Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

Reliable Physics Prophesy...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 26, 2012 at 9:13am

Electricity can run between two superconductors even through electrically insulating barriers (yellow). Now researchers have found that a magnetic field (curved arrows) can switch the amount of heat that flows from a hot side (red) to a cold one (blue).

The strange world of quantum mechanics just got a little stranger with the discovery that a magnetic field can control the flow of heat from from one body to another. First predicted nearly 50 years ago, the effect might some day form the basis of a new generation of electronic devices that use heat rather than charge as the information carrier.

The research stems from the work of physicist Brian Josephson, who in 1962 predicted that electrons could 'tunnel' between two superconductors separated by a thin layer of insulator — a process forbidden in classical physics. The Josephson junction was subsequently built and used to make superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), which are now sold commercially as ultra-sensitive magnetometers.

In the latest work, Francesco Giazotto and María José Martínez-Pérez at the NEST nanoscience institute in Pisa, Italy, measured the devices’ thermal behaviour — that is, how the electrons inside them transfer heat. The duo heated one end of a SQUID several micrometres long and monitored the temperature of an electrode connected to it. A SQUID consists of two y-shaped pieces of superconductor joined together to form a loop, but with two thin pieces of insulating material sandwiched in between (see figure); as the researchers varied the magnetic field passing through the loop, the amount of heat flowing through the device also changed. The effect was in line with a theory put forward by Kazumi Maki and Allan Griffin in 1965.

Nature: Magnetism flips heat flow

Validation of long-predicted quantum effect points the way to thermal electronics.
Edwin Cartlidge

The Top Ten...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 24, 2012 at 8:47am

The Physics World award for the 2012 Breakthrough of the Year goes "to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider". Nine other research initiatives are highly commended and cover topics ranging from energy harvesting to precision cosmology.

Of course, topping the list:

CERN discovers Higgs-like boson

Physics World: Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2012

Black Hole Firewalls...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 23, 2012 at 7:28am

An illustration of a galaxy with a supermassive black hole shooting out jets of radio waves.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Alice and Bob, beloved characters of various thought experiments in quantum mechanics, are at a crossroads. The adventurous, rather reckless Alice jumps into a very large black hole, leaving a presumably forlorn Bob outside the event horizon — a black hole’s point of no return, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Conventionally, physicists have assumed that if the black hole is large enough, Alice won’t notice anything unusual as she crosses the horizon. In this scenario, colorfully dubbed “No Drama,” the gravitational forces won’t become extreme until she approaches a point inside the black hole called the singularity. There, the gravitational pull will be so much stronger on her feet than on her head that Alice will be “spaghettified.”

Now a new hypothesis is giving poor Alice even more drama than she bargained for. If this alternative is correct, as the unsuspecting Alice crosses the event horizon, she will encounter a massive wall of fire that will incinerate her on the spot. As unfair as this seems for Alice, the scenario would also mean that at least one of three cherished notions in theoretical physics must be wrong.

Scientific American: Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists

If a new hypothesis about black hole firewalls proves correct, at least one of three cherished notions in theoretical physics must be wrong.

By Jennifer Ouellette and Simons Science News

Tau Ceti...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 22, 2012 at 6:30am

...yet another reason to live and discover something close to 'warp drive' (OK, maybe a tenth light speed to begin with). A pick-me-up post, post the now-deflated Mayan apocalypse:

A sun-like star in our solar system's backyard may host five planets, including one perhaps capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study reports.

Astronomers have detected five possible alien planets circling the star Tau Ceti, which is less than 12 light-years from Earth — a mere stone's throw in the cosmic scheme of things. One of the new found worlds appears to orbit in Tau Ceti's habitable zone, a range of distances from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface.

Space.com: Potentially Habitable Planet Detected Around Nearby Star

"Still Here": by Langston Hughes (and so are you)

The Skinny...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 21, 2012 at 7:00am

I am NOT giving up! This destructive myth has gone too long.

The above embed is from the SETI institute: From the people listening for "little green men." If an invasion were forthcoming; if a rogue planet were bearing down on us (it would be visible by now), they'd be killing themselves to get to a microphone: it'd be the last Nobel Prize awarded for the most trans-formative news ever! If THESE guys are saying it's bunk; it's bunk!

