Brian Clegg: Gravity

A history of gravity, and a study of its importance and relevance to our lives, as well as its influence on other areas of science. 

Physicists will tell you that four forces control the universe. Of these, gravity may the most obvious, but it is also the most mysterious. Newton managed to predict the force of gravity but couldn’t explain how it worked at a distance. Einstein picked up on the simple premise that gravity and acceleration are interchangeable to devise his mind-bending general relativity, showing how matter warps space and time. Not only did this explain how gravity worked – and how apparently simple gravitation has four separate components – but it predicted everything from black holes to gravity’s effect on time. Whether it’s the reality of anti-gravity or the unexpected discovery that a ball and a laser beam drop at the same rate, gravity is the force that fascinates. Gravity: How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives

It is an interesting read so far. I have always had a fondness of the historical take information can  provide from that historical sense.  Each time an author can enlighten the world with our science forbears it makes for a deeper feel of what came out of these scientists as precursors to where we are today. I enjoy how Brian Clegg can fill in the gaps with what I had learn of Sir Isaac Newton. The historical progress from the ancient Greeks to what has transpire to today in terms of our definition of Gravity.

It allows one to look at around them and the way in which early ideas became foundations points from which development move on toward the world of the science we have today in terms of that gravity.

Where is Our Starting Point?

	"The end he (the artist) strives for is something else than a perfectly executed print. His aim is to depict dreams, ideas, or problems in such a way that other people can observe and consider them." - M.C. Escher

• The Nobel Prize in Physics 1914 Max von Laue

• Quasicrystal: Prof. Dan Shechtman

Can you trace the patterns in nature toward matter manifestations?

	To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. -Plato, The Republic (Book VII)

The idea here is about how one's observation and model perceptions arises from some ordered perspective. Some use a starting point as an assumption of position. Do recognize "the starting point" in the previous examples?

 Cycle of Birth, Life, and Death-Origin, Indentity, and Destiny by Gabriele Veneziano

In one form or another, the issue of the ultimate beginning has engaged philosophers and theologians in nearly every culture. It is entwined with a grand set of concerns, one famously encapsulated in an 1897 painting by Paul Gauguin: D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"

The effective realization that particle constructs are somehow smaller windows of a much larger perspective fails to take in account this idea that I am expressing as a foundational approach to that starting point.

If you do not go all the way toward defining of that "point of equilibrium" how are you to understand how information is easily transferred to the individual from a much larger reality of existence? One would assume information is all around us? That there are multitudes of pathways that allow us to arrive at some some probability density configuration as some measure of an Pascalian ideal.

Of course there are problems with this in terms of our defining a heat death in individuals?

That's not possible so one is missing the understanding here about equilibrium. I might have said we are positional in terms of the past and the future with regard to memory and the anticipated future? How is that heat death correlated? It can't.

So you have to look for examples in relation to how one may arrive at that beginning point. Your theory may not be sufficiently dealing with the information as it is expressed in terms of your approach to the small window?

There are mathematical inspections here that have yet to be associated with more then discrete functions of reality as expressive building blocks of interpretation. The basic assumption of discrete function still exists in contrast to continuity of expression. This is the defining realization in assuming the model that MBT provides. I have meet the same logic in the differences of scientific approach toward the definition of what is becoming?

On the one hand, a configuration space as demonstrated by Tom that is vastly used in science. On the other, a recognition of how thick in measure viscosity is realized and what the physics is in this association. Not just the physical manifestation of, but of what happens when equilibrium is reached. Hot or very cold. Temperature, is not a problem then?

See my problem is that I can show you levitation of objects using superconductors but I cannot produce this in real life without that science. Yet, in face of that science I know that something can happen irregardless of what all the science said, so I am looking as well to combining the meta with the physical to realize that such a conditions may arise in how we as a total culture have accepted the parameters of our thinking.

So by dealing with those parameters I too hoped to see a cultural shift(paradigm and Kuhn) by adoption of the realization as we are with regard to the way in which we function in this reality. So if your thinking abut gravity how is this possible within the "frame work" to have it encroach upon our very own psychological makeup too?

Project Glass: I Can See Your Thoughts?

We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't. A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. Follow along with us at http://g.co/projectglass as we share some of our ideas and stories. We'd love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

An image of a cat that a neural network taught itself to recognize.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain.

Andrew Y. Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, is cautiously optimistic about neural networks. 

There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. 

Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000

So the idea here is that given enough information about the neurological data recorded from the picture of the brain,  neuron ignitions,  then what said we could not have taken that data and used it to create a image of what the mind of the other person is thinking? Looking into the images of Dreams so as to analyze the deeper recordings of the soul's language and creativity.

Oh Google Brain  then is a larger perspective of the human brain?

What if on the screen of that eye glass my Avatar materializes to answer my questions?

