Even Rick Bayless, a Top Chef Master, cannot tell a mango from a plum with his eyes closed. And Steve needs three ‘Blues Clue’s‘ before he can solve a puzzle. Unlocking the universe is no different, except that in this game when facts and logic fail, science gets a new set. We could be one episode away from revealing who authorized the Big Bang.

Albert Einstein was a naturalist. He believed that every condition had a physical cause. He saw no need for mind-body dualism or paranormal magic at the core of our existence. Einstein crafted his relativity novella with dynamic characters that act and react, interesting point of views, and a global sense of eternity. What Einstein envisioned was a static universe. ‘In the beginning‘ didn’t seem right to my 4-year-old either: “Where was I before I was a baby?” The Big Bang, the eruption of the primeval atom, where time and space suddenly came into being, was proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest. Like a greedy literary agent, science had transformed Einstein’s peaceful manuscript into a horror flick that starts with an explosion and finishes with a ‘cold death’. We all die in the end. God, I hate it when that happens.

My dad implanted in me his frustration with the cosmic unknown when I was in elementary school. He loved helping with my geography homework because we got to use the big atlas. It had a monochromatic illustration of the solar system inside the cover. Dad would subtly pull away from coloring subtropical climates in my book and wonder aloud:
“What do you think is around our galaxy?”
“More galaxies?” I offered.
“And what’s around the other galaxies?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay, nothing,” he concurred, which made me suspicious because conversations in my parents’ house always ended with a question.
“What do you think is around the nothing?” he then added.

I admire the daring of Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin. Controversy and scarcity of evidence did not diminish their desire to convert heretical ideas from hypothesis to reality. Their convictions laid a foundation for classical mechanics, genetics, and the theory of relativity. Some evidence presented itself to validate the space-time idea and support Einstein’s prediction of time dilation. But physical evidence can only account for 4% of the universe material, which we don’t yet understand in full. The other 96% of our universe is a mumbo jumbo spaghetti theory. We have dark matter and missing antimatter, an unaccomplished human genome project, ambiguous junk DNA, wormholes, and faster-than-light time travel. Our universe can get away with anything, like a paradoxical dark hole: what happens in a dark hole, stays in the dark hole.

Scientists seek a ‘theory of everything’ that can explain all our symptoms, despite successive failures and Hickam’s dictum that “patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please.” The strategy is to act like kids naming shapes of half-eaten animal crackers: “You are looking at it all wrong,” one would insist. “Why?” another would challenge. If life did not evolve on Earth, then perhaps Earth was showered with seeds of life from outer space. If dark matter is unreal, then perhaps our universe is not all there is, perhaps it requires a host. Or a wicked buddy, an anti-universe, where all the antimatter lives, where everyone is hot and negative. If the universe is not cooling down then perhaps it is heating up. Perhaps it will not be ‘cold death’ that we will suffer, possibly just a Big Crunch.

Baruch Spinoza defined God as a set of physical laws, a complex chain of cause and effect that governs the universe. Something science and religion can agree on is that nobody cares for a universe that is a random naturalistic accidental fluke. Randomness means that there is a possibility we are alone and the search for extraterrestrial real estate is futile. Variety in the universe does not necessitate randomness, much like embryonic stem cells follow a DNA script as they develop into heart, brain, and blood. Ironically, the perception of randomness is what gives us our sanity. It gives us free will and it protects our passwords from hackers. It allows atheists to reference acts-of-God in liability contracts. It empowers String theorists to push forward with their research. It lets us aspire to Big Bang by ourselves, make baby universes, and decide what happens on Tuesday.

The more we evolve, the more we realize that we are the same. Republicans want to be on Facebook. Gays want to be married. Jazz audiences are shrinking – blame it on syncopation? Surprises are overrated; it seems more comforting to belong to a pattern than to be special. Nature may be more uniform and structured than we are willing to admit: a cell under a microscope looks like a galaxy; the human nervous system looks like the roots of a tree; hurricane formations look like milk swirling in my coffee. Fractals, fractals, everywhere!

While the paisley neck tie is indeed a useful application of fractals, scientists must aim higher now that Obama is in office. They could, for example, use his HIG unit to interrogate the atmospheric muons on how being active slows down their decay, and then apply the intelligence to healthcare reform. Meanwhile, modern science continues to be a technology pimp. It employs virgins to study nature in a lab, then whores out nuclear, microwave mechanics, and genetics to the devil: he who cooks without fire, tans without sunlight, loses weight without a diet, builds muscle without exercise, will kill without aging. This, perhaps, is the creepiest recycling program and, sadly, the end of caramelization.

Space-time distorts our reality in a way that doesn’t seem logical. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ don’t exist inside an atom. Just like Moses gave us God’s commandments at Mount Sinai, we command our children to see prisms pop out of a page at geometry class. Yet physics theory, for all its freedom of irrationality, still cannot explain the early universe, nor can it explain why it banged so big. It is only natural that knowing should make us smart and that not knowing should make us smarter.

