I updated my Twist Ring paper at the scribd site:

www.scribd.com/doc/17227411/The-Paradoxes-of-the-Electron-Point-Source

This adds some specific analysis of the Heisenberg uncertainty paradox, and discusses the class of experiments that I call excitation experiments (using photons to add energy to a particle). This was important because this is commonly used in determining internal structure of particles but was missing from my paper. I also added a “future research” section which describes my work on creating a computer simulation of the twist ring.

Check it out and send me comments!

Agemoz

Physicist Richard Feynman, one of a handful of the most intelligent people who ever lived, was more than just another prolifically fertile brainiac. To be a well-rounded human was a priority for him, and in the area of his love life he achieved notable success. One of the world’s best-kept secrets, and one that would surprise a lot of macho men, if they were capable of absorbing a new idea in the first place, is the amount of nookie harvested by poets, physicists, and other supposedly non-virile specimens.

Feynman studied the science of picking up women in coffeeshops and bars. His numerous affairs with the wives of colleagues and grad students scandalized the academic world. In later life his interest in the visual arts grew, and he learned to draw quite passably, but emphasized to friends what a handy gimmick the sketchbook was for getting women to take their clothes off.

There was true love in Feynman’s life, and her name was Arline. Much of his heartless hounddogging seems to have been in reaction to Arline’s early and tragic death. Here’s how it went. The very young couple put off marriage so he could finish college and grad school, but when Arline came down with tuberculosis, Feynman was determined to marry her as soon as possible. They weren’t even supposed to kiss, because of the danger of contagion, and pregnancy would have been a disaster for her. When Feynman was called to New Mexico to help invent the atomic bomb, the kids were even more determined to marry, even though both families objected.

Probably the strongest resistance came from Feynman’s mother. His biography (Genius, by James Gleick) quotes from the letter she wrote, the gist of which was: Richard didn’t have enough money, and his parents would definitely not finance them. Worry and concern about Arline would compromise Richard’s ability to do his job. He would be laden with all the burdens of marriage to an invalid, while “not getting any of the pleasures of marriage.” Being the husband of a TB victim would make Richard a social outcast. “I was surprised to learn that such a marriage is not unlawful,” Feynman’s mother added. “It ought to be.” The subtext was clear: Arline was taking advantage of the innocent, idealistic, romantic young son.

The sweethearts celebrated their wedding, witnessed by two strangers, in a city office. With Arline his legal wife, Feynman was able to move her to a hospital near Los Alamos. They exchanged letters all week, indulging in puzzles and silliness that drove the Army censors crazy, and on weekends Feynman would borrow a car or hitchhike into town. Arline’s knowledge that there were women at Los Alamos made her very nervous, and after months of celibate companionship she insisted that the marriage be consummated. “I really think we’d both feel happier and better dear if we released our desires.) The biography doesn’t note how many times the pair were intimate; that may have been the only time, since Arline was after all a hospital inpatient. As her condition worsened, Feynman wrote desperately to any doctors he heard of who were rumored to have a hint of a cure. Then there was a brief giddy time when it appeared that Arline might be expecting a child – with the medical men insisting that if it were so, the only possible choice would be to “interrupt” the pregnancy. Then she died. Then the Los Alamos project came to fruition, and with the bitter irony: the only thing Feynman had fathered was the worst instrument of death that mankind had ever known.

Feynman’s mother had a change of heart and looked for reconciliation. “I’m proud and glad you married her and did what you could to make her short life happy.”

Two years after Arline died, Feynman wrote Arline a last, long letter, found among his papers after his own death. “I will always love you,” it said. “I want you to love me and care for me… I want to do little projects with you … you were the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.” He recalled her anxiety over her inability to be a real wife to him. Feynman assured her in this imaginary conversation, “You can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in the way of my loving anyone else…” He noted the stark truth that spelled itself out like an elegant equation: “I love my wife. My wife is dead.”

“Please excuse my not mailing this,” the sad postscript said, “but I don’t know your new address.” This letter, and maybe others like it, were of course part of a therapeutic process, a necessary step for any bereaved person. But along with the decision to get on with his life, there seems to have been a decision, conscious or unconscious, to armor himself against the possibility of another intense and potentially painful attachment.

Eventually he got back into the mating game, but it was a new, cynical and callous Richard Feynman who chased skirts almost obsessively. “He had worked out a kind of “all’s fair” approach to sexual morality and argued that he was using women as they sought to use him,” says biographer Gleick. “Love seemed mostly a myth – a species of self-delusion, or rationalization, or a gambit employed by women in search of husbands.” There was an ill-considered second marriage to a totally incompatible woman, who sued Feynman for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, including excessive bongo drum playing and doing math in bed.

