...In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, added his name to that list by coming up with an ingenious theory that gave scientists the tools to explain how two classes of particles, which now appear to be different, were once one and the same. His theory proposes the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things — a speck so precious it has come to be known as the "God particle." The scientific term for it is the Higgs boson, and to find it physicists are counting on the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, a 17-mile underground circuit that took 25 years to plan and $6 billion to build.

The LHC won't begin operation until this summer, but when Higgs, 78, made his first visit there on April 5, it was, in the nomenclature of particle physics, "an event." ...   more »

4) Here are the final letters by Leonard Susskind' and Lee Smolin in their email debate re the Anthropic Principle.

Smolin: ... My main point is that string theory will have much more explanatory power if the dominant mode of reproduction is through black holes, as is the case in the original version of CNS. This is the key point I would hope to convince Susskind and his colleagues about, because I am sure that the case they want to make is very much weakened if they rely on the Anthropic Principle (AP) and eternal inflation. ...

Susskind: ... Finally let me quote a remark of Smolin's that I find revealing. He says "It was worry about the possibility that string theory would lead to the present situation, which Susskind has so ably described in his recent papers, that led me to invent the Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) idea and to write my first book. My motive, then as now, is to prevent a split in the community of theoretical physicists in which different groups of smart people believe different things, with no recourse to come to consensus by rational argument from the evidence." First of all, preventing a "split in the community of theoretical physicists" is an absurdly ridiculous reason for putting forward a scientific hypothesis.

But what I find especially mystifying is Smolin's tendency to set himself up as an arbiter of good and bad science. Among the people who feel that the anthropic principle deserves to be taken seriously, are some very famous physicists and cosmologists with extraordinary histories of scientific accomplishment. They include Steven Weinberg [2], Joseph Polchinski [3], Andrei Linde [4], and Sir Martin Rees [5]. These people are not fools, nor do they need to be told what constitutes good science. ...    more »

3) Here's Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2:

...The issue here is not whether the usual phenomenological inflation was of the eternal kind although that is relevant. Eternal inflation taking place in any false vacuum minimum on the landscape would favor [in Smolin's sense] the maximum cosmological constant. But for the sake of argument I will agree to ignore eternal inflation as a reproduction mechanism.

The question of how many black holes are formed is somewhat ambiguous. What if two black holes coalesce to form a single one. Does that count as one black hole or two? Strictly speaking, given that black holes are defined by the global geometry, it is only one black hole. What happens if all the stars in the galaxy eventually fall into the central black hole? That severely diminishes the counting. So we better assume that the bigger the black hole, the more babies it will have. Perhaps one huge black hole spawns more offspring than 10^22 stellar black holes.

That raises the question of what exactly is a black hole? One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes. As repeatedly emphasized by 't Hooft [10][11][12], black holes are the natural extension of the elementary particle spectrum. This is especially clear in string theory where black holes are simply highly excited string states. Does that mean that we should count every particle as a black hole? ...   more »

Mysteriously, four spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions. -- These newfound enigmas join the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.

A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun. -- A host of explanations have been bandied about for the Pioneer anomaly. At times these are rooted in conventional science — perhaps leaks from the spacecraft have affected their trajectories. At times these are rooted in more speculative physics — maybe the law of gravity itself needs to be modified.

Now Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson and his colleagues — who originally helped uncover the Pioneer anomaly — have discovered that four spacecraft each raced either a tiny bit faster or slower than expected when they flew past the Earth en route to other parts of the solar system. ...   more »

IT'S an ambitious task, recreating the universe in a bucket. But if it is successful, the experiment could help solve the twin puzzles of why we're made of matter rather than antimatter and where the huge magnetic fields that span galaxies come from.

At last month's Cosmology Meets Condensed Matter conference in London, it emerged that space-time could be simulated in the lab using weird substances known as "superfluids", which flow without resistance and can even climb up the walls of jars. Intriguingly, the equations governing the particles inside superfluids are similar to those that represent the early universe, says Ray Rivers at Imperial College London. "We hope that we can use these to check things in the lab that frankly we don't have any hope of seeing through astrophysical observations." ...   more »

Imagine being able to peek inside a black hole and even perform experiments there. It may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to a team which claims to have simulated a black hole’s event horizon in the lab. -- Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues accomplished the feat by firing lasers down an optical fiber, exploiting the fact that different wavelengths of light move at different speeds within an optical fiber.

