Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

Twisted Hyperbole...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 21, 2017 at 7:06am

J Robert Oppenheimer, Image Source: YouTube

Topics: Einstein, Existentialism, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Oppenheimer, Politics

What I wouldn't give for "truthful hyperbole." The riff in "The Art of the Deal" that we now know was ghostwritten and probably like the life of the 45th president a blatant, pathological lie, it was at least a strategy towards an end: a clever tactic that bent the rules but did not break them or the administrative state. An armada is headed towards the Korean peninsula until its revealed it was actually in the Indian Ocean thousands of miles away. Two generals on his staff and his press secretary used the word "prudent," perhaps as a prayer that maybe in the long line of obfuscations, this was a legitimate act that wasn't born in indigestion, bad dreams and a tweeted warped imagination. What was alarming is the bluff or buffoonery could have ratcheted up tensions on the 38th parallel. 20+ million South Koreans, military bases and businesses like Hyundai and in the semiconductor industry were at the mercy of chance and blind luck if anything popped off. The closest military bases in South Korea or the pacific theater couldn't have responded in time to interdict catastrophe, only to help bury bodies in a conventional bombing aftermath. They're probably and rightly pissed with us.

His predecessor "wiretapped" him, and because he put his tweet in quotes it takes new meaning. Devin Nunes put himself squarely back on his dairy ranch and his political career in the golden crapper, getting the information from the White House to "reveal" it to the same and the media the next day. Correlate that to now the official log of visitors will in his bumbling aftermath not be revealed, so as to not know which staffer let the congressman in and the time stamp. Surprisingly, his midnight run has not been parodied by late night comedy as I've seen. It also explains 45's frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago: it is his country club, and as a guarantor of the privacy of members at $200,000.00 a year, no logs there are made, or will ever be published. A kingpin of the Mafia could visit or a Russian oligarch, and we would never know.

Andrea Mitchell, exasperated said this administration "flat out lies" as if beyond pathology, this chaos is a source of pleasure: a political pyromaniac that lights fires, denies responsibility while jerking off to the engulfing flames of a crumbling republic.

In geopolitics, it's dangerous. Being unpredictable, or thinking no one will ever challenge us because they think our president is insane is not a doctrine, not a strategy: it is pure insanity. This will embolden Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS/ISIL et al, not cow them. So far, the recent published opinions of ISIS that "the US is bankrupt and being run by an idiot" hasn't as yet resulted in a morning, mean-girl counter tweet storm.

Paul Mason, contributing to the Opinion Page of The Guardian (see Related links) summed it best:

"I don’t wish to alarm you, but right now the majority of the world’s nuclear warheads are in the hands of men for whom the idea of using them is becoming thinkable."

Those men are Vladimir Putin, Kim Jung Un and the 45th president, an "axis of grift, testosterone-driven, short-penis evil," thumping their chests like alpha apes, ignoring the ramifications of the effects of geopolitical gravity if we all plunge over this cliff. Nuclear war is thinkable to these men: megaton yield, radiation sickness, hunger, death, isotope half lives beyond human lifetimes for civilization to recover apparently is not. Trolls love to point out "science created the atomic bomb." Yes, it did. Werner Von Heisenberg was a scientist in the employ of the German Nazis working on the bomb. Father of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics, he likely would have been promptly executed for any misgivings had he not. Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist that almost single-handedly created the modern age during his "Annus Mirabilis," leading to this age of computers, solar panels, transistors, television, the Internet and GPS systems. He was also a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany for his life, that wrote the US president on the danger of them getting the bomb first and what this posed, encouraging what became known as The Manhattan Project, a sin science has tried to atone for (since Oppenheimer famously quoted Hindu scripture) in publishing the report annually by the Union of Concerned Scientists about how close we are to extinction. The colloquial phrase is "if we didn't do it, we all might be speaking German." I say we - especially ethnic and social minorities - probably wouldn't be having this pleasant conversation if we hadn't. It doesn't excuse the carnage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that most historians now say the Empire of the Sun was literally on its last legs, and a few months more of empty stomachs could have changed the minds of the most recalcitrant regimes. This genie has been out of its bottle for quite some time now. We hope each election our heads of state are levelheaded responsible actors, not someone who tweets reflexively the last thing seen on Fox News without thought or context, or from a White Genocide twitter account. Apparently from the recent US elections and the rise of xenophobia in Europe, fascism - what we fought WWII for and established in its wake NATO and trade agreements - is making a comeback.

Another name for Beelzebub is "the father of lies." Who knew he would be personified in a septuagenarian that could do so in 140 characters or less?

Components and Cornstarch...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 20, 2017 at 6:26am

Credit: American Chemical Society

Topics: Chemistry, Green Tech, Electronics, Nanotechnology

I of course have several nerd shirts. One I bought from my company spells out "I play with chips" using elements of the Periodic Table. The list of elements conform with literally substances used in most electronic devices: Iodine (I⁵³), Phosphorous (P¹⁵), Lanthanum (La⁵⁷), Yttrium (Y³⁹), Tungsten (W⁷⁴), Iodine (I⁵³), Thorium (Th⁹⁰), Carbon (C⁶), Hydrogen (H¹), Iodine (I⁵³), Phosphorous (P¹⁵), Sulfur (S¹⁶). I believe it was contracted to at least my company, but a simple logo change on the left sleeve could disseminate it. I don't see it anywhere else on the Internet.

I put the links to the safety data sheets on them above because with usage there is the discarding, the throwing away in trashcans that end up in landfills that like radioactive elements and plastics, have VERY long shelf lives hazardous to human health. I'm sure cornstarch is probably a lot less harsh. The shirt is still a good conversation starter.

As consumers upgrade their gadgets at an increasing pace, the amount of electronic waste we generate continues to mount. To help combat this environmental problem, researchers have modified a degradable bioplastic derived from corn starch or other natural sources for use in more eco-friendly electronic components. They report their development in ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Abstract

Nano metal–organic frameworks (ZIF-8) particles were synthesized, and poly(lactic acid) (PLA)/ZIF-8 nanocomposite films were prepared by solution-blending and film-casting methods. The addition of nano ZIF-8 particles improved the mechanical properties and had an impact on the crystallization of PLA. The electrical properties of the PLA/ZIF-8 nanocomposites were found to be dependent on the frequency and the ZIF-8 content. The prepared PLA/ZIF-8 films had good transparency even as the content of the nano ZIF-8 particles reached 3 wt %. Compared with 21.5% of pure PLA, the limited oxygen index value of the nanocomposite film containing 1 wt % ZIF-8 reached 26.0%. Therefore, it is proposed that the prepared nanocomposites can be used as the substrates and dielectric to make disposable electronics. The char residues after burning were studied in detail by scanning electron microscopy and Raman and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies, and the flame retardant mechanism was also discussed.

