Window Into the Mind

As we increase our knowledge of the genetic, neural and cognitive aspects of synaesthesia, we will find that we are beginning to understand the brain more completely. Researchers may wish that they possessed synaesthesia, but being able to explore a new and strange trait that may hold the answers to many fundamental questions is reward enough.

Yellow, Red, Blue
1925; Oil on canvas, 127x200cm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

Over the past 35 years I have spent a considerable time doing my own research. Learning to express myself, has been very difficult to say the least.

It is while doing this research that things seem to "overlap" as I ventured forward and finding examples, as if "analogies in nature" has been the "metaphorical struggle" that I use in "word use and comparison."

Creating the Language

It has accumulated from that research and integration within myself. So it is like creating and learning a "new language," while most of the time I come across as not being understood. That has been "my struggle" to get people "to see" what I am seeing? I don't get "images" in my head, but the accumulation of everything has been transposed into the way I express myself here in this blog.

It is true without lying, certain and most true. That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. Sir Isaac Newton

If I may by example give here "the idea of perfecting the self" in regards to Sir Isaac Newton. If he were to have been a alchemist, and persevered in his "psychological struggles," then what form would all his "struggles in self" have exemplified, if he "accomplished those parts of himself."

The "colour" of his being, and the alchemical relation to psychological changes? These alway existed and "as yet" had no name?

So from whence comes all "this energy of expression", to have been displayed as it has? In all the avenues of our "selves," that our experience has allowed that energy to manifest "this way" and "that way," and we have this "unique individual" before us, as you, or I, and "the many?" You "control the color or not" or, is it a "consequence" of this physiological process?


Smilack says her synesthesia helps her create art, such as this piece, "Squid Row." Photo by Marcia Smilack

Smilack belongs to the group of one to four percent of people worldwide with synesthesia, the neurological mixing of the senses. No two synesthetes have exactly the same perceptual experiences. Many perceive each number, letter of the alphabet, or day of the week as a different color. For others, sounds from the environment are always accompanied by moving geometric patterns in their "mind's eye."

Smilack has a rare form of synesthesia that involves all of her senses—the sound of one female voice looks like a thin, bending sheet of metal, and the sight of a certain fishing shack gives her a brief taste of Neapolitan ice cream—but her artistic leanings are shared by many other synesthetes. Scientists estimate that synesthesia is about seven times more common in poets, novelists, and artists than in the rest of the population. (Some of the most famous examples include artists David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky and writer Vladimir Nabokov.)

Marcia Smilack:

When you take a photograph of a reflection, you must compose your image upside down -- an odd and difficult task. Eventually, it is simply easier to give in and rely on other parts of your mind to compose the image. So, in an oxymoronic way, seeing in reflection "forces" you to let go, to trust what you feel.

Second, these images opened a unique window into the mind of the researcher. Remember the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that states every object observed is changed by the experience? Well, I am the voice from the other side, the voice of the object that was watching them the whole time they were watching me. I have learned that we change each other through our interchanges. And while it is hard for me to quantify what I have learned from them, it is a great deal. Their questions and responses provide a framework onto which I can project what I intuitively know but do not usually speak.

She has many wonderful links that I had accumulated, and more. Also check out the extensive amount of links associated with the Synesthesia Resource Center on Patricia Lynne Duffy's book web page.

Calculus, or Feynman's Toy Models?

Some, who possess what researchers call "conceptual synesthesia," see abstract concepts, such as units of time or mathematical operations, as shapes projected either internally or in the space around them

So, is it out of necessity that we can "create the language" necessary to view the reality around us as it is, and how shall we do that? Sir Isaac Newton created "Calculus."

So with this "unique perspective of synesthesia," how shall you give to the world from what began in self, and we have this "multitude of choices" as to the "fabrications" we may use from our "artistic creative design?" No choice, synesthesia just is?

Sometimes I relate the experience of reading a book, to what is "consumed one day" was by design, our place in the scheme of understanding things. Where we have "this experience" that we can correlate. So "it" makes sense. If a person with synesthesia was to read my blog, how much more would they take from my writing, then one without?

It is no different then our understanding of the science of things. Life can seem "mythic in proportion,", until, we understood the deeper part of the "design of reality?"

