There Be Dragons on the Dark Matter Issue?

 I have been intrigued by the comparison of the latest reporting by Bee of Backreaction at a workshop at Perimeter Institute about the Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability.

Bee writes, "Yesterday, we had a talk by Marcelo Gleiser titled “What can we know of the world?”."

I look at this from a historical position as it has been outplayed from the beginning as to the understanding that gravity in the universe can have it's counterpart revealed the action of a phenomenology search for the dark matter constituents while describing the state of the uinverse.

The type of detective work described by Sherlock Holmes has been used by astronomers for a long time to deepen our understanding of the universe. Ever since the phenomenal success of Isaac Newton in explaining the motion of the planets with his theory of gravity and laws of motion in 1687, unseen matter has been invoked to explain puzzling observations of cosmic bodies.

Sirius A & B

For example, the anomalous motion of Uranus led astronomers to suggest that an unseen planet existed, and a few years later, in 1846, Neptune was discovered. This procedure is still the primary method used to discover planets orbiting stars.
A similar line of reasoning led to the detection in 1862, of the faint white dwarf Sirius B in orbit around the bright star Sirius.

In contrast, the attempt to explain the anomalies in the motion of Mercury as due to the existence of a new planet, called Vulcan, did not succeed. The solution turned out to be Einstein's theory of general of relativity, which modified Newton's theory.

Today, astronomers are faced with a similar, though much more severe, problem. Unlike the case of Uranus, where the gravity of Neptune adds a fraction of a percent to the gravitational force acting of Uranus, the extra force needed in the cases described below is several hundred percent! It is no exaggeration to say that solving the dark matter problem will require a profound change in our understanding of the universe. See:Field Guide to Dark Matter

So given the outlay of experiential work to the subject there would be those that counter the proposal to support such research because they believe that such an exercise if fruitless to solving the nature of the cosmos and the way the universe could be expanding according to some speeding up of a gravitational consideration ?

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Update:
Impressions from the PI workshop on the Laws of Nature


See Also:
There Be Dragons?
Map of North America from 1566 showing both Terra In Cognita and Mare In Cognito.
Sounding Off on the Dark Matter Issue
Dark Matter Discovery Announced by Nasa

The Total Field

Conclusion:The state of mind of the observer plays a crucial role in the perception of time.Einstein

SPOILER ALERT:

To make a very, very long story short we discovered via Christian Shephard aka Jack’s dead father that all of the people on Oceanic 815 including Desmond, Daniel, Charlotte, Kate, Sawyer, Miles, Lapidus, Claire, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Richard, Michael, Walt, Miles, Ana Lucia, Locke, Hurley and Benjamin did really live on the island but when they died they moved on to L.A for their afterlife where they had the life that they always dreamed off. In The End we learned that those who did eventually find a way to forgive the people who hurt them , and forgave themselves were reunited with the people who meant something to them an went to heaven.See:Lost Finale Explanation:Lost Purgatory Ending Theories

Lost as in the emotive experience, as the "physiological and mental connection of being" winds down.

I thought what was very special was the recognition of all the memories traveling one path, all the fabrications of six years of Lost, to realize that they all could had been traveling in the after death consciousness. I mean, the fabrications of the island was a mass illusion, to support experience,  while all the emotions are played out with each of the persons involved "until they finally recognized each other enough" to gather one more time in the church.

What was special is that as each person is awakened to the reality of where they are, by thefinal  touch of love that connects the souls to that deeper level of recognition, while the memories of all that the had gone before was moved through flashes of realization that brought the experience together, culminating in the chance to go through the final gate to the light.




The island was hell. To burn out the light was to extinguish any hope of the light to support the illusions of the island and of the life of those in the after death consciousness.

I mean there are a lot of discrepancies once you realize that not all the people are there. A plane did escape, yet, there is no record of those people, while the focus was on a core group. The main actors I guess.

***

I think the journey to understanding the whole thing is to understand the "heaviness that supports the contention as gravity" is to evolve through the scientific understanding, as the ancients did,  looking toward cosmology.

