Tomorrow is crunch time, results day! I’m not incredibly nervous about it as I accept there is absolutely nothing I can do about it now.. I can finally become a proper graduand and move on.

Saboo you slaaag!

La constante de gravitación universal de Newton es tan famosa que todo el mundo cree que tiene un valor perfectamente bien conocido experimentalmente. Nada más lejos de la realidad. Es extremadamente difícil medirla (desde que Newton la introdujo hace más de 300 años) y su incertidumbre actual es muy grande (comparada con otras constantes en física teórica). Su última determinación experimental nos la ofrecen Jun Luo et al. en un artículo que se acaba de publicar en la prestigiosa Physical Review Letters: logran alcanzar una incertidumbre de unas 2.6 partes en 100.000 (mejor que el mejor dato oficial del NIST publicado en CODATA). ¿Parece poco preciso? Lo es. El artículo técnico es “Determination of the Newtonian Gravitational Constant G with Time-of-Swing,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 102: 240801, 2009.

Una cosa interesante de la figura que presento, lado derecho, es que los datos experimentales son contradictorios entre sí. Buenos resultados “aparentemente” como los ofrecidos por UWash-00 ó UZur-06, compatibles entre sí, están claramente sesgados respecto al nuevo valor. ¿Por qué? ¿Cómo es posible? Por supuesto, los autores consideran que su resultado es el más fiable de todos los publicados hasta el momento. Parece que los revisores que han aceptado este artículo también están de acuerdo, pero a los demás nos deja un cierto mal sabor de boca. ¡Qué van a decir sino!

Por cierto, el mejor valor de G obtenido con datos astrofísicos por AUI es mucho peor.

Rare Isotope Rap

As teaching is one of this lab’s main themes
It’s the place that introduced me to physics theory with beams
They accelerate nuclei, the protons and neutrons
At the centers of atoms, we call ‘em nucleons
Protons define the element, its chemistry
Neutron numbers affect elements with subtlety
They define the isotopes, and with the FRIB they hope
To make some that no one’s ever seen before, and that’s dope.
So you know the elements from the periodic table
But this other version highlights isotopes that are stable
The isotopes we know are on a diagonal track
And at first glance, I thought that it looked pretty whack
But as you get away from that stable nucleus line
There’s radioactive isotopes we don’t usually find
On earth, because these nuclei prefer to decay
Into more stable isotopes by tossing particles away
Before they can, the teams here check out their dynamics
Measure masses and lifetimes, and study their mechanics

They’re building FRIB with mysteries to solve
Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve
The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say
Exactly why some are stable while others decay
A more powerful machine can push the frontier
The physicists here, they get nuclear

So let’s say you were making a new kind of nucleus
In F-RIB, a planned facility that’s long been discussed
The starting atoms – they’re just ordinary
Stable isotopes – they’re easier to store and carry
You strip off their electrons for a charged state
They zip through electric fields made to accelerate
Then you slam them into something, we call it the target,
Five percent of your nuclei are going to really hit it
Those that do will be different from your starting crew
They’ve lost protons and neutrons, or maybe gained a few
All kinds of fragments have just been created
So you put them through a magnet that can get them separated
If it’s got lots of protons, it takes an inside curve
But more neutrons tend to drag it for an outside swerve
You filter out the isotopes that you don’t want in the stream
And voila, you’ve got a rare isotope beam
And to put your nucleus on the nuclear map
You’ll then measure it in a detector or trap
This facility is for research and to teach
So the “you” could be more than just a figure of speech.

