Topics: Diversity in Science, Optical Tweezers, Laser, Nobel Prize, Women in Science
I'm pretty sure I was in the throw of midterms. I did not miss it, just didn't have time to post about it.
Tools made of light
The inventions being honored this year have revolutionized laser physics. Extremely small objects and incredibly rapid processes are now being seen in a new light. Advanced precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas of research and a multitude of industrial and medical applications.
Arthur Ashkin invented optical tweezers that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers. This new tool allowed Ashkin to realise an old dream of science fiction – using the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects. He succeeded in getting laser light to push small particles towards the centre of the beam and to hold them there. Optical tweezers had been invented.
A major breakthrough came in 1987, when Ashkin used the tweezers to capture living bacteria without harming them. He immediately began studying biological systems and optical tweezers are now widely used to investigate the machinery of life.
Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland paved the way towards the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind. Their revolutionary article was published in 1985 and was the foundation of Strickland’s doctoral thesis.
New York Magazine (the home state of our current orange nightmare) couldn't be more stark: your futures are being determined by ossified, geriatric creatures that KNOW they will not live to see the impact of their disastrous decisions on the environment, stoking wars, cutting taxes for their wealthy benefactors and themselves (ballooning the federal deficit); packing the Supreme Court with right wing, misogynist and sexist ideologues that don't hold your views on fairness, equality and will influence your lives for at least two generations. Along with subverting our electoral process in 2016 with Russia, the cover up of the apparent murder and brutal dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi (15 must be the "magic number" in Saudi Arabia). This may tie to Jared Kushner being in the Saudi prince's "pocket," usually meaning he owes him, likely for a business loan that salvaged his New York property, ominously addressed "666 Fifth Avenue." Whether agnostics, atheists or theists, that's a lot to digest. I list these concerns because you will only get older, and the world they're destroying you will inherit, in whatever condition it's left in, however long it lasts.
Notice the message is fear: I saw a commercial warning of socialism, open borders, MS-13 paid for by a conservative PAC. I saw a bus load of seniors in Georgia getting on a bus to vote being stopped for no crime other than voting. Native Americans in North Dakota are having their votes blocked by legal fiat. Note the distinct dichotomy in the definitions of democracy and fascism - they're obviously leaning towards the latter. Parkland shooting survivors and their activism terrifies them. Since 2015, it's been observed they are getting older and dying off. The heady days of Ronald Reagan taking 61 to 30 voters between 18 to 24 is well-past their better days and jump shots. A lot of things back then aligned with that popularity: nostalgia was "Laverne and Shirley"; "Happy Days" "Back to the Future" and "Family Ties" with Michael J. Fox as a young urban professional - conservatism was "cool" but it's overstayed its shelf life. Democracy only worked for them when they were in the numerical majority - the tables turn circa 2042, and by the blatantly demonstrable voter suppression activities WITHIN the United States, they're panicking early now. The ONLY way they can stay in power is to suppress the youth and minority vote, and maybe collude with a foreign power.
Speaking of the environment: we're losing insects around the world at an alarming rate due to climate change. The meddlesome critters are an important part of our food chain, which if you're capable of reading this post, you're squarely at the top of it. Destroy the foundation; it eventually drives up the price of food, then inhibits the access to it. That is a recipe for starvation, poverty, hyper income inequality, wars...and extinction.
*****
The capitalized term First Contact, in Human context, was used to specifically refer to the first official publicly and globally known contact between Humans and extraterrestrials. The First Contact took place on the evening of April 5, 2063, when a Vulcan survey ship, the T'Plana-Hath, having detected the warp signature of the Phoenix, touched down in Bozeman, central Montana, where they met with the Phoenix's designer and pilot, Zefram Cochrane. This event was generally referred to as the defining moment in Human history, eventually paving the way for a unified world government and, later, the United Federation of Planets. The event also became an annual holiday called First Contact Day.Memory Alpha - First Contact
I've always been dubious about this platitude in Trek mythology, that somehow knowing that we're "not alone" in the universe was some kind of unifying force multiplier to eternal (and secular) Kumbaya and Koinonia. The screaming at immigrant children at the border BEFORE the 2016 elections and kiddie concentration camps now leave my optimism in doubt. Roddenberry was playfully imaginative, but Pollyannish at best.
Star Trek was born in the 1960s as was the Civil Rights movement, which involved hoses, bricks, fire bombings and assassinations. It was during the Cold War with (ironically) Russia, and the notion that "duck and cover" drills wouldn't ultimately save us from extinction. So, it was a brief respite from the existentialism that gripped most in those days. Someone who looked like us might survive our own pride and hubris. There could be life after half-life.
*****
The belief that everything in the universe is part of the same fundamental whole exists throughout many cultures and philosophical, religious, spiritual, and scientific traditions, as captured by the phrase 'all that is.' The Nobel winner Erwin Schrödinger once observed that quantum physics is compatible with the notion that there is indeed a basic oneness of the universe. Therefore, despite it seeming as though the world is full of many divisions, many people throughout the course of human history and even today truly believe that individual things are part of some fundamental entity.
People who believe that everything is fundamentally one differ in crucial ways from those who do not. In general, those who hold a belief in oneness have a more inclusive identity that reflects their sense of connection with other people, nonhuman animals, and aspects of nature that are all thought to be part of the same "one thing." This has some rather broad implications.
First, this finding is relevant to our current fractured political landscape. It is very interesting that those who reported a greater belief in oneness were also more likely to regard other people like members of their own group and to identify with all of humanity. There is an abundance of identity politics these days, with people believing that their own ideology is the best one, and a belief that those who disagree with one's own ideology are evil or somehow less than human.
It might be beneficial for people all across the political spectrum to recognize and hold in mind a belief in oneness even as they are asserting their values and political beliefs. Only having "compassion" for those who are in your in-group, and vilifying or even becoming violent toward those who you perceive as the out-group, is not only antithetical to world peace more broadly, but is also counter-productive to political progress that advances the greater good of all humans on this planet.
