Monday, February 20, 2012

Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society


The focus of the 2012 meeting, then, is on using the power of electronic communications and information resources to tackle the complex problems of the 21st century on a global scale through international, multidisciplinary efforts. We have a model already in the scale and scope of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But that’s just the beginning. The interconnections among, for example, climate change, agriculture, and health are as yet poorly understood; predictive modeling is in its infancy.
The ability to approach global problems through global collaborations depends on an educated populace and on substantial scientific and technological sophistication throughout the world. Thus building the global knowledge society depends on advancing education and research, the engines of the knowledge society, everywhere. This task is facilitated, but not accomplished, by the existence of electronically accessible open educational resources. There remain limitations of language and culture, of poverty and access.See: Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society(bold added by me for emphasis)


Flattening the world sounds like something that you would not like to return in thinking about the push for society to become better informed and pulled out of the dark ages? But it's not really about that. It's about leveling the playing field in terms of,  "Globalization of Knowledge."

 WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
Thomas Lauren Friedman

FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren't ready. I kept chewing over that phrase - the playing field is being leveled - and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language. See: Why the World Is Flat

The theme above then in opening linked article is like a mission statement.  So in a sense,  I highlight with the paragraphs above to illustrate what a stubborn scientist frustrated has been like,  locked in his own perspective about climate change( it seems a formulation principle arises with the basis of that topic. Okay, the presentation is specific and he talks about Quantum Computing) That one might in his case may cast a wide sweeping statement about the aims and purposes of giving as much knowledge as possible to the masses, as being leftist.

 Right,  left?  Nothing like being stereotype, yet,  a question in my mind exists about globalization? Suffering from "the products"  from which one could have grown up,  you can understand indeed why such skepticism might be measured as a "dying voice of concern about that global village?"  This though,  is not about economics. You See?:)

The public, needs to be better informed. Remove the barriers and constraints to that knowledge you then are successful in raising the standards of communication across the world. It should lower the stress level for an  impatient scientist who is frustrated with the level of knowledge perceived from the basis of the questions asked by the public?:)

 Ask you self then.........In respect of knowledge, do those who control the medium, control the message?

 The very thing you might fight for is in fact a form of something that one might see as being repressed under a presentation of some communistic system,  when in fact,  such monopolistic controls are much the same?

***

So why have I stayed out of the climate debate change? One, because I do not know enough, and two, because I knew nature was ever present while we were contributing to the environment in which we live.

So the population,  since my looking into the subject of particle research has it's basis set in understanding our connectives to the space around us? What is happening in the airs above earth that you would not take notice? Cosmic particle research? It may help one understand the logo better? Like ideas,  particles exist all around us?:)

How does this then contribute to the understanding that nature is ever a greater force then humanity could ever think itself  as to the design of our place in history.

See Also:

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Music of the Quantum



The weird quantum nature of the atomic world challenges us to revise the way we view the world around us. We learn that our everyday world - built out of the myriad superposition of matter waves, has an unexpected capacity for new kinds of behavior and "self organization" that we are only just beginning to fathom. Music of the Quantum World









See Also: Superconductivity Dance Flash Mob

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Ole Time Photo



This is a picture of my folks sitting on the stairs a bit before they were married. Also, some of their sisters and brother as well. A picture of my Grandma and Grandpa as well.

 

The house from which the picture was taken and the farm around .

See Also: 

The Landscape of the Neighborhood

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram


Leonard Susskind of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics discusses the indestructability of information and the nature of black holes in a lecture entitled The World As Hologram.

Event with Four Muons

Holometer Revised

Please take note of updated links of this entry. Thanks for clarifications from these two sources.



  • The Hoganmeter


  • Hogan's holographic noise doesn't exist



  • ***

    This plot shows the sensitivity of various experiments to fluctuations in space and time. Horizontal axis is the log of apparatus size (or duration time the speed of light), in meters; vertical axis is the log of the rms fluctuation amplitude in the same units. The lower left corner represents the Planck length or time. In these units, the size of the observable universe is about 26. Various physical systems and experiments are plotted. The "holographic noise" line represents the rms transverse holographic fluctuation amplitude on a given scale. The most sensitive experiments are Michelson interferometers.