Update:


Nature, so endlessly creative, has managed things so that each of us, hosts of synesthesia or not, perceives a slightly different world... a world colored by our one-of-a-kind pattern of neurons and experiences" -- Patricia Lynne Duffy

Radiactive Decay

Unit Circle


Complex numbers can be identified with points in the Euclidean plane, namely the number a + bi is identified with the point (a, b). Under this identification, the unit circle is a group under multiplication, called the circle group. This group has important applications in mathematics and science. See here.

Just briefly showing containment of "collision process" and for later study. This is how I see this "relation of cosmic particle collisions" to incidents in "high energy collisions processes" and I wonder if this is wrong? Also pointing toward "Neutrino oscillation" as a probabilistic consequence of Quantum mechanics.

To the Substance of this Post

Q9 raised an issue that is of some significance to me because of the way I was "geometrically seeing these collision processes." While, I had not moved my thinking to the human factor in this process, it has in my study raised the question of what effect it has on the human populations on a personal note.

Quasar9:

The general effects of radon to the human body are due to its radioactivity and consequent risk of radiation-induced cancer. As an inert gas, "radon has a low solubility in body fluids which lead to a uniform distribution of the gas throughout the body" (Lindgren, 1989). Radon gas and its solid decay products are carcinogens. Some of the daughter products, especially polonium-218 and 214, from radioactive decay of radon present a radiologic hazard. Depending on the size of the particles, radon decay products can be inhaled into the lung where they undergo further radioactive decay releasing small bursts of energy in the form of alpha particles that can either cause double strand DNA breaks or create free radicals that can also damage the DNA. Also See: Radon

The ABCs - and Xs and Zs - of Radiation

Alpha and beta rays are particles. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation, like X-rays but at higher energies. Health physicists worry most about HZE cosmic rays, those with high mass (Z stands for atomic number, which also implies mass) and energy (E). They have two principal sources, the Sun and the galaxy.

Quasar9:

The energy of alpha particles varies, with higher energy alpha particles being emitted from larger nuclei, but most alpha particles have energies of between 3 and 7 MeV. This is a substantial amount of energy for a single particle, but their high mass means alpha particles have a lower speed (with a typical kinetic energy of 5 MeV the speed is 15,000 km/s) than any other common type of radiation (β particles, γ-rays, neutrons etc). Because of their charge and large mass, alpha particles are easily absorbed by materials and can travel only a few centimetres in air. They can be absorbed by tissue paper or the outer layers of human skin (about 40 micrometres, equivalent to a few cells deep) and so are not generally dangerous to life unless the source is ingested or inhaled. Because of this high mass and strong absorption, however, if alpha radiation does enter the body (most often because radioactive material has been inhaled or ingested), it is the most destructive form of ionizing radiation. It is the most strongly ionizing, and with large enough doses can cause any or all of the symptoms of radiation poisoning. It is estimated that chromosome damage from alpha particles is about 100 times greater than that caused by an equivalent amount of other radiation. The alpha emitter polonium-210 is suspected of playing a role in lung and bladder cancer related to tobacco smoking. Also See:Alpha Particles

Low energy alpha particles may be completely stopped by a sheet of paper, beta particles by aluminum shielding. Gamma rays, being very high energy in nature, can only be reduced by much more substantial obstacles, such as a very thick piece of lead.

As for types of radioactive radiation, it was found that an electric or magnetic field could split such emissions into three types of beams. For lack of better terms, the rays were given the alphabetic names alpha, beta, and gamma, names they still hold today. It was immediately obvious from the direction of electromagnetic forces that alpha rays carried a positive charge, beta rays carried a negative charge, and gamma rays were neutral. From the magnitude of deflection, it was also clear that alpha particles were much more massive than beta particles. Passing alpha rays through a thin glass membrane and trapping them in a discharge tube allowed researchers to study the emission spectrum of the resulting gas, and ultimately prove that alpha particles are in fact helium nuclei. Other experiments showed the similarity between beta radiation and cathode rays; they are both streams of electrons, and between gamma radiation and X-rays, which are both high energy electromagnetic radiation.