CARL JUNG by Dr. C. George Boeree

The most important archetype of all is the self. The self is the ultimate unity of the personality and is symbolized by the circle, the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting. A mandala is a drawing that is used in meditation because it tends to draw your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure or as complicated as a stained glass window. The personifications that best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two people who many believe achieved perfection. But Jung felt that perfection of the personality is only truly achieved in death

That the continued evolution toward GR, is to solidify our understanding of the inverse square law of our positions in context of the life experience? Not just of the planets and galaxies held to the fabric of spacetime in the universe?

The general theory of relativity is as yet incomplete insofar as it has been able to apply the general principle of relativity satisfactorily only to gravitational fields, but not to the total field. We do not yet know with certainty by what mathematical mechanism the total field in space is to be described and what the general invariant laws are to which this total field is subject. One thing, however, seems certain: namely, that the general principal of relativity will prove a necessary and effective tool for the solution of the problem for the total field.Out of My Later Years, Pg 48, Albert Einstein

If you were to believe that the "books of the dead" Tibetan or Egyptian were really about books of life, then in the case of the Tibetan, the "clear light" was preceded "by the lost in reliving experiences, as in the fog  of not understanding, or smoke, as in the show Lost. It is about moving toward that Clear light. That we could be lost for a time, and why, beside the death beds practitioners would help the soul travel through the ether of being of the experienced that they gained in life.

If the heart was free from the impurities of sin, and therefore lighter than the feather, then the dead person could enter the eternal afterlife.

If you take this last ancient plate and the wording below as to the experience one can have, it does not seem to unlikely that our way in the after death world can be constructed according too, the heaviness with which we can experience life emotively. If you understanding Einstein's conclusion,  as to the pretty girl and the hot stove,  then you understand that experience can have it's durations too.

Hubble Takes a Close-up View of a Reflection Nebula in Orion

Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI) 

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1999, the Hubble Heritage Project snapped this picture of NGC 1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion. The Heritage astronomers, in collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to obtain the color image.


NGC 1999 is an example of a reflection nebula. Like fog around a street lamp, a reflection nebula shines only because the light from an embedded source illuminates its dust; the nebula does not emit any visible light of its own. NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy where new stars are being formed actively. The nebula is famous in astronomical history because the first Herbig-Haro object was discovered immediately adjacent to it (it lies just outside the new Hubble image). Herbig-Haro objects are now known to be jets of gas ejected from very young stars. 

The NGC 1999 nebula is illuminated by a bright, recently formed star, visible in the Hubble photo just to the left of center. This star is cataloged as V380 Orionis, and its white color is due to its high surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius (nearly twice that of our own Sun). Its mass is estimated to be 3.5 times that of the Sun. The star is so young that it is still surrounded by a cloud of material left over from its formation, here seen as the NGC 1999 reflection nebula.

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Hole in Space Found by Orbiting Telescope

Image courtesy ESA/HOPS Consortium

 

An orbiting European telescope looking for young stars recently found an unexpected surprise: a truly empty hole in space.

The hole lies in a nebula called NGC 1999, a bright cloud of dust and gas in the constellation Orion. The nebula glows with light from a nearby star.

The Hubble Space Telescope first snapped a picture of the nebula in December 1999. Astronomers assumed that an inky spot in the cloud was a blob of cooler gas and dust that's so dense it blocks visible light from passing through. (See a Hubble picture that shows dark globs in another nebula.)

Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP)

Blackhole substances are perhaps the most-perfect fluids in existence because they have ultra-low viscosity.

No matter what you call it, though, that substance and others similar to it could be the most-perfect fluids in existence because they have ultra-low viscosity, or resistance to flow, said Dam Thanh Son, an associate physics professor in the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington.

Son and two colleagues used a string theory method called the gauge/gravity duality to determine that a black hole in 10 dimensions - or the holographic image of a black hole, a quark-gluon plasma, in three spatial dimensions - behaves as if it has a viscosity near zero, the lowest yet measured.