Quaint, and for a better time, but until we get there...
65,853,625 voted for the sane candidate.
62,985,105 voted for the orange fascist tweeting on the loo and defecating from his pie hole in a breathtaking achievement of daily, all-time Olympic-level lying.
"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." John 8:44 NIV (yes, I'm trolling)
This election, I'm asking the "silent majority"...to give a shit. It's literally your futures.
Topics: Chemistry, Diversity, Diversity in Science, NASA, Nobel Prize, Women in Science
Click here to read about Frances Arnold's Nobel Prize.
"What the heck does Mom want? Oh, Mom probably doesn't understand the time difference, she's in Dallas right now and is probably still thinking it's California time…maybe she just wants me to go check on her cats…" A litany of mundane explanations ran through James Bailey's bleary mind at 3:23 a.m. on October 3 when he was awakened from a deep sleep by three phone calls from his mother's cell number. Bailey silenced his phone for the first two, getting grumpier with each ring. Call #3 did the trick. He picked up the phone and said groggily, "What do you want?" With great excitement and maybe a tinge of impatience, his mother said, "I wish you had picked up your phone, but I just won the Nobel Prize."
Bailey bolted upright, thrilled by the news and fueled by adrenaline. "I was overjoyed for her. It's fairly difficult to verbalize how I feel," he said. He never did manage to go back to sleep that night. In a few hours, he'd be able to share the news with his colleagues when he arrived at his job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Building 179, High Bay 1 -- the clean room where he is a flight technician working on Mars 2020.
Bailey's mother is Frances Arnold, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. Her 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors her pioneering work in creating new, improved enzymes in the laboratory using the principles of evolution. Arnold shares the prize with two other scientists.
Arnold's bio has an abundance of academic milestones and stellar awards. She was the first woman to receive the 2011 Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering. She is also the first woman and one of just a few individuals elected to all three branches of the National Academies: for Medicine, Sciences and Engineering.
Bailey traveled a different path than his mother to his job at JPL. Growing up in Pasadena, he didn't thrive in conventional schools, so he pursued vocational training in welding and machining. After high school, he worked on high-performance cars at a local shop. At 20, he joined the Army, where he was trained as a Blackhawk helicopter mechanic and became part of a flight crew. After wrapping up six years of military service, including crucial work on medical evacuation helicopter teams in Afghanistan, he learned JPL was looking for people with an aviation background to work as flight technicians. Bailey fit the bill, and he was hired.
In order to achieve the edge computing that people talk about in a host of applications including 5G networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), you need to pack a lot of processing power into comparatively small devices.
The way forward for that idea will be to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) computing techniques—for so-called AI at the edge. While some are concerned about how technologists will tackle AI for applications beyond traditional computing—and some are wringing their hands over which country will have the upper hand in this new frontier—the technology is still pretty early in its development cycle.
A new type of electronic noise has been discovered by a team of physicists and chemists in Israel and Canada. Dubbed “delta-T noise”, the effect occurs when two sides of a tiny electrical junction are at held at different temperatures. As electronic devices become ever smaller, the researchers predict that delta-T noise could become increasingly problematic. The good news is that delta-T noise could be used to measure temperature differences in nanometer-scale objects – something that is extremely difficult to do.
When physicists think of noise it is not the clamor from a pop concert or a busy road, but rather electrical signals that are an intrinsic property of a device. For almost 100 years, physicists have known about two sorts of fundamental noise in electrical signals. Thermal noise is proportional to temperature and is a result of the random motion of electrons. This creates fluctuations in electrical current even if there is no applied voltage and the average current is zero. Thermal noise can have negative consequences in a circuit, but it can also be used to measure the absolute temperature of an object. The second type of noise is called shot noise and does require an applied voltage. Shot noise occurs at very low currents when the discrete nature of electrons causes fluctuations in current.
The idea of delta-T noise first came to Oren Tal of the Weizmann Institute of Science when he was studying the effect of thermal noise on a molecular junction. The junction comprised a single molecule between two electrodes, which were at different temperatures. He realized that in addition to thermal noise, there may also be a noise associated with the temperature difference.
Could Earth's moon have its own moon? Science says: in theory. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Topics: Astrophysics, Exoplanets, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
I couldn't compound the two words in the post title (as in the article) and keep a straight face. Although, someone will likely write fiction about double system moons (if they haven't already).
True to form, the Internet has endeavored to name an unnamed thing, and the results are hilarious. From the people who brought you Boaty McBoatface— the Arctic research drone that has already returned some very interesting discoveries from the world's coldest abysses — here come moonmoons: moons that orbit other moons.
Moonmoons — also known online as submoons, moonitos, grandmoons, moonettes and moooons — may not exist in our solar system or any other. However, according to a pair of astronomers writing in the preprint journal arXiv.org earlier this week, the concept of a moon hosting its own mini-moon is, at least, plausible.
Abstract
Each of the giant planets within the Solar System has large moons but none of these moons have their own moons (which we call submoons). By analogy with studies of moons around short-period exoplanets, we investigate the dynamical stability of submoons. We find that 10 km-scale submoons can only survive around large (1000 km-scale) moons on wide-separation orbits. Tidal dissipation destabilizes the orbits of submoons around moons that are small or too close to their host planet; this is the case for most of the Solar System’s moons. A handful of known moons are, however, capable of hosting long-lived submoons: Saturn’s moons Titan and Iapetus, Jupiter’s moon Callisto, and Earth’s Moon. Based on its inferred mass and orbital separation, the newly-discovered exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b-I can, in principle, host submoons, although its large orbital inclination may pose a difficulty for dynamical stability. The existence, or lack thereof, of submoons, may yield important constraints on satellite formation and evolution in planetary systems.
Topics: Civil Rights, Diversity in Science, Existentialism, Human Rights, Star Trek, Women in Science
Kathryn Janeway was the Captain of the Starship Voyager, lost in the Delta Quadrant that managed to have a seven-year run and eventually get back to Federation space for her promotion to Admiral.
