2) And here's Lee Smolin's #2 to Leonard Susskind #1:

I am grateful to Lenny for taking the time to respond to my paper. I will be as brief as I can in replying, especially as the key points are already presented in detail in my paper hep-th/0407213 ["Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle"] or in my book, Life of the Cosmos or previous papers on the subject. -- For clarity I had in section 5.1.6 identified two arguments in Weinberg's papers. The first is the one I criticized in the summary. Susskind reponds, reasonably, by agreeing, and then raising the second argument. This argument is also criticized in detail in my paper, and it was perhaps a mistake not to include this in the summary I sent to Susskind.

This second argument is based on a version of the AP called the "Principle of Mediocrity" by Garriga and Vilenkin, who have done the most to develop it. Their version states that, "...our civilization is typical in the ensemble of all civilizations in the universe." -- This argument is discussed in full in sections 5.1.5 and 5.1.6. There I argue that the mediocrity principle cannot yield falsifiable predictions because it depends on the definition of the ensemble within which our civilization is taken to be typical as well as on assumptions about the probability distribution. I establish this by general argument as well as by reference to specific examples including Weinberg's use of it.

Can this be right if, as Susskind claims, Weinberg's prediction was found to hold? In fact, Weinberg's prediction did not work all that well. In the form that he made it, it led to an expectation of a cosmological constant larger than the observed value. Depending on the ensemble chosen and the assumptions made about the probability distribution, the probability that Lambda be as small as observed ranges between about 10 % and a few parts in ten thousand. In fact, the less probable values are the more reasonable, as they come from an ensemble where Q, the scale of the density fluctuations, is allowed to vary. While I am not an expert here, it appears from a reading of the literature [references in the paper] that to make the probability for the present value as large as 10% one has to assume that Q is frozen and fixed by fundamental theory. It is hard to imagine a theory where the parameters vary but Q does not, as it depends on parameters in the inflation potential. ...   more »

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1) Here's Leonard Susskind's answer to Lee Smolin's first email:

Yesterday I received an email message from Lee Smolin asking for my comments about a paper he had posted the previous day [1]. Having not had a chance to read the paper I asked if he would summarize the arguments. He was kind enough to do so in an admirably concise and clear summary. (See above). -- I took a quick look at the paper just to make sure that there was not more that I might have missed in the summary. -- I noticed that in the paper Smolin quotes the philosopher, Karl Popper. Personally I don't think these are deep philosophical issues requiring a heavyweight like Popper. Weinberg was just using good old fashioned common sense.

Weinberg's argument, which is clearly stated in his general audience book Dreams of a Final Theory is not that the cosmological constant has to be smaller than the limit from galaxy formation. If it were, then Smolin would be correct: the Anthropic Principle doesn't add much to the observed fact that galaxies exist. What Weinberg argued was that if the Anthropic Principle is correct, then the cosmological constant will probably not be much smaller than the galaxy formation limit. Weinberg was just expressing the common sense opinion that if anthropics is the only reason the cosmological constant is small, then it is unlikely that it will be orders of magnitude smaller than the anthropic limit. -- Was it a prediction that could be proved wrong? Most people thought so. Just about everyone I know was certain that the cosmological constant was exactly zero.

Smolin's next argument involves what he calls a scientific alternative to the Anthropic Principle. He argues for a Darwinian natural selection principle. Smolin believes, as I do, that universes can reproduce and give rise to mutated offspring that differ in the values of the constants of nature. He believes the mechanism involves black holes while I believe it involves eternal inflation and Coleman de Luccia bubble nucleation. But either will do. ...   more »

Introduction

Recently, I received a copy of an email sent by Leonard Susskind to a group of physicists which included an attached file entitled "Answer to Smolin". This was the opening salvo of an intense email exchange between Susskind and Smolin concerning Smolin's argument that "the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science".