***

2. A quark-gluon plasma, with the same quarks, but with "bags" disappeared and gluons flying around in their place. See: Just in case anyone forgot...

***

One of the things I worked a lot on in earlier months this year (and late ones of last year) was the lead article in a cluster of articles that has appeared in the last few days in May’s special edition of Physics Today. They are sort of departmental-colloquium-level articles, so for a general physics audience, more or less. It’s about some of the things I’ve told you about here in the past (see e.g. here and here), concerning exciting and interesting applications of string theory to various experiments in nuclear physics, as well as atomic and condensed matter physics (although we do not have an article on the latter in this cluster). I had a fun time working with Peter Steinberg on the article and remain grateful to him for getting us all together in the first place to talk about this topic way back in that AAAS symposium of 2009. It was there that Steven Blau of Physics Today got the excellent idea to approach us all to do an article, which resulted in this special issue....See: The Search For Perfection…

Clifford gives a link to the PDF version of the online article "What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles" I am not sure the article is free anymore as it now requires registry. Clifford has adjusted to this by giving "his" pdf link.

Cover: In contrast with everyday liquids such as the oil and water shown on the cover, a so-called perfect fluid has exceedingly low shear viscosity. But unlike a superfluid, the perfect fluid is not in a single quantum state. Three articles in this issue explore the connection to string theory (beginning on page 29) and the possible existence of perfect fluids in two very different regimes: ultracold fermionic atoms (page 34) and ultrahot nuclear matter (page 39). (Photo by Stefan Kaben.)

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See Also:

Physics Bits and Bites

The quest for Quantum Ideal liquids

Who Has Forgotten the Child's Question?

Physicists theorize that the omnipresent Higgs field slows some particles to below light speed, and thus imbues them with mass. Are we there yet?

How many of you with children have not heard our own children speak with impatience of wanting to be "there" and having to sit a long time before this is even possible?

Well, can you imagine the patience it took to materialize the experiments at Cern, in asking fundamental question about nature? It took a lot of patience and careful planning. There is no doubt about this.

I would also ask that those that visit this blog examine the picture below, as to the nature of "First Principle," in terms of computerized data, so that you understand this in context of an algorithm written, it is but the very essence of how something could have arisen in nature, had to be written into the "data accumulation" in order for us to recognize what is at the frontier of this experiment/knowledge in question.

The question of symmetry placed in this idea of computerized data, raises the idea of the types of formations that we will used to describe data gathered by Fermi as a descriptor of cosmos events in their unfolding.

Are we there yet?

Source of Q&A from linked article above.