Alyanna Nechayev was introduced at the "top of the pecking order" being Jean Luc Picard's immediate boss, often showing up to give him an assignment, chew him out or give him a disapproving "evil eye" (you've got to admit, those eyes were phasers set way beyond stun).
Benjamin Lafayette Sisko checked all boxes: a black man, single father; Starfleet Commander and widower. I was a fan of Avery Brooks in "Spencer For Hire" and "A Man Called Hawk," introducing my sons to him in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
To move each story arc along, backgrounds weren't deeply explored, mimicking a lot of the reasons for physics-defying technologies like warp drive, Heisenberg Uncertainty-violating transporters and replicators. There was a World War III before warp drive (unfortunately); there was probably a fictional equivalent of #MeToo before Janeway and Nechayev ascendancies; there were Bell Riots and on our actual time line - a Black Lives Matter movement - before a Benjamin Sisko.
Alynna Nechayev was a Human Starfleet flag officer during the late-24th century. She spent much of the 2360s and early 2370s dealing with issues near the Cardassian border. (TNG: "Chain of Command, Part I", "Journey's End", "Preemptive Strike"; DS9: "The Maquis, Part II")
Nechayev was a significant figure in Starfleet's dealings with the Cardassian Union and a fierce advocate of Federation security. She was Captain Jean-Luc Picard's direct superior, but her working relationship with him was poor.
In 2369, while serving as a Vice Admiral, she ordered Picard to relinquish command of the USS Enterprise-D to Captain Edward Jellico, the latter having experience with Cardassians in the past and having worked to establish the original armistice of the Federation-Cardassian War. She assigned Picard to a special operation to infiltrate a Cardassian installation on Celtris III. After Jellico's negotiations with Gul Lemec worsened, she authorized his actions against the Cardassian warships in the McAllister C-5 Nebula, at the risk of provoking open war and abandoning Picard. (TNG: "Chain of Command, Part I", "Chain of Command, Part II") [1]
*****
Kathryn Janeway was a 24th century Starfleet officer, most noted for her service as captain of the starship USS Voyager. She became the first Federation captain to successfully traverse the Delta Quadrant, encountering dozens of new planets and civilizations over the course of seven years. While there, she and her crew also survived numerous encounters with the Borg. By 2379, she was a Vice Admiral at Starfleet Command. (VOY: "Caretaker", "Endgame", "Friendship One", "Scorpion", "Scorpion, Part II"; Star Trek Nemesis)
Kathryn Janeway was born on May 20 in Bloomington, Indiana, on Earth. (VOY: "Year of Hell", "Imperfection") Her father was Vice Admiral Janeway and she had one sibling, a sister, who she described as the artist of the family. (VOY: "Sacred Ground", "Coda", "The Killing Game") Her mother was still alive as of 2378. (VOY: "Author, Author") [2]
*****
"So you're the commander of Deep Space 9... and the Emissary of the Prophets. Decorated combat officer, widower, father, mentor and... oh, yes, the man who started the war with the Dominion. Somehow I thought you'd be taller..."
– Senator Vreenak, 2374 ("In the Pale Moonlight")
By the 2020s, the American government – reacting to serious problems of homelessness and unemployment – created special Sanctuary Districts (essentially walled-off sections of the city grid) in most major cities. Unfortunately – while established with the benevolent intent of providing free housing and food, as well as prospects for future employment – the Sanctuaries quickly degenerated into inhumane internment camps for the poor. Even though people with criminal records were not allowed inside Sanctuaries, it didn't take long for the homeless and unemployed to be joined by the mentally ill and other, more violent, social outcasts. These groups were referred to by their slang terms – Gimmies, Dims, and Ghosts.
By late 2024, the twenty square blocks that made up Sanctuary District A had become overcrowded slums. With the records of people inside the Sanctuaries not uploaded to the planetary computer network (and therefore not accessible using an Interface), the true conditions inside were unknown to the general public. American society believed that, despite the political upheaval affecting Europe at the time, the United States was stable and had found a way to successfully deal with the social problems that had been the genesis of the Sanctuaries. An "out of sight, out of mind" mentality had set in. People in the district started to believe that their needs were forgotten. [3]
*****
To wit, each represented in science fiction what we're seeing today in this existential struggle by aspects of society that have historically been marginalized to say: we are human; #MeToo and the culmination of that struggle in actualized power.
For power to be actualized, it must first be seized. Occupy Wall Street is now a pitiful blog that hasn't been updated since August 2016. It's Reich/Right Wing counterpart - the Tea Party - not only demonstrated in the streets; they GOT elected. The Orwellian "Freedom Caucus" is now on Capital Hill making laws. "Killer Tweets" and witty Snap Chat posts will not change policy: only the grimy, dirty work of politics will accomplish that, and that needs to happen before we see a Nechayev, Janeway or Sisko on relativistic speed starships.
A lot can't be covered in 60 minutes between phasers, impossible spaceship speeds, Grandfather paradox plots and commercial sponsors.
Delegates at the first workshop on high-energy theory and gender held at CERN last month. (Courtesy: CERN)
Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, Women in Science
More than 3000 physicists have so far signed an open statement denouncing a recent talk by theoretical physicist Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa. The talk was given on 28 September at an inaugural CERN workshop on high-energy theory and gender in which he claimed that men, not women, face discrimination when seeking jobs in physics. The statement, which has been signed by Nobel laureate David Gross and other prominent scientists, calls Strumia’s arguments “morally reprehensible”.
Strumia’s presentation at CERN included graphs and tables that analyses the citation records of papers written by male and female physicists. In the talk, he stated that these data show that “top authors are man, man,…man”. He also claimed that data related to academic hiring show that women with fewer citations were being hired over men with greater numbers of citations. In one slide, Strumia, who is an associate of the theory department at CERN, claims that he was passed over for a job at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, despite having many more citations than the successful female candidate. The woman in question was in the audience at Strumia’s talk.