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity

Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations [1,2] and can form the basis for brain decoding devices [3,4,5]. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity [6,7,8]. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow [9], so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy [10,11] encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder [8] by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology. See:Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies

See Also:

• Professor Jack Gallant's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley Reconstructing Visual 

• Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies

Thoughts On Dark Matter Search

  

A filament of dark matter has been directly detected between the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. The blue shading and yellow contour lines represent the density of matter. Image credit: Jörg Dietrich, U-M Department of Physics

In light of direction LHC is experiencing there is always the questions of Oversight in terms of the direction science needs to take. I have listed one aspect of the question of directions that may be of interest here? I have seen this procedure used over and over again. This is how I know to focus in on the experiments as they are listed and work backwards to gain full insight in these experimental procedures.

 This focus with regard to be "lead by science is part of the mantra" I hold and features part of my respect toward the science process that I have come to build in respect of where we are going and what is happening. In this spirit there has always been help by scientists who want to help the lay public with information to help exceed current levels of understanding with regard to where we are right now in that science.

 The challenge is not to be lost in the confrontations of opposing view points in science but to focus more on what is being offered in terms of advancing that science knowledge. One has to put aside these character attacks in order to focus on the science process itself and information. Character attacks on theoretical definitions.

 Following scientists you get to know who is respecting this foundational approach in order to push forward public knowledge. The vitriolic statements about character are like sandpaper or a screeching board, to respect for individuals in their pursuits

Over the years as a researcher of sorts digging deeply for the directions science projects are initiated are always with the idea that advisory boards put forward proposals for money toward experimental procedures.

 So in order to justified this money I have to believe the best approach to advancing that money is to consider it as a method to falsify on scientific grounds.

 I know people have their own theories but in order to advance falsifiable methods these have to be considered at the time the phenomenology of experimentation is proposed as part of the development of that method to do so.

 So the OP introduction toward a news article is hardly sufficient to think about the advancement of any theory on the grounds that it could encapsulate the entire process of advancing science as nothing more then news fodder. To be able to raise the question for those who believe that it is a opportunity to advance their own theories or to ask the question in the spirit of the OP?

 Liquid Xenon both scintillates and becomes ionized when hit by particles (i.e. photons, neutrons and potentially dark matter). The ratio of scintillation over ionization energy caused by the collision provides a way of identifying the interacting particle. The leading theoretical dark matter candidate, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), could be identified in this way. LUX Dark Matter

See:

• Fermi Provides Insights?

Space Geodesy

 Project manager Stephen Merkowitz talks about his work with NASA's Space Geodesy Project, including a brief overview of the four fundamental techniques of space geodesy: GPS, VLBI, SLR, and DORIS.

Learn more about space geodesy at: http://space-geodesy.nasa.gov/

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11031

Space Geodesy provides positioning, navigation, and timing reference systems and Earth system observations

Geodesy is the science of the Earth’s shape, gravity and rotation, including their evolution in time. A number of different techniques are used to observe the geodetic properties of the Earth including the space-geodetic techniques of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like the US Global Positioning System (GPS), and the French Doppler Orbitography and Radio-Positioning by Integrated Satellite (DORIS) system. These space-geodetic observations also provide the basis for the reference frame that is needed in order to assign coordinates to points and objects and thereby determine how those points and objects move over time. See:  SGP Science

See Also:

•  VLBI

• Global Geodetic Observing System

Merging Galaxy Cluster Abell 520

Merging Galaxy Cluster Abell 520

This composite image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, formed from a violent collision of massive galaxy clusters. 

The natural-color image of the galaxies was taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. Superimposed on the image are "false-colored" maps showing the concentration of starlight, hot gas, and dark matter in the cluster. 

Starlight from galaxies, derived from observations by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, is colored orange. The green-tinted regions show hot gas, as detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The gas is evidence that a collision took place. The blue-colored areas pinpoint the location of most of the mass in the cluster, which is dominated by dark matter. Dark matter is an invisible substance that makes up most of the universe's mass. The dark-matter map was derived from the Hubble Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations by detecting how light from distant objects is distorted by the cluster of galaxies, an effect called gravitational lensing. 

 The blend of blue and green in the center of the image reveals that a clump of dark matter resides near most of the hot gas, where very few galaxies are found. This finding confirms previous observations of a dark-matter core in the cluster. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter, which predict that galaxies should be anchored to dark matter, even during the shock of a collision. Abell 520 resides 2.4 billion light-years away. See: Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation in Hubble Image

See Also:

• Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web of "Clumpy" Dark Matter in 3-D

EO: Earth Observatory

Twelve years after the Earth was buffeted by one of the more potent Sun storms in modern history, our nearest star crackled with activity again. A solar flare erupted on July 12, 2012, followed closely by a companion coronal mass ejection (CME)—a cloud of magnetically charged particles and energy that can disturb Earth’s magnetic field, disrupt satellites and ground-based electronics, and provoke auroras.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured these views of the flare in the Sun’s southern hemisphere on July 12, 2012. The top, global image shows the Sun as viewed at 131 Angstroms; the lower, close-up view is 171 Angstroms. Both ultraviolet wavelengths help solar physicists study the fine magnetic structures in the Sun’s super-heated atmosphere, or corona. The yellow and teal are false colors chosen by the science team to distinguish between the spectral bands. Download the movies linked beneath each image to see the active region develop and erupt. See:The Sun Erupts

 An X1.4 class flare erupted from the center of the sun, peaking on July 12, 2012 at 12:52 PM EDT. It erupted from Active Region 1520 which rotated into view on July 6.

