Using a new statistical technique to analyse publicly available data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, an astrophysicist in Germany says he may have spotted a tell-tale sign of exotic particles annihilating within the Milky Way. If proved to be real, this "gamma-ray line" would, he claims, be a "smoking-gun signature" of dark matter.Also a Physics World see: Has Fermi glimpsed dark matter?
There is a wide body of indirect observational evidence that an invisible substance accounts for some 80% of the matter in the universe. Although physicists can measure the effects that this dark matter has on the visible universe, they have very little understanding of what this mysterious stuff actually is. As well as looking for direct evidence of dark matter by detecting it – or even producing it – here on Earth, researchers are also scouring the skies for signs of the particles that dark matter might produce when self-annihilating. An excess of high-energy positrons (anti-electrons) observed by the Italian-led PAMELA spacecraft in 2008, and confirmed by Fermi last year, might be such a signature. However, it is possible that these positrons are produced by processes unrelated to dark matter. See:Gamma rays hint at dark matter
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Do Gamma rays hint at dark matter?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?
HiggsJetEnergyProfileCrotale and HiggsJetEnergyProfilePiano use only the energy of the cells in the jet to modulate the pitch, volume, duration and spatial position of each note. The sounds being modulated in these examples are crotales (baby cymbals) and a piano string struck with a soft beater, then shifted up in pitch by 1000 Hz and `dovetailed'.
Top quark and anti top quark pair decaying into jets, visible as collimated collections of particle tracks, and other fermions in the CDF detector at Tevatron. In HiggsJetRythSig we are simply travelling steadily along the axis of the jet of particles and hearing a ping of crotales for each point at which there is a significant energy deposit somewhere in the jet.
HiggsJetEnergyGate uses just the energy deposited in the jet's cells. At each time point (defined by the distance from the point of collision) the energy is used to define the number of channels used from the piano sound file. So high energy can be heard as thick, burbly sound whilst low energy has a thinner sound. See: Listen to the decay of a god particle
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Monday, April 23, 2012
Songs of the Stars: the Real Music of the Spheres
With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.-Wayne Hu
The Pythagoreans 2500 years ago believed in a celestial "music of the spheres", an idea that reverberated down the millennia in Western music, literature, art and science. Now, through asteroseismology (the study of the internal structure of pulsating stars), we know that there is a real music of the spheres. The stars have sounds in them that we use to see right to their very cores. This multi-media lecture looks at the relationship of music to stellar sounds. You will hear the real sounds of the stars and you will hear musical compositions where every member of the orchestra is a real (astronomical) star! You will also learn about some of the latest discoveries from the Kepler Space Mission that lets us "hear" the stars 100 times better than with telescopes on the ground See:Don Kurtz, University of Central Lancashire-Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 7:00 pm
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Near-Future Photon-Collider Setups
In the search for a quantum theory of gravity it is crucial to find experimental access to quantum gravitational effects. Since these are expected to be very small at observationally accessible scales it is advantageous to consider processes with no tree-level contribution in the Standard Model, such as photon-photon scattering. We examine the implications of asymptotically safe quantum gravity in a setting with extra dimensions for this case, and point out that various near-future photon-collider setups, employing either electron or muon colliders, or even a purely laser-based setup, could provide a first observational window into the quantum gravity regime. Can we see quantum gravity? Photons in the asymptotic-safety scenario
Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity: the hard facts
October 22-25, 2012
Perimeter Institute
Scientific area: quantum gravity
Quantum Gravity tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the quantum nature of spacetime. To make progress in this area it is mandatory to establish a contact to observations and experiments and to learn what the "hard facts" on quantum gravity are, that nature provides us with.
Quantum Gravity is a field where several approaches, based on different principles and assumptions, develop in parallel. At present it is not clear whether and how some of the approaches are compatible, and might share common properties. This meeting will draw on a diverse set of physicists who come to make proposals for quantum gravity phenomenology from a broad range of perspectives, including path-integral-inspired as well as canonical, and discrete as well as continuum-based approaches, providing a platform to exchange ideas with researchers working on theoretical and experimental aspects of different proposals.
This will be the third in a series of meetings, the first of which was held at PI (2007), the second at NORDITA (2010).
This meeting looks to the future and has two primary goals: 1) to assess the status of different proposals for QG phenomenology in the light of recent experimental results from Fermi, Auger, LHC etc. and 2) to discuss and stimulate new ideas and proposals, coming from a diverse set of viewpoints about quantum spacetime.
In order to allow for a fruitful exchange of ideas across different approaches, and between experimental and theoretical researchers, the workshop will lay a main focus on structured discussion sessions with short (15 min.) presentations. These are mainly intended for an exchange of ideas, and a discussion and development of new possibilities, thus participants are strongly encouraged to present new ideas and work in progress.
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Sunday, April 22, 2012
A Musical Score on Particles?