Phys.org: Degradable electronic components created from cornstarch

Teaching Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 19, 2017 at 7:02am

Image Source: Link below

Topics: Economy, Education, Jobs, STEM

I've taught physics at the college level as well as high school. I've taught special needs students as well as students acquiring their HSE (high school equivalency, the replacement of the GED).

There's a nostalgia of the "good old days" that like all with the distance of time, we mis-remember things because as students, we typically didn't understand the pedagogy of the times. Our nostalgic recollections do have the absence of distracting technologies like the ubiquitous contronym, "smart phones."

I've found using a method called “mind mapping” a good warm up. For example, when teaching about “work,” I put the word on the board and asked my HSE class what it meant. What I got:

Now of course, the trick is to get the five in the class to Work = Force x Distance, Power = Work/Time and Simple Machines. That takes a certain amount of patience. One student I recall "didn't want to be there." The other four did good work, and we had a humorous back-and-forth on "The Flash" and what I've termed "cartoon physics." Since speed was their thing, I explained what it meant when The Flash made a sonic boom; that it had nothing to do with the speed of light and how VAST that difference actually is. As work goes, we were all "pumped" at the end of the hour.

Hence, the article in Physics Today grabbed me. To continue teaching and propagating an understanding of physics as well as science, we're going to be a little creative, answer questions on cartoon physics and steer them back on the rails... to their own futures.

Physics is the most exciting endeavor I can imagine. That is why I want to become a physicist and join what Richard Feynman called “the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”¹ Now, after my second year of undergraduate studies in astrophysics at University College London (UCL), I want to comment on some of the vicissitudes I have experienced while being taught physics. The basic courses of my first two years were disappointing. They didn’t really give me the opportunity to join that greatest adventure. Most of my lecturers followed traditional teaching approaches based heavily on solving standard problems and learning by rote, with no hint of free inquiry or discussion. They seemed to be convinced that we would understand physics through that method. I was not enthusiastic.

Physics Today: How to teach me physics: Tradition is not always a virtue, Ricardo Heras

Electron Beams...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 18, 2017 at 6:23am

Figure 1: Using the Pegasus facility at UCLA, Maxson and colleagues [1] have compressed electron pulses to below 10 fs in duration. In this facility, a relatively long electron pulse (green) produced by an electron source (not shown) enters a specially designed linear accelerator (copper, left), whose electromagnetic fields act to compress the pulse several meters downstream from the accelerator. Here, the pulse can be made so short (below 10 fs) that it would “outrun” all atomic motion in molecules (blue) and materials. In an electron diffraction or microscopy experiment with pulses like this, atoms are effectively frozen in place during an exposure (yellow). [Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker]

Topics: Electromagnetism, High Energy Physics, Modern Physics, Particle Physics

When you read the term “electron beam,” what comes to mind? If you are a physicist or have a background in physics, it may be the great J. J. Thomson—discoverer of the electron—followed by a vision of an old television or oscilloscope powered by cathode-ray tubes. Very twentieth-century stuff. If this is your view, a new study by Jared Maxson at the Pegasus radiation facility at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues [1] should help make clear how electron beams are one of the primary enablers of twenty-first-century science. Ultrashort electron-beam pulses—less than 10 fs long in this case—are enabling forms of atomic-level dynamic imaging that were previously restricted to the realm of thought experiments [2].

It is difficult to overemphasize the impact that electron beams have had on scientific developments over the last century, or the impact they are expected to have over the next century. While electron beams are currently out of favor in high-energy physics, because of the move from electron-positron colliders to hadron colliders at CERN, Fermilab, and other laboratories, they are central to other areas of science. For example, when we want to perform detailed examinations of the structure of molecules and materials, electron beams are at the forefront. Transmission electron microscopes and scanning electron microscopes are remarkably efficient instruments for generating and measuring an enormous range of signals that reveal the structure of materials. These signals come from both the elastic and inelastic interaction of electron beams with materials, and modern materials science is unthinkable without these instruments. When operated at cryogenic temperatures, these same instruments enable 3D reconstructions of proteins, viruses, organelles, and even whole cells [3]. Complementary work can also be performed using synchrotron light sources or free-electron lasers [4], which produce x-ray and infrared beams that are themselves generated from pulsed relativistic electron beams circulating in storage rings or linear accelerators. The size of the facilities that host these instruments, and the properties and limitations of the instruments as sources of x-ray and infrared radiation, are largely determined by the properties of such electron beams.

APS Physics Viewpoint: Electron Pulses Made Faster Than Atomic MotionsBradley Siwick, Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry, Center for the Physics of Materials, McGill University, 801 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0B8, Canada

DDR...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 17, 2017 at 5:31am

Image Source: Quora

Topics: Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Semiconductor Technology

Info link: Double Data Rate, Wikipedia

The new, higher-speed DDR4 DRAM generation gained significant marketshare in 2016, representing 45% of total DRAM sales. Previously, DDR3 DRAM, including low-power versions used in tablets, smartphones, and notebook PCs, accounted for 84% of total DRAM sales in 2014 and 76% in 2015, but in 2016, DDR4 price premiums evaporated and prices fell to nearly the same ASP as DDR3 DRAMs. A growing number of microprocessors, like Intel’s newest 14nm x86 Core processors, now contain DDR4 controllers and interfaces. As a result, IC Insights expects DDR4 to become the dominant DRAM generation in 2017 with 58% marketshare versus 39% for DDR3.

The Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) officially launched the fourth generation of DDR in 2012. In 2014, DDR4 memories first began appearing on the market in DRAM modules for powerful servers and a small number of high-end desktop computers, which had souped-up motherboards or the “extreme” versions of Intel’s 22nm Haswell-E processors for high-performance gaming software and PC enthusiasts, but volume sales remained low until 2015, when data centers and Internet companies began loading up servers with the new-generation memories to increase performance and lower power consumption. In 2016, DDR4 memories quickly spread into more data center servers, mainframes, and high-end PCs, accounting for about 45% of total DRAM sales versus 20% in 2015. In 2017, DDR4 will move into more notebook PCs, high-end tablets, and smartphones and is expected to hold a 58% share of DRAM sales.

Solid State Technology:DDR4 set to account for largest share of DRAM market by architecture

Requiem for Moab...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 14, 2017 at 7:00am

Spock's comment that "Change is the essential process of all existence" remains one of the most memorable lines of dialogue ever uttered on Star Trek. - See more at: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Topics: Diversity, Existentialism, Futurism, Martin Luther King, Politics, Star Trek

It is Good Friday in the United States and elsewhere around the world.