They first shot a relatively slowmoving laser pulse through the fibre, and then sent a faster “probe wave” chasing after it. The first pulse distorts the optical properties of the fibre simply by travelling through it. This distortion forces the speedy probe wave to slow down dramatically when it catches up with the slower pulse and tries to move through it. In fact, the probe wave becomes trapped and can never overtake the pulse’s leading edge, which effectively becomes a black hole event horizon, beyond which light cannot escape.

This “laser black hole” could allow physicists to examine what happens to light on both sides of a event horizon – “a feat that is utterly impossible in astrophysics”, the authors note in their paper. ...   more »

Abstract

Mankind's destiny points toward a quest for the stars. Realistically, it is difficult to achieve this using current space propulsion science and develop the prerequisite technologies, which for the most part requires the use of massive amounts of propellant to be expelled from the system. Therefore, creative approaches are needed to reduce or eliminate the need for a propellant. Many researchers have identified several unusual approaches that represent immature theories based upon highly advanced concepts. These theories and concepts could lead to creating the enabling technologies and forward thinking necessary to eventually result in developing new directions in space propulsion science. In this paper, some of these theoretical and technological concepts are examined approaches based upon Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, spacetime curvature, superconductivity, and newer ideas where questions are raised regarding conservation theorems and if some of the governing laws of physics, as we know them, could be violated or are even valid. These conceptual ideas vary from traversable wormholes, Krasnikov tubes and Alcubierre's warpdrive to Electromagnetic (EM) field propulsion with possible hybrid systems that incorporate our current limited understanding of zero point fields and quantum mechanics. ...   more »

...In the outer regions of most galaxies, stars orbit around the centre so fast that they should fly away. The combined mass of all the observable inner stars and gas does not exert strong enough gravity to hold onto these speeding outliers, suggesting some mass is missing. -- Most astronomers believe that the missing mass is made up of some exotic invisible substance, labelled dark matter, which forms vast spherical halos around each galaxy. Another possibility is that the force of gravity behaves in an unexpected way, a theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND.

In the spiral galaxy NGC 4736, however, the rotation slows down as you move farther out from the crowded inner reaches of the galaxy. At first glance, that declining rotation curve is just what you would expect if there is no extended halo of dark matter, and no modification to gravity. As you move far away from the swarming stars of the inner galaxy, gravity becomes weaker, and so motions become more sedate.

...one exceptional dark-matter-less galaxy would be a great puzzle. "The current picture is that galaxies form inside of dark matter halos," Diemand told New Scientist. The dark matter's gravity attracts ordinary gas, which can then coagulate into stars. -- It is unclear how one would form a galaxy without a dark halo, or how one could remove the halo without destroying the galaxy," says Diemand. "A galaxy without dark matter really does not fit into our current understanding of cosmology and galaxy formation." ...   more »

...Active Galactic Nuclei - thought to be powered by supermassive black holes that devour large amounts of matter - are the most likely candidate for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.

Using the Pierre Auger Observatory, the team of scientists found that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed uniformly across the sky. Instead, the Auger results link the origins of these mysterious particles to the locations of nearby galaxies that have active nuclei in their centres.

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have long been considered sites where high-energy particle production might take place. They swallow gas, dust and other matter from their host galaxies and spew out particles and energy.

While most galaxies have black holes at their centre, only a fraction of all galaxies have an AGN. The exact mechanism of how AGNs can accelerate particles to energies 100 million times higher than the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth is still a mystery. ...   more »

...According to Einstein's theory, a rapidly spinning black hole makes space itself rotate. This effect, coupled with gas spiraling toward the black hole, can produce a rotating, tightly wound vertical tower of magnetic field that flings a large fraction of the inflowing gas away from the vicinity of the black hole in an energetic, high-speed jet...