Schema created by Vicinanza with an example bubble chamber particle track, which has been converted into a melody and then orchestrated as music. Image courtesy Domenico Vicinanza. |
Positrons – antiparticles of electrons, a trillionth of a meter in size – make no sound. But with a little help from the grid, music composer Domenico Vicinanza is giving positrons a voice to lift in song.
Vicinanza, a network engineer at DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), is an old hand at using GILDA (Grid INFN virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities) e-infrastructure, which is part of the European Grid Infrastructure, to blend science with music. In the past, he has derived music from volcanic seismograms with the City Dance Ensemble, and re-created 2,000-year-old Greek music with his troupe, the the Lost Sounds Orchestra.The smallest music in the universe
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Saturday, April 21, 2012
Lagrangian Worlds
Diagram of the Lagrange Point gravitational forces associated with the Sun-Earth system. |
In a certain sense a perfect fluid is a generalization of a point particle. This leads to the question as to what is the corresponding generalization for extended objects. Here the lagrangian formulation of a perfect fluid is much generalized by replacing the product of the co-moving vector which is a first fundamental form by higher dimensional first fundamental forms; this has as a particular example a fluid which is a classical generalization of a membrane; however there is as yet no indication of any relationship between their quantum theories.A Fluid Generalization of Membranes.
Perfect fluid
In physics, a perfect fluid is a fluid that can be completely characterized by its rest frame energy density ρ and isotropic pressure p.
Real fluids are "sticky" and contain (and conduct) heat. Perfect fluids are idealized models in which these possibilities are neglected. Specifically, perfect fluids have no shear stresses, viscosity, or heat conduction.
In tensor notation, the energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid can be written in the form
Perfect fluids admit a Lagrangian formulation, which allows the techniques used in field theory to be applied to fluids. In particular, this enables us to quantize perfect fluid models. This Lagrangian formulation can be generalized, but unfortunately, heat conduction and anisotropic stresses cannot be treated in these generalized formulations.
Perfect fluids are often used in general relativity to model idealized distributions of matter, such as in the interior of a star.
See also
References
- The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, by S.W.Hawking and G.F.R.Ellis, Cambridge University Press, 1973. ISBN 0-521-20016-4, ISBN 0-521-09906-4 (pbk.)
External links
- Mark D. Roberts, [A Fluid Generalization of Membranes http://www.arXiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406164 hep-th/0406164].
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In summary, experiments at RHIC have shown that a very dense QCD medium is formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Other measurements, namely elliptic flow and baryon-to-meson ratios, indicate that this medium is characterized by partonic degrees offreedom and that its expansion and cooling is well described by hydrodynamical models with high viscosity. Thus, this medium is more similar to a liquid than to a gas of gluons and quarks.Review on Heavy-Ion Physics
A Blue Flash in Ice
Future directions
The lack of observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRBs implies, at face value, that the theoretical models need to be revisited. “Calculations embracing the concept that cosmic ray protons are the decay products of neutrons that escaped the magnetic confinement of the GRB fireball are supported by the research community and have been convincingly excluded by the present data,” says Francis Halzen, IceCube principle investigator and a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "IceCube will continue to collect more data with a final, better calibrated and better understood detector in the coming years." Since April 2011, IceCube has collected neutrino data using the full detector array. With the larger detector, researchers can see more neutrinos, providing a “higher resolution” picture of the neutrino sky. See: Cosmic Rays: 100 years of mystery
See Also: IceCube Neutrino Observatory Explores Origin of Cosmic Rays
“This result represents a coming-of-age of neutrino astronomy,” says Nathan Whitehorn from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the recent GRB research with Peter Redl of the University of Maryland. “IceCube, while still under construction, was able to rule out 15 years of predictions and has begun to challenge one of only two major possibilities for the origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays, namely gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.”
Redl says, “While not finding a neutrino signal originating from GRBs was disappointing, this is the first neutrino astronomy result that is able to strongly constrain extra-galactic astrophysics models, and therefore marks the beginning of an exciting new era of neutrino astronomy.” The IceCube Collaboration’s report on the search appears in the April 19, 2012, issue of the journal Nature. See: Where Do the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? Probably Not from Gamma-Ray Bursts
Thursday, April 19, 2012
A Message from the Past?
I was looking for something in the cosmos that would reveal what is also being revealed in the LHC. We are looking at "interaction points" that are a determinate for the collision point while information which has come from what existed "before" and is being expressed today?
If such "a point on a line" recognizes that the lines extends "before" the universes birth then where did this information come from? Is it really a void?
Brookhaven National Laboratory
HOT A computer rendition of 4-trillion-degree Celsius quark-gluon plasma created in a demonstration of what scientists suspect shaped cosmic history. |
If super fluids can exist in nature then in what circumstances can such information be transferred through that interaction point? Cosmologically this looks real while such comparative natures would say how could such microscopic conditions allow for cosmic particle decays? Chernenko in the ice transmitted through to these detectors as information containing the subject of the particle which collided and came from the cosmos and helped with the new creation of particle determinants?