As he juggled a harem of women, the great physicist’s life soon became a nightmare of angry phone calls, abortions, demands for cash, and various sordid scenes. One of his dates received an anonymous note: “Dirty Dick, Filthy Fucking Feynman dates you. He will never marry you. Tell him he made you pregnant. You’ll make a quick $300-$500.” He was often accused of being an inconsiderate lover, and one woman told him that must be why his roster had such a turnover rate – it didn’t take long for any woman to have enough of him. Some men are like that – they know that “making love” can, in some cases, literally make love. And for whatever reason, love is the last thing they want to create, either in themselves or in their partners. So they fuck.

Feynman went on vacation with the wife of a colleague who demanded $1,250 as compensation for the pleasure of her company, or possibly darkmail. Or maybe she paid the fare and he promised to pay her back. You never know, with these things. But it’s all so daytime TV, like one of those shows where the people yell and curse at each other and the stupid sound track bleep-bleep-bleeps like a backhoe on a construction site.

Of course there were other things going on in Feynman’s life too. He was an enthusiastic percussionist and collector of exotic rhythm instruments. One of his hobbies was safecracking, and another was conceptualizing the field of nanotechnology, way back in 1959. He was a terrific professor, and his lectures are available in several media formats. He is renowned for (among many other accomplishments) his Feynman diagrams, which illustrate in visual form some pretty obscure stuff that few people even know exists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics theory for work in quantum electrodynamics.

Eventually he went to Switzerland and met an English girl in a blue bikini. He wanted to bring her to the U.S. to be his “housekeeper,” but a concerned friend warned him how much trouble one could land in, importing a woman for immoral purposes, so he got someone else to sponsor her instead. After some hesitation, he did end up hitch up with this lady. They had two children and remained married for many years until he died.

Richard Feynman knew he was terminally ill with cancer. His last ambition was to go to Tannu Tuva to hear the Throat Singers and other indigenous musicians, but since this was an Iron Curtain country, bureaucratic red tape held up the project until it was too late.

Whatever else Feynman did or didn’t do in his life, and however anyone may feel about it, his greatest achievement was to blow the whistle on the O-rings. Remember the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986? Killed seven people including the first Teacher in Space? Working with fellow scientists to figure out what happened, Feynman discovered that the rubber O-rings were responsible. Large matters of engineering safety and corporate ethics were behind this, and he ruined any chance of a cover-up by announcing his findings on live TV during a Rogers Commission meeting. Because he was already under a death sentence, any revenge that could be taken on him was moot, but still it was a brave and true action.

photo courtesy of kandinski, used under this Creative Commons license

This week researches at IBM published a paper in Science where they obtained an excellent resolution of pentacene.  The image below shows the pentacene image.

The image is stunning and the technique is equally fascinating.  This image was taken with a modified atomic force microscope (AFM) – a clever way of examining a surface with near atomic resolution.  An AFM tip is basically a small cantilever with a pointed tip.  The cantilever oscillates as it moves over the surface of the sample.  As distance between the surface and the cantilever changes, the frequency of the oscillation will change; this frequency change is often detected with a laser.  In this way a topography of the surface can be constructed.  A diagram of the AFM is shown below.

Read the rest of this entry »

A recent paper by Lorenzo Maccone on Physical Review Letters (see here) has produced some fuss around. He tries to solve the question of the arrow of time from a quantum standpoint. Lorenzo is currently a visiting researcher at MIT and, together with Vittorio Giovannetti and Seth Lloyd, he produced several important works in the area of quantum mechanics and its foundations. I have had the luck to meet him in a conference at Gargnano on the Garda lake together with Vittorio. So, it is not a surprise to see this paper of him in an attempt to solve one of the outstanding problems of physics theory.

The question of the arrow of time is open yet. Indeed, one can think that Boltzmann’s H-theorem closed this question definitely but this is false. This theorem has been the starting point for a question yet to be settled. Indeed, Boltzmann presented a first version of his theorem that showed one of the most beautiful laws in physics theory: the relation between entropy and probability. This proof was criticized by Loschmidt (see here) and this criticism was sound. Indeed, Boltzmann had to modifiy his proof by introducing the so called Stosszahlansatz or molecular chaos hypothesis introducing in this way time asymmetry by hand.  Of course, we know for certain that this theorem is true and so, also the hypothesis of molecular chaos must be true. So, the question of the arrow of time will be solved only when we will know where molecular chaos comes from. This means that we need a mechanism, a quantum one, to explain Boltzmann’s hypothesis. It is important to emphasize that, till today, a proof does not exist of the H-theorem that removes such an assumption.

Quantum mechanics is the answer to this situation and this can be so if we knew how reality forms. An important role in this direction could be given by environmental decoherence and how it relates to the question of the collapse. A collapse grants immediately asymmetry in time and here one has to cope with many-body physics theory with a very large number of components. In this respect there exists a beautiful theorem by Elliot Lieb and Barry Simon, two of the most prominent living mathematical-physicists, that says:

Thomas-Fermi model is the limit of quantum theory when the number of particles goes to infinity.

