
Just got back today from visiting the Grandkids and having spent Halloween with them.

The pictures are ones my wife took, on our way back.

While some like chocolate bars and the bubble nature of candy, some also like the molasses and ice cream? :)
Not many can see in this abstract way, or have considered how a photon might have traveled? Sure they have understood satellites and the travel through space, but have they consider this in context of CSL lensing? Sean put up a link yesterday that had me seeing how such a travel over distance might have had some photon's strange journies in context of such lensings.
Likewise, if the very fabric of the Universe is in a quantum-critical state, then the "stuff" that underlies reality is totally irrelevant-it could be anything, says Laughlin. Even if the string theorists show that strings can give rise to the matter and natural laws we know, they won't have proved that strings are the answer-merely one of the infinite number of possible answers. It could as well be pool balls or Lego bricks or drunk sergeant majors.
For example, theory says that Higgs particles are matter particles, but in most respects the Higgs behaves more like a new force than like a particle. How can this be? In truth, the Higgs is neither matter nor force; the Higgs is just different.
Scientists believe that the Higgs boson, named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who first theorized its existence in 1964, is responsible for particle mass, the amount of matter in a particle. According to the theory, a particle acquires mass through its interaction with the Higgs field, which is believed to pervade all of space and has been compared to molasses that sticks to any particle rolling through it. The Higgs field would be carried by Higgs bosons, just as the electromagnetic field is carried by photons.
"In the Standard Model, the Higgs boson mass is correlated with top quark mass," says Madaras, "so an improved measurement of the top quark mass gives more information about the possible value of the Higgs boson mass."
According to the Standard Model, at the beginning of the universe there were six different types of quarks. Top quarks exist only for an instant before decaying into a bottom quark and a W boson, which means those created at the birth of the universe are long gone. However, at Fermilab's Tevatron, the most powerful collider in the world, collisions between billions of protons and antiprotons yield an occasional top quark. Despite their brief appearances, these top quarks can be detected and characterized by the D-Zero and CDF experiments.
Physically, the effect can be interpreted as an object moving from the "false vacuum" (where = 0) to the more stable "true vacuum" (where = v). Gravitationally, it is similar to the more familiar case of moving from the hilltop to the valley. In the case of Higgs field, the transformation is accompanied with a "phase change", which endows mass to some of the particles.
In 2000 the same analogy was used to establish the robustness of the spectrum of primordial density fluctuations in inflationary models. This analogy is currently stimulating research for experimenting Hawking radiation. Finally it could also be a useful guide for going beyond the semi-classical description of black hole evaporation.
Our work is about comparing the data we collect in the STAR detector with modern calculations, so that we can write down equations on paper that exactly describe how the quark-gluon plasma behaves," says Jerome Lauret from Brookhaven National Laboratory. "One of the most important assumptions we've made is that, for very intense collisions, the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to hydrodynamic calculations in which the matter is like a liquid that flows with no viscosity whatsoever."
Proving that under certain conditions the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to such calculations is an exciting discovery for physicists, as it brings them a little closer to understanding how matter behaves at very small scales. But the challenge remains to determine the properties of the plasma under other conditions.
"We want to measure when the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a perfect fluid with zero viscosity, and when it doesn't," says Lauret. "When it doesn't match our calculations, what parameters do we have to change? If we can put everything together, we might have a model that reproduces everything we see in our detector."
By 'dilating' and 'expanding' the scope of our attention we not only discover that 'form is emptiness' (the donut has a hole), but also that 'emptiness is form' (objects precipitate out of the larger 'space') - to use Buddhist terminology. The emptiness that we arrive at by narrowing our focus on the innermost is identical to the emptiness that we arrive at by expanding our focus to the outermost. The 'infinitely large' is identical to the 'infinitesimally small'.The Structure of Consciousness John Fudjack - September, 1999
If conceived as a series of ever-wider experiential contexts, nested one within the other like a set of Chinese boxes, consciousness can be thought of as wrapping back around on itself in such a way that the outermost 'context' is indistinguishable from the innermost 'content' - a structure for which we coined the term 'liminocentric'.
Our attempt to justify our beliefs logically by giving reasons results in the "regress of reasons." Since any reason can be further challenged, the regress of reasons threatens to be an infinite regress. However, since this is impossible, there must be reasons for which there do not need to be further reasons: reasons which do not need to be proven. By definition, these are "first principles." The "Problem of First Principles" arises when we ask Why such reasons would not need to be proven. Aristotle's answer was that first principles do not need to be proven because they are self-evident, i.e. they are known to be true simply by understanding them.
PLato saids, "Look to the perfection of the heavens for truth," while Aristotle saids "look around you at what is, if you would know the truth"
Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature and scope of knowledge. The term "epistemology" is based on the Greek words "επιστημη or episteme" (knowledge) and "λόγος or logos" (account/explanation); it is thought to have been coined by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier.
Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?". Although approaches to answering any one of these questions frequently involve theories that are connected to others, there is enough particular to each that they may be examined separately.
There are many different topics, stances, and arguments in the field of epistemology. Recent studies have dramatically challenged centuries-old assumptions, and the discipline therefore continues to be vibrant and dynamic.
Innatism is a philosophical doctrine introduced by Plato in the socratic dialogue Meno which holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a tabula rasa at birth. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses. Innatism is the opposite of empiricism.
Plato claimed that humans are born with ideas/forms in the mind that are in a dormant state. He claimed that we have acquired these ideas prior to our birth when we existed as souls in the world of Forms. To access these, humans need to be reminded of them through proper education and experience.