Wikipedia says this is an incomplete list. Good Lord, it's 22 pages long! The sad part is, it's that long because after tomorrow, there are even MORE predictions. PT Barnum never said "there's a sucker born every minute" (his competitor did), but you get the idea.

Dude; madam: chill. Please do just: chill. Get a massage. Switch to herbal and decaf. WOO-SAH!

I do lean towards this one at the very bottom of the Wikipedia list: in 10¹⁰⁰ years, we either won't be around, or evolved to enter another dimension. Either way, blogging will be moot, and you and I won't be here to witness whatever at that future time is the current form of electronic entertainment and information exchange 100 zero years hence.

That's as much soothsaying as I want to do!

Apocalypse has come to mean "disaster," yet the literal translation is "un-covering"; a "disclosure of knowledge"; "revealing." It is from that the last book of the Bible, "Revelation" takes its name.

It will be revealing what we'll all feel like tomorrow: I will be blogging, the earth will be spinning, and certain persons in bunkers will have a lot of beans, rice and MREs to contend with...and certain hucksters that have made a HUGE amount of money on this fraud will fall silent as they book their flights to Bahamian shores...until tomorrow, I'll be:

USA Today: Maya 'end of world' is a mistranslation, Dan Vergano

The Long...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 20, 2012 at 6:53am

NASA: NASA Science; Google Plus
Institute of Physics: 2012 (evidence we'll all have a few more Mondays)

The Short...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 19, 2012 at 2:08pm

NASA: NASA Science

Bionic Woman...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 18, 2012 at 8:06am

Unrivaled control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralyzed woman's thoughts, a US study says.

Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralyzed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm.

Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal.

Experts in the field said it was an "unprecedented performance" and a "remarkable achievement".

Jan was diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration 13 years ago and progressively lost control of her body. She is now unable to move her arms or legs.

BBC News: Paralyzed woman's thoughts control robotic arm

Home Going...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 17, 2012 at 9:00am

http://www.scribd.com/doc/117118808/20-Were-Children

http://www.scribd.com/doc/116931183/What-Threat-Are-Children

p-i-n Fashion...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 17, 2012 at 8:18am

A cross-sectional image is shown of a silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities. Shown are the layers -- n+, i, and p+ -- that have been deposited inside the pore of the fiber. (Image: Badding lab, Pennsylvania State University)

University Park, PA and Southampton, England--Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Southampton have created a silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities that is scalable to many meters in length and has a bend radius of about 400 microns. Possible in the future: weaving together solar-cell silicon wires to create flexible, curved, or twisted solar fabrics. The findings are posted in an early online edition of Advanced Materials and will be published on a future date in the journal's print edition.

The team's new findings build on earlier work addressing the challenge of merging optical fibers with silicon chips. Rather than merge a flat chip with a round optical fiber, the team found a way to build a new kind of optical fiber with its own integrated electronic component, bypassing the need to integrate fiber-optics with chip-based electronics. To do this, they used high-pressure chemical vapor deposition to deposit semiconducting materials directly into holes in optical fibers.

Laser Focus World:
Silicon p-i-n junction optical fibers could lead to photovoltaic fabrics

Celestial Incubator...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 16, 2012 at 8:38am

Artist's impression of a protostar, with its jets of outflowing matter, protoplanetary disk, and envelope of gas and dust.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)

In their early stages of formation, the objects that will eventually become stars are small. They grow by gathering material from the surrounding cloud of gas. At least, that's what current theories tell us what happens. Due to the difficulty of resolving star systems during their formative years, most observations have been from later periods of their evolution, after the protostar has reached a substantial fraction of its final size and mass.

A new observation has revealed the youngest protostar yet observed. John J. Tobin and colleagues measured the properties of the newborn star and its environment, determining that it had only accreted about 20 percent of the matter surrounding it, and hasn't even begun nuclear fusion. Based on this, the protostar was likely no more than 300,000 years old at the time of observation, with the distinct possibility that it was even younger.

Ars Technica: Astronomers discover youngest protostar yet observed, Matthew Francis

The Danger of a Single Story...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 15, 2012 at 8:30am

I pulled the scheduled post on p-i-n diode technology. It will appear on Monday.