Although alpha, beta, and gamma are most common, other types of decay were eventually discovered. Shortly after discovery of the neutron in 1932, it was discovered by Enrico Fermi that certain rare decay reactions give rise to neutrons as a decay particle. Isolated proton emission was also eventually observed in some elements. Shortly after the discovery of the positron in cosmic ray products, it was realized that the same process that operates in classical beta decay can also produce positrons (positron emission), analogously to negative electrons. Each of the two types of beta decay acts to move a nucleus toward a ratio of neutrons and protons which has the least energy for the combination. Finally, in a phenomenon called cluster decay, specific combinations of neutrons and protons other than alpha particles were found to occasionally spontaneously be emitted from atoms.

No Extra Dimensions Yet?

Turning back to gravity, the extra-dimensions model stems from theoretical research into (mem)brane theories, the multidimensional successors to string theories (April 1999 p13). One remarkable property of these models is that they show that it is quite natural and consistent for electromagnetism, the weak force and the inter-quark force to be confined to a brane while gravity acts in a larger number of spatial dimensions.
The requirement of correctly reproducing Newton's constant, G, at long distances leads to the size of the extra dimensions in which gravity is free to act being related to the number of extra dimensions.

New physics experience might reveal more dimensions in the Universe than meets the eyeSee Here

Amazing isn't it that EOT-WASH GROUP would consider themselves as challenging the experimental basis of string theory thinking. If one did not see into the nature of that "dynamical world" what value would have ever been reached if there was no separation in the value of the "r distance?" No "varying energy valuation" in the strong force.


Fig. 1. In quantum chromodynamics, a confining flux tube forms between distant static charges. This leads to quark confinement - the potential energy between (in this case) a quark and an antiquark increases linearly with the distance between them.See Here.

If a "Q to Q" measure is considered and a "active consideration evident" in this exchange of a "r value," then why would they think the gravitational considerations would not have ever made sense in the distances of extra dimensions of 44 micrometres or larger?

By increasing this distance, the gravitational considerations are very important in terms of the energy valuation given as the "q to q" is moved apart. The energy is directly relate to the gravitational considerations?


Image: EOT-WASH GROUP, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Discovering extra dimensions with the relatively huge size of a few micrometers would offer spectacular confirmation for string theory, the still unproved body of equations that may unify gravity with the normally incompatible realm of quantum physics. "Even though we haven't seen anything, these results put boundaries on what people can legitimately propose," says experimental physicist and study author Eric Adelberger of the University of Washington. "Testing the inverse square law [meaning Newton's law of gravity] is the bombproof way to look for extra dimensions.

"

some physicists proposed that string theory might cause gravity to grow stronger at such distances if the universe came with relatively big extra dimensions of micrometers in width......Sundrum says that if extra dimensions failed to turn up at that distance, it would likely prune off that branch of string theory.

Collider Detector at Fermilab and Slac

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.

If for one moment you thought strings had some relation to the very nature as "building blocks of this universe," at what "energies" would we have said they had made their appearance? Microseconds perhaps after the universe came into expression?

The CDF Detector. Image from Fermilab

Three trillion times per second--that's how fast quarks in the B sub s (B_s) particle "oscillate," or switch between their matter and antimatter states, according to scientists from the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration. The CDF physicists measured this rapid oscillation with the help of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, Fermilab’s Tevatron, unprecedented computing power made available through the Open Science Grid and the LHC Computing Grid, and a healthy dose of ingenuity.

"B_s oscillation is a very subtle and rapid effect," says Jacobo Konigsberg from the University of Florida, co-spokesperson for the CDF collaboration. "It's astonishing that we can measure it at all."

When you look at these events, the cascading effect of this interaction with the earth's upper atmosphere, why did not one think of the constituent properties that would be exhibited at the beginning of that same universe?

Multi-Jet Hadronic Events


Event 12637_6353_600_z_3jet

In some hadronic events, the initial high-energy quark and or antiquark pair may radiate a high-energy gluon before the production of additional quarks and antiquarks in the strong force field is completed. These gluons also show up in the event picture, because they provide a different pattern. The momentum of each high-energy gluon appears as an additional jet of hadrons. This process results in three, four, or even five jet events. Sometimes though, as these pictures show, it is very clear to see.

I do not understand why people did not understand this relation to what was happening within the cosmos, would not be produced in our colliders? That what was happening at the beginning of our universe had some relation to what was being produced in those colliders?

Cosmic Rays


Cosmic rays are caused by protons from outer space. When a proton (shown in yellow) hits the air in the earth's upper atmosphere it produces many particles. Most of these decay or are absorbed in the atmosphere. One type of particle, called muons (shown in red), lives long enough that some reach the earth's surface.