• “No one laughs at God in a hospital / No one laughs at God in a war… But God can be funny,” Laughing With, Regina Spektor
• “Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak,” Antipholus trying to achieve a sense-of-self through the recreative powers of his love for Luciana, The comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare
• “Darwin was wrong. We didn’t evolve, God made us. So I just want to explain to you exactly how that happened. ‘Chapter One: In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.’ He doesn’t go into detail…” Animals, Ricky Gervais
• “The more we know the less we understand.” John Wheeler
• “Randomness is a reflection of our ignorance.” Albert Einstein
• “The Big Bang, undignified like a party girl jumping out of a cake.” Fred Hoyle
• “I would like the west better if it was in the east.” Go West, Chico Marx
• “Who’s to say / What’s impossible… I wanna turn the whole thing upside down / I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found,” Upside Down, Jack Johnson
• “Wish I knew what you were looking for / Might have known what you would find,” Under The Milky Way, The Church
• “Your head is balanced over your heart, your heart over the pelvis, your pelvis over the legs, and the legs over the Earth… From the center of the Earth and the center of your being: ‘Namaste.’” Yoga: Core Cross Train, Rodney Yee
• DARK MATTER!!, illustration by SHORT, 2009, available under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license

Schrödinger’s Cat

I

I often pray my cat
doesn’t understand
English.
How I spew out words
of wonderment pertaining
to wilderness—my cat, my poor cat,
a trapped disabled poet
viewing the world through
my clouded, dust ridden, glorified
windows
thirsty for nature—
hungry for adventure (and mostly birds)—
and craving life,
he jumps down from the windowsill,
half baked from the sun,
and rubs against my legs and Meows a soft
playful Meow that I perceive as
“I hate you.”

II

I often pray my cat
doesn’t understand
English.
How I spew out words
of wonderment pertaining
to wilderness—my cat, my poor cat,
a trapped disabled poet
viewing the world through
my clouded, dust ridden, glorified
windows
thirsty for nature—
hungry for adventure (and mostly birds)—
and craving life,
he jumps down from the windowsill,
half baked from the sun,
and rubs against my legs and Meows a soft
playful Meow that I perceive as
“Fuck you.”

Symmetry holds a power to fascinate us; this fascination is especially strong among chemists.  The symmetry of a molecule can have profound effects on its spectroscopic signature and even its chemical reactivity.  An important aspect of symmetry is chirality among chemical compounds.  Chirality refers to a sort of handedness.  Your left and right hands display chirality, they are mirror images of each other but they cannot be superimposed on each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leonard Adleman, of RSA and DNA computing fame, and also my mentor, has posted his essay on his views of interpreting Quantum Mechanics on Clifford Johnson’s blog. Coming from a mathematical logic angle, Quantum Mechanics does not require a (in my opinion outlandish) theory of many-worlds or ridiculous interpretations such as a “wave mechanicsfunction collapse”. The uncertainty and inherent “randomness” of the universe is merely a manifestation of the complexity of the universe; it is simply too complex for us mere mortals to comprehend everything in it. Godel’s Incompleteness provides a rigorous framework to describe this phenomenon in mathematics, and there should be no reason why it should not apply to our physical universe.

Here’s an excerpt from Len’s note:

For a long time, physicists have struggled with perplexing “meta-questions” (my phrase): Does God play dice with the universe? Does a theory of everything exist? Do parallel universes exist? As the physics theory community is acutely aware, these are extremely difficult questions and one may despair of ever finding meaningful answers. The mathematical community has had its own meta-questions that are no less daunting: What is “truth”? Do infinitesimals exist? Is there a single set of axioms from which all of mathematics can be derived? In what many consider to be on the short list of great intellectual achievements, Frege, Russell, Tarski, Turing, Godel, and other logicians were able to clear away the fog and sort these questions out. The framework they created, mathematical logic, has put a foundation under mathematics, provided great insights and profound results. After many years of consideration, I have come to believe that mathematical logic, suitably extended and modified (perhaps to include complexity theoretic ideas), has the potential to provide the same benefits to physics theory. In the following remarks, I will explore this possibility.

I encourage everyone to join in on the discussion following the post!

This is just in time, as well, for my one-year anniversary post for this blog, where I will be discussing why I personally love Godel’s Incompleteness so much. It shall hopefully come out sometime this week.

Okay, I just couldn’t pass this one up… I saw this video today on Yahoo Sports where they claim to show recent footage of the world’s longest basketball shot. I’m a bit skeptical, because such videos have been released to the Internet before and many are found to be digitally altered or tweaked.  So it’s tough to take something like this at face value.