Nigerian Novelist Chimamanda Adichie spoke at TED on a subject from which I title this posting (and give her credit), related to the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. It is east of Danbury, for me merely 30 - 45 minutes drive from me in New York.

Ms. Adichie was speaking on the power of ignorance with respect to stereotypes. Linda Christensen, following this theme as well, encouraged her African American and Latino students to express their experiences in personal essays.

We are getting bits and pieces of a story and calls for reactions; bills. All that may come to pass eventually, but some things to consider, as a single story isn't the full picture:

Doomsday: a lot of angst and hype about next Friday being suddenly 10^100 years into the future with imminent, hypo thermal death to the universe. At least that's the conventional science regarding the universe's end -- and NOT the hype. The good news is by THAT distant time, we'll all be gone (and I no longer blogging) when this occurs: just not next Friday.
Active shooter training: we're going to have to think about this. Places like Israel search you before you enter...the mall. That's not comfortable for US residents to think about, just as taking off our shoes and pat searches in airports still are not comfortable post-9/11, but we may have to think about and earnestly consider things we'd rather not.
Mental health: it amazes me that we'd never think of walking about with an obviously broken arm, pierced skin, blood streaming out of an open wound, yet we HIDE mental health issues. We stigmatize those that want to seek help as if admittance of a problem would be "career limiting." We spend more time on Facebook and "words with friends" when we need to speak to one another; see a play versus a movie; go to dinner at a restaurant and talk to one another.
Gun control: we're going to have to debate this (unlike both candidates' dodge in the last election cycle). Debate: A formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward. Instead of dismissing occurrences as "isolated"; this is becoming too frequent to ignore.

And one in particular, who can no longer...

Extended Entanglements...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 13, 2012 at 6:00am

To verify entanglement among the three photons, the physicists measured the times that the photons arrived at a detector. This 2D histogram shows that groups of three photons are all localized to a small region, indicating strong correlations in the arrival times of the three photons. Image credit: L. K. Shalm, et al. ©2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited

The physicists, from the University of Waterloo and the University of Calgary, have published their paper on three-photon energy-time entanglement in a recent issue of Nature Physics. As the physicists explain, this new form of entanglement is the three-photon version of the famous EPR correlations for continuous variables (e.g., position and momentum) between two particles. The EPR thought experiment, published in 1935, raised questions about the fundamental concepts underlying the young theory of quantum mechanics. "The Heisenberg uncertainty principle forbids one from simultaneously discovering both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary accuracy," lead author Krister Shalm of the University of Waterloo told Phys.org. "EPR pointed out that, if you create a pair of entangled particles, it is possible to measure both the position and momentum of both of them with arbitrary precision. It is still impossible to learn both the position and momentum of each of the individual particles, but, instead, we can learn information about the total position and momentum they share. Entangled particles, in some sense, are the ultimate team players. They lose their own individual identity with all the information in the system contained in the correlations."

Phys.org: Physicists extend entanglement in Einstein experiment, Lisa Zyga

AGU...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 12, 2012 at 1:52pm

12.12.12: The last time this date, or repetition of dates will occur again until January 1, 2101 (the 01.01.01 of the 22^nd Century). The Astronomical Society of the Pacific proclaims today Anti-Doomsday Day. There's a concert for Hurricane Sandy relief.

AGU is the American Geophysical Union. Yesterday, I posted Scientific American's assertion that we've become essentially two camps: scientists and non-scientists, or (I think) more accurately: those who trust The Scientific Method and its conclusions, and those -- for various reason -- who do not.

Dan Satterfield is the author of the blog (link below). He is a meteorologist/weatherman with 32 years of experience.

He advises: read the blog post, then watch the embed Carl Sagan lecture from AGU's annual meeting.

"We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." Carl Sagan

American Geophysical Union: IPCC Climate Forecast from 1990 - Amazingly Accurate
Astronomical Society of the Pacific: Anti-Doomsday Day

Utopia Planitia...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 11, 2012 at 8:42am

Utopia Planitia (Latin: "Nowhere Plain") is the largest recognized impact basin on Mars and in the solar system with an estimated diameter of 3300 km,[1] and is the Martian region where the Viking 2 lander touched down and began exploring on September 3, 1976. It is located at the antipode of Argyre Planitia, centered at 49.7°N 118.0°E. It is in the Casius quadrangle and the Cebrenia quadrangle of Mars.

