired” behaviors and responses. I was thinking hyper-dimensionally long before I learned that was the way to describe what I was doing, or how to explain the process to someone else. I think the first step in thinking hyper-dimensionally involved the unstated realization that everything in my existence occurred in my mind; the “outside” world distinguished from my “inner” world by my physical perspective in it and limited influence over it. In my “inner” world, I was everyone and everything, everywhere at once — all on the verge of being nowhere, nothing and nobody. My consciousness was an all encompassing point with unconscious depths in the shadow of oblivion.

I began to understand that there are many things you have to figure out for yourself, in order to know and understand them, and consciousness is one of those things. I suspect that the scientific study of consciousness will inevitably conclude that it is a complex form of a basic property of “awareness” inherent in energy as the combined medium of information structured in space, time and mind. It might arrive at that conclusion with more esoteric and granular terms, but that is pretty much what it will amount to. Any other proposition runs into the problem of spontaneous generation of the subjective state phenomenon that is the prerequisite for any observer of the objective state. The consequence of any reductive analysis is an increase in relative potential; which is to say that everything is implicit in nothing. The information potential of a singularity is infinite. The interesting thing is that I am not saying anything new here. The same observations have been made again and again in many different ways. None of them make any sense to people until they observe it for themselves. I have no idea what conclusions a scientifically valid description of it will lead to. The first steps in this direction were taken when science confronted the quantum paradox and the possibility of observer based reality.

For my purposes, this observation is not the end; it is just the beginning. To be perfectly frank, I find myself in an untenable position and this can only be corrected in a world where things we would think of as magical or miraculous can occur. In part, this is because any question of physical transformation runs into problems related to the preservation of the mind. I ran into this while contemplating the use of future nanotechnology to remodel a living body, picking this as the most scientifically plausible method of turning a man into a woman. Biological processes can and should be viewed as proof of the concept of nanotechnology, in which complex organisms are constructed on a molecular level. We know that some aspects of personality can be passed on biologically, but there is no indication that the subjective consciousness is transferable. If you were cloned, the clone would be his or her own person, with a unique subjective consciousness. He might be like you, and assuming your exact brain structure and chemical memory was copied precisely, think he was you, but you would not be him. Nothing we know of suggests that there is any continuity of consciousness in that kind of situation. In a transformational process, there is every chance that the thread of subjective consciousness would be broken as one form was broken down and another built up.

The possibility of transitional death forced me to focus on understanding the nature and survival requirements of the mind, and this is ultimately a question of significance for all of us in the face of the inevitability of death. Death is the inescapable paradox. It is reasonable to assume that it inspired the concepts of spirits and souls. The prospect of oblivion is something that drives us to truly assert ourselves, to dream of and strive for immortality. In our lives we experience oblivion in different ways. In a way, the singularity of our consciousness exists in a bubble of oblivion. It is not hard to argue that individual consciousness can only exist if it is shielded from universal consciousness. Until we actually die, we cannot know if death is the end of consciousness, the end of individuality, or the beginning of something else. All we can do is ask what the existence of the mind really depends on. One possibility is that the body and brain is the foundation on which the mind is built, while the other is that the body and brain are merely the scaffolding used in building a mind that can stand alone. We might as well be asking if the world is really what it appears to be. As it happens, it is not. The world as we know it exists only in our minds.

To be more specific, we exist in our minds and the world we perceive is constructed in our minds based on information provided through our senses. What we can know about the universe is based on the information that can be derived through its structure. Perception is the conversion of structure into information, through the structure itself, into our minds. Our bodies, our physical senses and our brains are part of and can be found in that structure, but our minds cannot. Our minds possess structure, based on they way they use information, however; this gives us information and structure in both abstract and manifest states. The process of transition from a manifest state to an abstract state presents us with one dynamic. The constant transformation of structure in the universe and in the mind gives us another dynamic, in general terms “change” or in more specific resolution “time” which we derive from the continuity of perception. It is possible that consciousness emerges from the organization of awareness in the structures of perception through the interpretation of information derived from static interactions with dynamic structure in the universe. The interesting question, of course, is what does the existence of the universe depend on?

I am not sure anyone claims to know an answer to this question, but science has given us a lot of ideas derived from tested information about the universe. It does not give us an origin for the medium of space-time or energy, but it can tell us that all matter is derived from energy and structure. I am strongly inclined to look at space and time as part of the way energy is structured, viewing dimensionality as a component of structure along with size, scale, position, etc. If, as I suspect, awareness is a property of energy, then even the mind can be fully encompassed in the universe. Mostly, energy seems to be the most persistent and pervasive thing encountered along the spectrum of extrapolation or reduction. I would hope that anyone critical of my inclination to view awareness as an inherent potential of energy will understand that I simply find awareness too fundamental to our experience of existence not to be implicit in energy. I think that the obvious complexity of structure found in the human brain and perceptual processes is evidence enough of the difficulty of focusing potential awareness into coherent consciousness. I do not pretend to have a hypothesis for how the structure and organization works, or where in the process proto-awareness becomes awareness or proto-consciousness becomes consciousness. I just see it intuitively in life in the world around us.

I did not get to this point in my speculation following a straight and direct route, and some of the most interesting and useful things I spent time on were essential to getting me this far, such as a study of dimensionality, part of which I have elaborated on in explaining the different dimensions and part of which I only hinted at in this post — dimensions of mind. It is a lot to go over and again, too much to really explain inside another topic. We do not truly know what energy is, but it does seem to be pervasive and universal enough to be a base medium that, through structure in manifest, static, dynamic and abstract ways would give us space, time and mind, the three media that encompass existence as we know it. Information and structure both have intimate relationships with energy. Our bodies and our minds can easily be seen as structured energy. We are energy and information forged into a truly dynamic state. With all the universe to show us that energy sustains information, it seems absurd to think it would simply delete information like us. Most of all, I would think that energy organized to the point of self-awareness would somehow be self sustaining. If we could become more complex by one dimension of space-time-mind, I suspect that maybe we would. Of course, that’s just me commenting on a mountain of unshared speculation.

A magnet is a very special metal. When a magnet goes near some other metals or other magnets, it will pull the other metal or magnet closer. This is called magnetism. The most common objects that are attracted to magnets contain iron or steel. Most other metals, including aluminium, are not attracted to magnets. In fact, there are only three magnetic metals they are Iron, Nickel and Cobolt.

A ferrofluid is a magnetic liquid and it looks cool:

To learn more see this clip.