    The Fermilab Holometer in Illinois is currently under construction and will be the world's most sensitive laser interferometer when complete, surpassing the sensitivity of the GEO600 and LIGO systems, and theoretically able to detect holographic fluctuations in spacetime.[1][2][3]

    The Holometer may be capable of meeting or exceeding the sensitivity required to detect the smallest units in the universe called Planck units.[1] Fermilab states, "Everyone is familiar these days with the blurry and pixelated images, or noisy sound transmission, associated with poor internet bandwidth. The Holometer seeks to detect the equivalent blurriness or noise in reality itself, associated with the ultimate frequency limit imposed by nature."[2]

    Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist at Fermilab, states about the experiment, "What we’re looking for is when the lasers lose step with each other. We’re trying to detect the smallest unit in the universe. This is really great fun, a sort of old-fashioned physics experiment where you don’t know what the result will be."

    Experimental physicist Hartmut Grote of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, states that although he is skeptical that the apparatus will successfully detect the holographic fluctuations, if the experiment is successful "it would be a very strong impact to one of the most open questions in fundamental physics. It would be the first proof that space-time, the fabric of the universe, is quantized."[1]


    References


    1. ^ a b c Mosher, David (2010-10-28). "World’s Most Precise Clocks Could Reveal Universe Is a Hologram". Wired. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/holometer-universe-resolution/. 
    2. ^ a b "The Fermilab Holometer". Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. http://holometer.fnal.gov/. Retrieved 2010-11-01. 
    3. ^ Dillow, Clay (2010-10-21). "Fermilab is Building a 'Holometer' to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion". Popular Science. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/fermilab-building-holometer-determine-if-universe-just-hologram.


    ***


    Fermilab Holometer


    About a hundred years ago, the German physicist Max Planck introduced the idea of a fundamental, natural length or time, derived from fundamental constants. We now call these the Planck length, lp = √hG/2Ï€ c3 = 1.6 × 10-35 meters. Light travels one Planck length in the Planck time, tp = √hG/2Ï€ c5 = 5.4 × 10-44seconds. 


    The physics of space and time is expected to change radically on such small scales. For example, a particle confined to a Planck volume automatically collapses to a black hole. 


    See: Fermilab Holometer


    ***





    A Conceptual Drawing of the 'Holometer' via Symmetry


    “The shaking of spacetime occurs at a million times per second, a thousand times what your ear can hear,” said Fermilab experimental physicist Aaron Chou, whose lab is developing prototypes for the holometer. “Matter doesn’t like to shake at that speed. You could listen to gravitational frequencies with headphones.”


    The whole trick, Chou says, is to prove that the vibrations don’t come from the instrument. Using technology similar to that in noise-cancelling headphones, sensors outside the instrument detect vibrations and shake the mirror at the same frequency to cancel them. Any remaining shakiness at high frequency, the researchers propose, will be evidence of blurriness in spacetime


    “With the holometer’s long arms, we’re magnifying spacetime’s uncertainty,” Chou said.

    See: Hogan’s holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe

    Sunday, February 05, 2012

    Bon Iver - Holocene (Official Music Video)



    My misses watched them on Saturday Night Live last night so I thought it worth the peek since she knows well my taste in music. You must admit the video is done well in concert with this music. It sort of raises the mystery of youth for most young men as they explore. Wonder about things around them as I do.

    At 4:36 of the video the young boy standing on the mound sort of raises a spectral feeling of the history for me. It's as if  one were to meld into this existence of "no barriers to our remembrance,"  might we see all the visual images of that history as far back as our humanity goes? This is a strange feeling for me and the music helps to nurture this creative thinking of "all time some how encapsulate in every moment." I guess the hill and this boy at that time represents this for me. The music for me aids in this exploration.

    Thursday, February 02, 2012

    Word Picture

     Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable . We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? See: Nature by Emerson

    I have this idea brewing for sometime in my mind and I am sure it fits with some who believe a comic strip while it can show it's humor can also show the discussion in science as well. But this is something quite subtle for what I had found in sciences developing mind that could at the same time speak about it's mathematics,  as well as unfolding in pictures who form as a continuous line of geometrical thinking. I might of in the past called it the Royal Road to Geometry, it was always the question of where all these lines of thinking could have evolved too.