They’re building the FRIB with mysteries to solve
Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve
The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say
Exactly why some are stable while others decay
A more powerful machine can push the frontier
The physicists here, they get nuclear

A branch of nuclear physics theory works to understand the stars
Because burning hydrogen only takes them so far
If they’re big they can run through helium, carbon
Neon, oxygen and silicon, right up to iron
Which is bound so tight that burning reaches its conclusion
There’s no energy to gain by either fission or fusion
So the core collapses, then BAM it explodes!
The nuclei get broken but it’s sending out loads
Of nucleons, which ram each other and stick together
Protons and neutrons can switch from one to the other
Swapping charge is simple when they’ve got the energy
To make a small charged particle and set it free
So they stagger through the chart, and when the story is told
They might be copper or iodine or possibly gold
And on a much smaller scale, these nuclei are made
In a lab to see how this scenario played
Out. The stuff we see on the earth from Peru to Moldova
Came out of an explosion – we’re made of supernova
(Supernovae…)

Although it’s for basic science, FRIB could hold answers
For medicine – specifically the treatment of cancer
Isotope therapy shoots nuclei into tumors
Killing cancer cells to keep the patient out of the tomb
The beam packs the most punch in the place where it halts
And since it stops in the tumor, it overcomes the fault
Of ordinary radiation, traveling all the way through
So isotopes have fewer side effects than x-rays do
Targeted radiotherapy is also under study
Inject an isotope into the patient’s body
Attached to a carrier that brings it into
The tumor, where it decays, killing just cancerous tissue
FRIB could make whatever isotope was needed
Aiding efforts to ensure this disease gets defeated.

They’re building FRIB with mysteries to solve
Like what reactions drive stars and how do they evolve
The strong force binds nuclei but we still can’t say
Exactly why some are stable while others decay
A more powerful machine can push the frontier
The physicists here, they get nuclear

I just finished 5 years of service in the U.S. Army.

I am now headed to the University of San Francisco, where I will pursue a bachelor’s degree in physics theory with a minor in Neuroscience.  I then plan to go to grad school and study Neuroscience.

My attraction to this subject is hard to explain.  I am not a religious person.  I used to consider myself a spiritual person.  But as I learned (in High School) more about the laws of science, I became fascinated with the science of consciousness.

This pursuit of study has numerous applications; from the average consumer (imagine inventing a “Think-on, Think-off” light), to the disabled (imagine installing a functional video camera to a blind man’s brain); from the artistic (imagine a psycho-reactive paint that changed colors at will), to the lethal (imagine a soldier with a compass, altimeter, thermal camera, ect. installed in his brain).

I don’t necessarily plan to invent such things, but the study itself would be rewarding to me.  If I find no creative applications, perhaps I’ll settle into teaching the field.

Of course I realize that there is much work ahead of me.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been to school.  But in order to leave the army with a clear conscious, I needed a plan that I could be excited about and not afraid of (my wife’s logic mostly).  And so I realize that I might fail, or change my mind, or spend the rest of my life working at McDonalds, but I will pursue this to the best of my ability.

I started this blog today because I want to document my journey from the beginning.  I want a place to organize stray thoughts, I want to share my interests, and I want to try my hand at explaining complex ideas at a very simple level (as you might be able to tell I don’t know too many big words, or complicated grammar, and I also misuse punctuation).

Based on my second hand experience with blogs from my wife’s blog, I know I can attain these goals with wordpress.

Welcome to the show and thanks for reading.

AZ Balloon (Stratocat) Stratospheric balloon. June 11, 09 Fort Sumner, New Mexico.- More like a rocket than a balloon, the maiden flight of the EBEX instrument ended tonight at 21:40 local time, a few kilometers northeast from Lake Havasu in the western side of Arizona, close to the border of California, in the southwestern of United States. The trip of more than 13 hours was the culmination of a project started at University of Minnesota’s physics theory and astronomy group a few years ago and of an integration and preparation effort at the launch base of more than two months. The balloon was launched from the Fort Sumner Airport in New Mexico, at 8:01 local time (14:01 UTC) and after a nominal ascent phase with a eastward flight path, it reached float altitude of near 117.000 ft and mounted onto the Jet Stream and following a very arrow-like straight course crossed the sky of New Mexico and Arizona.