This video uses SDO AIA footage in 131(teal), 171(gold) and 335 (blue) angstrom wavelengths. Each wavelength shows different temperature plasma in the sun's atmosphere. 171 shows 600,000 Kelvin plasma, 335 shows 2.5 million Kelvin plasma, and 131 shows 10 million Kelvin plasma.

 This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11043

See Also:

• Latest SDO IMage

ATLAS INCLUSIVE SEARCHES FOR SUSY AND DARK MATTER
Sascha Caron (Radboud University Nijmegen and NIKHEF)

See Also:Implications of LHC results for TeV-scale physics

-Information to Conference supplied by Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler

Fermi Provides Insights?

 There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this "dark matter" really is. Many scientists think it's likely that the mystery will be solved with the discovery of new kinds of subatomic particles, types necessarily different from those composing atoms of the ordinary matter all around us. The search to detect and identify these particles is underway in experiments both around the globe and above it.

Scientists working with data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have looked for signals from some of these hypothetical particles by zeroing in on 10 small, faint galaxies that orbit our own. Although no signals have been detected, a novel analysis technique applied to two years of data from the observatory's Large Area Telescope (LAT) has essentially eliminated these particle candidates for the first time. See: Fermi Observations of Dwarf Galaxies Provide New Insights on Dark Matter 04.02.12

NGC 147, a dwarf spheroidal galaxy of the Local Group

 

Dwarf spheroidal galaxy (dSph) is a term in astronomy applied to low luminosity galaxies that are companions to the Milky Way and to the similar systems that are companions to the Andromeda Galaxy M31. While similar to dwarf elliptical galaxies in appearance and properties such as little to no gas or dust or recent star formation, they are approximately spheroidal in shape, generally lower luminosity, and are only recognized as satellite galaxies in the Local Group.^[1]

While there were nine "classical" dSph galaxies discovered up until 2005, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has resulted in the discovery of 11 more dSph galaxies—this has radically changed the understanding of these galaxies by providing a much larger sample to study.^[2]

Recently, as growing evidence has indicated that the vast majority of dwarf ellipticals have properties that are not at all similar to elliptical galaxies, but are closer to irregular and late-type spiral galaxies, this term has been used to refer to all of the galaxies that share the properties of those above. These sorts of galaxies may in fact be the most common type of galaxies in the universe, but are much harder to see than other types of galaxies because they are so faint.

Because of the faintness of the lowest luminosity dwarf spheroidals and the nature of the stars contained within them, some astronomers suggest that dwarf spheroidals and globular clusters may not be clearly separate and distinct types of objects.^[3] Other recent studies, however, have found a distinction in that the total amount of mass inferred from the motions of stars in dwarf spheroidals is many times that which can be accounted for by the mass of the stars themselves. In the current predominantly accepted Cold Dark Matter cosmology, this is seen as a sure sign of dark matter, and the presence of dark matter is often cited as a reason to classify dwarf spheroidals as a different class of object from globular clusters (which show little to no signs of dark matter). Because of the extremely large amounts of dark matter in these objects, they may deserve the title "most dark matter-dominated galaxies" ^[4]

See also

• Galaxy
• Dwarf galaxy
• Dwarf elliptical galaxy
• Galaxy morphological classification
• Galaxy formation and evolution
• Groups and clusters of galaxies
• Irregular galaxy
• Local group
• List of nearest galaxies
• Dark galaxy

 

External links

• A popular overview
• Universe Today, Some Galaxies Are Made Almost Entirely of Dark Matter

 

References

1. ^ Mashchenko, Sergey; Sills, Alison; Couchman, H. M. (March 2006), "Constraining Global Properties of the Draco Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy", The Astrophysical Journal 640 (1): 252–269, arXiv:astro-ph/0511567, Bibcode 2006ApJ...640..252M, DOI:10.1086/499940
2. ^ Simon, Josh; Geha, Marla (November 2007), "The Kinematics of the Ultra-faint Milky Way Satellites: Solving the Missing Satellite Problem", The Astrophysical Journal 670 (1): 313–331, Bibcode 2007ApJ...670..313S, DOI:10.1086/521816
3. ^ van den Bergh, Sidney (November 2007), "Globular Clusters and Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies", MNRAS (Letters), in press 385 (1): L20, arXiv:0711.4795, Bibcode 2008MNRAS.385L..20V, DOI:10.1111/j.1745-3933.2008.00424.x
4. ^ Strigari, Louie; Koushiappas, et al; Bullock, James S.; Kaplinghat, Manoj; Simon, Joshua D.; Geha, Marla; Willman, Beth (September 2007), "The Most Dark Matter Dominated Galaxies: Predicted Gamma-ray Signals from the Faintest Milky Way Dwarfs", The Astrophysical Journal 678 (2): 614, arXiv:0709.1510, Bibcode 2008ApJ...678..614S, DOI:10.1086/529488

See Also:

• Team detects clusters’ dark matter scaffold