SLAC's Cosmic Ray Detector: The Cosmic Ray Detector consists of three pairs of scintillator panels for muon detection. Sets A, B, and C (see below) are oriented with the flat surface of the panels horizontally, at 45°, and vertically, respectively. In each pair, the panels measure 4.875 inches (12.4 cm) wide by 8 inches (20.3 cm) long, and the distance between them is 18.5 inches (47.0 cm). The panels are shielded from light with aluminum foil, black plastic sheets, and black tape. When muons penetrate through these panels, chemicals within will scintillate (emit flashes of light).

Circles Within Circles: Energy within the Cosmos

The Search for Dark Matter in the Unresolved X-ray Background by Kevork N. Abazajian

Figure left: False-color image of the deep exposure of the Chandra X-ray Observatory in the southern field (CDF-S).
Figure right above: The (circled) resolved point sources and extended sources that are removed from this field to determine the spectrum of the remaining unresolved X-ray background. (Note that the two panels have different orientations.)

A candidate light particle that reduces small-scale structures is a neutrino-like particle that has no standard interactions, but can be produced in the early universe with its small coupling with the standard neutrinos, often described as a “sterile neutrino” (Dodelson & Widrow, 1994). The same coupling for its production requires a decay mode of the sterile neutrino into a photon and the standard neutrino with which it is coupled. The decay photon is mono-energetic and has X-ray energies. This has allowed the use of contemporary X-ray observatories such as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory for a previously unintended purpose: the search for the signature of a dark matter candidate.

Newton's inverse-square (1/r2) law

The standard model of particle physics is a self-contained picture of fundamental particles and their interactions. Physicists, on a journey from solid matter to quarks and gluons, via atoms and nuclear matter, may have reached the foundation level of fields and particles. But have we reached bedrock, or is there something deeper? Savas Dimopoulos

While in the post previous to this I gave some indication of the gravity from the cosmological point of view, I then took it down to the particle collisions. I again reiterate this, in this post as well.


Source-detector configuration for the 1-m 1/r² test

Newton's inverse-square (1/r²) law is a cornerstone of General Relativity. However, this law has been challenged by many modern theories of gravity and particle physics. The supergravity and unified field theories often run into a new short-range force, with an accompanying new particle, which should appear as a violation of the 1/r² law. More recently, a possible violation of the 1/r² law in the range below 1 mm was suggested by string theories with extra dimensions.

Gravity: Another Example of a 1/R² Law

Two masses at a given distance place equal and opposite forces of attraction on one another. The magnitude of this force of attraction is given by:




where G is the universal gravitation constant (6.67 X 10^-11 Nm²/kg²), m₁ is the mass of the first object in kilograms, m₂ is the mass of the second object in kilograms, and r is the distance between the centers of the two masses, in meters.

It is not without thinking here that what you thought of the "microstate blackhole," could have found it's relevance in the temperatures reached, when seen at this level?


Fig. 1. In quantum chromodynamics, a confining flux tube forms between distant static charges. This leads to quark confinement - the potential energy between (in this case) a quark and an antiquark increases linearly with the distance between them.

The ideal experimental test of this new feature of QCD would be to study the flux tube of figure 1 directly by anchoring a quark and antiquark several femtometres apart and examining the flux tube between them. In such ideal circumstances, one of the characteristics of the gluonic flux tube would be the model-independent spectrum shown in figure 2. The excitation energy is p/r because the flux tube's mass is entirely due to its stored energy. There are two initially excited longest wavelength vibrations with identical energies because the motion of the flux tube is in the two symmetrical dimensions perpendicular to its length.

You ever hear of the term, "you can't hit the broad side of a barn?" WEll lets think about this when it comes to the measures of femtometres and such. Classically old, it was not witout some direction in thinking that one could be taken down to certain measures for those same considerations. Barn Yard?

Origin of the (classified) barn

In the luminosity lexicon, a picobarn is one trillionth (10-12) of a barn, and a femtobarn is one quadrillionth (10-15) of a barn... but what's a barn? The distinctive and amusing term originated with two Purdue University physicists working on the Manhattan Project in 1942—and it was classified information by the US government until after World War II.