The Biblical name Moab means "of his father" in Hebrew, the apparent product of the illicit, incestual coitus between Lot and his two daughters during a drunken seduction by both of them to ensure the continuance of his lineage. Several double entendre examples emerge to mind, salacious, lascivious and darkly ironic: manliness, missiles and spermatozoa. We tend to cheer presidents when they lob missiles, even the draft-dodger ones. In one case to conceal a consensual sexual peccadillo; the other to deflect from an active FBI investigation (with one revealed FISA warrant) regarding collusion with a foreign power... to "win."

I re-posted "Last Battlefield," a poignant episode in the third season of the original Star Trek as its ratings declined, eventually going into syndication and rabid fandom for what would or perhaps always was called futurism, a world Roddenberry envisioned beyond the assassinations of a president (John F. Kennedy), his brother (Robert F. Kennedy) and sandwiched between them Civil Rights icons Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. A world where humankind's progeny lives and survives.

This is the third rendition in the age of "mother of all bombs" as a madman plans to up-the-ante in oneupmanship penis envy on the Korean peninsula, a megaton yield promised proportional to 16 Hiroshima's. It may be bluff; it may be bluster. World wars have started on less: WWI, WWII. There is a plan to preemptively strike North Korea to hamper any nuclear program it may have, and at whatever stage. The madman has a "big brother" in the formerly-known-as currency manipulator, China, that will under obligation of treaty challenge such a plan. The impact of escalation would first immediately be felt by South Korea, Japan; world markets and stability.

We also have in this nation, a leader that prevaricates like middle school children generate flatulence. The Air Force drilled us in war games incessantly, then on deployment to the actual exercise or theater, we learned to change on the fly. We derisively called it "rigid flexibility." For the 45th occupant of the Executive Mansion and holder of the nuclear codes, the best description should be "consistent inconsistency." He promised to be unpredictable on the campaign trail, this being the only thing approaching a "doctrine." We - the hapless electorate - follow as best we can with a mixture of angst, attention-deficit, PTSD and whiplash.

What is more frightening than a president that makes obfuscation an Olympic sport is our collective cultural arrogance that the Earth as we know it will always be, and unlike the dinosaur we will not go extinct.

The exception to us with respect to the dinosaurs is they did not know about the missile-meteor that generated the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico... nor did they design it or tempt Apocalypse in 140 characters (or less).

* * * * *

This was first posted in August of 2013, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. I can hope Star Trek's return in 2017 to CBS has as much cultural impact as this episode did with me at its time and timing.

The vitriol and violence of the 2016 presidential campaign I've seen at political rallies; the racism, misogyny, tribalism and xenophobia purposely designed appealing to our lesser angels will not solve any problems, nor have any substantive policy proposals been forwarded by this particular camp. Sometimes art is a reflection of life. In this case, I sincerely hope life does not imitate art.

* * * * *

One of the most powerful Trek episodes for me as a youth was "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Recall, the 60's weren't just "make love, not war": there was a lot of both. Vietnam overseas, protests of the war and Civil Rights/Voting Rights marches at home. Suspicions that any deviance from the John Birch Society authoritarian "norm" was judged subversive; communist, therefore necessarily purged and crushed from existence. Judging from the date of airings, its first showing came nine months after the sad assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

It also aired during the climate of the Cold War, a period many seemingly LONG to get back to (that madness), where the nuclear "plan" was called MAD: mutually assured destruction. We still possess that insane power, essentially holding humanity hostage; guns to our own heads.

Gene Roddenberry put an interracial, international crew together: Nyota Uhura (literally: "Freedom Star" in Kiswahili); Hikaru Sulu (for the Sulu sea, meant to represent all of Asia, but of fictional Japanese origin); Pavel Andreievich Chekov (a RUSKIE for crying out loud!). You could say in this fictional treatment, Bele and Lokai "stood their ground" until the end. Roddenberry, as I've commented before developed his own eschatology, yet positive and relevant that we might just survive our own hubris, essentially stemming from old tribal conflicts and current contemporary displays of breathtaking stupidity and arrogance.

This episode was a stark warning; the inevitable consequences of NOT...

Source: Wikipedia

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is the fifteenth episode of the third season of the original science fiction television show Star Trek. It was first broadcast on January 10, 1969, and repeated on August 12, 1969. It was written by Oliver Crawford, based on a story by Gene L. Coon (writing under his pen name "Lee Cronin") and directed by Jud Taylor. The script evolved from an outline by Barry Trivers for a possible first season episode called "A Portrait in Black and White". The script was accepted for the third season following budget cuts. The episode guest-stars Lou Antonio and Frank Gorshin, best known for his role as The Riddler in the Batman live-action television series. Contrary to popular rumor and articles, Gorshin was not Emmy nominated for this role.

In this episode, the Enterprise picks up two survivors of a war-torn planet, who are still committed to destroying each other aboard the ship.

Amazon link

Once the Ariannus mission is completed, Bele takes control of the Enterprise again, but this time he deactivates the auto-destruct in the process and sends the ship to Cheron. Once there, the two aliens find the planet's population completely wiped out by a global war fueled by insane racial hatred. Both Lokai and Bele stare silently at the destruction on the monitor and realize they are the only ones left of their race (or, as they see it, their "races").

Instead of calling a truce, the two beings begin to blame each other for the destruction of the planet and a brawl ensues. As the two aliens fight, their innate powers radiate, cloaking them with an energy aura that threatens to damage the ship. With no other choice, Kirk sadly allows the two aliens to chase each other down to their obliterated world to decide their own fates, consumed by their now self-perpetuating mutual hate. Forlorn, Lt. Uhura asks if their hate is all they ever had. Kirk ruefully says no...but it is all they have left.

* * * * *

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

"The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., BrainyQuote.com

Equiangular Geometry...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 13, 2017 at 6:18am

Igor Balla for Quanta Magazine

Topics: Geometry, Mathematics, STEM, Research

Imagine a set of many lines as in a dream. The lines intersect at a point and radiate outward. There’s something perfect about the way they’re spaced that you can’t quite put your finger on. You start counting them, but before you can finish you wake up with a question hanging on the fringe of your mind: Just how many were there?

For at least 70 years, mathematicians have been trying to answer a question like that one. The sets of lines they’re interested in share a basic feature: Any two lines from the set intersect to form the same angle. Such sets of lines are called “equiangular.” Mathematicians want to know just how big those sets can get as you move past the 3-D space of our everyday experience and into higher dimensions.