Q&A with the Universe From the quest for the most fundamental particles of matter to the mysteries of dark matter, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions, many of nature’s greatest puzzles are being probed at the Large Hadron Collider.
What is the form of the universe? Physicists created the Standard Model to explain the form of the universe—the fundamental particles, their properties, and the forces that govern them. The predictions of this tried-and-true model have repeatedly proven accurate over the years. However, there are still questions left unanswered. For this reason, physicists have theorized many possible extensions to the Standard Model. Several of these predict that at higher collision energies, like those at the LHC, we will encounter new particles like the Z', pronounced " Z prime." It is a theoretical heavy boson whose discovery could be useful in developing new physics models. Depending on when and how we find a Z' boson, we will be able to draw more conclusions about the models it supports, whether they involve superstrings, extra dimensions, or a grand unified theory that explains everything in the universe. Whatever physicists discover beyond the Standard Model will open new frontiers for exploring the nature of the universe. What is the universe made of? Since the 1930s, scientists have been aware that the universe contains more than just regular matter. In fact, only a little over 4 percent of the universe is made of the matter that we can see.Of the remaining 96 percent, about 23 percent is dark matter and everything else is dark energy, a mysterious substance that creates a gravitational repulsion responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion. One theory regarding dark matter is that it is made up of the as-yet-unseen partners of the particles that make up regular matter. In a supersymmetric universe, every ordinary particle has one of these superpartners. Experiments at the LHC may find evidence to support or reject their existence.	Are there extra dimensions? We experience three dime nsions of space. However, the theory of relativity states that spacecan expand, contract, and bend. It’s possible, therefore, that we encounter only three spatial dimensions because they’re the only ones our size enables us to see, while other dimensions are so tiny that they are effectively hidden. Extra dimensions are integral to several theoretical models of the universe; string theory, for example, suggests as many as seven extra dimensions of space. The LHC is sensitive enough to detect extra dimensions ten billion times smaller than an atom. Experiments like ATLAS and CMS are hoping to gather information about how many other dimensions exist, what particles are associated with them, and how they are hidden. What are the most basic building blocks of matter? Particle physicists hope to explain the makeup of the universe by understanding it from its smallest, most basic parts. Today, the fundamental building blocks of the universe are believed to be quarks and leptons; however, some theorists believe that these particles are not fundamental after all. The theory of compositeness, for example, suggests that quarks are composed of even smaller particles. Efforts to look closely at quarks and leptons have been difficult. Quarks are especially challenging, as they are never found in isolation but instead join with other particles to form hadrons, such as the protons that collide in the LHC. With the LHC’s high energy levels, scientists hope to collect enough data about quarks to reveal whether anything smaller is hidden inside.
Why do some particles have mass? Through the theory of relativity, we know that particles moving at the speed of light have no mass, while particles moving slower than light speed do have mass. Physicists theorize that the omnipresent Higgs field slows some particles to below light speed, and thus imbues them with mass. We can’t study the Higgs field directly, but it is possible that an accelerator could excite this field enough to "shake loose" Higgs boson particles, which physicists should be able to detect. After decades of searching, physicists believe that they are close to producing collisions at the energy level needed to detect Higgs bosons.

Boundaries are what divide us

Change your thoughts and you change your world. Norman Vincent Peale

The words seem a wise choice.

This is not to support the religious right, or left,  nor to induce fear(contentions of Peale in the article,) but to support the idea of thoughts actually changing the ownership of the property we have paid for when we come to our conclusions.  What is the cost(belief) and one comes quickly to realizing the outcome has been provided for.

Intelligent Life in the Universe?

While Drake's equation is a good basis for systematic investigations of signals from extraterrestrial intelligences, I care little about the admittedly scarce possibility that we ever receive positive news from our SETI searches. I care more about the fact that, if we consider the whole universe instead than restricting to our small galaxy, and if we omit to require that other civilizations exist at present (whatever this means over billion-light-year distance scales), the probability becomes a certainty.Tommaso Dorigo

I was over at Tommaso Dorigo's Blog, Quantum Diaries Survivor" reading his take on Extraterrestrials: A Dime A Dozen and the opening with Stephen Hawkings Lecture. I cut out the section of my interest as well to see what Dr. Hawking was talking about, besides reading Tommaso's take.

Qualitatively, I have come to realize,  given the framework for consideration of such possibilities,  these equations mean an inductive/deductive self evident constraint  how are we ever to consider the possibility( You have to give yourself permission to entertain).

I mean can we ever know the framework of that Extraterrestrial Intelligence given the parameters for our own belief structures? We do not even know what is possible "not having the framework" to properly question how this can be so?

So what I found in Dr.Hawkings lecture was the generalities of consensus across the industry of science and no new ways in which to possibly perceive the" right questions concerning the framework for possible new intelligences" that we would perceive as Extraterrestrials.

***

NASA's 50th Anniversary Lecture By Professor Stephen Hawking

...........DR. HAWKING: What will we find when we go into space? Is there alien life out there, or are we alone in the universe?

We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth. So it must be possible for life to appear on othersuitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.

But we don't know how life first appeared. The probability of something as complicated as a DNA molecule being formed by random collisions of atoms in ocean is incredibly small. However, there might have been some simpler macro molecule which can build up the DNA or some other macro molecule capable of reproducing itself. Still, even if the probability of life appearing on a suitable planet is very small, since the universe is infinite, life would have appeared somewhere. If the probability is very low, the distance between two independent occurrences of life would be very large.