One significant consequence of powerful, black hole jets in galaxies in the centers of galaxy clusters is that they can pump enormous amounts of energy into their environments, and heat the gas around them. This heating prevents the gas from cooling, and affects the rate at which new stars form, thereby limiting the size of the central galaxy. Understanding the details of this fundamental feedback loop between supermassive black holes and the formation of the most massive galaxies remains an important goal in astrophysics. ...   more »

This recent report, from the session on 'Tipping Points' at the important Dec.07 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, illustrates the complexity of current technical discussions about the validity of the increasingly disruptive climate change scenarios being projected by various Climate Change computer models. The bottom line is that our models may be seriously underestimating the rapidly of the coming changes, as indicated in the previously posted article re the melting of arctic sea ice. ~rj

---

...In Hansen's talk, he did try to clarify what he meant by a tipping point. His notion of this has less to do with what mathematicians understand as "bifurcations," and more to do with a kind of inertia in the climate system. He means things like having passed a threshold of CO2 which, given warming in the pipeline and the lifetime of CO2, commits a certain discrete event — e.g. loss of perennial sea ice or the Amazon rainforest– to occurring even if we were to later reduce emissions to zero. He tried to distinguish between reversible and irreversible tipping points...

...where things get interesting is where you try to explain a magnitude of signal this big in terms of basic physics. This is important because there is a perception that GCM's vastly underestimate the amplitude of the response to total solar luminosity, leading to a perception that there is some "missing physics" (whether it be exotic amplification of a stratospheric response, or something like clouds and cosmic rays)...

But — the take-home point is that at this point the study of solar cycle response very strongly supports the notion that there is no need to invoke any mysterious or exotic missing physics (like cosmic ray modulation of clouds) in order to represent the response of climate to solar variability. If some models underestimate the response, this is likely to have more to do with errors in the vertical mixing of heat than any missing fundamental physics. ...   more »

The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. This website introduces methods, technology, and empirical results under the "Scientific Work" menu below, and gives background, interpretations, and implications under "Aesthetic View".

We have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running random colors per egg per sec custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis. Individual data create a random tapestry of color. The dot below indicates their global coherence.

Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We can interpret this as evidence for participation in a growing global consciousness. It suggests we have the capability and responsibility for conscious evolution. ...   more »

...The scientific paper, ''Missing Mass in Collisional Debris from Galaxies'' in the May 25 issue of Science Magazine is significant in that it questions the 23-year-old mainstream Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory, and it also opens the door of scientific acceptance to the competing five-year-old relativistic-proton dark matter cosmology. -- The researchers' conclusion, a departure from mainstream theory, reads: "it more likely indicates that a substantial amount of dark matter resides within the disks of spiral galaxies. The most natural candidate is molecular hydrogen in some hard-to-trace form."

The researchers point out that their conclusions disagree with the Cold Dark Matter theory that posits that there is no dark matter in the disks of spiral galaxies and that dark matter is comprised of non-baryonic matter, which excludes hydrogen and protons.

However, in agreement with the researchers' conclusion is the five-year-old competing relativistic-proton dark matter cosmology that posits that relativistic-protons, a hard-to-trace form of hydrogen, does indeed reside within the disks of spiral galaxies, as well as in their halos.    more »

BEIJING (AFX) - China has suspended the planned construction of a high-speed magnetic levitation train linking the eastern cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou due to health concerns, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

Citing unnamed Shanghai officials, Xinhua said the project has been suspended following petitions from residents living along the proposed route worried about possible health problems from the maglev's high powered magnets.

A question of whether the project can eventually recover the more than 40 bln yuan invested in it also casts a shadow over its feasibility, Xinhua said. -- It's now 'hard to say' if the train will be built at all, Xinhua quoted Wang Qingyun, the official in charge of transportation at the National Development and Reform Commission, as saying. ...   more »

The 'Ring of Dark Matter' was uncovered from the NASA-Hubble 3D Dark Matter Map data after astro-cosmology author Jerome Drexler pointed out that the reported anomalies and discrepancies were actually valid data. NASA issued the following news advisory May 10:

"GREENBELT, Md. - NASA will hold a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on May 15 to discuss the strongest evidence to date that dark matter exists. This evidence was found in a ghostly ring of dark matter in the cluster CL0024+17, discovered using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The ring is the first detection of dark matter with a unique structure different from the distribution of both the galaxies and the hot gas in the cluster. The discovery will be featured in the June 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal." ...   more »