Equiangular lines are much more than a curiosity — they’re an almost elemental way to think about geometry. Maximal constructions of equiangular lines often align perfectly with the vertices of highly symmetric shapes, which make them a way to discover the existence of those shapes in the first place. In addition, radiating equiangular lines would pass through the surface of a surrounding sphere at equidistant points. This property makes the lines important for so-called spherical codes, which have important applications in applied mathematics and computer science.

Last spring a team of mathematicians found the maximum number of equiangular lines possible in any dimension, given certain conditions. They proved that that number is much smaller than previous best estimates. Benny Sudakov, a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and one of the lead authors, credits the breakthrough to the wide range of mathematical techniques he and his coauthors were able to apply to the problem.

“It’s like when you’re cooking something, we suddenly found we had the right ingredients,” said Sudakov.

Quanta Magazine: A New Path to Equal-Angle Lines, Kevin Hartnett

Abracadabra...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 12, 2017 at 5:51am

Figure 1: Scheme of the setup used by Jennewein and co-workers [1]. A pump laser generates a three-photon entangled state through a cascade of frequency conversion processes in a nonlinear crystal. The oscillations in the rate of three-photon coincidence measured by the detectors provide the signature of genuine three-photon interference.

Topics: Applied Physics, Optical Physics, Photonics, Quantum Mechanics

Quantum interference effects lie at the heart of technologies that promise radically new capabilities for sensors, secure communications, and computing. Most existing experiments and applications rely on one photon interfering with itself, or two photons interfering with each other. However, the interference of a larger number of particles leads to a richer variety of phenomena, and may enable more sophisticated applications. Now, two independent groups, the first led by Thomas Jennewein at the University of Waterloo, in Canada [1], the second by Ian Walmsley at the University of Oxford, in the UK [2], have been able to isolate and observe, for the first time, “genuine” interference between three photons, that is, an effect deriving from the quantum interference of three photons that does not originate from two-photon or single-photon interference. The two studies provide new tools for controlling multiphoton interference, which may help researchers design new fundamental tests of quantum mechanics, quantum-communication protocols, and powerful quantum simulators.

The quintessential example of multiphoton quantum interference is the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, first observed in 1987. In an HOM experiment [3], two independent photons coming from different directions impinge on a 50:50 beam splitter. If the two incoming photons are distinguishable, the outgoing photons will split equally between the two exit ports of the splitter. However, if the two photons are identical and arrive simultaneously, the quantum-mechanical wave functions will interfere, and the two photons will always exit through the same port, even though each of them has an equal probability of exiting through both ports.

APS Physics Viewpoint: Photonic Hat TrickRobert Sewell, The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Av. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 3, 08860 Castelldefels (Barcelona), SpainApril 10, 2017• Physics 10, 38

Small Particles, Big Science...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 11, 2017 at 5:54am

More than 950 researchers from 30 countries have joined DUNE. Collaborators are developing new technologies for DUNE’s particle detectors, giant instruments that will help capture the notoriously elusive neutrino.

Topics: Astrophysics, Modern Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Collaborators are developing new technologies for DUNE’s two particle detectors, giant instruments that will help capture the experiment’s notoriously elusive quarry, the neutrino. With DUNE, which is expected to be up and running in the mid-2020s, scientists plan to get a better grip on the neutrino’s subtleties to settle the question of, for instance, why there’s more matter than antimatter in our universe — in other words, how the stars planets and life as we know it were able to form. Also on the DUNE agenda are studies that could bolster certain theories of the unification of all fundamental forces and, with the help of neutrinos born in supernovae, provide a look into the birth of a black hole.

It’s a tall order that will take a global village to fill, and researchers worldwide are currently building or signing up to build the experiment, taking advantage of DUNE’s broad scientific and geographic scope.

“We’re a country that does a lot of theoretical physics but not a lot of experimental physics, because it’s not so cheap to have a particle physics experiment here,” said Brazilian DUNE collaborator Ana Amelia Machado, a collaborating scientist at the University of Campinas and a professor at the Federal University of ABC in the ABC region of Brazil. “So we participate in big collaborations like DUNE, which is attractive because it brings together theorists and experimentalists.”

Machado is currently working on a device named Arapuca, which she describes as a photon catcher that could detect particle phenomena that DUNE is interested in, such as supernova neutrino interactions. She’s also working to connect more Latin American universities with DUNE, such as the University Antonio Nariño.

On the opposite side of the world, scientists and engineers from India are working on upgrading the high-intensity proton accelerator at Fermilab, which will provide the world’s most intense neutrino beam to the DUNE experiment. Building on the past collaborations with other Fermilab experiments, the Indian scientists are also proposing to build the near detector for the DUNE experiment. Not only are India’s contributions important for DUNE’s success, they’re also potential seeds for India’s own future particle physics programs.

Fermilab: The Global Reach of DUNE, Leah Hesla

#P4TC: ProtoDUNE, March 15, 2017

Spin Squeezing...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 10, 2017 at 5:33am

Illustration of a gas of 500,000 atoms in an optical trap. (Courtesy: Onur Hosten)

Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Bell correlations – a hallmark of an entangled quantum system – have been spotted in an ensemble of 500,000 rubidium-87 atoms. The atoms were prepared in spin-squeezed states by physicists at Stanford University in the US and the correlations measured to a whopping statistical significance of 124σ.

In quantum mechanics, entangled particles have much stronger correlations than are allowed in classical physics – a property that can be exploited in quantum technologies including cryptography. In 1964 the physicist John Bell famously calculated an upper limit on how strong these correlations could be if they were caused by classical physics alone – what has become known as Bell's inequality. Correlations stronger than this limit, Bell reasoned, could occur only if the particles are entangled.

In this latest work, Onur Hosten, Mark Kasevich and colleagues have measured these strong Bell correlations in an ensemble of 500,000 cold rubidium-87 atoms that are trapped by laser light. The atoms are put into an entangled state using a process called spin squeezing. The uncertainty principle dictates that the uncertainty in a measurement of the z-component of the total spin of the system multiplied by the uncertainty in the y-component must be larger than a certain value. Reducing (or squeezing) the uncertainty of the z-component increases the uncertainty of x-component, putting the system into a spin-squeezed state.

Physics World: Bell correlations measured in 500,000 atoms, Hamish Johnston Related Link

Science Mag: Bell correlations in a Bose-Einstein condensateRoman Schmied1,^*, Jean-Daniel Bancal^2,4,*, Baptiste Allard^1,*, Matteo Fadel1, Valerio Scarani^2,3, Philipp Treutlein^1,†, Nicolas Sangouard^4,†

A Quicksand...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 7, 2017 at 5:13am

My t-shirt. You can order at Teezily.com/science-wetheppl (I get no commission).