However, there is a possibility known as panspermia that life could spread from planet to planet or from stellar system to stellar system carried on meteors. We know that Earth has been hit by meteors that came from Mars, and others may have come from further afield. We have no evidence that any meteors carried life, but it remains a possibility.

An important feature of life spread by panspermia is that it would have the same basis which would be DNA for life in the neighborhood of the Earth.

On the other hand, an independent occurrence of life would be extremely unlikely to be DNA based. So watch out if you meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease against which you have no resistance.

One piece of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing is that we have fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half-a-billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of an Earth-like planet.

This would suggest either panspermia or that the probability of life appearing independently is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the 10 billion years available. If it is panspermia, any life in the solar system or in nearby stellar systems will also be DNA based.

While there may be primitive life in another region of the galaxy, there don't seem to be any advanced intelligent beings. We don't appear to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?

[Laughter.]

DR. HAWKING: If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far.

Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within the radius of a few hundred lightyears. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.

Why haven't we heard from anyone out there? One view is expressed in this Calvin cartoon. The caption reads: "Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

More seriously, there could be three possible explanations of why we haven't heard from aliens. First, it may be that the probability of primitive life appearing on a suitable planet is very low.

Second, the probability of primitive life appearing may be reasonably high, but the probability of that life developing intelligence like ours may be very low. Just because evolution led to intelligence in our case, we shouldn't assume that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of Darwinian natural selection.

It is not clear that intelligence confers a long-term survival advantage. Bacteria and insects will survive quite happily even if our so-called intelligence leads us to destroy ourselves.

This is the third possibility. Life appears and in some cases develops into intelligent beings, but when it reaches a stage of sending radio signals, it will also have the technology to make nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. It will, therefore, be in danger of destroying itself before long.

Let's hope this is not the reason we have not heard from anyone. Personally, I favor the second possibility that primitive life is relatively common, but that intelligent life is very rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.

[Laughter.]

DR. HAWKING: Can we exist for a long time away from the Earth? Our experience with the ISS, the International Space Station, shows that it is possible for human beings to survive for many months away from Planet Earth. However, the zero gravity aboard it causes a number of undesirable physiological changes and weakening of the bones, as well as creating practical problems with liquids, et cetera.

One would, therefore, want any long-term base for human beings to be on a planet or moon. By digging into the surface, one would get thermal insulation and protection from meteors and cosmic rays. The planet or moon could also serve as a source of the raw materials that would be needed if the extraterrestrial community was to be self-sustaining independently of Earth.

What are the possible sites of a human colony in the solar system? The most obvious is the Moon. It is close by and relatively easy to reach. We have already landed on it and driven across it in a buggy.

On the other hand, the Moon is small and without atmosphere or a magnetic field to deflect the solar radiation particles, like on Earth. There is no liquid water, but there may be ice in the craters at the north and south poles. A colony on the Moon could use this as a source of oxygen with power provided by nuclear energy or solar panels. The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.

Mars is the obvious next target. It is half as far, again, as the Earth from the Sun and so receives half the warmth. It once had a magnetic field, but it decayed 4 billion years ago, leaving Mars without protection from solar radiation. It stripped Mars of most of its atmosphere, leaving it with only 1 percent of the pressure of the Earth's atmosphere.

However, the pressure must have been higher in the past because we see what appear to be runoff channels and dried-up lakes. Liquid water cannot exist on Mars now.

It would vaporize in the near-vacuum. This suggests that Mars had a warm wet period during which life might have appeared either spontaneously or through panspermia. There is no sign of life on Mars now, but if we found evidence that life had once existed, it would indicate that the probability of life developing on a suitable planet was fairly high.

NASA has sent a large number of spacecraft to Mars, starting with Mariner 4 in 1964. It has surveyed the planet with a number of orbiters, the latest being the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These orbiters have revealed deep gullies and the highest mountains in the solar system.

