Hello Darkness My Old Friend

Void that is truly empty solves dark energy puzzle?

“In our picture, quarks and gluons can’t flutter in and out of existence unless they are inside hadrons,” says team member Craig Roberts of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. As a result, the vacuum is much calmer and, crucially, the problem it poses for the cosmological constant is reduced. Read the full story at NewScientist

More brain food. Yummy.

Related Articles

• Reexamining nothing: is the vacuum of space really empty? (arstechnica.com)
• Gravitational lens makes dark energy less mysterious (arstechnica.com)
• Expanding Universe and the Mysterious Force of Dark Energy (brighthub.com)

Why is gravity an illusion?

Image via Wikipedia

Erik Verlinde The theoretical physicist believes that gravity is an emergent phenomenon, not the elemental “force” that Newton and Einstein theorized it to be. He thinks it is the result of patterns of complex, microscopic phenomena.

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Gravity Doesn’t Exist | Erik Verlinde | Big Think. ←Click here to read comments and discussion.

More ideas from Verlinde

Related Articles

• Gravity is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics (3quarksdaily.com)
• “What if our dreams are right and gravity is just an illusion?” and related posts (letterfromhere.blogspot.com)
• What is Heat [The Scientific Indian] (scienceblogs.com)

Standard Model Animation

A quirky, and slightly sexist, but fun explanation of the standard model.

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Energy Is Conserved (the history) (via viXra log)

Whether you agree with him or not, this is great time-line in the history of physics.  Philip Gibbs is fast becoming one of my favorite physics bloggers. Not because of his opinions, (I have no idea who’s opinion to believe.)but because of the detail of his explanations. I guess what I am saying is, he describes physics at a level I understand. He doesn’t write in technical jargon that only physicists can understand. And, he doesn’t dumb it down for the masses like… a couple of other guys I just decided not to name. (Because I like and respect them) 

“We have been discussion the law of conservation of energy in the context of classical general relativity. So far I have not been able to convince anyone here that the maths shows that energy is conserved. Lubos Motl and Matti Pitkanen have posted some contrary arguments on their blogs to add to the old one by Sean Carroll. We have also been trading points and counterpoint in the comments with Ervin Goldfain joining in, also in disagreement with m … Read More“

via viXra log By Philip Gibbs

Is it time to tear apart the fabric of space-time?

Another “Theory of Everything” to think about. This guy is taking on Einstein. You have to admire his courage.

“And so space-time – the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter – was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity – one the most pressing challenges to modern physics.” Read the full story

via Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time – physics-math – 09 August 2010 – New Scientist.

A Scientist Takes On Gravity – NYTimes.com

Once again our concepts of reality are being challenged. I just love that. This time it is the sacred gravity, what fun. This was a mind bending read, especially having just re-watched the Matrix last night. Not that there is any connection, I am just drawing a correlation to everything being an illusion.

“It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.” Please read the full Story

via A Scientist Takes On Gravity – NYTimes.com.

Is There a New Physics Waiting to be Discovered?

Do you remember the scene in Star Trek where they did the sling shot around the sun to pick up enough speed to go back in time. Well, this is not what they are talking about. It just made me think of that. I thought I would share a geek moment with you.

“Experts are intrigued by the fact that while the acceleration is tiny and has no significant effect on NASA missions, it holds great interest because no explanation based on conventional physics and understanding has been found. The effect is so persistent that it could indicate some physics not considered in previous attempts to explain the motions of bodies in the universe.

In 1998, for example, NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft had its speed boosted by an additional 13.5 millimetres per second. There are many examples of this, but no explanation – which raises the tantalizing possibility that it could be a sign that a whole new branch of physics is waiting to be discovered.” Read the full story

via “The Spacecraft Flyby Mystery” – Is Dark Matter the Culprit or is There a New Physics Waiting to be Discovered?.

Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe

This is one of the most exciting theories I have heard in a long time. I am going to tell you why and you are going to think I am even nuttier than you already do. But, as you know, I don’t care. One night after watching some documentary about Stephen Hawking and the black hole wars, I was lying in bed just contemplating the Universe. Suddenly and image came into focus and a said aloud to my husband.

“I get it. It has a hole but it has no hole.”

Of course he groggily responded.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I went on to explain that I had seen an image of the Universe. That it was kind of like a doughnut. But, because we are inside the ring so we just keep going around and around. From our perspective it doesn’t have a hole. And the image I saw it was all stretched out so the “doughnut hole” was almost invisible.

“A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.

So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts.

This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction. In fact, Shu shows that singularities cannot exist in this cosmos.” Read the full article…

via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe.

LHC results: Not just the same old thing

At the International Conference on High Energy Physics someone said something about Supersymmetry. These guys are talking way over my head. But it sounds very exciting and I want to understand. Is there someone who can dumb it down just a little for me? I guess what I want to know is this, does this support the theory of Supersymmettry? Super Gravity? M-Theory?  Does it undermine the standard model? Does it mean anything? Where are Brian Cox, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku when I need them.

Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC

“It’s reassuring that from day one the LHC plunges into out-of-the-box searches that some call exotic. My hunch is that, if there’s any new physics at the TeV scale at all, it will take some unexpected form that will require non-standard techniques to discover. And the added value is that in these less explored corners of particle phenomenology interesting results and non-trivial limits can be obtained relatively fast, even during the first year of the LHC running.”

via Blogging ICHEP 2010: Heavy Long-lived Particles at the LHC.