After reading several postings by each of the physicists, I asked each if (a) they would consider posting the comments on Edge, and (b) if they would write a new, and final "letter". -- Both agreed, but only after a negotiation: (1) No more than 1 letter each; (2) Neither sees the other's letter in advance; (3) No changes after the fact. A physics shoot-out.
While this is a conversation written by physicists for physicists, it should nonetheless be of interest for Edge readers as it's in the context of previous Edge features with the authors, it's instructive as to how science is done, and it's a debate that clarifies, not detracts. And finally it's a good example of what Edge is all about, where contributors share the boundaries of their knowledge and experience with each other and respond to challenges, comments, criticisms, and insights. The constant shifting of metaphors, the intensity with which we advance our ideas to each other — this is what intellectuals do. Edge draws attention to the larger context of intellectual life. ...   more »

The pastor wanted to give her the tablecloth, but she made the pastor keep it for the church. The pastor insisted on driving her home, that was the least he could do. She lived on the other side of Staten Island and was only in Brooklyn for the day for a house cleaning job. What a wonderful service they had on Christmas Eve. The church was almost full. The music and the spirit were great. At the end of the service, the pastor and his wife greeted everyone at the door and many said that they would return. One older man, whom the pastor recognized from the neighborhood continued to sit in one of the pews and stare, and the pastor wondered why he wasn't leaving. …   more »

The Mother's Last Darshan

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Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.

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…listening to the sages of the woods,
In question and in answer broke from her
High strange revealings impossible to men,
Something or someone secret and remote
Took hold of her body for his mystic use,
Her mouth was seized to channel ineffable truths,
Knowledge unthinkable found an utterance.
Astonished by a new enlightenment,
Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,
They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
What they had only glimpsed at times afar.
These thoughts were formed not in her listening brain,
Her vacant heart was like a stringless harp;
Impassive the body claimed not its own voice,
But let the luminous greatness through it pass.   more »

Beyond the trembling veil of sight he disappeared
When with purple dusk the wind surged towards the sea.
In slow advancing night the dim boat sailed
To an island crowded by shadow-birds of Time:
The shouts of broken wings, of waves, beings
Falling not with their weight but with deathfulness
Of thickening gravity—they soon led him leeward.
His name drifted under the flood…   more »

... In July 1938 the Yogi-Poet had an assignation with the primordial Night, the Night of Creation. He went to meet her, carrying “God’s deathless light” in his breast. He was aware that this was going to be a very bold and dangerous rendezvous; it was going to be an exceptional and most decisive affair, fraught with possibilities. His fate and hence the fate of the world remained locked in them, in the possibility leading towards earthly deathlessness. So, he the pilgrim-soul made an assignation with the Night. But what was the outcome of that bold and dangerous rendezvous? What had actually transpired in the course of the meeting? But apart from dropping some broad hints, no communiqué was issued. If at all, it seemed that the way was lost and that there was no end to the “weary journeying”. Yet there was hope, there was conviction and certitude that the outcome was going to be a path leading towards immortality. There was the inalienable freedom, and the Yogi-Poet lived in the Spirit’s calm, and was in possession of the vast immobile bliss of the Being. Soon his rooms would get lit up with an endless Light, and rapture would be coursing through his nerves, and through every cell of his body. In a mute blaze of ecstasy, and preserving the “living sense of the Imperishable”, even in the bodily existence, he would proceed towards his goal. That was great indeed, marvellous. If the bodily existence was set ablaze in this way, it meant that there was the wonderful realisation or the siddhi of the Mind of Light in him, that the physical had started receiving the supramental. Sri Aurobindo had definitely moved towards it, a remarkable event, a landmark event in the evolutionary sequence. It is said that Pythagoras had a thigh of gold, and that Vamadeva, after crossing the hundredth year, lived in a golden body for sixteen full years. Something golden had happened in that far past, but now the Mind of Light has made the body its permanent base, permanent home. ...   more »

...the X Prize Foundation announced the first 10 teams entered in the Google Lunar X Prize. Unveiled in September 2007, the Google Lunar X Prize requires contestants to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon, explore the terrain for at least 500 meters, and transmit results of the trip back to Earth. The grand prize is $20 million, with a second prize of $5 million and bonuses of $5 million. ...   more »

So, one understands. One understands: the psychic being materialises itself... and that gives continuity to evolution. This creation gives altogether the feeling that there is nothing arbitrary, there is a kind of divine logic behind and it is not like our human logic, it is very much superior to ours—but there is one, and that was fully satisfied when I saw this.