NASA has also landed a number of probes on the surface of Mars, most recently the two Mars Rovers. These have sent back pictures of a dry desert landscape. However, there is a large quantity of water in the form of ice in the polar regions. A colony on Mars could use this as a source of oxygen.

There has been volcanic activity on Mars. This would have brought minerals and metals to the surface which a colony could use.

The Moon and Mars are the most suitable sites for space colonies in the solar system. Mercury and Venus are too hot, while Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants with no solid surface.

The moons of Mars are very small and have no advantages over Mars itself.

Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be possible. In particular, Titan, a moon of Saturn, is larger and more massive than other moons and has a dense atmosphere.

The Cassini-Huygens Mission of NASA and ESA has landed a probe on Titan which has sent back pictures of the surface. However, it is very cold, being so far from the sun, and I wouldn't fancy living next to a lake of liquid methane.

What about beyond the solar system? Our observations indicate that a significant fraction of stars have planets around them. So far, we can detect only giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but it is reasonable to assume that they will be accompanied by smaller Earth-like planets. Some of these will lay in the [inaudible] zone where the distance from the stars is the right range for liquid water to exist on their surface.

There are around a thousand stars within 30 lightyears of Earth. If 1 percent of each had Earth-size planets in the [inaudible] zone, we would have 10 candidate new worlds. We can revisit it with current technology, but we should make interstellar a long-term aim. By long term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years. The human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years.

Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing.

If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.

***

This same perspective about which I have involved myself with the issues of gravity has been at the forefront of my journey with regards to understanding gravity, and what we have come to know of it on Earth, is that it is not as it is in heaven?:)

Thoughts have this forming effect too, and in the world of Physical constants, how are such thoughts to be measured? "Particulate expressions" in such reductionist modes which lead to a inductive/deductive self evidential state of a ever forming Higg's field?? What thought has traversed the room, to arrive on the other side of the room with consensus?

Not as if, we can defy it's hold on us, while taking plane flights to experience this sensation of dropping fast to earth and leaving ourselves suspended for a time. That it is a consensus borne in mind that such an idea is limited to the framework for which all ideas about it are limited too.

The net result is that the meager N=2.1 becomes over 20 trillions! This means that there are presently 20 trillion civilizations around. 20 trillions. Okay, we might have dropped or added one factor of a hundred too many here or there, but the number is still enormous, no escape!

Is that not a sobering thought ? To me, that is both awesome and saddening. As far as awe is concerned, of course there is no need to explain it. But there is sadness too: for imagine the incredible, unfathomable number of things that we will never be able to know, constrained in our tiny planet, during our insignificant lives. Masterpieces, inventions, acts of bravery, adventures. But also wars, atrocities, catastrophes. The history of the universe will never be written - but it would be quite a read, I am sure.Tommaso Dorigo

So as with the idea of Intelligences in the universe, I place gravity along side of it, as in the context of formulating the right questions. In Tommaso's blog the entry is the deciphering in context of the Drake Equation yet not bound by it in belief. This does not make Tommaso irresponsible to me in shirking the basis of that determination by using the equation.

So of course along the way in my endeavors with those who I have conversed, or left trail bytes for consideration, is the idea that the world as we see it is not always as it seems and that by consensus, the framework is establish is one which limits our views according too.

A "synopsis of the events" can lead us too, and as has been extrapolated according to the world of science. The thoughts that are left to me have been the idea of how scientists can ever introduce new formulations outside of that structure consensus without first taking a new baby step(how so?). They have had to all come to agreement on the latest version of that consensus.

Then there are, the Physical Constants. It is as if in relation to the formulation to a mathematical consistency as a correlative function of the Drake equation in the process of.

This does not mean we sanction irresponsibility to the quest of discovering new worlds of thought, be it in context of Extraterrestrial Intelligences, or even about gravity and the quantum world in which it shall work.

I still visit those scientists who have placed "Outreach" even amidst the data and scientific endeavors they are pursuing. I look for the glimmer of hope that such baby steps are borne out of such minds.