For a more precise statement you can look at Review of Modern physics theory page 620ff. Thomas-Fermi model is just a semi-classical model and this just means that this fundamental theorem can be simply restated as saying that the limit of a very large number of particles in quantum mechanics is the classical world. In some way, there exists a large number of Hamiltonians in quantum mechanics that are not stable with  respect to such a particle limit losing quantum coherence. For certain we know that there exist other situations where quantum coherence is kept at a large extent in many-body systems. This would mean that exist situations where quantum fluctuations are not damped out with increasing number of particles.  But the very existence of this effect implied in the Lieb and Simon theorem means that quantum mechanics has an internal mechanism producing time-asymmetry. This, together with environmental decoherence (e.g. the box containing a gas is classical and so on), should grant a fully understanding of the situation at hand.

Finally, we can say that Maccone’s attempt, being on this line of thought, is a genuine way to understand from quantum mechanics the origin of time-asymmetry. I hope his ideas will meet with luck.

Science News in Brief

Conservationists of the Amphibian Survival Alliance have started a new push to protect the world’s amphibians from extinction.   a new initiative aimed at safeguarding the world’s amphibians from extinction.  Currently, almost a third of amphibians are in danger of extinction, mainly due to habitat destruction and the fungal infection: chytridiomycosis, or chytrid for short.

Sad Superstition: In many parts of Panama the Panama Golden Frog is considered a good luck charm and people collect it from the wild to put in their homes. For this reason, amongst others, it is an endagered species.

The Indian Space Agency has declared that all communication with the only Indian satellite orbiting the Moon have been lost, The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft lost radio contact on Saturday.

Space Club Freshmen:  Iran is the last country to have managed to put a sattelite into orbit.  It did so on Feb. 2, 2009. 

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time.  Although the physical shape of a carbon nanotube has been outlined in the past, this is the first time chemical bonds have shown up in the image. 

Molecule Photograph

Famous Firsts:  The first known photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 by the heliograph process.

Cool Creature

Shoebill

The Shoebill, or Balaeniceps rex, is a large stork-like bird. Its name is based on its huge shoe-shaped bill which it uses to hunt fish and frogs in the muddy waters of Africa. 

Feature Story: Fractals

A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales. The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure at all scales, but the same “type” of structures must appear on all scales. A plot of the quantity on a log-log graph versus scale then gives a straight line, whose slope is said to be the fractal dimension. The prototypical example for a fractal is the length of a coastline measured with different length rulers. The shorter the ruler, the longer the length measured, a paradox known as the coastline paradox.

That is the definition of a fractal according to Wolfram MathWorld.  Simply put, a fractal is a irregular geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which look like the original image.  So, as you zoom in on the picture, you continue to see the same image, even though it is many times smaller.  This property of fractals is known as self similarity. 

There are some rules as to how a fractal can be defined.  A fractal must:

1. Have a fine structure on many scales.
2. Be too irregular to define in simple Euclidean geometric terms (triangles, squares, cones, etc).
3. Is self similar.
4. Can be defined by a simple recursive (defined in terms of itself) function

Some famous fractals include the Mandelbrot function (above [Benoit Mandelbrot is seen as the father of fractal geometry]), the Koch snowflake, the Sierpinski triangle (and square), and the Cantor sets.

Fractals are more than pretty images that can be defined mathematically.  They also have profound implications in many other scientific fields including biology, engineering, medicine, and geography.  For example clouds, crystals, snowflakes, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, and various plants and flowers all follow elements of fractal geometry.  Trekkies rejoice, fractal geometry was used to create much of the topography seen on planets in the series.  Mountains were created by taking a pyramid and layering it with triangles of different sizes.Trees and ferns have fractal geometry: a branch on a tree resembles a tree and a fern frond resembles a full fern frond.  Also, fractal geometry may also determine when a blood vessel branches out into a fork and so on and so on. 

http://www.fractalwisdom.com/chaosmth.html

The Cosmic Perspective

Discoveries in the field of fractal geometry are revolutionizing the field of mathematics and our view of how nature functions.  These discoveries reveal a beautiful, hidden order which emerges from what seems to be chaos.  We can apply this new research in many fields to better understand the world around us and create new technologies.  As we look closer at everything, one can see patterns crop up out of nothingness.   These patterns, be they the simple symmetry of our circadian rhythms or something far grander like the separation of blood vessels in the body, reveal to us a factor which unites us all.

In his new book physics theory of the Impossible, renowned physicist Michio Kaku examines the scientific possibility of some of the classic tropes of Science Fiction.  Everything from invisibility to teleportation.  And from time travel to robots composing poetry.  In a recent interview on the book for the BBC World service, he said:

A lot of the predictions made by science fiction writers have been replaced by the march of science.

In his books and radio show, Kaku has long used Science Fiction as a way of getting a general audience interested in physics theory.  And his books are all must reads.  His latest book is no exception.

Source.