Preamble of The Open Statement:
We write here first to state, in the strongest possible terms, that the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate. Physics and science are part of the shared inheritance of all people, as much as art, music, and literature, and we should strive to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to become a scientist. The question of discrimination based on ascribed identity is a moral one, and we write to affirm that discrimination is not a welcome feature of our field, however pervasive it may be. It is clear that our social environment disparately affects the participation of people with ascribed identities that have been traditionally marginalized, and the fields of women’s and gender studies, science and society studies, physics education research, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and Black studies have had much to say over the years about how this marginalization operates. The thin veneer of scientific rigor with which Strumia’s talk began was followed by open discrimination and personal attacks, which we condemn unconditionally.
Fade to black: a type 1a supernova remnant as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. (Courtesy: NASA)
Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, Cosmology, Dark Matter
Primordial black holes do not account for all dark matter, according to new research by Miguel Zumalacárregui and Uroš Seljak at the University of California, Berkeley. The duo has made the best measurement yet of the abundance of black holes in the cosmos by measuring the gravitational lensing of light from type 1a supernovae. Their study puts an upper limit of 40% on how much dark matter can be accounted for by primordial black holes.
For decades, physicists have grappled with growing evidence that the formation and dynamics of galaxies and larger structures in the universe are governed by gravitational forces from unseen dark matter. While the mysterious substance appears to account for about 85% of all matter in the universe, dark-matter particles have yet to detected directly.
Abstract
The nature of dark matter (DM) remains unknown despite very precise knowledge of its abundance in the Universe. An alternative to new elementary particles postulates DM as made of macroscopic compact halo objects (MACHO) such as black holes formed in the very early Universe. Stellar-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) are subject to less robust constraints than other mass ranges and might be connected to gravitational-wave signals detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). New methods are therefore necessary to constrain the viability of compact objects as a DM candidate. Here we report bounds on the abundance of compact objects from gravitational lensing of type Ia supernovae (SNe). Current SNe data sets constrain compact objects to represent less than 35.2% (Joint Lightcurve Analysis) and 37.2% (Union 2.1) of the total matter content in the Universe, at 95% confidence level. The results are valid for masses larger than ∼ 0.01 M⊙ (solar masses), limited by the size SNe relative to the lens Einstein radius. We demonstrate the mass range of the constraints by computing magnification probabilities for realistic SNe sizes and different values of the PBH mass. Our bounds are sensitive to the total abundance of compact objects with M ≳ 0.01 M⊙ and complementary to other observational tests. These results are robust against cosmological parameters, outlier rejection, correlated noise, and selection bias. PBHs and other MACHOs are therefore ruled out as the dominant form of DM for objects associated to LIGO gravitational wave detections. These bounds constrain early-Universe models that predict stellar-mass PBH production and strengthen the case for lighter forms of DM, including new elementary particles.
Harry Taylor, 6, played with the bones of dead livestock on his family’s farm in New South Wales, Australia, an area that has faced severe drought. Credit: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images
Topics: Climate Change, Ecology, Economy, Global Warming, Politics
1.5 degrees Celsius
INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.
The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.
The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930 [1]
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Diversity, Existentialism, Human Rights, Politics
On a hot August night in 1930 a crowd gathered in front of an Indiana jail — men, women, and children shouting and jeering, demanding that the sheriff release his three prisoners. Three African-American teenagers: Tom Shipp, Abe Smith, and James Cameron — huddled inside their cells, charged with the murder of a white man and the rape of a white woman.
Some among the thousands of people in front of the jail formed a mob. They beat down the jail doors, pulled the three youths from their cells, brutally beat them, and dragged them to a tree on the courthouse square. At the last minute the mob spared Cameron, the youngest and most boyish of the trio. Smith and Shipp died, lynch ropes around their necks, their bodies hanging as the town photographer captured one of the most famous lynching photographs in American history. They weren't even hung properly. They had a noose put around their neck and were then pulled up into the tree. And one of them tried to get free so they hauled him down, broke his arms and hauled him back up again.
The third person 16-year-old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. Cameron was moved out of town, convicted as an accessory to the murder and served four years in jail. After the lynching, Cameron became a very devout man and vividly describes this day in his autobiographical account “A Time of Terror”. He became an anti-lynching activist in Indiana and, later, Wisconsin — where he founded a Black Holocaust Museum. He believed that the voice that came from the crowd to save him was the voice of an angel. Cameron died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92.
The picture was the inspiration for the poem “Strange Fruit” which was later put to song and popularized by the incredible Billy Holiday and became an early anthem for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Teacher/poet Abel Meeropol ran across this photo of the Shipp-Smith lynching a few years later in a magazine, and it so “haunted” him — his word — that he penned the anti-lynching poem “Strange Fruit”. [1]
*****
A contemporary of Kavanaugh's at Georgetown Prep told HuffPost the scene there included "14-, 15-, 16-year-olds, 17-year-old kids doing whatever the fuck they wanted to do, with no repercussions. Drugs everywhere. Partying everywhere. Drinking—just whatever we wanted to do. It was unbelievable, off the rails." At Yale, Kavanaugh belonged to a "secret society" that was basically a bunch of guys getting drunk together. To some extent, that's normal college nonsense, but after law school, Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski a federal judge later pushed out in disgrace after being accused of sexually harassing women he supervised, and showing pornography to his subordinates. (Kavanaugh has said he was unaware of this behavior, though Kozinski's nature doesn't seem to have been much of a secret; the judge ran an email list where he shared dirty jokes and stories.) When Kavanaugh was a judge himself, Amy Chua, the Yale professor most famous for writing Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, reportedly told her students it was "no accident" his female clerks "looked like models." (According to the Guardian, a student "reacted with surprise, and quickly pointed out that Chua’s own daughter was due to clerk for Kavanaugh. A source said that Chua quickly responded, saying that her own daughter would not put up with any inappropriate behavior.") [2]
*****
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph, there are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, where a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, where grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one man is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the one of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burnt to death, one of whom is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty towards women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are not merely smiling because of what they have done, but because they did it together. [3]
American "Exceptionalism"
Because we cannot resolve the past, we cannot move into a more equitable future or, as our personal mythology goes, "a more perfect union." We cannot resolve what we cannot admit has happened, and how that past scaffolds the current, blatantly-obvious present. The deified, slave-holding "founders" never wanted direct democracy. Democracies and republics are always "experiments": abstract ideals that are never meant to be concluded, or realized.