… EBEX (acronym for E and B EXperiment) is a balloon-borne polarimeter designed to measure the intensity and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave mechanics Background (CMB) radiation, what in short is some kind of residual “noise” originated at the time of the explosion that created the Universe. Measurements of the polarization of the CMB could probe the expansion that took place shortly after the big bang helping to know values of several cosmological parameters as well to provide helpful information on the levels of polarized Galactic dust for future CMB observations. It is a result of a cooperative effort of the afored mentioned University of Minnesota, along with Brown, Pennsylvania, Harvard, McGill, UC Berkeley, The International School for Advanced Studies and University of Rome, La Sapiensa, Italy, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie and Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale from France, University of Wales – Cardiff and the University of Toronto in Canada. – stratocat

May be the cause of this sighting among others.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Here is the Glossary. All terms are in alphabetical order.

Antimatter

Anything with mass and volume that has a configuration of negatively-charged particles with orbiting positively-charged particles

Borderspace

The plane of all zeros and ethereal numbers whose projections produce all complex numbers

Construct

Any matter, energy, idea, or otherwise entity in the Multiverse

Dimension

Any measure of Space-Time

Matter

Anything with mass and volume that has a configuration of positively-charged particles with orbiting negatively-charged particles

Space-Time

The continuum of all spatial and temporal dimensions that houses every location, event, or mixed geometry of the two

Thought of the day, stumbled into at Evolving Thoughts, “The Demon Spencer”:

RBH // June 16, 2009 at 7:56 am |

I wait in vain for a condemnation of Newton’s laws of motion, since they account for so many deaths in virtue of their description of how bullets, speeding automobiles, and the like generate so much energy of impact. F=MA must be immoral.

Where are Richard Weikart, Francis Beckwith and Douglas Groothuis when they could be useful?

By ALEXANDER LAWRIE

A SCOTS teacher who faked a reference for a new job has been banned from teaching.

Shamed Craig McAllister, 31, from Glasgow, was working as a physics theory teacher at Hyndland Secondary School in Glasgow when he made up the glowing report.

McAllister claimed he was effectively running the school’s science department, had received positive recommendations from pupils’ parents and was the school’s coordinator for the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme.

Read the rest of this entry »

Luke and I take the best notes in physics theory.

A Clockwork Moon?

One of the most outstanding indications of a deliberate design actually lies a short way out in space, with our nearest neighbor, the Moon. The Moon is about 240,000 miles from the Earth on average. Its diameter is 2160 miles, and it subtends an angle of 0.527 degrees, on average, as seen from the Earth. That’s about the apparent size of a dime seen from 6 feet away.

The Sun is about 93 million miles away, and about 865,000 miles in diameter. Its average apparent diameter, seen from the Earth, is 0.533 degrees. Compare that to the Moon’s 0.527 degrees. They’re essentially the same, 0.53 degrees across. That’s why a total solar eclipse is possible: The Moon is precisely the right apparent size. Put another way, the Moon is at precisely the right distance from the Earth, on average, to totally eclipse the Sun.

…

The Moon, the experts say with the absolute confidence of exacting research and extensive calculations, was blasted out of the Earth itself, very early in the history of Earth’s development. The Moon is still receding from the Earth, very slowly, they say. So it wasn’t always at just the right distance to totally eclipse the Sun, as it is now. This makes it even more astounding that, just by chance, after nearly 4.5 billion years of slow recession from the Earth, it should be at just the right distance from the Earth, throughout the recorded history of man (the last 6,000 years or so), to so precisely match the Sun in the sky, and figure so prominently in ancient man’s religiously-held beliefs.

Furthermore, the Moon goes through phases, from new to full and back again, every month. (That’s why we call it a “month”; it’s a “moonth” – “moon’s” – period, get it? Well, I bet 20% of you do.) These phases mimic the progression of a total eclipse, and underscore the total eclipse as the single recognizable theme of the Moon’s design. Because that’s what this “cosmic coincidence” obviously is, a deliberate design, made with deliberate intent: To emphasize, and memorialize, the total eclipse – as a once-upon-a-time catastrophic extinguishing of the Sun’s light by another body, perhaps. When the Sun “died”, as the world’s myths in fact claimed. That’s why the eclipse was universally feared, up to modern times. (In the Norse myths, at Ragnarok the Sun was overtaken and eaten by a “wolf”; in the Greek, the Sun’s chariot was driven out of its accustomed path by Phaethon, the Sun god’s son, who was hurled down to destruction – and in both accounts, the surface of the Earth was largely burned up.)