Many rocks at Utopia Planitia appear perched, as if wind removed much of the soil at their bases.[2][3] A hard surface crust is formed by solutions of minerals moving up through soil and evaporating at the surface.[4] Some areas of the surface exhibit what is called "Scalloped topography," a surface that seems to have been carved out by an ice cream scoop. This surface is thought to have formed by the degradation of an ice-rich permafrost. (Wikipedia) Also known in Star Trek lore, the place for building Federation starships.

Utopia Planitia shipyards

Hence, the appropriate title for the following from Scientific American:

In 1993, Americans elected the first physicist to Congress: Vern Ehlers, a Republican from Michigan. Just six years later, former assistant director of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, joined him. And in 2008, Fermilab physicist and Illinois Democrat Bill Foster joined them, only to lose re-election in 2010 before regaining his seat this year. At that rate, Holt joked to an audience of mostly chemists at Princeton University on November 9, “By mid-century, the population of Congress would be physicists.”

But that’s a “slow way” to inject scientific thinking into the political process, Holt argued. “I wish we could get more Americans and, hence, their representatives thinking like scientists, which means basing our conclusions on evidence,” he said.

That laudable goal may prove even more challenging than turning a physicist into an electrifying political speaker. Because humans are not born statisticians, thinking scientifically is both technically and psychologically challenging . We prefer a story (anecdote!) to a compilation of statistics (data!). The modern world, as Holt observed of C.P. Snow’s famous analysis decades ago, has become divided into two disparate camps: scientists and non-scientists.

This may be most apparent currently on the subject of climate change...“The evidence for climate change is strong enough that we should be taking very bold and very expensive action because the costs of not taking action will be even more expensive,” Holt argued, suggesting that legislation to combat climate change “probably will be undertaken again, I would guess relatively soon in the next Congress.”

Scientific American:
Representative Rush Holt's Advice to His Fellow Scientists on Politics
David Biello

Silica Conductor...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 10, 2012 at 9:01am

Optics and Photonics

Usually, if you blast enough light into an insulator, it will blow up quickly or break down slowly. But today, a pair of papers published in Nature describe using very intense femtosecond laser pulses that not only do not damage the material, but also induce electrical currents in an otherwise insulating dielectric—specifically a fused silica prism (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11567; Nature, Advanced DOI: 10.1038/nature11720).

The work is exciting because insulators that can quickly change into conductors (and back into insulators again) could be used for signal switching. Today's fastest semiconductor switching is measured in terahertz, but light-induced switching in insulators, such as demonstrated in these papers, could work at petahertz rates—more than 10,000 times the rate of current electronics. In the near-term, it could also make possible petahertz (10¹⁵ hertz) metrology.

Optics an Photonics: Ultrafast Light Turns Insulator into a Conductor, Yvonne Carts-Powell

Debunking Doomsday...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 10, 2012 at 8:30am

In 12 days...it will be the Winter Solstice for the northern hemisphere.

It will be the shortest day on the calendar; five days before Christmas/Saturnalia/Yuletide, Kwanzaa: it will be three days post the end of Hanukkah. It will be as it's always been.

Then, as it always has (and always will for some time), the days will start getting incrementally longer. Spring will arrive, temperatures will warm and flowers will blossom. We'll have to deal with the weather: post Katrina, post Rita, post Irene, post Sandy.

There is an eventual end of things just as there is an eventual end of us as living creatures.

Times arrow is orchestrated by entropy: the tendency for things to go from order to disorder, from hard, strong and young to the latter opposite as we age. Due to entropy, you can smell perfume sprayed out of a bottle (otherwise, it would either drop ungracefully in a lump on the floor, or never leave its container).

I am concerned...and saddened that so many young are led by this media hype to dread the future; to contemplate Hamlet's soliloquy. You have so much to live for...discover...enjoy. I lived with doomsday clocks and duck-and-cover drills due to a Soviet threat that now no longer exists.

Merry-go-round

I urge educators and parents to share the contents of the link below with your children. When the young are injured by myth as credible as Y2K was for spin, sport or ratings...it is no longer a game!

The surest cure to manipulated ignorance...is knowledge.