Having defined all the parameters of your science what would be the next question that would lead you to new insights? What new science beyond the experiments that you are working on?

FLOW

oscopelabs — July 29, 2008 — Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis.

Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world's dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question 'CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?'

Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

IN THEATERS:
Sept. 12
New York - Angelika Film Center
Los Angeles - Laemmle Sunset 5 See: F.L.O.W - For Love of Water

Solar Dynamics Observatory

SpaceCraft

• The total mass of SDO at launch was 3000 kg (6620 lb); instruments 300 kg (660 lb), spacecraft 1300 kg (2870 lb), and fuel 1400 kg (3090 lb).
• Its overall length along the sun-pointing axis is 4.5 m, and each side is 2.22 m.
• The span of the extended solar panels is 6.25 m.
• Total available power is 1500 W from 6.6 m² of solar arrays operating at an efficiency of 16%
• The high-gain antennas rotate once each orbit to follow the Earth.

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April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.
At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled "First Light" images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.


"SDO is working beautifully," reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is even better than we could have dreamed."


Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO's telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

Source for story here

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NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images

04.21.10

View related briefing materials here.

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

(From NASA:) A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA

Source of Picture is taken from here

Linking Experiments

Illustration: Sandbox Studio

 

The first round of physics

Nine proposals are under consideration for the initial suite of physics experiments at DUSEL, and scientists have received $21 million in NSF funding to refine them. The proposals cover four areas of research:

• What is the nature of dark matter? (Proposals for LZ3, COUPP, GEODM, and MAX)
• Are neutrinos their own antiparticles? (Majorana, EXO)
• How do stars create the heavy elements? (DIANA)
• What role did neutrinos play in the evolution of the universe? (LBNE)

In addition, scientists propose to build a generic underground facility (FAARM) that will monitor the mine's naturally occurring radioactivity, which can interfere with the search for dark matter. The facility also would measure particle emissions from various materials, and help develop and refine technologies for future underground physics experiments.

But why are there four separate proposals for how to search for dark matter? Not knowing the nature of dark-matter particles and their interactions with ordinary matter, scientists would like to use a variety of detector materials to look for the particles and study their interactions with atoms of different sizes. The use of different technologies would also provide an independent cross check of the experimental results.

"We strongly feel we need two or more experiments," says Bernard Sadoulet of UC Berkeley, an expert on dark-matter searches. "If money were not an issue, you would build at least three experiments."

The largest experiment intended for DUSEL is the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (see graphic), a project that involves both the DOE and NSF. Scientists would use the LBNE to explore whether neutrinos break one of the most fundamental laws of physics: the symmetry between matter and antimatter. In 1980, James Cronin and Val Fitch received the Nobel Prize for the observation that quarks can violate this symmetry. But the effect is too small to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. Neutrinos might be the answer.

The LBNE scientists would generate a high-intensity neutrino beam at DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 800 miles east of Homestake, and aim it straight through the Earth at two or more enormous neutrino detectors in the DUSEL mine, each containing the equivalent of 100,000 tons of water.

Studies have shown that the rock at the 4850-foot level of the mine would support the safe construction of these caverns. In January, the LBNE experiment received first-stage approval, also known as Mission Need, from the DOE.

Lesko and his team now are combining all engineering studies and science proposals into an overall proposal for review.

"By the end of this summer, we hope to complete a preliminary design of the DUSEL facility and then integrate it with a generic suite of experiments," Lesko says. "While formal selection of the experiments will not have been made by that time, we know enough about them now that we can move forward with the preliminary design. The experiments themselves will be selected through a peer-review process, as is common in the NSF."

If all goes well, Lesko says, scientists and engineers could break ground on the major DUSEL excavations in 2013, marking the start of a new era for deep underground research in the United States. SEE:Big Plans for Deep Science

See Also: 

Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

A first look at the Earth interior from the Gran Sasso underground laboratory

Mysterious Behavior of Neutrinos sent Straight through the Earth

Sounding off on Economic Constraints in Experimentation