    It always brings me back to the success of Einsteins to have realize that his freedom came when the geometry of Riemann was used to help move beyond the Euclidean frame of Reference:) While that success took to a malleable form of line bending(greater or less than the perfect line interferometer)(LIGO laser or GRACE), of course it's success was built on the successes of those before him. That's just the way of it.

    We see the earth much differently now. Much more then when it was first looked at from space, yet, there was individual peoples who dreamed of the earth from such a lofty ideal. Stepping out from the space capsule was an important step in moving beyond the fields of expression of an agricultural age.

    The importance of what I am saying is to understand the very act of "tracing back toward inside" where this line emerged from. So as to ask,  what is it that such emergence could encompass that we would say that the driving force of this manifestation?  It is to become ever the selection of matter constituents that will form the basis of the reality? So is it matter choosing or some deeper understanding of our having chosen to become partners in the reality we exist in? Where did this line lead too,  having traced it back to where it began?

    So the "word picture idea" is to understand that a universal language exists in each of us as a partner in the reality with which we participate? While one could have said that the math is revealing of the very schematics underlying this reality how does such math branch "outward" as it takes on the forms of what we find in nature? How are these mathematical terms "layered over" as to form the very conceptual basis of the words spoken? The word picture is a result then, but individual we shall choose it's covering, yet science must be very exact in this description.

     Paul Dirac


    When one is doing mathematical work, there are essentially two different ways of thinking about the subject: the algebraic way, and the geometric way. With the algebraic way, one is all the time writing down equations and following rules of deduction, and interpreting these equations to get more equations. With the geometric way, one is thinking in terms of pictures; pictures which one imagines in space in some way, and one just tries to get a feeling for the relationships between the quantities occurring in those pictures. Now, a good mathematician has to be a master of both ways of those ways of thinking, but even so, he will have a preference for one or the other; I don't think he can avoid it. In my own case, my own preference is especially for the geometrical way.


    So one traces back the development of our for-bearers of geometrical inquisition as to ask how to break free of the thoughts that we had been restricted too(Poincaré conjecture). This then is why our thrust to expression is the success based on the developing line of  geometry? Ask yourself.....shall Dali be your respite from what is sought in XY painting,  to have understood the Crucifix was leading even though Salvador's religion some vast question of a ideal based on the developing frame. It was the question of the association in mind as an artist? Where was this geometry leading then, as if leading to the ideal of what leads us all to our religion?

    Friday, January 27, 2012

    The dimensionality and geometry of the extra dimensions

    We investigate possible signatures of black hole events at the LHC in the hypothesis that such objects will not evaporate completely, but leave a stable remnant. For the purpose of de fining a reference scenario, we have employed the publicly available Monte Carlo generator CHARYBDIS2, in which the remnant's behavior is mostly determined by kinematic constraints and conservation of some quantum numbers, such as the baryon charge. Our fi ndings show that electrically neutral remnants are highly favored and a signifi cantly larger amount of missing transverse momentum is to be expected with respect to the case of complete decay. See: Black Hole Remnants at the LHC by L. Bellagambab, R. Casadioa;by, R. Di Sipioa;bz and V. Viventiax 16 Jan 2012

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    ATLAS Experiment © 2011 CERN  "Black Hole" event superimposed over a classic image of the ATLAS detector.
    ***

    If the fundamental Planck scale is of order a TeV, as the case in some extradimensions scenarios, future hadron colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider will be black hole factories. The non-perturbative process of black hole formation and decay by Hawking evaporation gives rise to spectacular events with up to many dozens of relatively hard jets and leptons, with a characteristic ratio of hadronic to leptonic activity of roughly 5:1. The total transverse energy of such events is typically a sizeable fraction of the beam energy. Perturbative hard scattering processes at energies well above the Planck scale are cloaked behind a horizon, thus limiting the ability to probe short distances. The high energy black hole cross section grows with energy at a rate determined by the dimensionality and geometry of the extra dimensions.See: High Energy Colliders as Black Hole Factories: The End of Short Distance Physics

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