I mean really, if, each of us is born into this world with such a blank slate, then how is an idea incorporated into such a design of our blank slate. Especially, if there had not been some influence predisposed, to draw ideas into the appropriate environment for consideration?
Where a dictionary proceeds in a circular manner, defining a word by reference to another, the basic concepts of mathematics are infinitely closer to an indecomposable element", a kind of elementary particle" of thought with a minimal amount of ambiguity in their definition. Alain Connes
Another wonderful spin-off is that it turns out that the charge of the electron is related to the radius of the little circle. This should not be surprizing: If the electric field is just a manifestation of geometry, the electric charge should be, too.THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS-Published by Houghton-Mifflin, Sep. 2006/Penguin (UK), Feb. 2007, Page 46
Model apprehension is part of the convergence that Lee Smolin and Brian Greene talk about, and without it, how could we look at nature and never consider that Einstein's world is a much more dynamical one then we had first learned from the lessons GR supplied, about gravity in our world?
Unfortunately, Einstein and the other enthusiasts were wrong. As with Nordstrom's theory, the idea of unification by adding a hidden dimension failed. It is important to understand why.
The strings move in a five-dimensional curved space-time with a boundary. The boundary corresponds to the usual four dimensions, and the fifth dimension describes the motion away from this boundary into the interior of the curved space-time. In this five-dimensional space-time, there is a strong gravitational field pulling objects away from the boundary, and as a result time flows more slowly far away from the boundary than close to it. This also implies that an object that has a fixed proper size in the interior can appear to have a different size when viewed from the boundary (Fig. 1). Strings existing in the five-dimensional space-time can even look point-like when they are close to the boundary. Polchinski and Strassler1 show that when an energetic four-dimensional particle (such as an electron) is scattered from these strings (describing protons), the main contribution comes from a string that is close to the boundary and it is therefore seen as a point-like object. So a string-like interpretation of a proton is not at odds with the observation that there are point-like objects inside it.
The surface of a marble table is spread out in front of me. I can get from any one point on this table to any other point by passing continuously from one point to a "neighboring" one, and repeating this process a (large) number of times, or, in other words, by going from point to point without executing "jumps." I am sure the reader will appreciate with sufficient clearness what I mean here by "neighbouring" and by "jumps" (if he is not too pedantic). We express this property of the surface by describing the latter as a continuum.Albert Einstein p. 83 of his Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
This striking pattern of convergence, linking concepts once thought unrelated, inspired Einstein to dream of the next and possibly final move: merging gravity and electromagnetism into a single, overarching theory of nature's forces.
In hindsight, there was almost no way he could have succeeded. He was barely aware that there were two other forces he was neglecting — the strong and weak forces acting within atomic nuclei. Furthermore, he willfully ignored quantum mechanics, the new theory of the microworld that was receiving voluminous experimental support, but whose probabilistic framework struck him as deeply misguided. Einstein stayed the course, but by his final years he had drifted to the fringe of a subject he had once dominated.
A lot of people do not understand that if you look to the cosmo, you do not just look at what is evident from observation, but that your observation is increased, as you enhance your perceptions about the "real depth" of that universe.
"Observations always involve theory."Edwin Hubble
There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.Nikolai Lobachevsky
Niki Sanders, a 33-year-old Las Vegas showgirl who can do incredible things with mirrors
A doppelgänger (pronunciation (help·info)) is the ghostly double of a living person. The word doppelgänger is a loanword from German, written there (as any noun) with an initial capital letter Doppelgänger, composed from doppel, meaning "double", and gänger, as "walker". In English, the word is conventionally not capitalized, and it is also common to drop the German diacritic umlaut on the letter "a" and write "doppelganger", although the correct spelling without umlaut would be "doppelgaenger".
Like many detectors, this experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator in Batavia, Illinois investigates the oscillation of neutrinos from one type to another. Since 2003, it has observed neutrinos created from protons in Fermilab's particle booster, part of the system that the lab normally employs to accelerate protons to higher energies for other experiments. MiniBooNE is a 40-foot-in-diameter spherical steel tank filled with 800 tons of mineral oil and lined with 1,280 phototubes (some of which are being adjusted in this image) that produce a flash of light when charged particles travel through them. Analyses of these light flashes are already providing tantalizing information
Current evidence shows that neutrinos do oscillate, which indicates that neutrinos do have mass. The Los Alamos data revealed a muon anti-neutrino cross over to an electron neutrino. This type of oscillation is difficult to explain using only the three known types of neutrinos. Therefore, there might be a fourth neutrino, which is currently being called a "sterile" neutrino, which interacts more weakly than the other three neutrinos.
BooNE will determine the oscillation parameters and possibly yield further information about the mass of a neutrino
Mon, 12 Sep 2005 - An Italian team of astronomers have found a gamma ray burst that blew up 12.7 billion light-years away - the most distant ever seen. Astronomers have calculated that it exploded with 300 times more energy than our Sun will put out in its entire 10+ billion year lifespan. The blast was discovered by NASA's Swift satellite, which is dedicated to discovering these powerful explosions.
It was Socrates' turn to look puzzled. Oh, wake up. You know what chaos is. Simple deterministic dynamics leading to irregular, random-looking behavior. Butterfly effect. That stuff. Of course, I know that, Socrates said in irritation. No, it was the idea of dynamic logic that was puzzling me. How can logic be dynamic