It is really interesting. I was very interested. It was there, calm and quiet, and it said to me, “You were looking, well, there it is, yes, it is that!”

And then I understood why the mind and the vital were sent out of this body, leaving the psychic being—naturally it was that which had been always governing all the movements, so it was nothing new, but there are no difficulties any more: all the complications that were coming from the vital and the mental, adding their impressions and tendencies, all gone. And I understood: “Ah! It is that, it is this psychic being which has to become the supramental being.”...   more »

The Darshan Message


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"How inflation happened a split second after the Big Bang." "Identify the exact sources of these cosmic rays and how they accelerate particles." Two different Nobel Laureates raised these two unrelated queries in cosmology publicly in November and December 2007. The timing of these queries is close to the fourth anniversary of a postmodern Big Bang cosmology theory published Dec. 15, 2003, in a cosmology book, "How Dark Matter Created Dark Energy and the Sun," authored by Jerome Drexler.

There is the possibility that plausible answers or helpful responses to both of these queries can be derived from a recent cosmology paper utilizing Drexler's dark matter theory and Big Bang cosmology... The paper argues that the Big Bang, which occurred at the beginning of time, must have satisfied the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thus, immediately after the Big Bang the entropy of the universe would be at the lowest level it would reach throughout all time. Therefore, the Big Bang should not be characterized, as it has been for over 40 years, as a chaotic fireball explosion associated with a high level of disorder and high entropy.

The very low entropy could be achieved by the Big Bang firing out, in all directions, high-velocity ultra-high-energy (UHE) relativistic protons and helium nuclei in the well-known ratio of 12 to 1. A very high percentage of their energies would be available to do work since their entropy, a measure of the percentage of their energy unavailable to do work, would be very low. Such a Big Bang, characterized by a dispersion of UHE relativistic nuclei, would be highly efficient and could create very high usable energy and very low entropy, and might be designated a Relativistic Big Bang. This concept is fundamental to Drexler's dark matter theory and his postmodern Big Bang cosmology. ...   more »

The Pentagon counted down Wednesday toward an unprecedented effort to shoot down a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite, using a souped-up missile fired from a ship in the Pacific.

The timing was tricky. For the best chance to succeed, the military awaited a combination of favorable factors: steady seas around the Navy cruiser that would fire the missile, optimum positioning of the satellite as it passed in polar orbit and the readiness of an array of space- and ground-based sensors to help cue the missile and track the results.

The operation was so extraordinary, with such intense international publicity and political ramifications, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates — not a military commander — was to make the final decision to pull the trigger.

The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the United States or elsewhere. ...   more »

Sri Aurobindo introduced the term ‘Mind of Light’ with a specific suggestion, with a kind of well-defined association; he introduced it in his very last prose writings when he was, at the request of the Mother, contributing a series of articles to the Bulletin of Physical Education during 1949-50. To this term he gave a special technical connotation involving a whole world of luminous yogic and psychological sense. It is indicative of the fact that his own yoga-tapasya had progressed to a stage from where the envisioned manifestation of a fuller divine life could come within the realisable range of the evolutionary ascent. The role of the Mind of Light as an active principle, in fact an effectuating power, is seen to be that of the leader of a type of new mental beings, of a presiding official over the intermediate race, the race governed, in the Mother’s phrase, by la conscience du surhomme, the superman consciousness. This new race, the new humanity, will be “not only capable of standing enlightened in the radiance of the Supermind but able to climb consciously towards it and into it.” This surhomme is not simply 'aboveman' or 'overman'; it is already governed not by Overmind but by the delegate power of the Supermind itself. Indeed, the appearance of the Mind of Light is the first definite and assured entry of the Supermind itself in the earth-consciousness, the beginning of the process of supramentalisation. It is that which will carry out the preparatory work and bring mortality’s travail closer to its end. It will be the initiation of termination of the presently death-processed evolution.   more »

More than half of the sunlike stars in the galaxy could have terrestrial planets with the potential to harbor life, a new study suggests.

The research, announced yesterday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, is just one of a set of recent findings that suggest the roster of potential life-harboring worlds is huge—even in our own solar system.