Way before the "Strange Fruit" of Abel Meeropol's poem and the iconic voice of Billy Holiday making it a classic, the first "other" were the natives found in the Americas and the Caribbean, slaughtered for the affront of existing on real estate colonizers from Europe wanted. Colonizers gave themselves the excuse they were not Christians, therefore "others" and slaughtered accordingly. As they did in Africa with fields of diamonds beneath the feet of natives there, they plundered and made themselves wealthy beyond sultans and kings. Way before that in Europe, the iconography of Christendom was purposefully changed from the Madonna and Christ child I purchased in the Vatican store during the reign of Pope John Paul III. John Paul was originally from Poland, and the iconography never changed to its Anglicized versions made popular during the international slave trade that also contributed to the colonizers' exchequer. Yeshua Ben Joseph's name was also transformed to its Greco-Roman equivalent, with a smattering of pagan folklore and sun-worship thrown into what was "the way." It was no great leap that under the circumstances "Manifest Destiny" - the precursor to exceptionalism - was a perfect mythology to mask crimes against humanity, humanity like people of color (see: Scottsboro Boys and the Central Park 5), humanity like the LGBT: humanity like...women, who are vilified by either Eve or Lilith depending on the day. Way before this present darkness of fascism, was the scaffolding of sadism.
It is quaint to see us almost on-cue wring our hands in woe. That the descendent's of those photographed smiling around the hanging corpses of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (one of many proto-selfies) would act at all differently than their forebears. Some of these photos historically were taken after church services with the preacher in attendance. The notion that calling ourselves a "Christian nation" is itself an abomination. Christian supremacy was the precursor for its ethnic-nationalism equivalent, replacing choir robes for Klan ones. This disdain for everyone other than themselves is baffling how they've managed to pull it off as long as they have, until they have a Karl Rove "permanent republican majority" for at least two generations, and the raving maniac confirmed by the fiat of a stolen Supreme Court Justice seat from his former boss, Merrick Garland may well one day become Chief Justice and put the nail in the coffin of anything resembling our better angels and usher in a kangaroo court for a soon-coming banana republic and Idiocracy.
But "better angels" is myth as well, a folklore we tell ourselves. History is only learned by historians and taught formally at universities, or self-taught by the purchase of books by actual historians (at least while we still can). All else is propaganda to reinforce the constant lies that flow from the fetid streams of bullshit mountain.
I guffaw almost to ralfing as I repeat those lies: we're the "indispensable nation," Winthrop's "city on a hill," a dung heap far above the necks of lesser humanity stamped upon by the 1% owners of the former republic. We, people of color, the LGBT and women are now the "strange fruit" hanging from fascist poplar trees.
No. This nation is exceptional for only ONE thing: cruelty.
And that exceptional savagery now has a "justice" robe and an asterisk next to his name.
But justice was never the point, nor was "law": only order (white supremacy).
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." O'Brien, "1984" by George Orwell.
Howard Zinn epilogue:
"It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice." [4]
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Diversity, Human Rights, Politics
"While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction (or, son of perdition - KJV) so that Scripture would be fulfilled." John 17:12 NIV
"Don't let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God." 2 Thessalonian 2:3, 4 NIV
I will be off blog studying for midterms next week.
I am admittedly trolling...
This is the basis for "doomsday preppers" and conspiracy theorists positing positions on "the New World Order" and Davos globalist (an anti-semitic term). It sold a lot of books, like "Christ Returns in 1988: 101 Reasons Why" (newsflash). These are the lines televangelists used to raise ungodly amounts of "seed money" from desperate people that are doing the enlarged equivalent of throwing a coin in a fountain; the visible fruit being mansions, suits, limos and leer jets. It bled into the deification of market forces in a Janus, Faustian merger of libertarianism and prosperity gospel. Co-opting God, the party previously of "family values" voted for the p---y grabber without batting an eye. For the Right/Reich Neo-Fascists that bear no relation to the progenitor of their "faith," these scriptures do not give them pause, since they never believed them in the first place.
These were their Emperor's Klan bedsheets since the legitimization of domestic terrorism cum white supremacy. It was easier to hide them in "abstract" Lee Atwater language, coded phrases: "dog whistles" either with shouted lies from literally a bully pulpit, or tweeting like a loon from the loo. The orange one used the word acquisitions versus the correct accusations in reference to his Supreme Court nominee. When I called him on it, he deleted the tweet. Orange genius has no sense of cache memory...probably thinks it's "fake news."
We are post the spectacle of a kangaroo court where evidently, eleven white men's ball sacks shriveled as they whined in the shadows of the senate, hiring a "female assistant" fromMaricopa County, Arizonato ask the tough questions so they wouldn't look like they're as unfair as many were to Professor Anita Hill a generation ago. This is SUPPOSED to be a part of their constitutional duties to "advise and consent" a Supreme Court nominee. If they wanted safety, they should have stayed out of politics and frankly, stayed at home. They sidelined her when she tried to do the job she was hired for to Kavenaugh -prosecuting sex crimes, whom I will now and forever refer to asthe screaming lunatic, conspiracy theorist judge andraging misogynist. Lindsey Grahammimicked him perfectly.