But I’m willing to be convinced – most especially because, if true, it’s a pretty damn cool feat!  And it does make sense that, given enough attempts, something like this could be done – there is, after all, nothing in the laws of physics theory which would prevent it.  With that, here are two videos showing the claimed shot…

So, my fellow skeptics, what do you think?  Real or fake?  Let the games begin! 

It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics theory within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim.

Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to know about how common metals carry electricity and heat. Why some of them are magnetic is a trickier question. Physicists know the basics: The electrons that flow through iron, nickel, and other magnetic materials act like little bar magnets. Below a certain temperature the electrons align so that they all point in the same direction, at least within relatively large “domains” in the crystalline material. The question is why do the electrons align themselves?

An answer was proposed in the 1930s by British theorist E. C. Stoner. It depends on a key bit of quantum mechanics called the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that no two electrons can be in exactly the same condition or “quantum state” at the same time. To see how this works, first consider a nonmagnetic metal. The electrons can be thought of as a kind of gas within the solid, with equal numbers of electrons pointing with their north poles up as down, because that would be their lowest-energy state.

Electrons repel each other, which increases the energy of the gas. Stoner argued that if the electrons repel each other hard enough, they could lower their total energy by aligning. The flipping of some of the electrons would agitate the gas and increase its “kinetic” energy a bit. But because of the exclusion principle, no two aligned electrons could be in the same place at the same time, meaning the electrons would avoid each other so that energy from the short-range repulsion would drop even more. Stoner came up with a highly simplified mathematical model that encapsulates this idea. However, no one has ever rigorously proved that the model produces such alignment or “ferromagnetism.”

via Magnetized Gas Points to New physics theory — Cho 2009 (918): 1 — ScienceNOW.

I'd make the time if a car wash around here looked like that… mmmm a Jaguar.

I had to return a book. I’ve had to return the book all week. It was mis-printed so about twenty pages were missing. Of course I didn’t notice this when I bought it – and Ocean’s school… they thought the idea of photocopying the missing pages was a bad one – I thought the idea of going into town was much worse one. But there is no room for non-conformists at his school – with the threat of expulsion and public corporal punishment for ’serious’ breaches… anyhow – it’s not a battle I wanted to take on and so, sullenly, like a ‘good’ mom, I went to town.

As I pulled into the central parking lot, no less than a half-dozen car washers asked me if I wanted a wash and in order to help convince me, they pointed out what a filthy, piece of shit car I owned and how they could help make it look a little bit better if it was given a good wash. Not being able to argue this point, but not having the time for a wash, I pulled into a parking space. Well, I tried to – I couldn’t get the angle right and on my thrid attempt at squeezing into the closest spot to my final destination, despite the parking lot being empty for the most part, one of these car washers guided me back into a spot behind me.

“Wanna wash?” he mumbled.
“No, but thank you,” I replied.
“Thank you, Wah?!” And really quickly there was this tension between us. He was glaring at me, breathing a bit heavier, puffs of smoke escaping his flared nostrils, teeth barred.

Wow. It’s not like he bought me dinner and now I owed him a fuck.

I quickly walked off, leaving him to his unjustified and intense anger.

So, I exchanged the book in a typical Bajan fashion – no eye contact, no appologies for their error (ah – but typically Bajan also means that it’s never ANYONE’s error after all) and strolled back to the carpark having mostly forgotten about the madassed car washer.

But there he was standing next to my car, still growling at it.

I actually considered – do I ignore him/quickly get in the car and lock the doors/casually mumble some greeting in hopes of diffusing the situation?

“Alright” I said to him (a common Bajan hello/goodbye).

“Alright rasshole,” was the polite reply as I quickly slid into the car and pulled off.

Newton’s third law – ‘For every action, there is an EQUAL and opposite reaction’.

Recognize, asshole – Johnny-of-the-day goes to you.

I watch,
entranced–
as the wind plays tag with the stars.

Moonclouds
in soft, beguiling undertones
beckon me to join;

And the trees
in gentle whispers,
echo.

I start the climb,
to top the hill,
the grasses waving me skyward.

The very essence
of the evening
ever drawing me onward–

Urging me to reach the sky,
to touch the clouds,
to dance with the moon.

I top the crest
and throw wide my arms,
and Moonclouds sweep down to embrace me.

Hello, world. This is my first real foray into a blog with a purpose. That purpose is to prepare myself and others for the physics theory GRE.

To be honest, I’m not the studying type. On the other hand I am the teaching type. I am very eager to share my knowledge and skills with other people. My goal here is to use something I love doing, teaching, to motivate myself to do something I have a hard time getting myself to do, study. In discussing and writing articles on the content of the physics theory GRE I hope prepare myself and others for taking the exam this spring.

I’m always interested in any comments or questions you may have, so please feel free to send e-mails or comment on individual posts. Our best strategy for preparation is to push the boundaries of our understanding. Asking difficult questions and commenting on points of interest are integral to this process, and as such are greatly encouraged.

I hope you’re excited. I certainly am. Tomorrow we start our test prep!