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Model Building in Life
"...underwriting the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato claimed to see the universe as created with in the Timaeus; more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this new set of design elements-- and their most general instances are not the regular solids, but crystallographic reflection groups. You know, those things the non-professionals call . . . kaleidoscopes! * (In the next exciting episode, we'll see how Derrida claims mathematics is the key to freeing us from 'logocentrism'-- then ask him why, then, he jettisoned the deepest structures of mathematical patterning just to make his name...)
* H. S. M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes (New York: Dover, 1973) is the great classic text by a great creative force in this beautiful area of geometry (A polytope is an n-dimensional analog of a polygon or polyhedron. Chapter V of this book is entitled 'The Kaleidoscope'....)"
I just wanted to show you what has been physically reproduced in cultures. This in order to highlight some of the things that were part of our own make up, so you get that what has transpired in our societies has been part of something hidden within our own selves.
As I have said before it has become something of an effort for me to cataloged knowledge on some of the things I learn. The ways in which to keep the information together. I am not saying everyone will do this in there own way but it seems to me that as if some judgement about our selves is hidden in the way we had gathered information about our own lives then it may have been put together like some kaleidoscope.
Online Etymology Dictionary-1817, lit. "observer of beautiful forms," coined by its inventor, Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), from Gk. kalos "beautiful" + eidos "shape" (see -oid) + -scope, on model of telescope, etc. Figurative meaning "constantly changing pattern" is first attested 1819 in Lord Byron, whose publisher had sent him one.
So to say then past accomplishments were part of the designs, what had we gained about our own lives then? What page in the book of Mandalas can you have said that any one belonged to you? It was that way for me in that I saw the choices. These I thought I had built on my own, as some inclination of a method and way to deliver meaning into my own life. Then through exploration it seem to contain the energy of all that I had been before as to say that in this life now, that energy could unfold?
Scan of painting 19th century Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting |
Maṇḍala (मण्डल) is a Sanskrit word meaning "circle." In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T.[1][2] Mandalas often exhibit radial balance.[3]
These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism.[4][5] The term is of Hindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.
In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to the psychologist David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises."[6] The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self,"[citation needed] and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.[7]
In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.[citation needed]
So what does this mean then that you see indeed some subjects that are allocated toward design of to say that it may be an art of a larger universal understanding that hidden in our natures the will to provide for something schematically inherent? Our nature, as to the way in which we see the world. The way in which we see science. What cosmic plan then to say the universe would unfold this way, or to seek the inner structure and explanations as to the way the universe began. The way we emerged into consciousness of who you are?
Would there be then some algorithmic style to the code written in your life as to have all the things you are as some pattern as to the way in which you will live your life? I ask then what would seem so strange that you might not paint a picture of it? Not encode your life in some mathematical principle as to say that life emerge for you in this way?
The kaleidoscope was perfected by Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, in 1816. This technological invention, whose function is literally the production of beauty, or rather its observation, was etymologically a typical aesthetic form of the nineteenth century - one bound up with disinterested contemplation. (The etymology of the word is formed from kalos (beautiful), eidos (form) and scopos (watcher) - "watcher of beautiful shapes".) The invention is enjoying a second life today - as the model for many contemporary abstract works. In Olafur Eliasson's Kaleidoscope (2001), the viewer takes the place of the pieces of glass, producing a myriad of images. In an inversion of the situation involved in the classic kaleidoscope, the watcher becomes the watched. In Jim Drain's Kaleidoscope (2003), the viewer is also plunged physically inside the myriad of abstract forms, and his image becomes a part of the environment. Spin My Wheel (2003), by Lori Hersberger, also forms a painting that is developed in space, spilling beyond the frame of the picture, its projected image constantly changing, dissolving the surrounding world with an infinite play of reflections in fragments of broken mirror. The viewer becomes one of the subjects of the piece. (Not the subject, as in Eliasson's work, but one of its subjects.)
See: The End of Perspective-Vincent Pécoil.
Would there be then some algorithmic style to the code written in your life as to have all the things you are as some pattern as to the way in which you will live your life? I ask then what would seem so strange that you might not paint a picture of it? Not encode your life in some mathematical principle as to say that life emerge for you in this way?
Although Aristotle in general had a more empirical and experimental attitude than Plato, modern science did not come into its own until Plato's Pythagorean confidence in the mathematical nature of the world returned with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. For instance, Aristotle, relying on a theory of opposites that is now only of historical interest, rejected Plato's attempt to match the Platonic Solids with the elements -- while Plato's expectations are realized in mineralogy and crystallography, where the Platonic Solids occur naturally.Plato and Aristotle, Up and Down-Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
BroadBand Portals of the OECD
Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the World Wide Web, talks about the challenges ahead and why an open Internet is key to its continuing success
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The OECD broadband portal provides access to a range of broadband-related statistics gathered by the OECD. Policy makers must examine a range of indicators which reflect the status of individual broadband markets in the OECD. The OECD has indentified five main categories which are important for assessing broadband markets.OECD Broadband PortalSee Also:Ask the Wrong Questions and . . . : the CRTC’s Review of Wireless Competition
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