Topics: Climate Change, Education, Environment, Global Warming, Politics, Scientific Method

I almost don't want to post anything about climate change because of trolls, but one cannot pick when a battle will begin. I like what Scientific American said (I apologize I couldn't find it for this post), that instead of talking about the heating of the globe, we should be discussing replacing those coalminers' jobs that aren't coming back and instead think of new avenues of employment; future instead of past jobs.

I wore a t-shirt, purchased for The March for Science (April 22): "We The People want evidence based SCIENCE," along with its associated symbols. That got me into a spirited conversation with a gentleman that obviously had deep religious convictions. I didn't think a shirt would spark a back-and-forth weeks before the march.

Some of the things I pointed out:

- A 6,000-year-old universe limits Deity ("How do scientists know how old the universe is?"). An ~ 13.6 billion year universe is far more expansive, and does show the limit of our technology - that's as far as our telescopes can see. I connected this to my next point.

- I reviewed with him the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, discovered accidentally by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964, resulting in the pair achieving the Nobel Prize in 1978. This is evidence of an expansion and colloquially coined as "The Big Bang."

- In 1979, the Nobel in Physics was won by Abdus Salam, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Steven Weinberg "for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current." I've had the luck to meet Dr. Weinberg at a conference in Austin, Texas, and have a personal autographed copy of "The First Three Minutes," two of my life's greatest thrills. I mentioned them because Abdus Salam (deceased) was a devote Muslim; I'm betting Dr. Weinberg is at least an agnostic.

- I continued the discussion with the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment that measured the speed of light by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what was then Case School of Applied Science (now Case-Western Reserve). Before that, scientist thought of light as being carried along by the "luminiferous ether" (since waves were their thing back then). This led to the Nobel Prize in 1907. I believe - and, I told the gent - Michelson was a practicing Christian. They were the "shoulders of giants" opined by Sir Isaac Newton and the foundation for the Special Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein.

- That led to a discussion of The Scientific Method and Theory (versus the colloquialism "in theory"). Scientific theory has to be proven in experiment, or discarded. I explained that was the unifier in the scientific enterprise: Agnostics, Atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims et al are welcome to the table of inquiry as long as one forms a null hypothesis; an aleph null hypothesis and after experiment and evaluation able to prove it, replicate it in controlled conditions elsewhere and stand up to peer review (and if it doesn't), be willing to throw it out like "luminiferous ether".

I'm kind of a "ringer" for discussions like this. Yeah, everything I said was a mouthful, but when people ask questions out of a sincere desire to KNOW, I answer as best I can. What I don't know, I try to point them in the right direction. Our encounter ended amicably and respectfully. I'm pretty sure we both enjoyed it.

There is a "disdain for expertise," and that phrase can lead to a plethora of search engine results. The current, rampant anti-intellectualism is as American-born as Eugenics, perverted by the Nazis and mentioned by the Executive Mansion's current resident in his bigoted, misogynistic, nationalistic, xenophobic campaign ("good genes," even included in a 90-second rambling mash). The disdain is exacerbated by technology, information "at our fingertips" has made us all experts on areas and subjects we have no passion to study or excel in, the equivalent to watching a few videos online and calling oneself a martial arts master.

To have a disdain for expertise, you must have a disdain for education and learning; The Scientific Method must be assaulted as probing could reveal inconvenient truths that could result in apostasy; heresy. Authoritarians in particular are famous for not liking anything that diverges from their carefully crafted narratives. If remote mind control weren't in the realm of science fiction, they would have nations of automatons.

From an article in New Scientist by Brian Owens:

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is facing a future in which its hands will be tied on making many policies if a new bill becomes law.

Last week the US House of Representatives passed a bill, the HONEST Act, that would prevent the EPA from basing any of its regulations on science that is not publicly accessible – not just journal articles themselves, but all of the underlying data, models and computer code.

“The HONEST Act requires EPA to base new regulations on sound science that is publicly available, and not hidden from the American people,” said Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chair of the House science committee, who sponsored the bill, in a statement. “The days of ‘trust me’ science are over.”

“Allowing EPA’s data to be independently reviewed promotes sound science that will restore confidence in the EPA decision-making process,” said Smith.

While this may sound like a laudable move towards increased transparency, it would actually hobble the agency’s ability to develop good, science-based public health regulations, says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy.

“It’s couched in terms of transparency, but is actually one of several actions intended to bring regulations to a halt,” he says.

The reboot of COSMOS enjoyed high ratings and I'll assume high sales of DVDs (I bought the set), but only one season. There was a tremendous push back online from authoritarians that were threatened by information that countered their narrative.

There is a comforting narcissism in willful ignorance, but it is lethal to constitutional republics. The fall of Rome was a slow decline: military overreach, economic stagnation and an empire too massive and extensive to reasonably manage.

We are in a quicksand, and in the nature of the medium, we will discover our folly neck-deep and unable to extricate ourselves from its steady pull. Perhaps a few more t-shirt conversations - before and after the march with respectful dialog as my surprise encounter - might help and throw a lifeline to the republic.

GERDA...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 6, 2017 at 5:59am

From Nature: “The inner walls of the water tank are covered by a reflecting foil improving the light detection. This permits the identification of cosmic muons.” Image: K. Freund, GERDA collaboration

Topics: Antimatter, Big Bang, Cosmology, Neutrinos, Particle Physics

You and me, we’re matter. Everyone you know is matter. Everything on Earth, spare a few particles, is matter. Most of the things in space are matter. But we don’t have convincing reasons why there should be so much more matter than antimatter. So where’s all the antimatter?

A team of European scientists have taken a major step in understanding this conundrum, using a house-sized detector called the Germanium Detector Array, or GERDA, buried inside a mountain in Grand Sasso, Italy. GERDA’s scientists are looking for a strange behavior in radioactive atoms, called “neutrinoless double beta decay” (I’ll get to that in a second). Some versions of the rules of particle physics says this behavior could help explain where all the antimatter went. But for now, the experiment is reporting some important results: it works.

“A discovery of [neutrinoless double beta] decay would have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of particle physics and cosmology,” the researchers write in the paper, published today in the journal Nature. It’s important that we understand why there is more matter than antimatter today. The Big Bang probably should have created equal amounts... but it didn't.

Neutrinos, they’re weird. Scientists don’t know how much they weigh, but even at the upper limit of what we guess their mass is, they’re many times lighter than electrons. They’re also really common—for example, the sun sending almost a hundred billion of them per square centimeter of your body every second. They don’t interact via electromagnetism, though, so they don’t harm us in any way. If they were their own antiparticle, what scientists call “Majorana particles,” they should annihilate one another. Most extensions of our main theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model, say this is true.

