(HD) Dark Matter & Dark Energy in the Universe - Full Documentary

See:(HD) Dark Matter & Dark Energy in the Universe - Full Documentary

The Xenon Dark Matter Project

Model of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search which translates actual data into sound and light. We have not yet had a dark matter interaction, but we have lots of particles hitting the detectors and that is what you are watching. A downloadable version is at my webpage http://www.hep.umn.edu/~prisca More info on our experiment can be found at http://cdms.berkeley.edu and http://www.soudan.umn.edu

There is current data that deals with this topic that has been transformed in how we look at this issue.  I leave that up to viewers to think about all the other bloggers that have already spoken to this. I wll give one link below for consideration.

See:

• Breaking News: Two Great New Measurements

Analogies Make You Think

See:

Falling into a Blackhole- On Sept. 25, four theoretical physicists — Raphael Bousso (U.C. Berkeley), Juan Maldacena (Institute for Advanced Study), Joseph Polchinski (U.C. Santa Barbara) and Leonard Susskind (Stanford University) — answered your questions about the latest theories about what happens when matter falls into a black hole and how these ideas are prompting researchers to reconsider our understanding of gravity.

See Also:

• Metaphors and analogies: scientists’ friends or foes?

Gravity The Movie and the Expanse of Space

Went and saw the movie yesterday. I must say it had a crazy effect on me seeing the movie in 3d.

It seem to capture some of my fears about having lost some constraint on how one is attach to the matters with which we are held bound. The grasping continuously,  of trying to grab onto and hold too, as if the need exists for all humanity to be grounded.

Effectively as a participant once fully engaged, it showed me a glimpse into the future, one way or another, of being involved in the process. While being to old to ever consider such a process now in space exploration, if there is a future life,  I have already glimpsed it,  and seen some of the work I was going to do.

Wishful thinking on my part perhaps, but equally real that the fear of being lost in space, ever so real as to the understanding of what we may call home to many of us. It is as fragile to realize that what we call home here on earth could have ever lost such bounds as to what we all remain attached too. In that moment of realization perhaps to see all around, us, as no longer being held to Earth as the mass between us somehow looses it gravitational hold.

You must forgive me for my layman pondering. How is it that we can change this gravitational connect between the masses without altering the mass of one? It seems to me that there is a  link  to mind somehow in what I come to believe to be true, is an ability to change how that mass is viewed? Is there any scientific proof for this that we can change the laws of gravity, by either injecting something into the space between these masses, or,  by altering the nature of the mass itself?

As Sandra Bullock is shown on the shore,  we find we are safe again.



Such a feeling had been deeply entrenched in my mind as I moved closer to the edge of a viewing point over looking  the Grand Canyon. That such an expanse of space was to have been found with such familiarity,  as in the movie just seen.

So in a way this idea of releasing the matters is a strange thing in my mind as to have ever considered it beyond the materialistic binds with which this process is viewed. That there are other and thought provoking ideas about what the spirit of ourselves can ever be held so tightly so as to see the way in which we are connected to the experiences in life.

What would it mean to have found that the attachments of life can be so easily held in perspective that we can release those things which keep us grounded. Not that we feel safe, but to realize that there is another kind of gravity that holds us to the materialistic binds which make our lives human here on earth.

See Also:

• Spacecraft propulsion
• Nature of Mass

CERN Courier: AMS-02 provides a precise measure of cosmic rays

Fig. 1. AMS, far left, was installed by NASA on the International Space Station on 19 May 2011, where it is the only major physical science experiment. It will operate there for the station's lifetime of approximately 20 years.
Image credit: NASA.

AMS-02 is a large particle detector by space standards and built using the concepts and technologies developed for experiments at particle accelerators but adapted to the extremely hostile environment of space. Measuring 5 × 4 × 3 m³, it weighs 7.5 tonnes. Reliability, performance and redundancy are the key features for the safe and successful operation of this instrument in space (CERN Courier July/August 2011 p18 and p23). See: AMS-02 provides a precise measure of cosmic rays

It's important I think to see the context of particle  reductionism in the proper light  as we examine what goes on in LHC. Doing AMSII work on space station at the same time, we see from space those energies which help us  to understand the naturalness of the work being done.

Data: CERN computing through the ages and Quantum AI Lab

Video: CERN computing through the ages

A peek at the early days of the Quantum AI Lab: a partnership between NASA, Google, and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer.

History of The Fly's Eye Event

Two mirrors within the University of Utah's High Resolution Fly's Eye cosmic ray observatory. (Credit: Image  From University of Utah)

Most understand my curiosity with what is happening naturally around us in terms of High Energy Cosmic Events ( It should be stressed that the energy required to move these particles this fast is enormous. Millions of times more energy per particle than humans have been able to create. See- Closure).

The highest energy particle ever observed was detected by the Fly's Eye in 1991. With an energy of 3.5 x 10²⁰eV (or 56J), the particle, probably a proton or a light nucleus, had 108 times more energy than particles produced in the largest earth-bound accelerators. See: Wayback Machine

So for me it is an interesting confirmation about what scientists do with regard to trying to understand these events. How much energy is involved and whether we can create models with which to understand the decay products that are created from.