David Morrison
Director, Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe
NASA Senior Scientist

There is widespread and unnecessary fear of doomsday on December 21, 2012. Some people worry about a Maya prophesy of the end of the world, others fear a variety of astronomical threats such as collision with a rogue planet. Opinion polls suggest that one in ten Americans worry about whether they will survive past Dec 21 of this year, and middle-school teachers everywhere report that many of their students are fearful of a coming apocalypse.

SETI Institute: Doomsday 2012 Factsheet

NOT a Wormhole...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 8, 2012 at 9:05am

Physics World - a 'solar energy funnel'

Computer simulations by researchers in the US and China could lead to solar cells that work efficiently across a broad range of the solar spectrum. Dubbed a "solar energy funnel", the new concept offers a way of using strain to modify the band gap of a semiconductor so that it responds to light within a range of different wavelengths. However, the funnels have yet to be made and tested in the lab – some researchers suggest using them in practical devices could prove problematic.

The basic operating principle of a solar cell is that an electron in the valence band of a semiconductor material absorbs a photon and jumps across an energy "band gap" into the conduction band. The result is an electron and a positively charged hole, which do not move separately through the semiconductor but instead form a bound state called an exciton. To extract electrical energy, the electron is collected at one electrode and the hole at another.

Light from the Sun comes in a range of wavelengths and therefore an ideal solar cell should be very efficient at converting this broad spectrum into electricity. Unfortunately, semiconductors with a fixed band gap are not very good at doing this. In particular, longer-wavelength photons do not have enough energy to make an electron to jump the band gap and will not be converted into electrical energy. Photons with energies greater than the band gap will be converted, but regardless of their energy they will only create just one electron–hole pair. Any excess energy will be dissipated in the semiconductor as heat.

Physics World: Semiconductor funnel could boost solar cells

The Wonder Years...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 7, 2012 at 6:41am

Physics World - How ULAS J1120+0641 may have appeared

For the first time, astronomers have determined the chemical composition of gas from the first billion years of the universe's life. The gas consists mostly of neutral hydrogen atoms, which means that it may mark the era before stellar radiation began ionizing the universe. Furthermore, the gas shows no signs of the heavy elements that are forged in stars so it may contain only the light elements produced by the Big Bang.

"We are starting to look back to the epoch that is probably when the first stars were turning on," says Robert Simcoe, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who built the instrument that acquired the spectrum of the far-off gas. "This is the very first [chemical] measurement that anybody has made in any environment at these early times."

The Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago, showered the cosmos with hydrogen and helium. Aside from a trace of primordial lithium, heavier elements – which astronomers call metals – arose later, after stars formed and exploded, casting oxygen, iron and other metals into space. Furthermore, the first stars radiated extreme ultraviolet light that ionized gas, tearing electrons from the hydrogen nuclei. The universe is still ionized today.

**********

"And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos we've begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos."

Carl Sagan

Physics World: Ancient gas sheds light on universe's first billion years

Counter Argument...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on December 6, 2012 at 6:58am

Physics arXiv

Part of science is the point/counter-point of differing views. It is part of the process of the Scientific Method. Famous recollection: the argument between Einstein and Bohr on Heisenberg and Quantum Mechanics. Now an accepted part of physics, Einstein ultimately lost.

To the Google-it-downloading public, this can be confusing and frustrating. However, this is science: examination leads to different theories; theories are vigorously debated, verified or refuted. Then, everyone in the science community decides to go in the direction of the new paradigm. Probably why a lot of scientist (at least in the US) don't go into politics.

One of the driving forces in modern science is the idea that the Universe “computes” the future, taking some initial state as an input and generating future states as an output. This is a powerful approach that has produced much insight. Some scientists go as far as to say that the Universe is a giant computer.

Is this a reasonable assumption? Today, Ken Wharton at San Jose State University in California, makes an important argument that it is not. His fear is that the idea of the universe as a computer is worryingly anthropocentric. “It’s basically the assumption that the way we humans solve physics problems must be the way the universe actually operates,” he says.

What’s more, the idea has spread through science without any proper consideration of its validity or any examination of the alternatives. “This assumption…is so strong that many physicists can’t even articulate what other type of universe might be conceptually possible,” says Wharton.

Physics arXiv: Why The Universe Is Not a Computer