That’s what GERDA is looking for. They’re watching 35.6 kilograms of a special form of germanium, the shiny semiconducting metal, sitting inside a vat of liquid argon inside a bigger vat of water, waiting however long it takes for it to experience a neutrinoless double beta decay. No, they haven’t found any evidence of the process yet. But their experiment works really, really well—there’s no background noise, which is an incredible feat. Otherwise, we might see a false signal. And there’s radiation that could set off the detector everywhere, from the sun to the air we breathe.

Gizmodo:Scientists Are Getting Closer to Understanding Where All the Antimatter Has GoneRyan F. Mandelbaum

PEEM...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 5, 2017 at 5:17am

Experimental set-up shows an array of graphene-capped liquids. The caps enable the liquids to be studied using an image technique that previously was restricted to studying solid surfaces. Credit: A. Strelkov/NIST

Topics: Graphene, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology

By capping liquids with graphene, an ultrathin sheet of pure carbon, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have revitalized and extended a powerful technique to image surfaces. The graphene lids enable researchers for the first time to easily and inexpensively image and analyze liquid interfaces and the surface of nanometer-scale objects immersed in liquids. The new capability has the potential to advance the development of batteries, highly charged capacitors for power-grid technology, and new catalysts such as those used in the chemical industry.

In the imaging technique, known as photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM), ultraviolet light or X-rays bombard a sample, stimulating the material to release electrons from a region at or just beneath its surface. Electric fields act as lenses, focusing the emitted electrons to create an image.

NIST: Graphene Lid Revitalizes Imaging Technique, Ben Stein

Micro-Gami...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 4, 2017 at 5:33am

Image Source: Origami Resource Center

Topics: Graphene, Nanotechnology, NEMS, Robotics

Thirty years ago, a professor in Japan folded an origami crane smaller than a pinhead. Peering through a microscope, he used a sewing needle to carefully crimp the paper.

Now researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have gone one step further, creating origami about the size of a red blood cell. Too small for human hands, their origami folds itself. This new take on an old tradition is made not from paper, but from sheets of glass and carbon only a few atoms thick.

“It’s the world’s thinnest origami … comparable in size to a biological microorganism,” said Marc Miskin, a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of applied physicist Itai Cohen at Cornell. He described the new research in a March 14 talk at an American Physical Society meeting in New Orleans.

The simple shapes formed by the micro-gami, such as cubes and pyramids, lack the grace and sophistication of a bird. But they could be a step toward miniature machines that fold themselves up into packages small enough to be injected into the body.

Inside Science: World's Thinnest Origami Could Build Microscopic MachinesDevin Powell

No Fooling...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on April 3, 2017 at 6:22am

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Comets, NASA

A comet whose identity took nearly 100 years to pin down is making its closest approach to Earth today (April 1), just in time for April Fools' Day, but this is no cosmic prank. It is the comet's closest Earth encounter in more than 50 years, and maybe more than a century, NASA officials said.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák is named after its three discoverers —Horace Tuttle, Michael Giacobini and L'ubor Kresák — who tracked the comet separately over nearly a century.

Tuttle first spotted the comet in 1858, when 41P was first identified as a sun-orbiting (or periodic) comet, NASA officials wrote, citing the Cometagraphy website by Gary Kronk. But the length of the comet's orbit was unknown at the time. Comet 41P was rediscovered in 1907 by Giacobini, but still not tied to the object seen by Tuttle in 1858.

Another astronomer, Andrew Crommelin, later linked the two observations by Tuttle and Giacobini and predicted Comet 41P would return in 1928 and 1934, but the object went unseen, according to Cometography. It wasn't until 1951, when Kresák spotted the comet and linked it with the earlier observations, that Comet 41P identity was officially pinned down.

Space.com: April Fools' Comet Passes by Earth, Took Nearly a Century to IdentifyTariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor

The Shattering...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 31, 2017 at 7:30am

Image Source: wiseGEEK

Topics: Civics, Existentialism, History, Politics

From FBI.gov:

COINTELPRO The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. All COINTELPRO operations were ended in 1971. Although limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period), COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.

The John Birch Society (TIME):

Had his story ended when he retired as a candy-maker, Robert Welch Jr. might have made his mark on history as the father of the Sugar Daddy, Sugar Babies and Junior Mints. But Welch, whose shrewd leadership helped grow his brother’s Massachusetts candy business a hundred-fold from 1935 to 1956, shifted his aim from caramels to communists.

On this day, Dec. 9, in 1958, Welch — then retired from the candy business — founded the ultraconservative John Birch Society along with 11 like-minded “Americanists,” as they referred to themselves. Their goal was to expose and eradicate the growing leftist threat in America, which they believed to be 40 to 60 percent communist-controlled, according to a 1961 TIME report. Members of the John Birch Society saw communists wherever they looked, from the Oval Office of Dwight Eisenhower (“A conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,” per Welch) to the Bay of Pigs (“a theatrical performance jointly sponsored by Castro and ‘his friends in the U.S. Government’ in order to strengthen the communist hold on Cuba,” as paraphrased in TIME).

The "growing leftist threat"...

COINTELPRO was the government version of John Birch. Though the write up eludes to other groups the FBI had under surveillance, it was felt by African American communities the most, specifically the Black Panther Party; the Nation of Islam; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, etc. The approval of the Communist Manifesto by the likes of Huey Newton and the unrest in the streets likely gave J. Edgar Hoover much alarm. It couldn't have been the treatment of American citizens by their fellow citizens and de facto/de jure Jim Crow laws against them. It was easy to wrap surveillance in the flag and patriotism to hide the racist overtones of the act.

The "growing leftist threat"...

If the Birch philosophy sounds familiar, it's because one of its ardent members was the famous Koch Brother's father, Frank Koch, an MIT oil engineer. He infamously built oil refineries for Nazi Germany and did a considerable amount of business with the Russians.

The Nazis... the Russians...

It was "American" to oppose godless communism. It was easy for the right to demonize the left as unpatriotic, out-of-touch and not fluent in the deified "free market."

The reclusive billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer has been known to fund right wing groups in this country (Steve Bannon) and overseas (Nigel Farage). Like many of the self-made billionaires he's likely a fan of Ayn Rand and her apotheosis of selfishness in "Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," lauded by Congressman Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, Speaker Paul Ryan and President Ronald Reagan. It's funny how an avowed enemy of religion as a sickness can be so praised by those who put the Ten Commandments, godly masculinity and "family values" on high pedestals.