"Our observations suggest that between 20 percent and 60 percent of sunlike stars form rocky planets like our solar system's," said Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, at a press briefing Sunday.

Meyer and his team used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study heat from the dust around sunlike stars of various ages, much like looking at "the smoke you see rising from chimneys in Boston on a cold day." ...   more »

I was on a huge boat which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on. This boat, as large as a city, is fully organised, and it had certainly already been functioning for some time, for its organisation was complete. It is the place where people who are destined for the supramental life are trained. These people—or at least a part of their being —had already undergone a supramental transformation, for the boat itself and everything on board was neither material nor subtle-physical nor vital nor mental—it was a supramental substance. This substance was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance which is closest to the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a mixture of gold and red, forming a uniform substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like that—the light was like that, the people were like that—everything had that colour, although with various shades which made it possible to distinguish things from each other. The general impression was of a world without shadows; there were shades but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything went on regularly and in silence. And at the same time one could see all the details of an education, a training in all fields, by which the people on board were being prepared. …   more »

Here is Randy Pausch reprising his Last Lecture. Let us applaud this American spirit at the following beautiful video:
this is the American spirit    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 »

Even now her splendid being might flame back
Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
To the souls of men their deep identity.
Or she might wake into God's quietude
Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night
And rest appeased in his white eternity.
But this was now unreal or remote
Or covered in the mystic fathomless blank.
In infinite Nothingness was the ultimate sign
Or else the Real was the Unknowable.
A lonely Absolute negated all:
It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude
And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace.   more »

Timeless India: Has India really changed over time, and can change be for the better? Do Indians think that history matters, or that progress is possible?
Fabulous India: Are there limits to the acceptable? Should the ways people believe and worship and act make sense?
Secret India: Do Indians integrate India's spiritual traditions with the wider, ordinary pursuits of life? Or do Indians keep separate their spiritual lives from their daily pursuit of wealth, comfort, material advancement?
Learned India: Is it important to know and understand the traditional intellectual systems of India, or is it true that it is simply not worth the time and trouble to learn them in today's busy world? Is the academic tradition of the West a help or a threat to Indian culture and religion in today's world?
Free India: Can Indians agree on a balance between individual freedom and the good of society as a whole? Can people be seriously told what they should do? Can family, regional, and class traditions be changed or even discarded, for the sake of the greater good in modern society?
The world is changing rapidly and neither "India" nor "the West" are what they were in the past (unless India is indeed unchanging and timeless!); the century before us seems rich in exciting possibilities that seem likely to challenge and change all of us. But even now we must look back as well as forward. We cannot afford to forget the past and the attitudes we have held toward one another over the ages; if we forget, then we may continue to bear the burden of those preconceptions even in the 21st century. ...   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 »

…the tremendous hour must arrive. The Mother’s own yoga-tapasya bearing the agony and ecstasy in the process of bringing to the gross earth-consciousness the supreme Beatitude got more and more intensified in the course of swift time. Her way to meet the grim hour lay in complete surrender to the Divine: “What Thou willest, what Thou willest” became her solicitous and powerful mantra for the physical transformation. Therein indeed is the true remedy for the body-problem. The Mother describes, as follows, the triumph in what she calls the descent of the superman consciousness, her experience of 1 January 1969:

In the night it came slowly and waking up this morning, there was as though a golden dawn, and the atmosphere was so light. The body felt: ‘Well, it is truly, truly new.’ A golden light, transparent and… benevolent. ‘Benevolent’ in the sense of a certainty—a harmonious certainty. It was new.

How wonderful, this Divine work in the earth-consciousness! The Divine in the Physical! That's tremendous indeed! and beyond our comprehension! Glory to the Divine in all his worlds! …   more »

For centuries, it had been the dream of alchemists to turn inexpensive metals into gold. Certainly, it is not enough from an alchemist's point of view to transfer only the appearance of a metal to gold. However, the possibility of rendering a certain metal to a completely different color without coating can be very interesting in its own right. In this work, we demonstrate a femtosecond laser processing technique that allows us to create a variety of colors on a metal that ultimately leads us to control its optical properties from UV to terahertz.   more »