“The CMS experiment presented results from their program to search for another type of exotic particle—stopped gluinos. These particles, if created in LHC collisions, would stop in the CMS detector, live a relatively long time compared to the infinitesimal lifetimes of particle like a top quark, and then decay into other particles. CMS physicists hunt these particles by collecting data between collisions of bunches of protons in the LHC beam. The DZero experiment has previously searched for the particles, and determined that they could not exist with a lifetime longer than 30 microseconds. With only a few months’ worth of data, CMS has now excluded the existence of these particles with a lifetime between 75 nanoseconds and 6 microseconds.”

via symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » LHC results: Not just the same old thing

Schedule for LHC’s next few years revealed

The race is on, or continuing between the LHC and the Tevatron.  Regular readers know of my passion for particle physics. I find the work they are doing at the accelerators endlessly fascinating. Will they find this Higgs? Personally I don’t think so. Can I back that up with a reasoned argument? Nope. But, there are some very brilliant theoretical physicists who can. My point, I don’t have a horse in this race. I am watching it for the beauty of the game. It is beautiful.

“Steve Myers, CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, presented the LHC schedule for the next 10 years today in the first plenary presentation at the International Conference on High Energy Physics. Myers also presented his predictions for the amount of data that the LHC may collect over the same time period. These predictions over the next few years will be scrutinized closely by scientists at Fermilab’s Tevatron, who have proposed extending the accelerator’s life for a further 3 years.” Read full Story»

via symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » Schedule for LHC’s next few years revealed.

Are We Living Inside a Black Hole?

This is a new one. I don’t know about you, but I will have fun thinking abut this one this weekend. My definition of fun is different than most.

“Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein’s general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account.” Read Full Story

via Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? | Popular Science.

Bubbles!

I am a little obsessed with bubbles. As you may have read on this blog, I had an awakening a couple of years back. It was brought on by many factors including physical and mental trauma. Not the least of which were a couple of mini-strokes that happened while I was “dead” or being revived. The point being that my brain seems to have rewired itself in some strange and wonderful ways. Before this enlightenment, I had almost no knowledge of quantum physics, astrophysics, particle physics, etc. So, When I had this eye-opening experience and all these pieces started falling into place, my mind started racing out of control. It was almost too much to handle. I have never been a very disciplined person. I said “Shit, I need to learn to meditate.” Once I calmed myself down, I started reading as much as I could online and watching every documentary I could find on the evolution of well… everything. I had a picture in my head that I could not articulate because I did not have the language. First, the language center of my brain is a little messed up. Second, I don’t have the education. I took one physics and one trigonometry class in high school. I think I took one advanced algebra class in college but that is it. Of course I knew of the Big Bang theory but could not discuss it in detail. My knowledge of string theory didn’t go beyond my love for the series Quantum Leap.

I knew that what I put together in my mind was important. It was something the world should know. But who the hell was I to tell anyone anything. I felt an urgency to find some word, some image, just someplace to start looking for someone to tell what was in my head. I knew it was that important. Then I saw a documentary on M-Theory. I turned to my husband and said “Everything’s OK now. They’re already working on it.” All the anxiety and urgency melted away. The thirst for knowledge did not. I still read every thing I can. (it takes a long time) And watch every documentary.

Yes I am quite aware of how utterly nuts this all sounds. I am myself a skeptic. If I read this on someones blog I would cry “bullshit”. But I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I am not trying to sell anything. I don’t care if you believe me or not. For a long time I was convinced I was alone in this experience. Upon further research, it is quite common.

Now for the obsession with bubbles. BUBBLES! Forgive me. Yes, it does have to do with bubble universe theory. It is also a very sweet inside joke with my husband having to do the movie Finding Nemo and of course the character Bubbles. We are now the type of happy couple I use to make fun of back when I was a cynical person.

Parallel Universes is a 2001 documentary produced by the BBC’s Horizon series. The documentary has to do with parallel universes, string theory, M theory, supergravity, and other theoretical physics concepts. Participants include Michio Kaku, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Burt Ovrut, Alan Guth and other physicists. It is not the documentary I was watching that day, but it is one of our favorites. If you have not seen it please take the time. Even if you have no interest in physics. It will rock your world. If you have seen it. It is worth another viewing. We have watched it several times.

 

Our Queer Universe

This is one of my favorite TED talks by Richard Dawkins. It is a very beautiful way of explaining the way we evolved to look at the world.

A reason for capitalists to care about Quantum Physics.

ScienceDaily (2010-06-28) — An Australian-led team has developed the most efficient quantum memory for light in the world, taking us closer to a future of super-fast computers and communication secured by the laws of physics. So there is your capitalists/consumers/war mongers benefit for funding research into quantum physics.

Has Quantum Mechanics gone mainstream?

I am not really sure how mainstream The Crossword Blog of The New York Times is, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see a Numberplay puzzle based on Spooky Action at a Distance.  I think it is great when mainstream media makes physics, and science in general, fun and entertaining. I already think they are but for some reason the general public finds quantum mechanics dull. We need to find more ways like this to wake them up.