What used to be called "norms" have been eroding for some time. It was during the over year-long delay to even hear Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell's proudest moment. It precedes the orange dolt by years, if not decades. Clarence Thomas invoked "high-tech lynching," playing his one and only race card after a life of black republicanism disdaining the advances made by Civil Rights and Affirmative Action that even made his ascension possible. As most republican appointees we've seen recently, his mission to the EEOC appeared to be wreck it or at least hobble its primary function, anathema to most conservatives. As 53% of white women consciously and deliberately voted for an admitted sexual assaulter, there are African Americans that consciously go along with, and support white supremacy. So, it's not at all surprising that conservative women not only support Kavenaugh, but are willing to make excuses they would not make to their own daughters...or, they just might.
These old, ossified buffoons and their caricature of a wise-guy mobster are not republicans. That is just a label of their tribal cult. They are impervious to facts, as debates about adequate sexual education as the most effective means of reducing teenage unwanted pregnancy; climate change and the pursuit of alternative energy resources, the age of the earth, evolution, scientific literacy jettisoned. The hearing's limits were - to agree with the screaming, crying, pompous banshee trying to lie his way on the Supreme Court - an orchestrated farce!
Federal Republic: A federal republic is a federation of states with a republican form of government.
Republic: A republic (Latin: res publica) is a form of government in which the country is considered a "public matter", not the private concern or property of the rulers. The primary positions of power within a republic are not inherited. It is a form of government under which the head of state is not a monarch.
You cannot be a federal republic with the shameful display by twelve misogynists (11 senators and one asshole, crying judge) without norms, rationality, reality and an agreement on what is truth!
"While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction (or, son of perdition - KJV) so that Scripture would be fulfilled." John 17:12 NIV
The sons of perdition will not go to destruction alone. With Putin and his lackey's help, so will our republic and likely...the world.
In a small basement laboratory, Harry Levine, a Harvard University graduate student in physics, can assemble a rudimentary computer in a fraction of a second. There isn't a processor chip in sight; his computer is powered by 51 rubidium atoms that reside in a glass cell the size of a matchbox. To create his computer, he lines up the atoms in single file, using a laser split into 51 beams. More lasers—six beams per atom—slow the atoms until they are nearly motionless. Then, with yet another set of lasers, he coaxes the atoms to interact with each other, and, in principle, perform calculations.
It's a quantum computer, which manipulates "qubits" that can encode zeroes and ones simultaneously in what's called a superposition state. If scaled up, it might vastly outperform conventional computers at certain tasks. But in the world of quantum computing, Levine's device is somewhat unusual. In the race to build a practical quantum device, investment has largely gone to qubits that can be built on silicon, such as tiny circuits of superconducting wire and small semiconductors structures known as quantum dots. Now, two recent studies have demonstrated the promise of the qubits Levine works with: neutral atoms. In one study, a group including Levine showed a quantum logic gate made of two neutral atoms could work with far fewer errors than ever before. And in another, researchers built 3D structures of carefully arranged atoms, showing that more qubits can be packed into a small space by taking advantage of the third dimension.
The advances, along with the arrival of venture capital funding, suggest neutral atoms could be on the upswing, says Dana Anderson, CEO of ColdQuanta, a Boulder, Colorado–based company that is developing an atom-based quantum computer. "We've done our homework," Anderson says. "This is really in the engineering arena now."
Rescue personnel evacuate residents as flooding continues in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. AP Photo/David Goldman
Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Politics, Research
As Hurricane Florence’s wrath along the Carolina coast concludes, things for thousands of North and South Carolina families will never be the same. Heavy downpours from the Category 4 storm, which was downgraded to a Category 2 when it hit landfall, brought flash flooding from the coastal plain last Thursday all the way to the Triad by late Sunday night. Winds in some parts of Guilford County reached upwards of 30 mph, with Guilford County receiving a total of up to 24 inches of rain.
Although Florence had been downgraded to a Tropical Depression by the time it reached Guilford County, the area experienced flash flooding, while other parts of the state experienced extreme flooding that will likely last several weeks. Duke Energy reported 1.4 million total power outages in the Carolinas. There have been at least 37 storm-related deaths reported – 27 in North Carolina, eight in South Carolina and two in Virginia. Preliminary numbers from government officials estimate the storm left behind $2.5 billion in damages to the state of North Carolina. The storm also kept Eastern North Carolina synagogues closed on September 19, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.
In Greensboro, a section of Lake Brandt Road is still closed while crews repair a sinkhole that formed in the pavement under a bridge due to heavy rain flow. City officials also reported that 63,000 gallons of untreated wastewater in Greensboro leaked from Buffalo Creek and the Cape Fear River basin for four hours before it was detected. [1]
*****
When Hurricane Florence thundered ashore, it came crashing down on Duke Energy’s coal ash disposal site and cajoled loose some 2,000 cubic yards of the mucky material. Duke, which is closing all of its coal ash sites by 2029, has been through this before. What has the industry learned?
Coal ash is disposed of either as a liquid that goes into large surface impoundments or as a solid that is placed into landfills. But now the industry is in the process of converting it to dry ash and burying it in places with liners while also monitoring the ground water.
“Once the damage is assessed,” says the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, “DEQ will determine the best path forward and hold the utility accountable for implementing the solution that ensures the protection of public health and the environment.” [2]
*****
Millions of chickens have died and waste from pigs and coal ash has leaked into floodwaters in North Carolina as authorities work to control environmental threats and stop the spread of any contamination.
But continued high water is keeping state and federal officials from knowing the full extent of the problem.
Officials are most concerned that the coal-burning byproducts, animal waste, and even untreated human sewage in floodwaters could contaminate sources of drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that at least 23 public and private drinking water systems in North Carolina were not supplying water and that 21 others were operating with restrictions like a boil water advisory.
Reggie Cheatham, director of the EPA's Office of Emergency Management, said Monday that some sewage has been released into the floodwaters through sewer system manholes and, in one case, a power failure at a water treatment plant. Cheatham told reporters some of the untreated sewage had been released into the Neuse and Cape Fear rivers. [3]
Topics: Diversity, Diversity in Science, History, Internet, Nobel Prize, Optics
Charles Kao, the electrical engineer who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics with Willard Boyle and George Smith, has died in Hong Kong aged 84. Kao was awarded half of the 2009 prize “for ground-breaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication.”