A History of Physics at Purdue (Gartenhaus, Tubis, Cassidy, and Bray) cites the July 1972 issue of Physics Today in which Marshall Halloway and Charles Baker write of tossing around ideas over dinner until arriving at "barn" to describe the typical nuclear cross section of 10-24 cm2, the effective target area that a nuclear particle represents in a collision. Dining in the Purdue Memorial Union, back in Lafayette, Indiana, Halloway and Baker dismissed "Oppenheimer" and "Bethe" as candidates, then considered John Manley, director of the Purdue group at Los Alamos. They decided "Manley" was too long, and then, as the authors put it in the Physics Today article to:

So here we are looking at what the EOT-WASH GROUP is doing? What is "compactification" in line with any thinking, that the world around us from a cosmological point of view is large(large circle), and that amidst it's reality, exists this finer world of particulars that "we'd only imagine" while the measures to it's finest(small circle) was produce and then energies assigned.

It would be as if you looked at the cosmos and never thought about it constituents "bits and pieces," which make up those cosmological processes. Yet, for me, "circles within circles" would have made me wonder which circle represented which part of the views at any one time, whilst we speak about these energies from one perspective to the next.

Savas Dimopoulos:At close encounter the particles can exchange gravitons via the two extra dimensions, which changes the force law at very short distances. Instead of the "Newtonian inverse square law" you’ll have an inverse fourth power law. This signature is being looked for in the ongoing experiments.

.....and more here for how perspectve can change once you give a direction in which to think about.

Savas Dimopoulos:At first we faced denial. We had deliberately used the word "sub-millimeter" in our first paper. Physicists were surprised, to say the least, that such a thing was not already excluded experimentally. I remember a stage in 1998 when colleagues wondered if we had not forgotten some crucial experiment. We were not discouraged. No! We gave talks on the ideas, and by July 1998 had analyzed the laboratory and cosmological constraints. That paper marked a sea-change in opinion: physicists began to think this was an interesting idea. By the fall of 1998 we were showing how to do real physics. Now several study groups are taking us very seriously: the high citation rates speak for themselves.
Personally I am not surprised by the reaction. Revolutionary ideas go through a cycle: denial, followed by "okay it is consistent but can you do anything with it?" and finally, once you show how to do real physics, you may get the third phase where many physicists become interested in the field. The same thing happened to me and Giorgi back in 1981 when we first proposed the supersymmetric extension of the standard model of particle physics. Initially there were the usual skeptics but now it is completely accepted.
Oddly, for me, the major competitor to these proposals for extra dimensions is the supersymmetry extension. But let's recall some of the disadvantages of the standard model. First, it shuts out gravity. Second, it has 18 free parameters, many of them very small. Third, the vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude larger than what you would naively guess from the standard model.
Proposing extra dimensions to space is a drastic step. But once you have the extra space you can attribute the smallness of some quantities to the statement that their origin is somewhere far away inside space, just as an astronomer might attribute the faintness of a galaxy to its large distance. For example, maybe the smallness of the electron mass arises because its origin is far away inside the extra dimensions.
My view is that both of the big ideas I have worked on are testable in the next decade by LHC. The two frameworks have complementary features. I'm greatly looking forward to the outcome

Make sure you look at the "compactification" label to the right index

Gravity Free Environment on Earth

It's taken some time from a layman perspective to try and "place this experiment" in a setting that helps orientate views. Well, at least in my case. :)

So here is a "guide below" that may seem trivial to some, yet, directed to the "microperspective" on this experiment, speak to cosmology as well. While it may seem easy from a "cosmological standpoint" gravities "effect" is of some importance in "condense matter views."

A "Top/down approach" pointing you toward LHC and the "anomaly of relativity" in the perfect fluid, seems like going "full circle?"

See:"Cosmic Variance"

Anyway to the essence of what has been instigated by the post of Seans, and what came about from the "Aerogel and Stardust" Post.