The highest-energy cosmic ray ever detected was observed on October 15, 1991 by the Fly's Eye cosmic ray detector in Utah, USA. The detector is located in the desert in Dugway Proving Grounds 75 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The Fly's Eye detects cosmic rays by observing the light that they cause when they strike the atmosphere. When an extremely high-energy cosmic ray enters the atmosphere, it collides with an atomic nucleus and starts a cascade of charged particles that produce light as they zip through the atmosphere. The charged particles of a cosmic ray air shower travel together at very nearly the speed of light, so the Utah detectors see a fluorescent spot move rapidly along a line through the atmosphere. By measuring how much light comes from each stage of the air shower, one can infer not only the energy of the cosmic ray but also whether it was more likely a simple proton or a heavier nucleus. See: The Fly's Eye Event

Animation of air shower detection in the Auger Engineering Array

See Also:

• The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory

Lawrence Krauss - Debate in Stockholm, 2013

A discussion about the definition of nothing. And the relation of philosophy and theology to science. Attendees are Lawrence M Krauss, Bengt Gustafsson, Åsa Wikforss, Stefan Gustavsson and Ulrika Engström. Moderator: Christer SturmarkLawrence Krauss - Debate in Stockholm, 2013

See:

• Quantum Gravity in the Cosmic Microwave Background? 
• Using Cosmology to Establish the Quantization of Gravity
• A Short Primer on Gravity Waves

A Deeper Search for Building Blocks of Nature

National High Magnetic Field Laboratory

The strange properties of superconducting materials called “cuprates” (bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide is shown here), which cannot be described by known quantum mechanical methods, may correspond to properties of black holes in higher dimensions.

According to modern quantum theory, energy fields permeate the universe, and flurries of energy in these fields, called “particles” when they are pointlike and “waves” when they are diffuse, serve as the building blocks of matter and forces. But new findings suggest this wave-particle picture offers only a superficial view of nature’s constituents. See:

Signs of a Stranger, Deeper Side to Nature’s Building Blocks 

By: Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine, July 1, 2013

Abdus Salam Movie – The Dream of Symmetry

The movie presents the extraordinary figure of Abdus Salam of Pakistan, who not only was an outstanding scientist but also a generous humanitarian and a valuable person. His rich and busy life was an endless quest for symmetry, that he pursued in the universe of physical laws and in the world of human beings.See:Abdus Salam Movie – The Dream of Symmetry

See Also:

• Abdus Salam Movie – The Dream of Symmetry
• Exploring Matter At the Dawn of Time

Nima Arkani-Hamed Lectures

Nima Arkani-Hamed on developments in Physics and future vision

The Salam Lecture Series 2012, with a week-long series of lectures by renowned theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed. Giving his audience a panoramic view of 400 years of physics in his first lecture, Arkani-Hamed provided insights into the various concepts that have dominated the world of fundamental physics at different points in history. "Everything that we have learned [over the past 400 years] can be subsumed with a basic slogan, and the slogan is that of unification," he said. "More and more disparate phenomena turn out to be different aspects of the same thing." "Physics," he stressed "forces you to remove artificial distinction between disciplines.

See Also:

• Nima Arkani-Hamed Lecture: Day 1
• Nima Arkani-Hamed Lecture: Day 2 
• Nima Arkani-Hamed Lecture: Day 5
• The Amplituhedron
• Guest Post: Lance Dixon on Calculating Amplitudes

Exploring Matter At the Dawn of Time

Physicist Paul Sorensen describes discoveries made at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At RHIC, scientists from around the world study what the universe may have looked like in the first microseconds after its birth, helping us to understand more about why the physical world works the way it does - from the smallest particles to the largest stars. See: Exploring Matter at the Dawn of Time and RHIC

Detailed Characterization of Jets in Heavy Ion Collisions Using Jet Shapes and Jet Fragmentation Functions

The CMS detector has excellent capabilities for studying high-pT jets formed in heavy ion collisions. Previous CMS analyses have characterized the energy loss of hard-scattered partons traversing the medium produced in such collisions at a center of mass energy of 2.76 TeV using the momentum imbalance of di-jet and photon-jet events. In this paper, the fragmentation properties of inclusive jets with pT,jet>100~GeV/c in PbPb collisions are characterized by measuring differential and integated jet shapes, as well as charged particle fragmentation functions. A data sample of PbPb collisions collected in 2011 at a center of mass energy of sNN−−−√=2.76~TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of Lint=140 μb−1 is used. The results for PbPb collisions as a function of collision centrality are compared to reference distributions based on pp data collected at the same collision energy. For both PbPb and pp collisions, jets are reconstructed with the anti-kT clustering algorithm with a resolution parameter of 0.3 and using ``Particle Flow'' objects that combine tracking and caloritmetry information. The jet shapes and fragmentation functions are measured for reconstructed charged particles with \pt>1~GeV/c within the jet cone. For the most central collisions indications of a broadening of the differential jet shape in PbPb collisions are observed, as well as a significant rise of the PbPb/pp fragmentation function ratio for the softest fragmentation products with pT<3~GeV/c. See: Detailed Characterization of Jets in Heavy Ion Collisions Using Jet Shapes and Jet Fragmentation Functions

See Also:

•  public page of the CMS results
• "Whatever happened to AdS/CFT and the Quark Gluon Plasma?"