Kao was born on 4 November 1933 in Shanghai, China. He studied electrical engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich) and received his PhD in electrical engineering from University College London in 1965 under the supervision of Harold Barlow. While pursuing his PhD, he was employed by Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) at the firm’s Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL) in Harlow, UK.
While working at STL in 1966, Kao realized that optical fibres made from high-purity glass could be used to transmit light signals over long distances. A few years later, he showed that fibres made of fused silica had the required purity and could also be easily manufactured. This was a crucial step towards the development of fibre-optical telecoms networks, which provide the backbone to the Internet.
Topics: Alternative Energy, Chemistry, Green Energy, Nanotechnology, Photosynthesis
During photosynthesis, plants split water into hydrogen ions and oxygen. If researchers could devise a method to mimic nature, the hydrogen could provide a carbon-neutral energy source. A significant challenge to implementing such a technology is developing a system that separates the electrons and the positively charged holes; otherwise, the hydrogen and oxygen could react back into water. Researchers led by Jacek Stolarczyk of Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and Frank Würthner of the University of Würzburg may have overcome the difficulty by introducing two intermediaries—an oxidation catalyst and platinum particles—to a novel semiconducting nanorod.
The researchers started with an approach that already generated hydrogen but at the nanorod’s expense. When a cadmium sulfide nanorod in water absorbs light, the energy spurs the donation of electrons to a platinum reducing agent. The free H+ can then form H2. But without an oxidation catalyst, the arrangement is unsustainable because the remaining holes oxidize the nanorod’s sulfur lattice. The figure illustrates the researchers’ solution: decorating a newly synthesized CdS nanorod with both platinum nanoparticles and an oxidation catalyst.
The process begins when the nanorod absorbs light, which mobilizes electrons. The oxidation catalyst then draws holes from the length of the nanorod. Each Pt tip attached to either end of the nanorod acts as the electron sink. The oxidation half reaction (red arrows) removes electrons from OH− to produce O2 and water; the reduction half reaction (blue arrows) uses the electrons to covalently bond hydrogen atoms to generate H2. The researchers deployed a fresh chemical group to attach the catalyst to the nanorod. With that innovation, the anchoring group was more resistant to oxidation and the holes were swiftly transferred to the catalyst. (C. M. Wolff et al., Nat. Energy, 2018, doi:10.1038/s41560-018-0229-6.)
Topics: Civil Rights, Diversity, Human Rights, Politics
Charles Blow revealed his own assault experiences on CNN. It was courageous but not hard to believe, as every 98 seconds an American is sexually assaulted; 15 persons per day. One in nine girls and 1 in 53 boys under 18 experience this. I apologize if this triggers anyone.
*****
I was five years old, and my mother visited her sisters in Washington, DC. He was introduced to me as my "uncle," as cohabitation in 1967 was still considered taboo. I accepted that explanation and had my trust violated by a stranger. My mother defended me with what looked like a lead pipe administered forcefully on his temple. We left on the next bus. We never discussed it.
It erupted in fits and starts after I married my wife. I argued about insane things that I didn't think important, but wanted to "win." She was at her wits end, and very close to ending our marriage. My rage was not expressed physically, but I was verbally and emotionally abusive.
My "uncle" experience came out in marriage counseling. I tried to describe it dispassionately, as if I was viewing a scene through an opaque screen. Our counselor wasn't having it: "No, Reginald. That was abuse. That was assault."
That hit me with the same blunt-force trauma as the original lead pipe planted in the asshole's head. I tried to drown my feelings of helplessness and lack of masculinity in a 1.5 liter wine bottle. I collapsed on my kitchen table. I wept. My wife embraced me. I was solidly in my thirties, decades from the event. I dreaded telling my father. When I did, we didn't speak for about two weeks. When we finally did, he was angry that my mother didn't tell him; that I didn't tell him. I just recalled to him the likely reason my mother didn't bother. My father owned a .38 caliber pistol, .22 caliber rifle, and a protective temper. We made amends as I told him I preferred him on this side of the criminal justice system...as my dad.
Time has consumed my parents and my hellish assaulter. It is a defense mechanism to construct a "screen" - opaque and dim to hide the pain. I am revealing this as a husband and a father. I am revealing this as a US Air Force veteran. I am revealing this as a martial artist of 38 years experience. I am revealing this as an example that damning a woman for not reporting an assault immediately as it happened is not taking into account the psychology of survivors and a complete lack of human empathy.
*****
Questions have lingered since shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced in July and reporters digging into his public record found that Kavanaugh’s financial disclosure forms showed tens of thousands of dollars of fluctuating credit card balances as well as a loan against his retirement account for the 12 years before 2017. All of these debts disappeared from Kavanaugh’s financial disclosures in 2017 and the forms did not indicate an obvious source of funds to repay them, prompting speculation about potential conflicts of interest.
Finances are the first lever point of influence by an adversary or a oligarch - American or Russian - to a sitting Supreme Court Justice. It's why it's front-and-center on a government SF-86 application, and why the Federal Bureau of Investigation (apparently, the teen girl tweeter-in-chief thinks "investigation" is not part of its function) looks at it. On just this alone, it turns the spirit of the court from an arbiter of the law without partisan considerations on its head. The court teeters from Supreme to kangaroo; the Federal Republic to banana. We are teetering towards collapse, which only pleases Putin.