Microgravity Science Glove Box-The MSG will enable astronauts on board the ISS to perform a wide variety of materials, combustion, fluids and biotechnology experiments as well as investigations in the microgravity environment. It can also accommodate minor repairs and servicing of hardware requiring a controlled working environment. The facility offers users a wide range of innovative, utilization alternatives from manual control by astronauts via laptop computers to fully automated and remote control from Earth (telescience). A permanent data exchange link with ground stations is also ensured.The MSG will be integrated and used in the US Destiny Laboratory for a projected operational period of ten years.ESA is planning to use the facility for European experiments. The first time MSG will be used by a European astronaut to perform European experiments will be during a Soyuz taxi flight mission in October 2002. ESA's Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne will perform four different experiments in the MSG in the field of protein crystallization, zeolites crystallization, combustion and fluid science.
Frank De Winne works with the Microgravity Science Glovebox(MSG)Credits: ESA

Why is it we cannot create this environment, other then, the method described in terms of the drop tower, or, out in space? What ways do you know that such simulation can be developed to move the ideas of product development "done there in space." To make it feasible to create the condense matter states that are purer free from the effect of gravity on earth.

“On Earth, buoyancy continuously deforms and moves fluids in complex manners, making it difficult to study how materials that solidify from the melt form semiconductors and other products,” said Dr. Aleksandar Ostrogorsky, the SUBSA principal investigator who also teaches and conducts research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “In microgravity, the fluids are almost stagnant, resembling solids. The absence of motion makes it easier to observe and mathematically describe what is occurring when the crystals are melted, and how the materials solidify to form a new crystal.”

The idea occurred to me today to find a way in which to "create the environment" that is conducive to perfecting the "purity of alignment of substances" in a gravity free environment. I mentioned the aerogel in the previous article and how developing that product in space gives the product superior qualities, that one might not have here on earth.


Aircraft: A two-engine turbofan aircraft similar to the McDonnell-Douglas DC-9

A typical mission is 2 to 3 hours long and consists of 40 to 50 parabolas. These parabolas can be flown in succession or with short breaks between maneuvers to reconfigure test equipment. The Reduced Gravity Office provides scheduling, test coordination, and in-flight direction for the test programs.

So, we create the conditions for it. Whether it be the Space Shuttle, the Airplane or the Miniature Drop Tower.

NASA's "Weightless Wonder" KC-135a Reduced Gravity Laboratory

By comparing the results from fuel vaporization in a reduced-gravity environment with those under normal conditions, the students aim to gain a better understanding of how fuel droplets behave under different conditions to optimize the fuel injection process. The findings may be used in helping promote changes in engine design while improving efficiency and reducing emissions.

By understanding the process from "space to earth" we see where ingenuity of mind applies the differences of "time clocks" and such.


As one of the fields which obey the general inverse square law, the gravity field can be put in the form shown above, showing that the acceleration of gravity, g, is an expression of the intensity of the gravity field.

In a manner that "it's effects" in relation to gravity may be considered from a cosmological and micro-gravity perspective, in relation to "Inverse Square law( I use sound in the example, but click on the image provided)" and "Inverse Fourth Power Law."


This miniature drop tower is used by Microgravity man and others to demonstrate the effects of reduced gravity on physical and chemical phenomena that are normally masked by Earth's gravity.

So here we are "to the experiment" in a microperspective that is currently being explored.

Eric Adelberger on Aug 12th, 2005 at 2:37 pm

Please don’t get too excited yet about rumors concerning the Eot-Wash test of the 1/r^2 law. We can exclude gravitational strength (|alpha|=1) Yukawa violations of the 1/r^2 law for lambda>80 microns at 95% confidence. It is true that we are seeing an anomaly at shorter length scales but we have to show first that the anomaly is not some experimental artifact. Then, if it holds up, we have to check if the anomaly is due to new fundamental physics or to some subtle electromagnetic effect that penetrates our conducting shield. We are now checking for experimental artifacts by making a small change to our apparatus that causes a big change in the Newtonian signal but should have essentially no effect on a short-range anomaly. Then we will replace our molybdenum detector ring with an aluminum one. This will reduce any signal from interactions coupled to mass, but will have little effect on subtle electromagnetic backgrounds. These experiments are tricky and measure very small forces. It takes time to get them right. We will not be able to say anything definite about the anomaly for several months at least.

Update:

Check out Backreaction's Water in Zero Gravity

Aerogels and Stardust

IN a previous post on "Stardust," I was enamoured with "the product," that could do all the things that it said it could do.

-It is 99.8% Air

-Provides 39 times more insulating than the best fiberglass insulation

-Is 1,000 times less dense than glass

-Was used on the Mars Pathfinder rover

So having understood what "less gravity can do" in organizing of chemicals in space, it is of course of interest when such a chemical can be made into a product in it's "pure form," to have it "almost clear" in it's constitution and strong to hold weight.