Hubble Movie Theater: Revelation

Take a thrill ride through 15 years of Hubble images, starting with Hubble’s first picture and ending with its anniversary image of the Whirlpool Galaxy. In less than three minutes, 800 Hubble images flash over the screen, sometimes as fast as 60 pictures per second.See:HUBBLE Site

PI director Neil Turok’s welcome speech

See Also: Perimeter Institute and the crisis in modern physics

Catching Black Holes on the Fly

Black Holes Shine for NuSTAR Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures. See: Catching Black Holes on the Fly

See:

• NuSTAR: the Nuclear Spectroscopic Array(PDF)
• The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array Mission - NuSTAR

How to Find Black holes with Lasers

In February 2013 I was invited by the Institute of Physics to give a lecture in the famous lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain as part of their Physics in Perspective series. I was to expect about 400 students and teachers from schools across the country. See: How to Find Black holes with Lasers

 Freise_Finding_Black_Holes_with_Lasers_180213_reduced.pdf

What Dirac And Feynman Had in Common?

"The adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing" -- Richard Feynman

Should I be so bold to change the word in Feynman's quote as to suggest that "perpetual" be changed to "perceptual?" Conceptually, to be able to explain the Diagrams,  as a process unfolding?

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students." Feynman, Richard. 1988. What Do You Care What Other People Think? New York: Norton. P. 59.

A Conformal Diagram of a Minkowski Spacetime

The question I raised in the Blog Post title is one that has to do with perception and how we can see in different ways. How did such a view of the natural world bring to light....anti-matter? Was it a conceptualization about time?

While Dirac spoke about projective geometry I could not but help to see that Feynman thought to use his diagrams to help see in "that kind of space."  As a layman, I could definitely be wrong.

You can picture all the directions in Minkowski space as the points in a three-dimensional projective space. The relationships between vectors, null-vectors and so on - - and you get at once just the relationships between points in a three-dimensional vector space. I always used these geometrical ideas for getting clear notions about relationships in relativity although I didn’t refer to them in my published works.Oral History Transcript — Dr. P. A. M. Dirac

See:

Word Picture

True North

What is your true north? What does your bird look like?

http://www.revivewithenergy.com If you find that you are confused on whether you are sensing the voice of intuition or the voice of ego, skip to 5 min 40 secs to get clarity on which it is. That is....if you want to skip the peacock story at the beginning. Ha! Enjoy.

  "The power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking, all of those are a major change in psychology. I can't think of a bigger change in my lifetime. You were asking what's exciting? That's exciting, to me."

THE MARVELS AND THE FLAWS OF INTUITIVE THINKING: Edge Master Class 2011

Daniel Kahneman

[9.12.11]

See Also:

• The Old Wise Man

Re-thinking an Alien World?

A distant super-Earth named ""55 Cancri e"" is wetter and weirder than astronomers thought possible. The discovery has researchers re-thinking the nature of alien worlds.

 Visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/...

How to Make a Neutrino Beam

Hey why not get an animated view of the reasons how? It is from an Symmetry Magazine article on November of 2012. It is information worth remembering in the scheme of particle reductionism..

Neutrinos are elusive particles that are difficult to study, yet they may help explain some of the biggest mysteries of our universe. Using accelerators to make neutrino beams, scientists are unveiling the neutrinos’ secrets. See: How to make a neutrino beam

You might be interested in what they have been doing while us lay people have been pondering what this particle reductionism is all about.  I mean sure there must be benefits from the work that goes on right?

DEMONSTRATION OF COMMUNICATION USING NEUTRINOS

 See Also:

• The Crown of the Creation Syndrome

Euclid

Socratica Studios

Maybe you can identify the section from which this picture is taken from. The picture seen in the Fresco painted by Raphael, is entitled the School of Athens in  heading above?:)

All those who have written histories bring to this point their account of the development of this science. Not long after these men came Euclid, who brought together the Elements, systematizing many of the theorems of Eudoxus, perfecting many of those of Theatetus, and putting in irrefutable demonstrable form propositions that had been rather loosely established by his predecessors. He lived in the time of Ptolemy the First, for Archimedes, who lived after the time of the first Ptolemy, mentions Euclid. It is also reported that Ptolemy once asked Euclid if there was not a shorter road to geometry that through the Elements, and Euclid replied that there was no royal road to geometry. He was therefore later than Plato's group but earlier than Eratosthenes and Archimedes, for these two men were contemporaries, as Eratosthenes somewhere says. Euclid belonged to the persuasion of Plato and was at home in this philosophy; and this is why he thought the goal of the Elements as a whole to be the construction of the so-called Platonic figures. (Proclus, ed. Friedlein, p. 68, tr. Morrow)