During the 1960's, COINTELPRO was concerned that foreign powers were infiltrating us and destabilizing our republic in the various Civil Rights organizations. They, along with the John Birch Society, were decidedly anti-communist, such that the Republican Party made this stance a litmus test for two generations. At that time, foreign Russian interference would have been called the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or the Committee for State Security). If they were infiltrating Civil Rights organizations, it was a time and an environment ripe for manipulation.

Fast-forward 40 years: 1968 - 2008. Forty years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the country has gone through a massive experiment in forced busing that would eventually be objected to and eliminated. Cities would through economic opportunities and structured stratification re-segregate more so than 1968. The former Soviet Union would fall in that window in 1989. Then President George Bush (41) and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would opine on the "Peace Dividend." The previous Russian Politburo was their 1%. As I recall from Air Force ROTC class in college, they were the ones with the actual money while their populations starved. They had access to things like fashion, food, sex all the while pretending that the Politburo was "temporary" and eventually there would be pure Communism with no hierarchy, no stratification: no "income inequality" as we now call it. It never came. An attempt at reformation from the previous authoritarian communist regime - Democratization - would be attempted and fail. Some would say it was a weakness of Russian civil society, as in democratization usually entails a beneficial tug-of-war from above and below. If citizens aren't putting pressure on their leadership, that leadership will eventually go back to what they know well: ironclad, authoritarian control.

2008 saw the election of the country's first African American president, Barack Hussein Obama, for the first time in 232 years of the republic during a financial free fall compared quite literally to the Great Depression, a concern that furrowed his brow and eventually grayed his mane. A graduate of two elite schools, a Constitutional Scholar and community organizer, he "dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't'." His crowds were compared to rock concerts. We quickly spat out the bubblegum philosophy of a "post-racial" society. We had "grown up" Dr. Maya Angelou commented; poems were composed, t-shirts were made, tearful hymns were sung: we had finally "overcome."

President Obama's name was a source of angst to his legitimacy. Then the Tea Party arose, AstroTurf-fed by dark money - Koch, Mercer et al - as a faux grass movement, their bigotry was hidden - at least initially from their Tea Party selves - behind clever slogans and jingoism: "I want my country back!" The demographics was decidedly, predominately the only original creation of the American continent: "whiteness," and a few people of color comfortable in tokenism and able to maneuver within a religion of white supremacy, that itself masquerades as a faux evangelical Christianity.

The KGB became the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service). Some rumors that they would weaponize misinformation on a scale heretofore unseen. As the former KGB observed an opening in the Civil Rights unrest, the FSB noticed Birtherism, the bigotry, the calling out "YOU LIE" during a president's State of the Union; the praying Psalms 109:8 and callously calling themselves "Christians." They saw faux voter integrity ID laws designed to act as a 21st Century poll tax; they saw the slaughter of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, and countless others. Add to it the lack of any jurisprudence/convictions of their slayers (the noted exceptions in Davis and McBride): note also the rush to call them "thugs" and disappointed Kentucky fans "students." The clever bigotry giving way to blatant racism, our national pathology laid naked to any intelligence officers to manipulate. From the ascendancy of a rock star African American president, the situation demanded his precise antithesis as counterbalance.

It was simply a change in strategy: if COINTELPRO was correct (though biased), the infiltration was through some Civil Rights organizations. If our current intelligence is correct, the infiltration was through our obvious bigotry: it was designed to shatter our institutional norms, and internationally like democratic republics from within.

With fake news by bots and hackers, servers between Moscow and New York; backroom deals that may have been caught with (possible) FISA-warranted incidental communications monitoring, the Russians merely enacted in real-time cyber attacks the poignant observation President Lyndon Baines Johnson made on a trip to the south with journalist Bill Moyers:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

With Brexit proceeding in the UK, spurred broadly by bigotry, their next targets to destabilize western democracy are France and Germany, with the ultimate goals of dismantling NATO and the European Union. There would be in essence a "New World Order" - not of the conspiratorial kind - but under the same conditions when "IRA" stood for Irish Republican Army (not Individual Retirement Account): there were a lot of bombings, death and instability. Before the EU, European countries often warred among themselves. That can't be good for tourism, ...or world peace.

We have "given them the store" of white supremacist bigotry, and our republic. I'm concerned apathy, racism, stupidity and tribalism may well not allow us... to get it back.

Lies and Automation...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 30, 2017 at 8:30am

Image Source: Mining.com link below

Topics: Alternative Energy, Economics, Jobs, Robotics

The times I've talked about automation: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and finally here. So it's not a new subject broached, hardly.

However the signature of repealing climate change rules merely to roll back your predecessor's executive order will benefit no one except the owners of the mines.

Robotics, not regulations is the reasons your mining jobs aren't coming back. A robot doesn't get sick, it doesn't have sick kids to stay home with; it doesn't require vacation/medical/dental/retirement benefits or get tired, however it will due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) wear down and eventually need repair. For that you need technicians, a specialty that can be awarded after two years study for an associates degree or military service in communications electronics or related military occupational specialty. So in this instance, a four year degree or higher is a bit of overcompensation and unnecessary from a cost-point concern, i.e. you could find yourself "overqualified" and not be hired due to the fact the potential employer is likely to think this is an interim assignment and you'll just find a better paying job when one opens.

We are ALL on a giant spaceship on an elliptical trajectory around the sun that takes approximately 365.25 days as we measure it, adjusted every fourth year with a "leap day" on which here in America we've parked our presidential election years. Due to the angle of incidence of ultraviolet light and our respective proximity on the globe, Melanin has rendered identifying pigmentation to different groups. We have no spare planets like it within the solar system or light years in human lifetimes. Learning to share within our respective sandbox is the only immediate surety for species survival in the near future.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been ambivalent and avoided discussing it to placate the electorate through another election cycle, our political thinking like our financial reduced to quarterly concerns, not existential ones. The best way to obfuscate is to punt about "clean coal" (an oxymoron), alternative energy (that will take considerable national will and government investment - e.g. the oil industry has literally been on government subsidies since the Bolshevik revolution), and of course demonize "the other" that doesn't look quite like your constituents in the first place (it tends to work "like a charm"; see ultraviolet and Melanin above).

That would take considerable synaptic activity, some long-range planning and a little less solipsism.

Brookings Institute

Increased automation guarantees a bleak outlook for Trump’s promises to coal miners,
Devashree Saha and Sifan Liu

Mining.com

Study shows 96% of some mining jobs can be automated,
Frik Els

New York Times

Coal Miners Hope Trump’s Order Will Help. But Few Are Counting on It,
Campbell Robertson
Policy Shift Helps Coal, but Other Forces May Limit Effect,
Clifford Krauss and Diane Cardwell
Planned Rollback of Climate Rules Unlikely to Achieve All Trump’s Goals,
Coral Davenport

Failure...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 29, 2017 at 8:13am

Credit: Getty Images

Topics: Education, Science, STEM, Research

I've failed quite often.