It sort of opens the idea for me of manufacturing processes in space, and the construction of and use of those same products to build in space, and on, "planets of the future"

Almost as light as air, capable of withstanding a direct flame or catching speeding comet dust like a baseball mitt stops a hardball, aerogels are some of the strangest solids in the world. This "Space Age Styrofoam" was developed in a chemistry lab decades ago but is now appearing in snowsuits, explosives and even energy storage technology.

Aerogels are the lightest and lowest-density class of materials in the world. Up to 99 percent of the dry, rigid gels are air, while the rest consists of silica, carbon, metals and other substances; it feels like a Styrofoam peanut. Yet, some formulations can support close to two thousand times their weight (if it is lowered onto them slowly). "Enough force to crush a Rice Krispie will crush an aerogel," states Stephen Steiner, a nanomaterials graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aerogel researcher.

<Image: COURTESY OF LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL NATIONAL LABORATORIES-Aerogels are poor thermal conductors and therefore exceptional insulators for windows, snowsuits and spacecraft


Image: COURTESY OF NASA/JPL-CALTECH-Translucent silica aerogel is mostly air but two grams of the material is strong enough to hold a 2.5 kilogram brick

I was less then kind in my statements about stardust, as the images of dust in the air were given for introspection, about how we might see that dust in the universe.

"Last Sunday, after seven years in space traveling nearly three billion miles, Stardust landed in the Great Salt Lake Desert with a treasure from when the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago," says astronomer Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington, who led the Stardust team. "We should have more than one million particles larger than one micron in diameter."

Image: D. BROWNLEE / NASA-Collecting of Stardust

Music of Hemispheres

Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard

Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published a paper in Nature on the phenomenon. But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. About four years ago, however, we and others began to uncover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysterious aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of abstract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language.

See here.

Who would have thought to present such an "overlapping of the senses," to think, that our life is much better defined in all that we can become. While we "concretize" our views about the matter states . "IN principle, in our convictions, and no less, then the "what of change" in our human constitutions.


Images courtesy of Vinod Menon (Stanford University)-Images from an experiment to locate the neural regions of the brain involved in listening to music. Daniel Levitin and another scientist scanned the brains of 13 people as they listened to scrambled and unscrambled versions of a tune.

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49, surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his lab look more like a recording studio.

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

Of course these are "matter states" defined and "of measure."

Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses.

But yes indeed, what of a more "quantumly defined view" about what is not seen? Least I say, with "conclusive proof" that all these states of being in our human structure, and without measure are "not true?" Then what use "any method" that I would say and develop of value to "other defines states" of being, other then the "physical?" Emotional, Mental, or spiritual?

Sir Isaac Newton

It is true without lying, certain and most true. That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation.

Babies Begin Life with Synesthesia

It is not without wonder then, that the child in us all, was in a better defined state of existance? Before, the "focus of structure" along with the views of the physical body, could have "pronounced the reality" with "all the things" that make each of us human to our reality now.

Whilst it "may have been" less complicated then "before," we assigned each of our senses accordingly to what stimulai will activate the "different regions of our brain?" These are learnt and developed states, that has "past our meddling", to have now become engrained in our physical makeup? What then, are we to evolve too?

Society with the way it now is, is focused in the "communication era of computers" and such. What attribute of the mind/brain is being developed, as we physically type on the keynoard in front of us, whilst we communicate on a level of mind that is less then the verbal sound communications our mouth's manifest in relations?

Clock Work Universe

Fig 1.4 A two-dimensional coordinate system can be used to locate the position of any point in terms of its x- and y-coordinates

Figure 1.4 shows the two-dimensional case, with a grid extending over part of the page. The grid is calibrated (in centimetres) so the position of any point can be specified by giving its x- and y- coordinates on the grid. For example, the coordinates of point A are x = 3cm and y = 4cm.

This idea becomes more powerful when we consider lines and geometrical shapes. The straight line shown in Figure 1.5 is characterized by the fact that, at each
point along the line, the y-coordinate is half the -coordinate. Thus, the x- and
y- coordinates of each point on the line obey the equation y = 0.5x, and this is
said to be the equation of the line.



This is the beginning of a branch of mathematics, called coordinate geometry, which represents geometrical shapes by equations, and which establishes geometrical truths by combining and rearranging those equations.