Dr. Huffman isn’t the only person to bring up the theory that our Moon may be artificial. Dr. Noel Huntley, a scientist devoted to the study of Fortean subjects, wrote four years ago the Moon might be a very ancient space vessel and suggesting that it might have a connection to the ancient Sumerian’s Nibiru/Anunnaki legends.

Can the Moon be artificial, thus proving the existence of a very ancient human or alien culture and confirming the theory of the Biological Universe?

Or is it more New Age hogwash in a different wrapper?

The Clockwork Moon Science Ignores

Hat tip

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More dark matter mysticism?

…

Stars born in that early period were so hot and dense that they lived for a mere 100,000 years, consuming their hydrogen and fusing it into helium and other heavier elements. According to a recent announcement from the Paris Institute for Astrophysics theory, however, some of those early stars might actually still exist within our own Milky Way galaxy. The preserving factor? Dark matter might have dampened stellar fusion to such minimal activity that the aging process of those stars was suspended and they stopped evolving.

The original stars are known as population III stars and, as the press release states, many of them could have formed within vast clouds of dark matter that preserved them for a practical eternity. According to Gianfranco Bertone of the Paris Institute: “These stars can be frozen for timescales longer than the age of the universe.”

If dark matter particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) are made from heavier versions of normal matter, they might be drawn down to stellar cores through gravitational attraction. The dark matter could then act like other thermonuclear phenomena and undergo violent collisions with normal particles, emitting radiation and elementary fragments that appear to be based on conventional theories of stellar evolution. Dark matter would put a halt to nuclear fusion and “freeze” the star in its aging process for hundreds of thousands of years. Once the dark matter was burned up the star would then go back to fusing hydrogen into helium as prevailing theories assert.

…

Indeed, dark matter might have the ability to bring dead stars back to life. If a white dwarf (the supposed husk of a yellow star like the Sun) entered a dense dark matter cloud, it might actually begin to burn dark matter and start to shine as if it were a white star. Some researchers suggest they could become many times brighter than before.

Building a theory on another theory and relying on the conclusions of one speculation to prop up the conclusions of another is tantamount to science fiction. In the case of “dark matter burners” and stars almost as old as the universe we are dealing with a step-by-step descent into sheer irony.

Since dark matter is unseen and undetectable and has been inferred from mathematical manipulations, could it be that something else is taking place? From the perspective of the Electric Universe theory galaxies and stars are all driven by electric currents flowing through dusty plasma.

Astrophysics theory during the past 40 years or so has suffered from the lack of sufficient funding necessary to carry out empirical observations needed for verification of hypotheses. So instead mathematical modeling became prevalent, because it is cheaper than building particle accelerators and telescopes.

And this is the result; far out mathematics that few people can decipher and invention of imaginary entities necessary to make some equations make sense.

Hopefully when the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and improvements in telescope software become available, some hard empirical data will either answer some questions.

Or ask new ones.

Frozen in the Dark

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“Failed” dark-holes = gamma-ray bursts?

Gamma-ray bursts are the most massive explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and yet scientists still know relatively little about them. Dark bursts, such as the one in the center of the artist’s rendering above, remain especially mysterious.

New research published last week on the arXiv website, and not yet peer reviewed, suggests that gamma-ray bursts may be the result of a strange effect that can stop a dark hole from forming.

The current thinking is any star more than three times the size of the sun will eventually collapse into a dark hole. But Ilya Rozen of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow thinks a phase change of matter into a very different form creates a vacuum in an imploding star that results in a burning wall he predicts would stop a dark hole from forming and emit powerful gamma-ray bursts.

Hmm, what if the gauge in which we measure intergalactic distances, red-shift of the ‘expanding’ universe is wrong?

That would mean those gamma-ray bursts might be a lot closer than we think and our theory of the gravity driven universe and dark-holes could be wrong also.

Mysterious Gamma-Ray Bursts May Have Ties to Failed dark Holes