I've received D's on Quantum Mechanics homework from an admired professor with the admonition "SEE THE ANSWER" in all caps as if shouting from the paper. I remember crying, largely out of frustration and out of the fact I truly had deep respect for the professor, who had talked me into majoring in physics in the first place (I was initially a math major). I also remember looking at the solutions in the Mezzanine of the library. I saw where my mistakes were. My next homework grade was a B- and my test score was an A. I passed Quantum with a high B overall.

Failure is a large part of the scientific enterprise. A story I heard years ago from a Thomas Edison experiment with a lab assistant (there had been an explosion):

Assistant: "When are you going to give up this crazy idea? This is the 9,999th time you've tried to invent this light bulb!"

Edison: "Yes. This is the 9,999th time we tried to invent the light bulb. But there's an explosive application that could prove useful later."

"Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater," Albert Einstein. I think he was referring to learning Tensor Calculus to describe the General Theory of Relativity.

Somehow we miss the fact that when Einstein was working at a patent office in Germany, he probably saw himself as a failure. He took a job because he'd made his then girlfriend pregnant. Being responsible, he took a job to support his new family. His "Miracle Year" was 1905 when he published four papers: The Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity and Mass-Energy Equivalence (E=mc²).

The competitive nature of western civilization doesn't allow or celebrate failure. Reality television, sporting contests, millennials awarded medals for "just showing up" at t-ball doesn't account for the many stutter steps if not downright stumbles a team makes to a championship. We celebrate the aftermath; the end result looking effortless and inevitable, the great discoveries often preceded by a lot of hard work and...failure.

Some of that failure is by design: peer review I've often stated can be brutal and demeaning. It can discourage anyone in the sciences to rethink if this is "what you really wanted to do with your life." A whole comic series was started by Jorge Cham (who has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering) quite literally on this angst.

There are sleepless nights, long experiments that take you through weekends (that everyone else outside seems to be enjoying). "Why am I doing it"? you may ask.

I tend to think of loud explosions and parents that didn't freak out (largely because I didn't die nor their house didn't burn down).

You throw yourself back into the lab, the chalkboard or the computer program...out of love.

People in the sciences are usually there because they love it: solving complex problems is almost meditative; spiritual in the satisfaction of not just solving problems, but birthing in many cases something that didn't previously exist. Someone in their past supported them despite their socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation and said four important words: "you can do it."

And to show our love of the area and the support from family and friends, many of us did.

**********

Four weeks into my first semester of college, my academic confidence was completely shredded. I had back-to-back tests in cell biology, chemistry, and calculus, and my time management skills weren’t quite there yet. I failed my calculus exam, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I had the intelligence or the ability to get a degree in science.

My story has a happy ending—at least to me. Through stress eating, meltdowns, and support from my professor and older students, I studied my way to an A-minus in that calculus class. But, even better: I learned how to fail, something I keep learning and relearning as I come to the end of my second semester in graduate school. It’s the fundamental underpinning of scientific resilience—failing repeatedly, and picking yourself up to try again.

It’s what I think is missing from many young Americans’ educational experiences, and, in part, why I think so many of us, as smart and creative and technically adept as we are, shy away from scientific research as our careers.

Learning resilience is fundamental to a successful career as a scientist. The experiments we try will fail many times before they work, whether as an undergraduate, a PhD student, or a postdoc gunning for a faculty position.

But actually overcoming failure is challenging. Many students who began science degrees with me switched to other majors the first time a project failed. One failure and they were gone.

This dropout situation has lasting implications for American science. The US has plenty of scientists, but fewer and fewer are being born in the US. These foreign-born scientists are welcome, as far as I’m concerned, but with all the recent changes in immigration and visa policy, it’s an uncertain future—large numbers of our scientists-in-training could be forced to leave after they finish graduate school or postdocs.

Without these scientists, American science will suffer.

Scientific American:One Reason Young People Don’t Go Into Science? We Don’t Fail Well, Sara Whitlock

Martian Tsunamis...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 28, 2017 at 8:39am

Image Source: BBC. Did early Mars have a vast northern ocean?

Topics: Mars, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration, Spaceflight

Scientists have located an impact crater linked to powerful tsunamis that swept across part of ancient Mars.

The team believe an asteroid triggered 150m-high waves when it plunged into an ocean thought to have existed on northern Mars three billion years ago.

Lomonosov crater in the planet's northern plains fits the bill as the source of tsunami deposits identified on the surface.

Details were outlined at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Although the idea has lost some of its currency in recent years, some scientists think an ocean might once have filled the vast lowland region that occupies the Red Planet's northerly latitudes.

Growing evidence that tsunami waves washed over the boundary between the southern highlands and northern lowlands help strengthen the hypothesis.

BBC Science: Impact crater linked to Martian tsunamis, Paul RinconNASA: Giant Tsunamis Battered the Coastlines of an Early Martian Ocean

CAL...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on March 27, 2017 at 9:36am

NASA will use CAL to better try to understand a highly misunderstood type of matter in space. Image Credit: NASA

Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, International Space Station, Materials Science, NASA, Thermodynamics

NASA has a goal of creating what they say will be the coldest place in the entire universe, as it will help them to understand a property of matter that isn't well-understood. The project has been in development for a number of years, but soon it will come to fruition.

In the near future, an ice chest-sized box that NASA is calling the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) will be shipped to the International Space Station aboard a supply rocket.

CAL will come equipped with the tools it needs to hyper-chill gas atoms to just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, which citing NASA, is about 100 million times colder than even the depths of outer space itself. It's worth noting that at absolute zero, atom activity reportedly freezes. The tools that will make this possible include a vacuum chamber, special lasers, and what NASA calls an “electromagnetic knife.” These tools will essentially slow the gas molecules that get trapped inside to a near-motionless state.

Since there is so much misunderstanding about how these kinds of hyper-chilled properties impact physics, this is a huge opportunity to fill a gap in mankind's expanding knowledge. The gasses that get chilled to these kinds of low temperatures really aren’t even gasses anymore – their atoms become arranged into a state of matter dubbed Bose-Einstein Condensate. This is a unique type of matter that we don’t fully understand yet. Scientists describe it as a type of “super fluid” that lacks any friction.

Lab Roots: NASA Aims to Create the Coldest Place in the Universe, Anthony Bouchard