The optics are already bad when you're putting the pressure of a deadline on a possible victim of sexual assault who has to flee her home due to death threats. For that alone, the FBI should be called. What used to be derisively referred to as cowardice or "shell shock" is now correctly Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which anyone who has been sexually assaulted are now triggered by the Neanderthal clumsiness of Senators Grassley and Hatch. The optics are already bad post the public accountability of Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, Bill O'Reilly, and "me too" that pretty much the same cadre of old, ossified white males will judge an accuser of their president*'s pick to the US Supreme Court, only to give himself a 5-4 vote in case the House of Representatives flips and "impeachment is ON the table." Grassley previously was all for an FBI investigation for Clarence Thomas, yet he and Hatch are deathly afraid now. The defense of Judge Kavenaugh, who according to former Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) may have lied under oath for his current job is "that was decades ago" and "boys will be boys"; sexually assertive girls are routinely called whores and sluts, sexually assertive p---y grabbing man-babies with toadstool penises... become president*.
The only way to get "boys" to behave is to remove the current statute of limitations most laws have on sexual harassment and predation. That Sword of Damocles is only oppressive on a certain group of men that wish to practice predation unencumbered by accountability. It should force society as a whole to think reflectively on how poorly American culture raises its men in misogynistic toxicity.
The accountability for toadstool man-babies...is The Constitution.
A group of researchers recently observed a mysterious infrared emission coming from near a pulsar in NASA's Hubble Space telescope data. This animation depicts one possible source of the emission: a "fallback disk" or a disk that formed from materials of the parent star falling back into the neutron star after a supernova. Credit: ESA/N. Tr’Ehnl (Pennsylvania State University)/NASA
Space is filled with bizarre signals that we scramble to put meaning to — and now, researchers have detected yet another mysterious signal. This one emanated from near a neutron star, and for the first time, it's infrared.
So, what's nearby that could have created the weird signal? Scientists have a few ideas.
When a star reaches the end of its life, it typically undergoes a supernova explosion— the star collapses, and if it has enough mass, it will form a black hole. But if the star isn't massive enough, it will form a neutron star. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions]
Neutrons stars are very dense and, as their name suggests, are made up mostly of closely packed neutrons. Neutron stars can also be called "pulsars" if they are highly magnetized and rotate rapidly enough to emit electromagnetic waves, according to Space.com.
Typically, neutron stars emit radio waves or higher-energy waves such as X-rays, according a statement released by NASA yesterday (Sept. 17). But an international group of researchers from Penn State, the University of Arizona and Sabanci University in Turkey observed something interesting in NASA's Hubble Space Telescope data: a long signal of infrared light emitted near a neutron star, the researchers reported yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal.
This signal, they found, was about 800 light-years away and was "extended," meaning it was spread across a large stretch of space, unlike typical "point" signals from neutron stars that emit X-rays. Specifically, the signal stretched across 200 astronomical units (AU) of space, or 2.5 times the orbit of Pluto around the sun, according to a statement from Penn State. (One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
A new uncertainty principle holds that quantum objects can be at two temperatures at once, which is similar to the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, in which a cat in a box with a radioactive element can be both alive and dead. Credit: Shutterstock
The famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat implies that a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time — a bizarre phenomenon that is a consequence of quantum mechanics.
Now, physicists at the University of Exeter in England have found that a similar state of limbo may exist for temperatures: Objects can be two temperatures at the same time at the quantum level. This weird quantum paradox is the first completely new quantum uncertainty relation to be formulated in decades.
Heisenberg's other principle
In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg postulated that the more precisely you measure a quantum particle's position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa — a rule that would become the now-famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]
The new quantum uncertainty, which states that the more precisely you know temperature, the less you can say about energy, and vice versa, has big implications for nanoscience, which studies incredibly tiny objects smaller than a nanometer. This principle will change how scientists measure the temperature of extremely small things such as quantum dots, small semiconductors or single cells, the researchers said in the new study, which was published in June in the journal Nature Communications.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."Richard Feynman
When the researchers turn an external magnetic field in different directions (indicated with arrows), they change the orientation of the linear electron flow above the kagome (six-fold) magnet, as seen in these electron wave interference patterns on the surface of a topological quantum kagome magnet. Each pattern is created by a particular direction of the external magnetic field applied on the sample.Image by M. Z. Hasan, Jia-Xin Yin, Songtian Sonia Zhang, Princeton University
Topics: Modern Physics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics
An international team of researchers led by Princeton physicist Zahid Hasan has discovered a quantum state of matter that can be “tuned” at will — and it’s 10 times more tuneable than existing theories can explain. This level of manipulability opens enormous possibilities for next-generation nanotechnologies and quantum computing.
“We found a new control knob for the quantum topological world,” said Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. “We expect this is tip of the iceberg. There will be a new subfield of materials or physics grown out of this. … This would be a fantastic playground for nanoscale engineering.”
Hasan and his colleagues, whose research appears in the current issue of Nature, are calling their discovery a “novel” quantum state of matter because it is not explained by existing theories of material properties.
Hasan discusses the discovery with Yin and Zhang in his office in Jadwin Hall.Photo byNick Barberio, Office of Communications
Hasan’s interest in operating beyond the edges of known physics is what attracted Jia-Xin Yin, a postdoctoral research associate and one of three co-first-authors on the paper, to his lab. Other researchers had encouraged him to tackle one of the defined questions in modern physics, Yin said.
“But when I talked to Professor Hasan, he told me something very interesting,” Yin said. “He’s searching for new phases of matter. The question is undefined. What we need to do is search for the question rather than the answer.”
The classical phases of matter — solids, liquids and gases — arise from interactions between atoms or molecules. In a quantum phase of matter, the interactions take place between electrons, and are much more complex.
“This could indeed be evidence of a new quantum phase of matter — and that’s, for me, exciting,” said David Hsieh, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and a 2009 Ph.D. graduate of Princeton, who was not involved in this research. “They’ve given a few clues that something interesting may be going on, but a lot of follow-up work needs to be done, not to mention some theoretical backing to see what really is causing what they’re seeing.”
Hasan has been working in the groundbreaking subfield of topological materials, an area of condensed matter physics, where his team discovered topological quantum magnets a few years ago. In the current research, he and his colleagues “found a strange quantum effect on the new type of topological magnet that we can control at the quantum level,” Hasan said.
